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Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry The following profile is the 13th in a series of 30....

The idea for this podcast episode comes from listener Phoebe Gavin of New York City. In addition to being an OIF veteran, Phoebe is a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the first and largest non-profit, non-partisan association for new veterans. Thank you, Phoebe, and all your fellow veterans, for your service. Let’s begin with two adapted-from-real-life stories to paint a more accurate picture of PTSD. Consider proceeding with caution if you’re a super-empathizer or a survivor yourself....

The massive and deadly eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano stunned the world when it sent a huge plume of gas, ash and other debris hurtling into the atmosphere last weekend. The mushrooming brown cloud was clearly visible in satellite images. As the plume drifted, ash fell on other islands in the Polynesian nation of Tonga, including the main island of Tongatapu. This has complicated the response to other damage caused by the eruption—particularly from the tsunami it generated—because falling ash covered the runway of Fuaʻamotu International Airport on Tongatapu....

Researchers demonstrated a small, lightweight wind turbine under simulated Martian atmospheric conditions, at the Aarhus Wind Tunnel Simulator II at Aarhus University in Denmark. “For now, we can say for the first time and with certainty, that, YES, you can use wind power on Mars!” the researchers, led by Christina Holstein-Rathlou of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, wrote in the study. Realistic conditions The objective of the wind turbine investigations was to see how much power is produced under realistic Martian atmospheric conditions....

Dear EarthTalk: This winter is shaping up to be one of the coldest in recent memory where I live. What can I do to reduce my home heating bill now and in the future? – Eric Lenz, Seattle, WA Whether global warming is somehow to blame or not, much of the United States is getting walloped this winter. The Seattle area has suffered its most significant and lingering snowfall—and lower than average winter temperatures—in decades....

The current wave of immigration, which rivals the massive influx of 1880-1914, started with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Since then, about 27 million legal immigrants have crossed the border. In addition, an estimated 10.3 million illegal ones live in the U.S. The net result is that, as of 2004, there were 34.2 million foreign-born residents in the country. More than half are from Latin America and about a quarter from Asia, which contrasts with the pre-World War I period, when the foreign-born were overwhelmingly European....

Two Russian cosmonauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday (April 19) to begin a six-hour spacewalk to upgrade the orbiting lab with new experiments. Clad in their bulky Orlan spacesuits, veteran cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Roman Romanenko began their spacewalk just after 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) to install a space weather experiment to the space station’s hull and prepare the outpost for the arrival of a robotic cargo ship later this year....

In 2008, pieces of diamond encased in rock descended from space and landed in the Nubian Desert of Sudan. And, according to a new study, these meteorite crystals provide the first physical evidence of an ancient lost building block from the dawn of the solar system. In the study, a research team found that the Almahata Sitta meteorite once belonged to a protoplanet, one of tens of early worlds that experienced impacts and buildups to ultimately create the rocky planets in our solar system....

“While other work has focused on how to more easily integrate robots into teams, we focused instead on how robots might positively shape the way that people react to each other,” says Sarah Sebo, a graduate student at Yale University and co-author of the research, published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. To measure these changes in reactions, researchers at Yale and Cornell University assigned participants to teams of four—consisting of three people and one small humanoid robot—and had them play a collaborative game on Android tablets....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - For years, doctors and patients have been waiting for the arrival of an “artificial pancreas” to take the guesswork out of life with diabetes by measuring blood sugar levels and automatically delivering the amount of insulin needed to keep the disease in check. But now that this experimental device is close to becoming reality, a new study suggests that tests to date have largely ignored a big segment of the patient population that might use it - people of color....

From undulating surface to inky black depths, Earth’s oceans are littered with the carcasses of tiny life-forms called phytoplankton that in life form the basis of the marine food chain. These microscopic ghosts contain a reservoir of carbon estimated at a staggering 662 gigatons—200 times greater than the amount stored in all living plants and animals—that could come back to haunt us if unleashed from its watery grave as planet-warming carbon dioxide....

