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Guiding a recent tour of a Kyoto University lab, a staff member holds up a transparent container. Inside are tiny pale spheres, no bigger than peas, floating in a clear liquid. “This is cartilage,” explains the guide, Hiroyuki Wadahama. “It was made here from human iPS cells.” A monitor attached to a nearby microscope shows a mass of pink and purple dots. This is the stuff from which the cartilage was grown: induced pluripotent stem cells, often called iPS cells....

Last October, T-Mobile made an astonishing announcement: from now on, when you travel internationally with a T-Mobile phone, you get free unlimited text messages and Internet use. Phone calls to any country are 20 cents a minute. T-Mobile’s plan changes everything. It ends the age of putting your phone in airplane mode overseas, terrified by tales of $6,000 overage charges. I figured my readers would be jubilant. But a surprising number had a very different reaction....

Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, by Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman. Copyright 2011 by Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and the Wiley Web site at www.wiley.com, or call 1-800-225-5945. There are people who meet, fall in love, stay married for their entire lives, and never have an unkind word for their spouses....

All our experience of the world, and ability to act on it, are channelled through our body. The pioneering computer scientist, Alan Turing, correctly realised the human mind is special not particularly because of its computing power, but because the body provides it with a unique interface to the world. Current research in psychology and neuroscience is probing how the brain represents the body. Recent advances have revealed that body representation is fundamentally multisensory, arising from the combination of many different sensory signals....

First responders arrive at a disaster scene—a bombing, say—and, after stabilizing victims, treat them with a puff of a nasal spray to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The spray sends neuropeptide Y (NPY), a tiny but powerful signaling protein, deep into the nose and up into the brain. There it prevents the brain’s stress system from kicking into overdrive and causing PTSD, which disrupts sleep, mood and thought in some people following trauma....

The mystery of why the ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn’s moon Enceladus did not freeze over long ago may now be solved — heat from the scraping of rock churning within the fragmented core of Enceladus could keep its underground ocean warm for up to billions of years, a new study finds. This heat could help provide the kinds of conditions required for life to develop, according to the study....

Dieters take note: thinking in detail about eating can reduce actual food consumption, according to a study in the December 10, 2010, issue of Science. Imagining an experience is known to evoke the same physiological responses as the real experience, so researchers at Carnegie Mellon University tested whether imagining chowing down could simulate the experience enough to satisfy people’s cravings. Study participants thought about eating a food—M&M’s or cubes of cheese—one morsel at a time and then afterward were offered the same food to eat....

Humanity’s origins in Africa are so taken for granted these days that it often comes as a surprise to discover that the scientific world—except for Charles Darwin—was at first rather skeptical of the idea. Indeed, most of the fossil evidence gathered in the first half of the 20th century was consistent with the idea that the genus Homo, of which our species Homo sapiens is just the most recent member, arose in Asia....

In the past decade the amount of electricity produced by harnessing the wind in the U.S. has grown 13-fold, now supplying some 2.3 percent of U.S. electricity needs, or enough juice to power the state of Wisconsin. Wind turbines have been rising above the plains in Texas, cropping up on ridge lines in Oregon and even threatening to appear offshore in Massachusetts’s Nantucket Sound—all to take advantage of the uneven heating of Earth’s surface that creates air currents, or wind....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - A medical journal criticised British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline on Thursday for delaying access to key data from a trial of its antidepressant paroxetine (Seroxat, Paxil) that would have shown earlier that it is neither safe or effective in adolescents. The widely used medicine is linked to an increased risk of suicide in young people and has carried a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “black box warning” advising against its use in adolescents since 2004....

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have grown more acutely aware of the air we breathe. And along with airborne virus transmission, we have had to worry about smoke plumes from increasingly severe wildfires. Some weather forecasts now routinely include outdoor air quality measures—but most Americans spend about 90 percent of their time indoors, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In order to counter airborne health threats at home or in the office, more people are now tracking contaminants with handheld air quality monitors, and the market for such devices is expected to reach $4....

In Baltimore, men in one of the most down-at-the-heels, blighted parts of the city live 20 years less, on average, than men in the leafiest, most well-to-do neighborhoods. Numbers such as these are why poverty and lack of access to medical care are often blamed for poor health in the U.S. But it is not a simple money = health equation. Other numbers make that clear. By global standards, the poor of the U....

The Dead Sea is a place of mystery: the lowest surface on Earth, the purported site of Sodom and Gomorrah, a supposed font of curative waters and, despite its name, a treasure trove of unusual microbial life. Yet its future is anything but a mystery. After centuries of stability—owed to a delicate equilibrium between freshwater supply from the Jordan River and evaporation under the relentless Middle Eastern sun—the lake is now disappearing....

“Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.” —From The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, 1874 Imagine you are an astronaut, untethered from your safety line, adrift in space. Your damaged radio lets you hear mission control’s repeated attempts to contact you, but your increasingly desperate cries of “I’m here, I’m here” go unacknowledged—you are unable to signal that you’re alive but injured. After days and weeks of fruitless pleas from your loved ones, their messages cease....

By Patpicha Tanakasempipat BANGKOK, June 1 (Reuters) - Thai wildlife authorities found 40 tiger cub carcasses in a freezer in Thailand’s infamous Tiger Temple on Wednesday as they removed live animals in response to international pressure over suspected trafficking and abuse. The Buddhist temple in Kanchanaburi province west of Bangkok had become a tourist destination where visitors snapped selfies with bottle-fed cubs. But the temple has been investigated for suspected links to wildlife trafficking and abuse....

Can we test the claims of theology with experiments? In science, theories are routinely subjected to the guillotine of experiments. The same could apply to any theory that puts “skin in the game” and makes testable predictions, even if those are in the realm of theology. This was already recognized by Isaac Newton, as discussed in Michael Strevens’ new book The Knowledge Machine. “I feign no hypotheses,” wrote Newton in 1713 for the second edition of his book Principia....

(Credit:Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)Search for porn using Google Image Search today and you might not find much. The company rolled out a change to its image search algorithm overnight that makes it tougher to stumble across adult pictures, whether or not you’re searching for them. Here’s how a Google representative explains the change:“We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for – but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them....

Hurricane Patricia, the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, is plowing toward Mexico’s west coast. The Category 5 storm was a modest hurricane just two days ago but has quickly become a monster, seemingly out of nowhere. As the Mexican government in three states scrambles to evacuate thousands of people, meteorologists are watching nervously to see what the storm will do next. Patricia, they say, is shaping up to be not only the most powerful but the fastest-growing on record....

APRIL’S ISSUE TANGLED WITH quantum braids in “Computing with Quantum Knots,” by Graham P. Collins. Readers also learned about new vaccines coming to market that promise to conquer childhood diarrhea caused by rotavirus, a frequent killer of young children in the developing world, in “New Hope for Defeating Rotavirus,” by Roger I. Glass. Most interesting were reader responses to another health problem, depicted by Madhusree Mukerjee, about public health scientist Smarajit Jana’s work in organizing sex workers to fight HIV in India [“The Prostitutes’ Union,” Insights]....

Neuroscientists have long aspired to understand the intangible properties of the mind. Our most treasured cerebral qualities, like the ability to think, write poetry, fall in love and even envision a higher spiritual realm, are all generated in the brain. But how the squishy, pinkish-gray, wrinkled mass of the physical brain gives rise to these impalpable experiences remains a mystery. Some neuroscientists think the key to cracking that mystery is a better map of the brain’s circuitry....