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Twenty-one dead lab chickens piled up this spring at a government facility before its researchers could pinpoint why. The team had requested and received what was meant to be a relatively harmless strain of avian flu. Instead, the virus killed all the test birds during experiments. The samples, it turns out, were contaminated with the deadly H5N1 flu strain. The mishap raised concerns about safety procedures at the lab that provided the virus....

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen Knopf, 2013 ($26.95) Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Cohen, director of Google Ideas and a foreign policy wonk who has advised Hillary Clinton, deliver their vision of the future in this ambitious, fascinating account. For gadget geeks, the book is filled with tantalizing examples of futuristic goods and services: robotic plumbers; automated haircuts; computers that read body language; and 3-D holographs of weddings projected into the living rooms of relatives who couldn’t attend....

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, launched a new cargo ship to the International Space Station today (Dec. 1), but the fate of the robotic supply ship is unclear after issues cropped up during its trip into space. The unmanned Progress 65 spacecraft blasted off atop a Russian Soyuz-U rocket at 9:51 a.m. EST (1451 GMT) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a mission to deliver more than 2.5 tons (2.3 metric tons) of food, equipment and other supplies to the space station....

When you open your eyes and reach out to shut off the alarm clock, two distinct brain systems are activated: one recognizes the clock, and the other guides your hand. Neuroscientists have long been aware of this “dissociation” between the recognition and guidance systems, but they had not been able to observe both in action. Now Lior Shmuelof and Ehud Zohary of Hebrew University in Jerusalem have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to see the duality in action in human volunteers....

The pairing of Pluto and its moon Charon is unique in our solar system because Charon is nearly half the size of the planet it orbits, whereas the diameters of most moons are just a few percent of those of their parent bodies. Findings published today in the journal Science shed new light on how the pairing formed and support the hypothesis that a large cosmic collision was to blame....

Earlier this year Hewlett-Packard announced the launch of its Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) project, a 10-year effort to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors across the planet. Technologists say that the information gathered by this kind of ubiquitous sensing network could change our knowledge of the world as profoundly as the Internet has changed business. “People had no idea the Web was coming,” says technology forecaster Paul Saffo....

Although microbes may have invented alcohol, it was the mammals that mastered it. Usually this meant simply munching on one overripe palm fruit too many—but then there are Indian elephants, which are known to have a hankering for liquor and rice beer. From tipsy tree shrews to drunken monkeys, the primate lineage crawls with critters getting high off the hooch. And with our fruit-eating pedigree, 10 percent of the modern human liver’s enzymes are solely dedicated to turning alcohol into energy....

Ask astronomers what question they most want to answer, and you will get scattered responses: How did the first stars, galaxies and black holes form? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? Are we alone? Each question demands its own large telescope: no ultimate, one-size-fits-all instrument will ever exist, for none can be made to gather each and every kind of cosmic light. Black holes sometimes shine in x-rays, for instance, whereas Earth-like exoplanets are best studied in optical and infrared light....

On January 5, 2001, the Clinton administration finalized a new policy called the Roadless Rule, which put 58 million acres of national forest lands off limits to mining, logging, drilling and road-building. Industry and many states balked at the restrictions, environmentalists cheered, and everyone wondered: Would the protections survive? George W. Bush, a former oilman whose campaign promises included opening Arctic lands to drilling, would take office just 15 days later....

Lose weight while you sleep? It sounds too good to be true—but recent research indicates that there is a connection between how much you weigh and the amount of shut-eye you get per night. Two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, help to control appetite. When you do not get enough rest, levels of ghrelin, which increases hunger, rise; levels of leptin, which promotes feelings of fullness, sink. A study in the May issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology found a significant disruption in nighttime ghrelin levels in chronic insomniacs....

On April 8 the United Nations Youth Forum hosted a panel of three inspiring young activist leaders that was moderated by Scientific American. In it, they explained what sparked them to take action on climate justice, big climate opportunities they see ahead and what global leaders can do to help make their visions happen. The leaders are Fatemah Alzelzela in Kuwait, a Young Champion of the Earth at the U.N. Environment Program and founder of Eco Star, a group making a difference in reducing waste; Maximo Mazzocco in Argentina, a Generation 17 Young Leader at the U....

