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Two wildfires ignited in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies last weekend, pushing residents out of their homes and stretching the state’s fire season past its traditional endpoint. The Miner’s Candle Fire was first reported on Sunday near Idaho Springs, a city 30 miles west of Denver, and scorched roughly 20 acres. The West Ranch Fire flared up the same day just to the east, near the Ken Caryl Valley, and was contained after burning 12 acres....

Any type of open and truthful disclosure reduces stress and helps individuals come to terms with their behavior. It is not coincidental that some of the most powerful people or institutions in many cultures encourage people to confess their transgressions. And there is very strong evidence that writing about upsetting experiences or dark secrets can benefit your mental and physical well-being. Similar to religious confession, expressive writing encourages individuals to explore their deepest thoughts and feelings about upsetting experiences....

Last week, federal agents swooped in on 23 of the 24 people indicted on charges of stealing archaeological artifacts from public land and Indian reservations in the Southwest. But after a 60-year-old physician committed suicide over the weekend, Utah senators are saying the raid was overkill. The arrests were made following a two-year operation codenamed “Cerberus Action,” after the multi-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the underworld. The case involves 256 Native American artifacts including woven baskets, pots, sandals, and an ax, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation values at $335,685....

Penguin fossils from 10 million to 12 million years ago have been unearthed in South Africa, the oldest fossil evidence of these cuddly, tuxedoed birds in Africa. The new discovery, detailed in the March 26 issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, could shed light on why the number of penguin species plummeted on Africa’s coastline from four species 5 million years ago to just one today — Spheniscus demersus, or the jackass penguin, known for their donkeylike calls....

Come 2017, British Airways could be able to fuel flights from London’s City Airport to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on trash. The airline has partnered with Washington, D.C.-based Solena Fuels to make 50,000 metric tons of jet fuel from municipal solid waste per year. It is the first project in the world to attempt to convert trash into a drop-in fuel for airplanes. British Airways agreed in 2012 to buy the jet fuel from Solena per year over 11 years at “market competitive prices,” about $510 million for the price of conventional jet kerosene....

Daniel Lende is a neuroanthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. He and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what this new field can teach us about craving, capoeira and the link between the brain and culture. LEHRER: You’re a neuroanthropologist. What’s that? LENDE: Someone who thinks that both brains and culture make us who we are, so good research needs to create bridges between anthropology and neuroscience. The problem is that most modern science is still full of dichotomies....

Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now. Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise....

Lasers could help weld intestines together with the aid of a novel glue filled with microscopic gold rods, researchers say. Diseases that affect the bowels include colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, both of which afflict about 1.5 million people in the United States annually. During surgery to remove diseased tissue, leaks from intestinal holes are common and can lead to life-threatening bacterial infections. Lasers are already able to weld ruptures in tissues such as cartilage, blood vessels, corneas, livers, urinary tracts, nerves and skin together by causing proteins to fuse....

One of the most striking features of living organisms, both animals and plants, is the way their physiology and behavior have adapted to follow the fluctuations of daily light and nocturnal darkness. A clock in the brain synchronized to environmental cues generates biological changes that vary over a 24-hour cycle—circadian rhythms (from the Latin words circa and diem, meaning “about” and “a day,” respectively). In this way, the earth’s rotation is reproduced in the dynamics of our neuronal circuits....

Motorola has announced a new initiative to help smartphone users take handset customization beyond ringtones, wallpaper, and body colors to its very form and function. The Google-owned handset company on Monday announced Project Ara, a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. An endoskeleton, or structural frame, holds the smartphone modules of the owner’s choice, such as a display, keyboard, or extra battery. The approach should allow users to swap out malfunctioning modules or upgrade as innovations emerge, providing a handset that stays up-to-date much longer than today’s smartphones....