The world watched helplessly this week as Paris’s treasured Notre Dame cathedral went up in flames. Although fire brigades managed to save parts of the building, such as the bell towers, the blaze destroyed the roof and spire—along with countless artifacts. However, this is not the first time Notre Dame has suffered major damage, and the reconstruction project to come (donors have already pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort) is neither the first nor likely the last for the cathedral....

It’s no secret that obesity, which plagues more than 600 million people worldwide—more than one in three adults in the U.S. alone—leads to serious health problems: cardiovascular disease, diabetes and even several types of cancer. But obesity has also been established as a risk factor for cognitive decline, particularly in middle-aged and older people. What’s not as well understood is this link’s underlying molecular mechanism—and that’s exactly what a group of researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham sought to decipher in a four-part experiment on mice published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience....

Landing in U.S. theaters today, Ridley Scott’s The Martian is being acclaimed as one of the most realistic portrayals of human space exploration ever filmed. Based on the 2011 novel by Andy Weir, the film stars Matt Damon as Mark Watney, a wisecracking botanist-turned-astronaut marooned on Mars after being accidentally left behind by his crewmates. Faced with extremely limited food and supplies, and with any hope of rescue more than a year and millions of kilometers away, early on Watney lays out his stark options for subsistence in the film’s most memorable line of dialogue: Either “science the shit out of this,” or die....

A few months ago, when European Space Agency director general Johann-Dietrich Woerner laid out a vision for his agency to lead the way in establishing an international Moon Village, I had a feeling of déjà vu. In January 2004 President George W. Bush announced his own Vision for Space Exploration, in which the U.S. would lead the world back to the moon. Once we had gone there, and humans had learned to live and work successfully on another world, we would head on to Mars as the ultimate destination....

Joseph Lister published his “Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery” in 1867; it was one of the major milestones on the road to modern medicine. In the next 40 years, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch developed a firm basis for the germ theory of disease; vaccines for cholera, anthrax, rabies, typhoid fever and plague were developed, and a cure for malaria found. The outbreak of the First World War, however, showed that medical care lagged for those injured by the mass-produced weapons that now saturated the battlefield....

Nearly 600 million years ago Earth’s continents were lifeless lands—but the oceans were teeming. Below the white-capped waves a dizzying variety of life-forms grazed blindly on gooey mats of microbes that covered the seafloor. Thought to represent the earliest flowering of complex multicellular life on our planet, these creatures arose in a world devoid of predators, and had no need for hard protective carapaces or skeletons. Their soft, squishy bodies resembled, tubes, fronds or even thin, quilted pillows; they bore scant similarity to the anatomy of animals today....

For a few weeks in July, a commuter rail station in New Jersey enjoyed the same screening protection as that surrounding the soldiers and civilians in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Using millimeter waves–wavelengths of light shorter than microwaves but longer than infrared–a walk-through portal produced images of passengers before they boarded the trains. Like an x-ray, the technology creates a revealing picture that can highlight items, such as plastic guns, that typical transit security sensors fail to detect....

When a massive star dies in a supernova, the explosion is only the beginning of the end. Most of the stellar matter is thrown far and wide, but the star’s iron-filled heart remains behind. This core packs as much mass as two Suns and quickly shrinks to a sphere that would span the length of Manhattan. Crushing internal pressure—enough to squeeze Mount Everest to the size of a sugar cube—fuses subatomic protons and electrons into neutrons....

By Valerie Volcovici and Michael Martina WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States and China on Tuesday signed eight partnership pacts to cut greenhouse gases that will bring the world’s two biggest carbon emitters closer together on climate policy, but fundamental differences between the two sides remain. Consensus between the United States and China will be a crucial part of any new global climate pact to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but they have long struggled to come to an agreement on how the costs of cutting greenhouse gases should be distributed among rich and poor nations....