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Practice Removes Prejudice Like it or not, most people hold subconscious stereotypes about individuals of races other than their own. New research found a link between such implicit (unconscious) bias and the “other-race effect”—the fact that we can distinguish faces of our own race better than other-race faces. In the study, Caucasians’ implicit bias toward African-Americans diminished after they learned to individuate faces of that race. The other-race effect is not the cause of implicit racial bias, but it prevents us from overcoming our preconceived notions, says lead author Sophie Lebrecht....

President Biden’s promise to ensure that communities of color are not left behind in the vaccine rollout shows that he is ready to tackle the pervasive inequities of health care laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. But turning that promise into practice is not just a case of establishing more vaccination sites. We first need to know where those at high risk within underserved communities are located in order to set up mobile vaccination sites in the right places, and that will require the federal government to use a scientific, data-driven system for identifying those most in need....

You know the exit is somewhere along this stretch of highway, but you have never taken it before and do not want to miss it. As you carefully scan the side of the road for the exit sign, numerous distractions intrude on your visual field: billboards, a snazzy convertible, a cell phone buzzing on the dashboard. How does your brain focus on the task at hand? To answer this question, neuroscientists generally study the way the brain strengthens its response to what you are looking for—jolting itself with an especially large electrical pulse when you see it....

The so-called muon anomaly, first seen in an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2001, hasn’t budged. For 20 years, this slight discrepancy between the calculated value of the muon’s magnetic moment and its experimentally determined one has lingered at a significance of about 3.7 sigma. That is a confidence level of 99.98 percent, or about a one-in-4,500 chance the discrepancy is a random fluctuation. With the just announced results from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Ill....

Contrary to the old adage, green grass may make for better neighbors, not jealous ones. According to preliminary results from an ongoing long-term study of landscapes and human interaction, neighbors are more likely to be social when living among lush lawns. These results from six mini-neighborhoods in Phoenix may not bode well for the ongoing conflict between environmental and social wants. Sociologist Scott Yabiku of Arizona State University and an interdisciplinary team of colleagues have set up five independent landscape groupings within a larger suburb of virtually identical housing units....

Key concepts Physics Forces Weight Buoyancy Gravity Center of mass Introduction It’s time to set sail! Even if you don’t live near a lake or ocean, you will get to do some sailing in this science activity as you build your own toy sailboat. But first you have to make sure your boat doesn’t capsize! Are you up for the challenge? Background Do you remember playing with toy boats in the bathtub—or have you ever been on a real boat?...

Sound analysis of sperm whale “clicks” suggests they might have names, similar to the individual, identifying whistles that dolphins display. And we thought they just sang to one another. Illinois’s Tevatron accelerator lab, set to close later this year, finds possible evidence of what may be a new elementary particle or force of nature. Talk about going out with a bang. NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft returned the first close-up pictures of Mercury taken from orbit....

Another month, another variant. As of July, the version of SARS-CoV-2 called BA.5 is officially the dominant strain in the U.S., making up 54 percent of all new cases. This is unlikely to be the last variant, and each new strain, this one in particular, is highly contagious and has its own set of mutations that help it evade the immune system and existing antibodies from previous infections or vaccinations. Despite a constantly changing landscape, one thing that has remained steady since the beginning of this long pandemic is that science is ever vigilant....

One of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of amanitas—the group of fungi that includes death caps, destroying angels and the polka-dotted mushrooms of Super Mario renown—is kept in a converted garage in Roosevelt, N.J. The stockpile is maintained by Rodham E. Tulloss, aged 70, who has documented species so rare they have been seen only once or twice in the past 50 years. His climate-controlled Herbarium Rooseveltensis Amanitarum may contain more distinct species than any university or museum....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Roller coasters may seem like a very modern type of entertainment—constantly getting bigger, faster and scarier thanks to advances in technology. But they actually date back to the mid-1800s. Gravity-propelled railways built to transport coal from up in the mountains down to the town in Pennsylvania, US, were hired out at weekends by fare-paying passengers riding purely for the fun of it....

