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Barely two months after Xi Jinping was named China’s new leader, the Twitter generation seemed to be gaining the upper hand over the nation’s status quo regime. Ham-handed censors rewrote an editorial in the newspaper Southern Weekend without notifying the editors—and even managed to add a glaring historical error. Censorship is routine in China, especially for liberal periodicals such as Southern Weekend, but this time the editors went ballistic. They cried foul on Sina Weibo, the country’s popular microblogging platform, and wrote an open letter calling for the removal of the provincial propaganda chief....

Dec 30 (Reuters) - China will slap a total ban on the domestic ivory trade within a year, the government announced on Friday, shutting the door to the world’s biggest end-market for poached ivory. The State Council said in a notice a complete ban would be enforced by Dec. 31, 2017. A first batch of factories and shops will need to close and hand in their licences by March 31, 2017....

When she first began studying the people who had terrorized her country, Natalia Trujillo prepared herself to come face to face with monsters. She would be interviewing former combatants from the long, bloody conflict that had gripped Colombia for more than 50 years. The complex power struggle between guerrilla insurgents, the government, paramilitary groups and drug traffickers had killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Four of Trujillo’s family members had been kidnapped, and the violence had driven her father from his farmland....

There is a mystery brewing in the far reaches of our solar system. Astronomers have long thought the eight planets orbit in nearly perfect circles because they once formed within the swirling disk of dust and gas that surrounded the young sun. But in 2003 scientists discovered something strange: a dwarf planet known as Sedna whose elongated orbit takes it from twice Pluto’s distance to more than 20 times its distance from the sun....

Since 2007 economists from Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have issued the annual Global Innovation Index (GII), a report that sizes up the innovative capacities and results of the world’s economies. This year’s report includes data on 142 economies, which represents 94.9 percent of the world’s population and 98.7 percent of global GDP. How does one measure something as abstract as “innovation”? The GII researchers use 84 data points ranging from political stability to ease of starting a business to the number of Wikipedia edits originating there every year....

Five digits radiating from a palm, an arrangement both flexible and strong—capable of playing a piano, wielding a hammer, offering a comforting touch. The hand is our most familiar body part, central to most everyday tasks, from dressing and driving to cooking and texting. Yet from an evolutionary standpoint, it remains largely mysterious, particularly when it comes to the earliest stage of its origin. Other four-limbed creatures—tetrapods, as they are known—have hands that look and function quite differently than ours do....

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he will head up a panel on vaccine safety for Donald Trump. The president-elect’s transition team spokeswoman later walked that back, saying that he is “exploring the possibility” of forming a panel on autism, but “no decisions have been made.” Let’s hope Trump drops any idea of a vaccine panel headed by Kennedy. For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality....

We wake up to time, courtesy of an alarm clock, and go through a day run by time—the meeting, the visitors, the conference call, the luncheon are all set to begin at a particular hour. We can coordinate our own activities with those of others because we all implicitly agree to follow a single system for measuring time, one based on the inexorable rise and fall of daylight. In the course of evolution, humans have developed a biological clock set to this alternating rhythm of light and dark....

After many lawsuits and a 2012 U.S. Department of Justice settlement, last month an independent review found that antidepressant drug Paxil (paroxetine) is not safe for teenagers. The finding contradicts the conclusions of the initial 2001 drug trial, which the manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline had funded, then used its results to market Paxil as safe for adolescents. The original trial, known as Study 329, is but one high-profile example of pharmaceutical industry influence known to pervade scientific research, including clinical trials the U....

When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon in the 1970s, they left behind two pairs of temperature probes drilled into the surface. The sensors measured how easily the soil radiated heat, in the hope of learning how much radioactive heating the moon produced and details about its recent geological activity. The nuclear-powered lunar heat flow probes broadcast data back to Earth, where they were stored on tapes, until 1977. But the experiments’ principal investigator Marcus Langseth studied it only through December 1974....

The nation’s top science academy is spending part of a $500 million oil spill settlement to provide climate change education in Gulf Coast communities that are highly vulnerable to sea-level rise and other climate threats. The grants, ranging from $98,000 to $764,000, will be distributed to organizations serving middle and high school students mostly in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, according to a list of awards released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine....

The earliest evidence for lice infesting humans is a 10,000-year-old specimen of a Brazilian mummy’s lice-ridden hair. Evidence was lacking, however, that prehistoric South Americans created and used combs to remove the pests. Now the first such objects thought to be made and used for this practice have been found by scientists in Chile, Brazil and the U.S. The combs are made of barbed reeds with thin, tightly-spaced teeth. All were found at five sites in northern Chile and are estimated to be between 240 and 800 years old....

The nation’s 47 million uninsured are not the only reason that health care has become a big issue in the presidential campaigns. Besides leaving many uncovered, the U.S. also has trouble controlling the spending habits of a health care colossus that is on track to consume 20 cents of every dollar by 2015, a tripling from 1970 levels. Even back in 2005, the health expenditures for each U.S. citizen exceeded the entire per capita incomes of Chile or Venezuela....

Ten years ago researchers embarked on a study of zebrafish–a quick breeding aquarium pet. While searching for cancer causing genes, they ended up isolating the gene that makes European skin white, thanks to the golden variant of the fish. The genetic basis for human skin color has eluded scientists for years, with previous studies pointing to more than 100 different genes involved in the production of melanin–the pigment responsible for skin color and a natural sunblock....

An explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant that injured more than 100 and killed an estimated five to 15 people on Wednesday (April 17) is an eerie echo of another Texas industrial disaster that struck almost exactly 66 years ago. On April 16, 1947, a ship loaded with ammonium nitrate docked at the Port of Texas City erupted in flames, causing a massive explosion that killed approximately 576 people, according to the Texas State Historical Association....

Dear EarthTalk: My husband and I are expecting a child and we’re concerned about the environmental impacts of disposable diapers. I remember the old cloth diapers with pins that my mom used. Are there any new developments in the cloth diapering field? – Stephanie, via e-mail A growing number of green-minded parents are starting to recognize the health and ecological benefits of reusable cloth diapers over disposables. Most brands of disposables are made from petroleum-derived plastic and wood fiber—some 250,000 trees fall each year to feed America’s disposable diaper addiction....

Last spring, national scientific organizations began holding conferences online in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the trend has continued into 2021. For example, the American Physical Society annual meeting was the first major physics conference to be virtual last year, and will still be held in cyberspace this coming April. In hindsight, such changes were inevitable. The uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. made attending large public gatherings far too risky....

Given its 13,000-year history, one might assume we’d have beer figured out by now. But recent research examines the bubbly liquid’s composition with unprecedented focus, singling out a new quality-control measure. Beer contains three complex organic ingredients: grain, hops and yeast. Throughout the brewing process, these all interact with one another’s by-products, creating hundreds of chemical derivatives that can influence taste. Although some food chemists consider beer’s complexity daunting, Stefan Pieczonka, a Technical University of Munich researcher pursuing what he calls a “Ph....

A very dark room. Polarizing film. Plain gray, high-quality film (“experimental grade”) gives the best results; avoid film tinted with a color (see this page for some places that sell film). You need to cut it into six squares, each about two inches on a side. The box on page 94 describes what polarizers do to photons. A laser, such as a laser pointer. If yours emits polarized light, align its polarization at 45 degrees from the vertical....

Novelists often offer deep insights into the human psyche that take psychologists years to test. In his 1864 Notes from Underground, for example, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky observed: “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind....