At right is a picture of someone’s brain as seen through functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. This particular subject is taxing his neurons with a working memory task—those sunny orange specks represent brain activity related to the task. fMRI images show the brain according to changes in blood oxygen level, a proxy for degree [...]

After months of contentious debate, the journal Science is publishing a controversial study on Friday about H5N1 avian influenza‘s ability to spread among mammals. The report faced a tortuous path to publication as some researchers sought to censor the study’s findings for fear that they could be replicated and put to nefarious use. In a [...]

A year ago, Volkswagen in China launched a marketing campaign called The People’s Car Project (PCP), which invited Chinese customers to submit ideas for cars of the future. Participants were able to tinker with designs on a Web site that Volkswagen set up for that purpose, or they could upload their own designs. Wang Jia, [...]

Hot weather is more than uncomfortable; it’s a killer. In fact, heat is the number one weather-related cause of death in the U.S. In an average year, heat kills more people than floods, hurricanes, lightning and tornadoes combined, according to the National Weather Service. And this year is going to get hotter than normal. “Most [...]

ANCHORAGE—In the menagerie of known extrasolar planets, there are hot Jupiters, super-Earths, exo-Neptunes. The terminology astronomers apply to their distant finds rests heavily on the few analogue planets in our own solar system. And they have good reason to believe that planets elsewhere follow the general trends that define our solar system—massive planets, for instance, [...]

Whenever I stay in a hotel room, I’m a little wary of the throw pillows, a bit skittish about the television remote and would never even consider taking a bath. Perhaps I’m being overly paranoid, but as a slight germaphobe, I figure it doesn’t hurt to be a little cautious. New preliminary research vindicates at [...]

At first glance, the news that the Taliban have reportedly decided to ban polio vaccinations for 160,000 children in tribal regions of Pakistan as a way of protesting ongoing drone attacks by the U.S. might seem foolishly counter-productive. As Ed Yong put it in on Twitter, “Taliban to US: “If you don’t stop killing our [...]

The U.S. Department of Energy supercomputer standing watch over the nation’s nuclear arsenal was crowned the world’s fastest supercomputer Monday at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The ascension of Sequoia—run by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—on the TOP500 list of the supercomputers marks the first time since November 2009 that a [...]

Cotton genetically engineered to produce a natural pest killer not only reduces the spraying of pesticides, but has also boosted the populations of beneficial insects, according to a new study. The study monitored the impacts of so-called Bt cotton over more than 20 years and 2.6 million hectares of farmland in northern China and found [...]

Tinnitus, a condition that causes people to hear sounds such as ringing in the ears even when all is quiet, afflicts at least 10 percent of American adults. Although there’s nothing doctors can do to alleviate this discomfort permanently, new approaches to treating the problem are in the works. One of the latest is a [...]