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An expert federal panel has added its voice to the growing campaign for laws requiring homebuyers to be informed about a property’s flood history, calling current disclosure practices “not adequate.” A Federal Emergency Management Agency advisory panel says in a new report that prospective buyers cannot “make a fully informed decision” about whether to buy a property in states that do not require sellers to disclose flood history. The disclosure can help buyers determine whether a property has been previously damaged by flooding, is at risk of future flood damage and whether new owners should buy flood insurance....

One reason for the uncertainty over the Sahara’s age is that researchers use such different methods to estimate it; these include studying desert dust found in sediment under the Atlantic Ocean, analyzing sandstone and modeling the ancient climate. To help settle things, geomorphologist Daniel Muhs of the U.S. Geological Survey (lead author on the new research) and his colleagues looked at sediment on Spain’s Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria islands, where they found evidence of Saharan dust....

People can change — but how? This is the central concern of “Redirect,” a new book by Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Wilson offers a tour of recent scientific work on psychological change, with a focus on techniques that help a person who is struggling — bad behavior, bad grades, bad attitudes — find a new, better path. Again and again, Wilson asks: What actually works?...

Listen to the mockingbird. This bird makes a lot of noise. He copies all sorts of other bird songs, repeating, repeating, over and over, sometimes for hours. People must have thought this behavior was vaguely insulting to other birds, else we wouldn’t have named this one the mockingbird. But now, listen more closely. You’ll hear that this virtuoso bird isn’t just copying other species’ tunes. He’s sampling them like a DJ and transposing, bending, tweaking them into his own quite deliberate form....

The hippocampus is a small curl of brain, which nests beneath each temple. It plays a crucial role in memory formation, taking our experiences and interactions and setting them in proverbial stone by creating new connections among neurons. A report published on June 27 in Science reveals how the hippocampus learns and hard wires certain experiences into memory. The authors show that following a particular behavior, the hippocampus replays that behavior repeatedly until it is internalized....

I’ve gotten a lot of questions and emails about the Whole30 diet, including one from Jazmine, who wrote: I have recently been researching the Whole30 diet promoted by Melissa Hartwig. I have been reading her book and getting very excited, until I saw that the diet was ranked 38th out of 38 in US News and World Reports annual diet ranking. I have found your balanced, real-world, science-based approach to nutrition to be a breath of fresh air in the often murky waters of fad diets and I trust your opinion, so what do you think?...

Across the country a crucial trove of crime-solving data is sitting unused in the form of untested rape kits. These cardboard boxes contain envelopes filled with hairs, skin cells, semen, clothing and other forensic evidence collected from survivors after they report a sexual assault. If the DNA on these items matches DNA in a criminal database, it can lead to an arrest. It is practically criminal, then, to put women through the emotionally and physically difficult, hours-long collection process and then never analyze the kits....

The number of mammal and bird species varies from place to place, but these groups of vertebrates still span much of the world. Reptiles do not. New research shows they are highly concentrated in hotspots and are largely absent across the rest of the earth (blue map). This highly uneven dispersion (brown maps) is a surprise. Scientists had diagrammed the somewhat smooth distributions of other tetrapods—vertebrates descended from the earliest four-limbed creatures....

By Kate KellandLONDON (Reuters) - The risks to public health from exposure to emissions from shale gas extraction or fracking are low as long as operations are properly run and regulated, the British government’s health agency said on Thursday.In a review of the potential health impact of fracking, which involves the pumping of water and chemicals into dense shale formations to push out gas and oil, Public Health England (PHE) said any health impacts were likely to be minimal....

The debate is as fierce and perennial as the surf pounding the Alaska coastline. On one side, commercial and sports fishermen complain that calculated fishing quotas do not match the number of fish actually in the water. On the other, conservation authorities worry that overfishing will deplete the sockeye and chinook salmon stocks plying the Pacific Northwest waters. New techniques using existing acoustic sonar equipment may help both sides by determining how many salmon are in the water as well as distinguishing one species from the other....

