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A worldwide arms race has erupted between inventive street chemists who concoct “legal” highs and government officials who wish to regulate and interdict the proliferation of synthetic cannabis products that can send their users to an emergency room or the morgue. “Legal” pot with names like Spice, K2, Genie Silver and Yucatan Fire now flies off the shelves as “incense” in head shops, convenience stores and, of course, on the Web....

The bountiful fields of the U.S. are awash in atrazine. About 36 million kilograms of the odorless, white powder are applied on farms to control grassy weeds. Every year some 225,000 kilograms of the herbicide become airborne and fall with the rain, up to 1,000 kilometers from the source. All that atrazine may have a sexual effect: turning male frogs female. As described in the March 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, biologist Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues exposed 40 African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) to 2....

Last month Spanish authorities put out an urgent call for donations of snorkeling masks to build improvised devices to help COVID-19 patients breathe. Shortages of ventilators, which push air into failing lung, have inspired members of maker culture worldwide. Innovation has continued as the shape of the pandemic has shifted. In addition to addressing the demand for standard ventilators, a mask-based approach provides a potentially more benign form of breathing assistance than invasive ventilation, which involves intubation: inserting a tube into the trachea....

Across much of the United States, this has been an unusually mild winter, especially for those living east of the Mississippi. Not a few people have noted that spring seems to have come early this year. Of course, in a meteorological sense that could be true, but in 2012 it will also be true in an astronomical sense as well, because this year spring will make its earliest arrival since the late 19th century: 1896, to be exact....

Winter winds howl off the Dakota prairie through Minnesota, turning the 1,100 megawatts worth of wind turbines in Xcel Energy’s system in that state. By 2020, the utility expects to more than triple that amount in a bid to avoid more polluting energy sources. But the wind doesn’t always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren’t using much electricity, like late at night. So Xcel Energy, Inc....

The Indian River Lagoon, a shallow estuary that stretches for 156 miles along Florida’s eastern coast, is suffering from the activities of human society. Poor water quality and toxic algal blooms have resulted in fish kills, manatee and dolphin die-offs and takeovers by invasive species. But the humans who live here have needs, too: the eastern side of the lagoon is buffered by a stretch of barrier islands that are critical to Florida’s economy, tourism and agriculture, as well as for launching NASA missions into space....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It may not be intuitive, but drop a hammer and a feather and—in the absence of air resistance—they will hit the ground at exactly the same time. This is a key principle of physics known as “universal free fall”, stating that all objects accelerate identically in the same gravitational field. In fact, it’s an important theme in Albert Einstein’s immensely successful theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity works....

The Yukon River is delivering upwards of five tons of mercury a year to the Arctic environment, likely in response to a warming climate, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey announced Tuesday. The river is pumping three to 32 times more mercury into the environment than similarly sized river basins, based on limited data. And while scientists don’t know the reason for the Yukon’s big mercury load, they say evidence points strongly to two suspects: Melting permafrost, and the Yukon basin’s unique placement as a catchment for pollution from Asia and Europe....

Artificial-intelligence researchers have long struggled to make computers perform a task that is simple for humans: picking out one person’s speech when multiple people nearby are talking simultaneously. It is called the ‘cocktail-party problem’. Typical approaches to solving it have either involved systems with multiple microphones, which distinguish speakers based on their position in a room, or complex artificial-intelligence algorithms that try to separate different voices on a recording. But the latest invention, described in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a simple 3D-printed device that can pinpoint the origin of a sound without the need for any sophisticated electronics....

The same sort of abdication of responsibility occurs when nearby farmers outside the city burn the forest to create pastureland for cattle. Despite the increase in hospital admissions, especially of children, resulting from respiratory problems caused by the smoke, the official position is that the wildfires are inevitable because of “development.” This is technically correct: without the fires, there would be no cattle to export, and without cattle, the ranch owners wouldn’t have enough money to donate to the politicians (or to keep for themselves, because many of the ranch owners are politicians)....

