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Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Do you know any good math puzzles? If so, please send me a note and let me know what they are—I’m always looking for good puzzles to add to my collection and to share with math fans around the world. If not, today we’re going to take a look at 3 fun listener-inspired math puzzles that you can use to kick-off your collection and amaze your friends at future dinner parties....

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” So begins Franz Kafka’s The Trial, a novel Kafka worked on between 1914 and 1915 but never finished. It was saved from oblivion by his friend Max Brod. Disobeying Kafka’s orders to burn his manuscripts after his death in 1924, Brod edited the text of The Trial and published it in 1925. What is the charge against Josef K....

As the plane began its descent into Medford, we dropped into the blanket of smoke that covered southwestern Oregon and northern California. It was late July 2018, and several major fires were burning in the region. I was en route to join a Cal Fire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) team investigating a fatal incident that had taken place two days earlier. What the group leader told me over the phone had sent chills up my spine: “A firefighter has been killed in a fire tornado....

China’s high-tech industrialization policy, known as Made in China 2025, purports to take the country to the front ranks of advanced manufacturing in aerospace, robotics, clean energy, transportation and the life sciences. But the transformation into a global biotech and pharmaceutical dynamo might prove more challenging than making robots or self-driving cars. That is because China lacks a good regulatory and ethical review process, a serious problem highlighted last November when scientist He Jiankui gave the world an unwelcome surprise....

Techniques that have armed scientists in the battle against COVID-19 have scooped two out of five US$3-million Breakthrough prizes—the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. One award went to the biochemists who discovered how to smuggle genetic material called messenger RNA into cells, leading to the development of a new class of vaccine. Another was scooped by the chemists who developed the next-generation sequencing technique that has been used to rapidly track variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus....

The Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Foundation has sold royalty rights to treatments developed with support from its ‘venture philantrophy’ model. Royalty pharma – which accumulates royalty payments from established drugs – paid $3.3 billion for royalties on Vertex pharmaceuticals’ Kalydeco (ivacaftor). The venture philanthropy model, adopted in the late 1990s, sees the foundation provide upfront funding for pharmaceutical companies to help reduce the financial risk of developing drugs to treat CF. It gave a total of $150 million to Vertex to support the company’s CF drug development program....

Despite their names–Brightly and Leitner–this is a dark story. Wayne Brightly was a social studies teacher at the John Philip Sousa School in New York City, with a conspicuous record of nonachievement that included multiple failures of his teaching certification exam. Rubin Leitner had spent part of his life homeless and reportedly has Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder marked by “an obsessive focus on a subject of interest, poor relationships and communication difficulties”–according to, well, me, in the Anti Gravity of August 2003....

President Biden plans to host a high-level Earth Day summit, delivering on a campaign pledge and challenging his climate policy team to ready ambitious and credible commitments that can stand up to global scrutiny. A White House planning document says Biden will announce tomorrow the April 22 gathering, marking the fifth anniversary of the signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement, where then-Secretary of State John Kerry signed the accord he helped negotiate the previous December....

Last week Elon Musk’s brain tech start-up Neuralink unveiled the latest version of its neural implant technology. In characteristic Musk style, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla announced the news during a widely hyped livestreamed event in which he showed off the implant’s functionality in several pigs. The device is about the size of a large coin and can be fully embedded in the skull. Attached to it are 1,024 threadlike, flexible electrodes that extend down into the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for numerous functions, including motor control and sensory feedback....

Although ethics classes are common around the world, scientists are unsure if their lessons can actually change behavior; evidence either way is weak, relying on contrived laboratory tests or sometimes unreliable self-reports. But a new study published in Cognition found that, in at least one real-world situation, a single ethics lesson may have had lasting effects. The researchers investigated one class session’s impact on eating meat. They chose this particular behavior for three reasons, according to study co-author Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside: students’ attitudes on the topic are variable and unstable, behavior is easily measurable, and ethics literature largely agrees that eating less meat is good because it reduces environmental harm and animal suffering....