“All the world’s a stage…,” Shakespeare wrote, and physicists tend to think that way, too. Space seems like a backdrop to the action of forces and fields that inhabit it but space itself is not made of anything—or is it? Lately scientists have begun to question this conventional thinking and speculate that space—and its extension according to general relativity, spacetime—is actually composed of tiny chunks of information. These chunks might interact to create spacetime and give rise to its properties, such as the concept that curvature in spacetime causes gravity....

Looking in from the outside, it can be difficult to understand an eating disorder. Why would anyone want to throw up, starve themselves, binge until they hurt, or feel tortured by food? But eating disorders serve a purpose for those who suffer from them. After all, Psychology 101 teaches us that behavior exists because it gets reinforced. Therefore, once we understand what individuals derive from their eating disorders—how bingeing, purging, or restricting meets a need—it makes way more sense....

Key concepts Physics Heat Sun Materials Introduction Have you ever walked across a large parking lot on a sunny summer day and felt like you were roasting? That’s because the asphalt gets really hot in the sun! Streets, buildings and parking lots can get so hot, they raise the average temperature of urban areas by a few degrees relative to surrounding rural areas. Do you think natural materials also heat up in the sun—or only human-created materials?...

Roses are red, but science could someday turn them blue. That’s one of the possible future applications of a technique researchers have used to genetically engineer blue chrysanthemums for the first time. Chyrsanthemums come in an array of colours, including pink, yellow and red. But all it took to engineer the truly blue hue—and not a violet or bluish colour—was tinkering with two genes, scientists report in a study published on July 26 in Science Advances....

Earthquakes are rattling the globe this year, but the number of atmospheric catastrophes, like floods, is multiplying faster as the world warms, according to the lead climate researcher at a global insurance corporation. Haiti, Chile and China suffered jarring quakes in the first half of 2010, resulting in more than 225,000 deaths. Nearly all of those occurred in Haiti during a January shake, marking a global spree of tectonic rumblings that caused $38 billion in total losses, according to catastrophe data collected by insurance giant Munich Re....

How do space probes navigate large distances with such accuracy? —T. STORM, BROADBEACH, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA Jeremy Jones, chief of the navigation team for the Cassini Project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, replies: Accurate navigation in space depends on three factors: estimating the probe’s current position and velocity (the trajectory), predicting its future trajectory and adjusting the trajectory to achieve the mission objectives. Estimating the current trajectory requires a model of the forces acting on the probe and measurements of the distance and speed of the probe....

Grassoline it ain’t. After a jury ordered a leading cellulosic biofuel company to pony up millions for defrauding investors, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will likely come in 60 million gallons shy of its 100 million gallon target next year. Late last month, a federal court in Mobile ordered Cello Energy of Bay Minette, Ala., to pay $10.4 million in punitive damages for fraudulently claiming it could produce cheap diesellike fuel from hay, wood pulp and other waste....

Ten years ago Dennis Degray’s life changed forever when he slipped and fell while taking out the trash in the rain. He landed on his chin, causing a severe spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed below the neck. Now he’s the star participant in an investigative trial of a system that aims to help people with paralysis type words using only their thoughts. The promise of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) for restoring function to people with disabilities has driven researchers for decades, yet few devices are ready for widespread practical use....

A year ago, Superstorm Sandy hammered all three international airports in and around New York City. LaGuardia International got the worst of it when Sandy’s 3.7-meter storm surges overwhelmed the airport’s protective berm wall system with nearly 380 million liters of water from Flushing Bay, flooding the airfield and closing it for three days. In an acknowledgement that LaGuardia’s outdated defenses against extreme weather will continue to be compromised over time, local and federal officials recently approved $37....

Sitting by the window of a posh coastal hotel in Half Moon Bay, Calif., wearing a baby-blue sweater and khakis, Ian Wilmut doesn’t project the image of a scientist who pulled off one of the most dramatic experiments in modern biology. When he and his collaborators unveiled Dolly the cloned sheep in 1997, they ignited the embryonic stem cell research field, struck awe in the public and set off a panic about the imminent cloning of humans....