We humans emitted 35.9 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2014, mostly from burning coal and natural gas in power plants, making fertilizer and cement, and other industrial processes. If chemists could capture carbon dioxide and turn it into chemical building blocks for other products, the way plants do, says Cornell University chemical engineer Lynden Archer, “carbon dioxide would not be a nuisance anymore, but a gift.” For years scientists have been trying to store carbon dioxide captured from exhaust flues at power plants and other emitters, mostly by injecting it deep underground....

Five-year-olds invent imaginary friends, teenagers visualize what an amorous crush would be like, and adults plan for job achievements, buying a house or traveling the world. Imagination is a trait that we all possess and use in our daily lives. But if we try to think of situations that are too far from our reality in time or space—perhaps the world in 2500 or what it would be like to live on the moon or Mars—we often have a hard time visualizing those scenarios....

Galileoscope $30 at galileoscope.org; all ages. Cameron Hummels, a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Columbia University and head of outreach for the department, says that these are by far the best-quality telescopes for the price. “Because they’re so inexpensive, they don’t come with a tripod, so I’d recommend getting a cheap camera tripod—the taller the better. Also, download some free sky-visualization software for identifying astronomical targets” (www.stellarium.org). Snap Circuits From $31....

Such physical attacks are less common than a string of expletives when a customer is asked to wear a face covering as a safeguard against COVID-19 transmission. But amid the stress of a dangerous global pandemic, combined with the extreme political polarization of protective measures in the U.S., there have still been an alarming number of outright assaults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued guidance saying employees at retail establishments and other service business should refrain from arguing with a customer when confronted with an attack or threat of violence over a request to put on a mask....

The 2019 Canadian guideline for physical activity throughout pregnancy was recently published in the British Journal of Sports and Medicine—and it has some surprising recommendations for pregnant women. To get into the nitty-gritty of the new guidelines, I recently talked to one of the authors, Dr. Margie Davenport. Margie is an Associate Professor of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. Her graduate work focused on the use of prenatal exercise to promote cardiometabolic health in women diagnosed with, or at risk for, gestational diabetes....

For many years now, neuroscientists have been telling the subjects of experiments something like this: “Please lie in the MRI scanner and relax. When you see the task instructions come onto the screen in front of you, do your best.” The researcher would then use the brain’s activity during the “lie there and relax” period as a mere control condition; the object of scientific interest was always what “lights up” when a subject reads, makes financial decisions or performs some other task....

Daggers, axes and jewelry made from rare iron during the Bronze Age are literally out of this world, according to new research finding that ancient artisans crafted these metal artifacts with iron from outer space carried to Earth by meteorites. The finding upends the idea that a few artisans during the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East knew how to make iron by smelting it from Earth’s crust. Instead, it appears that Bronze Age metalworkers sought out meteorites to make these treasures, said study author Albert Jambon, a French archaeo-metallurgist and a professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, in Paris....

After nearly 40 years, researchers have discovered a new type of building block for electronic circuits. And there’s at least a chance it will spare you from recharging your phone every other day. Scientists at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., report in Nature that a new nanometer-scale electric switch “remembers” whether it is on or off after its power is turned off. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter....

When arteries carrying blood to the heart muscles become blocked, doctors often clear them by performing an angioplasty (inserting a balloon to open the narrowing passageways) and then inserting a mesh metal tube called a stent. This conduit is designed to act as scaffolding to keep the artery open. Because this procedure was introduced three decades ago, researchers have been searching for ways to coat such stents to protect patients from allergic reactions to the metal and keep surrounding tissue from growing through the mesh and reclogging the artery....

By Mark Schrope Since it was first launched in 1964, the venerable Alvin submersible, owned by the US Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, has enabled numerous historic discoveries. On Tuesday, Alvin was plucked from the sea for the last time in its current form. With the sub’s final mission complete–it has been studying the depths just a few kilometres from the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico–it will now undergo a $40-million rebirth as a submersible with dramatically improved capabilities....