NASA has officially joined the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, a space telescope that will launch in 2020 to study the mysterious dark matter and dark energy pervading the universe. NASA will contribute 16 infrared detectors and four spares for one of the Euclid telescope’s two planned science instruments, agency officials announced today (Jan. 24). NASA has also nominated 40 new members for the Euclid Consortium, an international body of 1,000 scientists that will oversee the mission and its development....

NASA’s next major space observatory is meant to tackle some of the biggest questions in astronomy when it launches in 2025—including what exoplanets look like and how dark energy is driving the Universe’s expansion. But the project’s cost is rising quickly, and NASA managers are struggling to keep its budget in check. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) has grown in scope and complexity since it was proposed nearly a decade ago, and its price has swollen from US$1....

When you have cared for dogs and wild wolves from the time they are little more than a week old and have bottle-fed and nurtured them day and night, you are wise to their differences. Since 2008 Zsófia Virányi, an ethologist at the Wolf Science Center in Austria, and her colleagues have been raising the two species to figure out what makes a dog a dog—and a wolf a wolf. At the center, the researchers oversee and study four packs of wolves and four packs of dogs, containing anywhere from two to six animals each....

We stood around the body planning our autopsy strategy. A scalpel, we realized, was not going to be the appropriate implement for this corpse, so we made our decision. It took all three of us to muscle the slippery black bulk of the pilot whale into the screaming blur of the band-saw blade. The whale had died of natural causes, after a distinguished military tenure conducting deep-sea operations for the U....

Mini drones sporting horsehair coated in a sticky gel could one day take the pressure off beleaguered bee populations by transporting pollen from plant to plant, researchers said. Roughly three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world’s food crops depend on animals to pollinate them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some of nature’s most prolific pollinators are bees, but bee populations are declining around the world, and last month, the U....

The fastest, tallest and longest dive coaster, on which amusement park thrill seekers can experience free fall, is set to open next summer at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. Valravn is designed to take riders 20 stories up to a 66-meter peak from which they plummet at a 90-degree angle and feel weightless. That first drop generates sufficient energy to propel the coaster car throughout the rest of the ride. By cranking the roller coaster’s cars up to the top of a hill, the cars store a large amount of gravitational potential energy....

By Julie Steenhuysen Texas health officials on Monday reported the state’s first case of Zika likely spread by local mosquitoes, making Texas the second state within the continental United States to report local transmission of the virus that has been linked to birth defects. The case involved a woman living in Cameron County near the Mexico border who is not pregnant, the Texas Department of State Health Services said. Pregnancy is the biggest concern with Zika because the virus can cause severe, life-long birth defects, including microcephaly, in which a child is born with an abnormally small head, a sign its brain has stopped growing normally....

Main Sources & More to Explore: Read “The Quest for Superheavy Elements and the Island of Stability” in Scientific American’s March 2018 issue. Most of these massive elements are extremely short-lived, but theory predicts that if scientists can create atoms with the right combinations of protons and neutrons, they might become stable and endure for minutes, days or even years. In honor of the 2013 Lindau meeting, which focuses on chemistry, we have updated our interactive periodic table with links to Nature Chemistry’s In Your Element essay series....

1969 Abortion Debate “Abortion is still the most widespread, and the most clandestine, method of fertility control in the modern world. In recent years several nations have legalized the practice, and as a consequence, induced abortion is emerging from the shadows and has become a topic of worldwide discussion and controversy. The debate ranges over a wide spectrum of considerations: moral, ethical, medical, social, economic, legal, political and humanitarian. The experience of countries that have made abortion legally permissible is now beginning to provide a body of reliable data with which to evaluate the pros and cons of the practice....

Daily weather forecasts in the U.S. wouldn’t be nearly as accurate as they are without the three geostationary weather satellites that are parked 22,000 miles above Earth. Next month these predictions will get even better: the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA plan to launch the first of four satellites that should deliver what the agencies call “game-changing” capabilities for predicting both ordinary weather and dangerous storms such as hurricanes....