From Nature magazine An international framework for providing information about how Earth’s climate will affect everything from health to disaster planning is set to bring order to an area that has given some scientists cause for concern. The field of ‘climate services’ has boomed in recent years, with various organizations and individuals using climate models to advise policy-makers and local people on crop production, infrastructure planning and disease management. At the first ever ‘extraordinary session’ of the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, Switzerland, which finished on Wednesday, members of the organization agreed on an implementation plan for a ‘Global Framework for Climate Services’ to manage how such information is gathered and communicated....

Many people are working to harness renewable energy sources more effectively and to enhance energy efficiency. All good. Most of the efforts will probably result in welcomed but incremental improvements, however. Radical innovations are needed to drastically change the energy game. For years scientists and engineers have touted some fantastic schemes: satellites that beam solar power to receivers on land; wind machines that hover in the atmosphere, generating electricity. Down on earth, however, researchers have recently received substantial government or private funding for a remarkable variety of long-shot technologies in a few key areas....

BOSTON—Astronomy is facing a lean decade. That was the message handed down by senior representatives of the federal agencies that fund much of the field’s research in the U.S. during “town halls” with scientists here at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Science agencies are facing flat or declining budgets, and in that environment new astronomy initiatives will often be possible only at the expense of existing ones. “We can turn off the old to enable the new,” NASA Astrophysics Division director Jon Morse said in a May 23 town hall discussion....

A blind young man shares his mother’s habit of compressing his lips together when puzzled, despite never having seen her face. This is just one of the examples cited as part of a study published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA showing that relatives who have never seen one another nonetheless share similar facial expressions–proof that even a grimace may be hereditary. Darwin was among the first to note that facial expressions are innate for humans and other animals....

Perception is mathematically impossible. This might seem like a bold statement—after all, you are perceiving these letters right now—but it’s nonetheless true. Imagine a black-and-white line drawing of a cube on a sheet of paper. Although this drawing looks to us like a picture of a cube, there are actually an infinity of other three-dimensional figures that could have produced the same set of lines when collapsed on the page. But we don’t notice any of these alternatives....

The body of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was unearthed from his tomb in Isla Negra, Chile, this week. The exhumation marks the beginning of a forensic analysis aimed at clarifying whether the Nobel prizewinner’s death in 1973 was from prostate cancer — as has been believed — or from poisoning, as a key witness has claimed. Why has Neruda’s body been exhumed now, 40 years after his death? Chilean judge Mario Carroza ordered the exhumation in February as part of an investigation that was opened in 2011 after Neruda’s former driver Manuel Araya said that the real cause of the poet’s death was an unscheduled injection that he received a few hours before dying on 23 September 1973....

Gabriela (not her real name), a 42-year-old investment counselor, has been receiving therapy by computer chat for more than a year now. She fell into a deep depression after her last breakup and needed an ear she could count on to be consistently supportive and objective. She had face-to-face therapy years ago after she lost a child, and she thinks it is overrated. With chat therapy, she can look back at the e-trail and relive therapeutic moments....

The kinds of bacteria that can cause diarrheal ailments such as food poisoning lurk all around us. These germs, which include Escherichia coli and Shigella, can be especially easy to pick up when traveling internationally, as well as in places, such as a children’s day care, that are hard to keep clean. In April the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an outbreak of Shigella sonnei that has become resistant to ciprofloxacin—one of the last remaining medications in pill form that can kill that pathogen....

A huge wave has been spotted in the upper atmosphere of Venus, baffling scientists because it’s staying so still above the planet’s surface. Usually clouds in that region move at about 100 meters (328 feet) per second, whereas this cloud is stationary compared to the planet’s rotation. New work suggests that the wave was created in the lower atmosphere when it flowed over a mountain, which would be similar to a phenomenon on Earth called a “gravity wave....