EarthTalk® E - The Environmental Magazine Dear EarthTalk: I’m planning a major home renovation and want to include as many green-friendly features as possible. Where do I begin to look?—Matthew Glaser, Queens, N.Y. There has never been a better time to renovate green, given the abundance of Earth-friendly building material choices as well as contractors well-versed in energy- and resource-efficiency. Many homeowners don’t realize that they can save money in the long run, despite the up front costs, by choosing materials and strategies that will lower utility bills and reduce maintenance and replacement costs moving forward....

On November 25, South African scientists announced the discovery of a new, “heavily mutated” variant of the coronavirus, triggering global panic. Countries quickly imposed travel bans and closed their borders, but the variant has already been detected in at least 23 countries, including the U.S. One reason for the knee-jerk reactions is the new variant’s high number of mutations: Omicron, as it has been dubbed by the World Health Organization, has more than 30 changes to its spike protein....

While Yesenia Chavez was growing up on Chicago’s Southeast Side, it seemed like everyone had asthma. Her mother and sister had the condition, as did many of her classmates. Sometimes she felt left out because she did not have an inhaler. Now as an adult living here, she may have dodged asthma—but this working-class, predominantly Latino area is home to more than 50 current and former industrial sites. And some of them have emitted the kind of air pollution that research has linked to environment-related health conditions such as asthma and others that are prevalent in Chavez’s community....

COPENHAGEN—U.S. forests and soils store some 90 billion metric tons of carbon, or 50 years worth of present U.S. emissions from fossil fuels, according to a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey. As negotiators here at the United Nations’ climate summit continue to struggle to draft a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions—including efforts to reduce deforestation and protect natural sinks—the U.S. Department of Interior is transforming the business of public lands and waters to help combat climate change....

This week’s show was suggested by Nutrition Diva listener Leslie Ghiringhelli, who wrote: “I was recently at my local health food store and overheard a salesperson from a company that sells A2 milk touting its superiority over regular milk. She was saying that the protein that’s in regular milk (but not A2 milk) causes everything from diabetes to autism to autoimmune disease. As an RN and science-minded person, I was immediately skeptical....

Virgin Atlantic became the first commercial airplane operator to fly a plane powered partially by palm tree oil this week. In a short but historic flight, one of the company’s Boeing 747-400s flew more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) from London Heathrow Airport to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, reaching a peak altitude of 25,000 feet (7,600 meters) during the 40-minute flight, with one of its four engines burning a blend of 20 percent coconut and babassu oils mixed with regular petroleum-based jet fuel....

Taking cues from the insect kingdom, scientists have built a tiny boat that uses surface tension, but no moving parts to navigate through water. Miniature electrodes at the rear of the thumbnail-size vessel neutralize the surface tension of the water there, thereby allowing tension at the front to tug it forward. An electrode on the side of the boat enables it to steer clockwise. The device moves at a speed of 0....

Imagine we could voyage back in time, back nearly a third of the way to the big bang itself, back to when life on Earth was just emerging. The exact details of how chemistry gave way to biology—of how life arose and took hold of our world—are now lost to the ages, swept away by more than four billion years of our ever changing planet’s history. What is clear, however, is that the secrets of life’s earthly genesis would be invaluable guides in the search for life elsewhere in the universe....

By Susan Kelly CHICAGO (Reuters) - Even though many doctors see need for improvement, surgical robots are poised for big gains in operating rooms around the world. Within five years, one in three U.S. surgeries - more than double current levels - is expected to be performed with robotic systems, with surgeons sitting at computer consoles guiding mechanical arms. Companies developing new robots also plan to expand their use in India, China and other emerging markets....

Tanning beds will no longer be considered as harmless as dental floss or a Band-Aid under new regulations unveiled today. Until now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has lumped all three items into the same regulatory class. None of those devices have needed to clear expert scrutiny or submit health and safety information before going to the market. Now the FDA will treat tanning beds and sunlamps like other devices that expose users to radiation, such as CT scanners....