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At a February 12, 2002, news briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained the limitations of intelligence reports: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Rumsfeld’s logic may be tongue-twisting, but his epistemology was sound enough that he was quoted twice at the World Summit on Evolution....

A tiny startup outside Chicago has created external hardware for a smartphone that enables a user to feel as well as see an image on flat glass. The user has the sensation of touching keys on a keyboard, for example. The company, called Tanvas, is selling its $2,000 TPad phone, a standard Motorola Moto G coupled with haptic technology, which creates the illusion of touching physical textures and shapes displayed on its screen....

Melissa Krechmer, a social worker in Philadelphia, grew tired of hearing the same refrain from each of her doctors. “I’d go to my allergist, and they would [say], ‘You need to take your Zyrtec, but you also need to lose weight,’” Krechmer says. “It’d be every time, no matter what type of visit.” This went on for years, even as her repeated attempts to lose weight only led her to disordered eating....

Mark Sabbatini first noticed the cracks in his apartment’s concrete walls in 2014. It had been six years since he moved to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago far out in the Barents Sea, about halfway between Norway’s northern tip and the North Pole. He was an itinerant American writer drawn by promises of an open, international society—and jazz music. Every winter the community of Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town at 78 degrees North latitude, holds a jazz festival to liven up the perpetual darkness....

I have gotten a handful of questions lately from listeners wanting to know whether a certain diet or supplement will help with “brain fog.” Each of the people that wrote to me had come across a blog or a YouTube video or podcast that described a product or dietary regimen that was supposed to treat brain fog. Interestingly, each offered a completely different solution for the same problem. Although Brain Fog is not a recognized medical condition, it’s a term that I’m starting to see more and more frequently....

“Science isn’t political.” If you’re in STEM, you’ve likely heard this refrain before; its sentiment might even resonate with you. It may not surprise you that only 43.6 percent of STEM students voted in the last presidential election, compared to 49.2 and 53.2 percent of students in the humanities and social sciences, respectively. Science, however, has always been political; the events of 2020 have only made the relationship between science and society more explicit....

Editor’s note: This chapter from A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind by Robert A. Burton (Saint Martin’s Press, April 23, 2013) relates that one of the most-heralded developments in neuroscience in recent years—the discovery of “mind reading” mirror neurons—fails to live up to the assertions of some researchers that these brain cells afford profound insights into the intentions of another individual. Excerpted from A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us about Ourselves,by Robert A....

Related stories EU regulators: We’ll scrutinize Windows RT browser behavior Browsers on Windows RT: It’s a tough antitrust case to make Senate panel eyes Windows RT browser restrictions Poll: Windows 8 or Windows RT device? Why Mozilla believes Firefox on Windows RT is a bust Although many new devices technically can accommodate other browsers besides those that come with the operating system, those third-party browsers won’t always get the full privileges and thus power of the built-in browser....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Novavax reports that its two-dose protein-based vaccine against COVID-19 has been 100% effective in preventing severe illness, hospitalization and death due to COVID-19, as well as 90.4% effective against COVID-19 symptoms in large-scale human studies. These studies, which involved thousands of people in the U....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from developing countries will be 127 percent higher than in the world’s most developed economies by 2040, according to figures released Thursday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).Under the policies currently in place worldwide, carbon emissions will grow 46 percent by 2040 from a 2010 baseline, the EIA projected in its biennial International Energy Outlook.Energy-related emissions will total around 45.5 billion tonnes in 2040, up from a reference level of 31....

This week’s diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the ‘genomic age’ by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative — in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine — is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism’s observable characteristics, or phenotype....

By Jessica Marshall of Nature magazineNanomedicines, advocates say, will one day be commonplace. Nanoparticles are already being used in bone-replacement composites and chemotherapy delivery systems, and more sophisticated systems could eventually carry personalized therapies to the precise site in the body where they are needed.But their size – measured in billionths of a meter, on the same scale as much of our cellular machinery – means that nanoparticles could also have unexpected effects, such as triggering unwanted immune responses....

Next time you eat fish for dinner, consider that your meal is probably worth more money as a carbon capture and storage device. By assigning a dollar value to carbon stored in ocean ecosystems, two recent scientific reports are attempting to make nations reconsider the true worth of their fishing activities. The first, a new assessment backed by the Global Ocean Commission, roughly estimates that fish and other aquatic life in the high seas absorb enough carbon dioxide to avert $74 billion to $222 billion in climate damage per year....

The world is counting on an international climate agreement in Paris next month to stop the rising fossil fuel and biofuel emissions that are warming the planet. Creating an international agreement is an admirable goal, but it is interesting that countries are not racing to zero emissions on their own. It is even more amazing that no country has performed a study on the benefits and costs of going to 100 percent clean, renewable energy....

In 1922, a pair of sociologists at New York’s Columbia University were poring over 50 years of U.S. economic and mortality data, when they noticed a surprising result. Lean times in the country’s history didn’t correspond with more deaths, as they expected. In fact, the opposite was true. More people—babies included—died when the economy prospered. William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas were sceptical enough to delve further. Would accounting for a possible lag in time between the downturn and the rise in deaths change the outcome?...

When gasoline prices climbed to $3 a gallon last summer, hybrid vehicles–which combine a conventional engine and a battery-powered electric motor to achieve improved fuel economy and performance–began racing out of showrooms. Whereas the average U.S. car goes about 23 miles on a gallon of gas, a full-fledged hybrid car such as a Toyota Prius travels about twice as far on the same amount, depending on how it is driven. Annual U....

SAN DIEGO — Doctors may want to roll up their sleeves before work, literally. A new study suggests that long sleeves on a doctor’s white coat may become contaminated with viruses or other pathogens that could then be transmitted to patients. In the study, the researchers had 34 health care workers wear either long- or short-sleeved white coats while they examined a mannequin that had been contaminated with DNA from the “cauliflower mosaic virus....

Are men more impressed with their own scientific research than women? Or are women warned off “overstating” their work? A new analysis suggests it might be a little of both. Women were 12.3% less likely than men to frame their work with positive words like “novel” or “excellent” in abstracts, according to a new study of 15 years of clinical research publications. In the case of only top-tier journals—there are numbered rankings for this in the arcane world of scientific publishing—the gap widened to 20....

NASA’s Curiosity rover has measured the highest level of methane gas ever found in the atmosphere at Mars’s surface. The reading taken last week at Gale Crater—21 parts per billion—is three times greater than the previous record, which Curiosity detected back in 2013. Planetary scientists avidly track methane on Mars because its presence could be a sign of life on the red planet. On Earth, most methane is produced by living things, although the gas can also come from geological sources such as chemical reactions involving rocks....

From Simons Science News (find original story here). In the 1930s, Michael Goldberg designed a family of highly symmetric spherical forms consisting of hexagons and pentagons. Because of their aesthetic appeal, organic feel and easily understood structure, they have since found a surprising number of applications ranging from golf-ball dimple patterns to nuclear-particle detector arrays. For more information, see George Hart, “Goldberg Polyhedra,” in Shaping Space, 2nd ed., edited by Marjorie Senechal, 125–138, Springer, 2012....