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On Aprl 10 the U.S. research vessel Thomas G. Thompson will steam 900 kilometers northeast from New Zealand and stop in the wide open Pacific Ocean. If all goes according to plan, it will drop Nereus, a robotic vehicle the size of a subcompact car. Nereus will dive, and dive, and dive down to one of the deepest and most hostile places on earth: the Kermadec Trench. It will hit bottom at just beyond 10,000 meters—the extent of Mount Everest, plus a modest Smoky Mountain....

Corporal punishment has long been a hotly debated subject, with conflicting study results and opposing ideologies feeding the fire. Now the results of a five-year effort to review the scientific literature are in: a task force appointed by the family services division of the American Psychological Association (APA) concludes that “parents and caregivers should reduce and potentially eliminate their use of any physical punishment as a disciplinary measure.” Psychologist Sandra A....

It’s been a quarter century since government regulations limiting emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides from coal-fired power plants began to neutralize the problem of acid rain, but lakes in the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada have been sluggish to recover. Scientists have linked the delayed comeback to a lack of acid-buffering calcium in surrounding soils, which continued to acidify despite cuts in pollutants. Now, however, a study shows for the first time that soil acidification has begun to reverse across a broad swath from western Ontario to Maine (Environ....

On a cool Saturday afternoon at the überhot Garren hair salon in New York City a few masters of fashion were debating something many would call obvious: Which is more likely to tangle—curly hair or straight hair? The seemingly straight answer, if you will: “When we put a [model] in a wind machine, we can still put a comb through her hair—if it’s straight. Curly? Forget it,” says Robert Vasquez, a hairstylist who specializes in what his industry terms “difficult” hair....

OCTOBER 1956 WASTED RADIATION–“At present, nuclear power offers the most promising alternative to fossil fuels. However, progress in this field so far scarcely touches the heart of the problem. We speak of nuclear ‘power,’ but what we are really working on is nuclear heat. We are proposing to hook up the nuclear reactor to the steam turbine, an only modestly efficient invention of the 19th century, and to throw away three quarters of the energy of the nuclear reaction....

A new drug candidate has shown promising signs in treating tuberculosis. The synthetic molecule is effective in mice and bears no similarity to existing TB drugs, many of which have become inadequate as drug-resistant bacterial strains have developed. If it is shown to be safe and effective in humans, it could help to combat a disease that killed 1.4 million people in 2011. A team led by Kevin Pethe, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute Korea near Seoul, investigated more than 120,000 compounds over 5 years, infecting mouse immune cells called macrophages with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the bacterium that causes TB — and observing whether candidate compounds inhibited bacterial growth....

A remarkably important event has just occurred in the world of psychology: A leading, peer-reviewed journal has published the strongest evidence yet that psychodynamic psychotherapy – “talk therapy” – works. In fact, it not only works, it keeps working long after the sessions stop. Full disclosure: We report this not as disinterested observers, but as psychotherapists and researchers on the process and efficacy of therapy. Our book, “Handbook of Evidence-Based Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,” summarized the body of research through last year and another will follow late this year....

GENES MAKE UP ONLY ABOUT 2 PERCENT of the human genome. The rest was for many years ignored as “junk DNA.” But over the past decade biologists have come to understand that this space is an incredibly important part of the genetic code, home to a vast unexamined treasure trove of information that controls how genes behave. A more thorough investigation of junk DNA could upend our understanding of the delicate interplay between genes and the environment and could lead to entirely new strategies in medicine’s endless struggle against disease....

I am writing this article in bold, retroexperimental fashion, using a technique found rarely in the modern publishing world: handwriting, using pen and paper, those dead-tree tools seen by technophiles as historical curiosities, like clay tablets or Remington typewriters. Why do such a thing in a keystroke age? In part I do so because handwriting is becoming a marginal activity, in society and in my life. We type more than ever before, and it’s not uncommon to meet people who have ceased writing by hand altogether, their scripts withering like vestigial limbs....

It is often said that women and men are more different than similar. That’s not even mostly true; women and men are pretty similar. But there are a few spheres in which there are strong gender differences. One of them is sex. Men want sex more than women do. (While I am sure that you can think of people who don’t fit this pattern, my colleagues and I have arrived at this conclusion after reviewing hundreds of findings....

At the heart of modern electronics are transistors, which act like valves to direct the flow of electrons. Now researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created the first transistors that electrically control molecules instead. By connecting them to microscopic test tubes and petri dishes, these nanoscale transistors could lead to labs-on-a-chip that work without moving parts. Much as 30-ton computers shrank over decades to microchip size, investigators are now miniaturizing labs to run millions of experiments simultaneously and dramatically speed analysis of DNA, proteins and other molecules....

NASA’s newest planet-hunting powerhouse, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), leaped into orbit Wednesday evening (April 18) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. TESS lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT), then separated from its rocket ride 49 minutes later. “When you come off the top of the rocket, all the fun for us spacecraft folks begins,” Robert Lockwood, TESS spacecraft program manager for Orbital ATK, the company that built the satellite for NASA, said during a prelaunch news conference here on Sunday (April 15)....

The block room at the Randolph School in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., is bustling with preschool builders. One boy places a tall, wood, cross-shaped block under a newly erected archway, explaining to onlookers that it is a revolving door. On a nearby wall hang drawings the children have made of past creations; sometimes the students build over several days, creating miniature, interconnected cities. “Thomas wrecked my building!” one child complains. Evan Miklos, his teacher, has been observing the children, occasionally piping in with open-ended questions or suggestions....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Why do we exist? This is arguably the most profound question there is and one that may seem completely outside the scope of particle physics. But our new experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has taken us a step closer to figuring it out. To understand why, let’s go back in time some 13....

Alien worlds that orbit the energetic dead stars known as pulsars may leave electric currents behind them—anomalies that could help researchers find more of these strange planets. Astronomers know of only four “pulsar planets” so far, and much remains unknown about such worlds, but scientists propose that they formed in the chaos after the supernova explosions that gave birth to the pulsars. A pulsar is a kind of neutron star, a stellar corpse left over from a supernova, a giant star explosion that crushes protons with electrons to form neutrons....

In the 19th century, the most photographed man⁠ in the world wasn’t Walt Whitman or Ulysses S. Grant or even Abraham Lincoln⁠. It was Frederick Douglass. The famous orator and abolitionist was known for using his eloquent voice to impart the horrors of slavery, which he had experienced firsthand. He traveled all over the country, speaking to large crowds and making arguments to end the enslavement of Black people. On the days when there were no scheduled lectures, he would visit a daguerreotype studio⁠ to have his picture taken....

Cockroaches could inspire superheroes if they weren’t so repulsive. Some species can hold their breath for as long as 40 minutes. Others can survive blasts of strong radiation, subsist on paper and dried glue, or live for weeks without a head. Recently researchers discovered another superpower: the nocturnal creatures can see in near–pitch black by pooling light signals over time, like time-lapse photography. Physicists at the University of Oulu in Finland—where it is too cold for roaches to live outside of the laboratory—put about 30 American cockroaches through virtual-reality experiments to test their night vision....

Hundreds of years ago, the oceans off the coast of North America teemed with cod. A new analysis highlights just how few of the big fish remain. The findings indicate that the volume of cod on Nova Scotia’s Scotian Shelf has dropped more than 90 percent since the 1850s. Using daily fishing logs from the 1850s–which recorded the number of fish caught, their size and their location–together with a population modeling program, Andrew A....

The pathway to approving many new medical devices is broken beyond the point of repair, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Medical equipment that comes with moderate risk—more than bandages but less than pacemakers—rarely goes through clinical testing for safety or efficacy before reaching patients, the report warned. As long as these moderate-risk items, which include artificial hips and blood-glucose monitors, are “substantially equivalent” to devices already on the market, they do not need to undergo testing before getting clearance....

Tastebuds alone do not determine what something tastes like. Researchers have demonstrated that expectation, too, plays a role. Previous research in primates had suggested that expectation had little effect on how taste registers in the brain. Neuroscientist Jack Nitschke and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin lined up 30 college-age volunteers to see whether the same holds true for humans. The neuroscience team prepared five drinks containing water mixed with varying amounts of quinine or sugar and paired them with five symbols: water with a strong concentration of quinine was linked to a minus sign; water with a milder concentration got a crossed-out minus sign; simple distilled water received a zero; and water with either a mild or strong concentration of sugar got the plus sign equivalents of their negative counterparts....