One evening while one of us (Colosi) was making dinner, her six-year-old daughter, Gianna, appeared with 10 little pieces of paper in her hand. She had been doing her homework, she said, and each of the scraps contained one of the words she was supposed to learn. When her mother asked why Gianna had torn apart her spelling list, she shrugged: “So I can do stuff with it.” For Gianna, abstract concepts became easier to understand after she had transformed them into physical objects—in this case, pieces of paper she could hold, feel and manipulate....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). The first data ever transmitted over Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, blipped from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles to one at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto on Oct. 29, 1969. That evening, the team at UCLA got on the phone with the SRI team and began typing “LOGIN.” “We typed the L and we asked, ‘Did you get the L?...

The European Ombudsman has upheld a complaint made by animal rights group PETA that the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is not doing enough to enforce substitution of animal testing when companies prepare safety data on compounds under EU regulations on registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals (Reach). The ECHA’s triennial report on animal testing in June 2014 showed progress on alternative mechanisms for meeting Reach requirements without animal testing. However, the agency admitted that some firms had initiated animal tests that could have been substituted for validated in vitro methods, and that some animal tests were being undertaken without consultation with the ECHA as to whether they were necessary....

The United States has begun producing plutonium-238 again for the first time in a quarter century, marking a key step toward averting a feared shortage of this important spacecraft fuel, NASA officials say. The U.S. Department of Energy’s plutonium reboot has not yet advanced beyond the test phase, but NASA is confident that production will eventually ramp up enough to power space probes for several decades to come. “That’s going to revive our supply and allow us to be able to complete a number of potential plutonium-necessary missions over this decade, and position us well into the decade after that,” Jim Green, head of NASA’s planetary science division, said Monday (March 18) at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas....

The hydra, a small freshwater creature, tears itself apart every time it gets hungry. Rather than have lips, the hydra’s mouth is a sealed piece of intact skin that it tears open to gobble each meal. In a new study, biophysicists have filmed hydras as they create these temporary rips, showing for the first time how its cells manage the maneuver. The findings, reported today in Biophysical Journal, may offer clues into tissue regeneration....

Runny nose, cough, fever: patients show up in clinics every day with these classic symptoms of respiratory infection. But is the culprit a bacterium, which can be attacked with antibiotics, or a virus, which is harder to target with medication? Often doctors cannot be certain. But researchers say they are closing in on an accurate test that can make the call quickly, right in a physician’s office. Faced with an unknown infection, doctors sometimes order laboratory tests for common bacteria such as Streptococcus....

Anyone who has ever lugged a pallet of water down to the basement in preparation for the latest extreme weather event knows that water is heavy. How heavy? About 8.3 pounds per gallon. Now, scientists have developed a way to use water’s weight to measure just how much of it is sitting up in snow-covered mountains in the western United States. In states like California, which is currently in the midst of a crippling drought, the more water managers know about how much snow is in the mountains, the better they can plan for the summer to come (Greenwire)....

Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is the only economist on Earth who spends his days studying the fluctuating cost of warp-disruption batteries and T2 light drones. That’s because he’s the world’s first virtual-world economist. This past August, Guðmundsson took up residence in EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online game, to report on its economy, research its society and coordinate with academic institutions on their entrance into virtual worlds. Think Alan Greenspan—only in Battlestar Galactica....

The wrong diagnosis of a woman suffering from the MERS coronavirus led to more than 49 other patients and medical staff being exposed to the disease in a Saudi hospital, the World Health Organization said in a statement on Tuesday. The unnamed 49-year-old from Buridah city developed symptoms on June 9 and was admitted to hospital on June 10 where she was in a critical condition in an intensive care unit, the WHO said....

Charles F. Zorumski, head of the department of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, answers: It is indeed possible for a person to get intoxicated and not remember what she or he did. This state is called a “blackout” or, more precisely, a “memory blackout.” During a blackout a person is intoxicated but awake and interacting with the environment in seemingly meaningful ways, such as holding a conversation or driving a car....