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Many who dream of adorning their faces with technology were stunned to hear that Google-type glasses might not be welcome at McDonald’s. Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, claimed that he had worn his Digital Eye Glass while ordering himself a Ranch Wrap in Paris. He insisted that the employees did not take kindly to them. He claimed that they had tried to take them off him. Now McDonald’s has declared: “Non....

TORONTO (Reuters) - The Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan said on Sunday it was evacuating an additional 8,000 people from the far north of the province, as wildfires continue to spread and threaten homes. The provincial government said that as of Saturday there were 114 active fires in the province. More than 5,000 residents have already been moved out of the area in the past week. The latest evacuations are around the town of La Ronge, roughly 600 km (370 miles) north of the provincial capital, Regina....

Babble, bafflegab, balderdash, bilge, blabber, blarney, blather, bollocks, bosh, bunkum. These are a few of the synonyms (from just the b’s) for the demotic descriptor BS (as commonly abbreviated). The Oxford English Dictionary equates it with “nonsense.” In his best-selling 2005 book on the subject, Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously distinguished BS from lying: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction....

About 1.3 billion years ago two black holes collided and sent undulating waves outward through spacetime like ripples on a pond. Here on Earth in the fall of 2015, a sensitive laser-based instrument recorded the waves and offered the first tangible evidence of black holes since Albert Einstein theorized their existence more than 100 years ago. And now, for the first time, scientists have taken a photograph of a black hole....

The Trump administration has significant power to undermine the workings of the Affordable Care Act. The bigger question is how much of that power it will use. President Donald Trump’s executive order on Inauguration Day urging federal officials to “take all actions consistent with law to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens” of the federal health law did not provide administration officials with any new powers to unravel parts of the law....

A crash that killed a driver in a Tesla Model S electric car in self-driving mode has called into question the safety of driverless vehicle technology. This week, federal officials announced the launch of a formal investigation into the accident. The crash occurred on May 7 in Williston, Florida, when a tractor-trailer made a left turn in front of the Tesla, and the car failed to apply the brakes, the New York Times reported....

Expecting something from Apple can be a dangerous game, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try and read the tea leaves every once in a while. Below are five things I think we can expect from Apple next year. Some of these are based on a long ramp-up of rumors and telltale signs from this year, with others outright speculation from trends and the company’s product release habits....

Noreen emailed to ask “Could you do a podcast on probiotic foods that one should avoid if one has a compromised immune system? Is commercial yogurt ok since it’s pasteurized? What about kombucha? Homemade sauerkraut, pickles, hot sauces?” Before I answer Noreen’s questions, let’s talk about how probiotic bacteria might affect the immune system. One of the immune system’s jobs is to protect us from harmful bacterial. And the beneficial organisms that we refer to as probiotics contribute to this effort in a number of ways....

Understanding biological water oxidation is central to achieving artificial photosynthesis and providing cheap and efficient hydrogen production. However, cracking the mystery of such a complex system has resulted in two competing oxidation state schemes, accompanied by controversy and debate over which is correct. Now, Dimitrios Pantazis, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Germany, and his colleagues feel they have proven one scheme more valid than the other....

For the second time this year, a spacecraft is about to partner with an asteroid in an intimate dance. In June, the Japanese mission Hayabusa2 arrived at the 1-kilometre-wide asteroid Ryugu, from whose dusty surface it aims to scoop a sample early next year. On 3 December, the NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx will reach an even tinier space rock, named Bennu, in pursuit of the same goal. OSIRIS-REx will spend the next few weeks buzzing over Bennu’s poles and equator, gathering information to estimate its mass....

Mice with a disrupted circadian rhythm gene overeat and develop problems related to obesity, suggesting that in mammals the 24-hour clock cycle is finely tuned to metabolic functions. Science Express, April 21 Elderly nursing-home residents often are not given sleeping pills, for fear that the compounds will increase the risk of falls. Ironically, a study finds that insomnia itself, not sleep medication, predicts future falls. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, March 30 online...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China shut down 8,347 heavily polluting companies last year in northern Hebei province, which has the worst air in the country, state news agency Xinhua said on Thursday, as the government moves to tackle a problem that has been a source of discontent.Local authorities will block new projects and punish officials in regions where pollution is severe due to lax enforcement, Xinhua cited Yang Zhiming, deputy director of the Hebei provincial bureau of environmental protection, as saying....

The Trump administration violated the Clean Air Act by not taking action on harmful emissions from landfills, a federal court ruled yesterday. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found EPA failed to meet its statutory obligation to restrict climate-warming methane and various conventional pollutants that spew from municipal solid waste landfills across the country. The waste sites are the third-largest emitters of human-caused methane in the United States....

Four centuries ago Galileo pointed his spyglass toward the heavens and astronomy changed forever. As the world celebrates the 400th anniversary of the telescope, another cosmological revolution is coming: The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT)—all expected to see first light by 2020—will dwarf the biggest observatories in use today. The largest, the 42-meter (138-foot) E-ELT, will gather 15 times more light than today’s 10-meter (33-foot) optical telescopes....

Depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders can also influence physical health; they are linked with increased risk of heart disease, for example, and shorter life expectancy. Recent research suggests this may be related to accelerated aging—and new work finds that a form of purely psychological therapy can have a protective physiological effect. A study led by clinical psychologist Kristoffer Månsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden showed that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a common psychotherapy technique, not only reduced anxiety levels in people with social anxiety disorder but also improved cellular aging markers for some patients....

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. American science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft considered The Colour Out of Space to be his best story. In this 1927 classic tale of cosmic horror, a small Massachusetts farming community faces unspeakable evil from the outer reaches of the universe....

Every nation – developed and otherwise – is dependent upon a stable agricultural sector, and climate change threatens that stability, a panel of experts said yesterday. World population is expected to swell by 50 percent by 2050. This alone is a challenge for the world’s supply of vital grains, said Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist and fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. But then you have to tack on the impacts of climate change....

Has Stephen Hawking overreached? The publication in September of The Grand Design, a book the British physicist co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech, raised hackles as some saw it as denying the existence of God based on scientific arguments. Physics, the book states, can now explain where the universe came from and why the laws of nature are what they are. The universe arose “from nothing” courtesy of the force of gravity, and the laws of nature are an accident of the particular slice of universe we happen to inhabit....

In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health....

(Reuters Health) - Watching movie characters use guns may not necessarily make kids more likely to pick up a weapon themselves, but it may mean children who play with guns are more apt to fire them, a new experiment suggests. For the experiment, researchers had children watch a 20-minute clip from the PG-rated films “The Rocketeer” or “National Treasure.” The kids were randomly assigned to watch either an unedited version of the clip, or a version in which scenes showing guns were edited out but the action and narrative of the film were not altered....