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A baseball thrown by a top-flight power pitcher makes noise. “Oh, you can definitely hear a fastball,” former Yankee Derek Jeter says in the excellent new documentary Fastball. “You can hear it whizzing by you. It sounds like trouble is what it sounds like. If you’re facing someone with some control problems, it can be a very, very troubling experience.” I saw a preview of Fastball in March at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University in New Jersey....

Massive objects bend and warp spacetime, a phenomenon Albert Einstein asserted in his general theory of relativity. When two such objects—such as black holes or neutron stars—merge, the collision generates subtle spacetime ripples called gravitational waves. Although his theory predicted them, Einstein remained skeptical that gravitational waves actually existed or could ever be observed. Now, however, they are routinely detected by extremely sensitive instruments, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a continent-spanning experiment with “listening” stations in Hanford, Wash....

COVID-19 is different from the viral epidemics of the recent past in a few ways: it is more widespread than severe acute respiratory syndrome, more infectious than seasonal influenza and has killed more people than Ebola. And it is different in the way that epidemiologists are tracking its progress. Instead of relying principally on the number of infections, or the ratio of deaths to infections—known as the case fatality rate—researchers are looking at the daily deaths attributed to COVID-19 to monitor the impact of the disease and to guide responses....

Despite a summer of success, recent competition and some controversial tweets — including some misleading infographics — have left many who follow the space industry feeling less than supportive of Jeff Bezos and his space company. Over the past few months, commercial spaceflight has launched into overdrive as companies like Axiom planned crewed missions to the International Space Station, SpaceX won NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) contract to build a moon lander and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic successfully completed crewed suborbital flights with the companies’ respective billionaire founders on board....

By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazineThis year’s hunt for the Higgs boson is drawing to a close. On October 30, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, ended its 2011 run of the proton-proton collisions that search for the elusive particle, thought to give other fundamental particles their mass.But physicists believe that the collider will have collected enough data by the end of 2012, after experiments resume in March, to say whether the Higgs exists....

Zinnias have opened their pretty petals for the first time on the International Space Station, and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly couldn’t be prouder. The zinnias, grown as part of the Veggie program, have had a rough path: They battled excessive water, overdrying and even enterprising mold before beginning to recover in early January. To better balance conditions for the zinnias, NASA named Kelly an autonomous gardener (or “commander” of Veggie) on Christmas Eve, so he could independently decide when the plants needed to be watered or tended to instead of waiting for directives from Earth....

Kathy Stack’s memory loss began with the little things: losing her wallet, taking a wrong turn, forgetting someone’s name. In 2013 at the age of 68, she visited her neurologist, who sent her to a memory loss specialist. He told her she had a 50–50 chance of developing full-blown Alzheimer’s disease within five years. Two years later, Stack, who was the first female department director of community services for Saint Paul, Minn....

By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazine Texas is bearing the brunt of an outbreak of West Nile virus that is on track to be the worst the United States has ever experienced. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 46 people in the state have died from the virus this season, and 526 have been affected by the neurological aspects of the disease that can lead to paralysis....

For those who doubt that the global climate is changing, seven new graphs should put that notion to rest. This morning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first public summary of a six-year study called Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. It contains the report’s graphs and explains the data behind them. As a set, the graphs show strong trends over many decades: Average surface temperatures have risen up to 2....

Humans boast a rich trove of words to express the way we feel. Some are not easily translatable between languages: Germans use “Weltschmerz” to refer to a feeling of melancholy caused by the state of the world. And the indigenous Baining people of Papua New Guinea say “awumbuk” to describe a social hangover that leaves people unmotivated and listless for days after the departure of overnight guests. Other terms seem rather common—“fear,” for example, translates to “takot” in Tagalog and “ótti” in Icelandic....

Fast-forward to the year 2100. Computers, writes physicist and futurist Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future (Doubleday, 2011), will have humanlike intelligence, the Internet will be accessible via contact lenses, nanobots will eliminate cancers, space tourism will be cheap and popular, and we’ll be colonizing Mars. We will be a planetary civilization capable of consuming the 1017 watts of solar energy falling on Earth to meet our energy needs, with the Internet as a worldwide telephone system; English and Chinese as the contenders for a planetary language; a unified culture of common foods, fashions and films; and a truly global economy with many more international trading blocs such as we see today in the European Union and NAFTA....

Two weeks ago, the Pine Gulch Fire became the largest wildfire in Colorado history when it grew to an area nearly the size of Chicago. The 139,000-acre blaze, ignited July 31, was fueled by another record: The area where the fire occurred experienced its hottest August in at least 126 years. Garfield and Mesa counties in western Colorado shattered temperature records that date to 1895, according to newly released NOAA figures that show a similar, daunting trend across the western United States....

(Reuters Health) - A new vaccine for the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV) has led to a dramatic decrease in infections among teen girls and young women, but many children still aren’t getting inoculated, a U.S. study suggests. Within six years of the U.S. vaccine debut in 2006, there was a 64 percent decline in the prevalence of four vaccine-preventable strains of the virus among girls aged 14 to 19 and a 34 percent drop among women aged 20 to 24, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics....

Socrates famously railed against the evils of writing. The sage warned that it would “introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.” He got a few things wrong. For one, people nurture Socrates’ memory because of all of the books written about him. But he also was off the mark in his musings about a forgetfulness of the soul....

The Advances section of Scientific American’s March issue discusses how reducing soot emissions could be a quick, if temporary, fix for global warming; explains why cramming for tests doesn’t work; and examines physicists’ latest efforts to make an object disappear. To learn more about these, and all our other stories, click on the links below. Remains of the Day The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a video and podcast about the Japan tsunami debris on its Web site....

Imagine you are a juror for a horrific murder case. Harry is the defendant. You sit down with 11 of your peers–people who may not be up on the latest scientific understanding about human behavior. Most of the jurors have never heard the word “neuroscience” nor given a moment’s thought to the concept of “free will.” And you know that most jurors have little patience for criminal-defense arguments based on such notions as “temporary insanity....

Hopes that Congress would take up the net neutrality cause took a hit Tuesday, when Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a bill that promises consumers some internet access protections. But the bill also includes several loopholes favoring internet service providers (ISPs). Blackburn’s Open Internet Preservation Act would prohibit ISPs from blocking or slowing internet traffic—an apparent attempt to blunt the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) revocation last week of the 2015 Open Internet Order....

Wide angle substantially nondistorting mirror: Every passenger’s side mirror carries a warning that objects “are closer than they appear” because the curved surface designed to give drivers a wider field of view ends up distorting distance. But U.S. regulations require the driver’s side mirror to be flat because depth perception was judged to be more important than field of view at that location. The result is a blind spot just beyond the driver’s left shoulder....

By Cezary PodkulWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supporters of the renewable fuels industry turned out en masse on Thursday, desperate for the U.S. government to change course after last month announcing a plan to lower the amount of biofuels that must be added to the fuel supply in 2014.About 300 people attended a public meeting held by the Environmental Protection Agency on the Renewable Fuel Standard, proposed changes which have become one of the most divisive policy issues of the year....

Are equations beautiful? To scientists, formulas’ ability to represent fundamental truths or concisely capture complexity is indeed exquisite. To many in the public, though, they can be the opposite of beautiful—intimidating, utilitarian and opaque. Yet for others, the very mystery can be alluring: even when we cannot understand what equations say, we can be moved by knowing they have meanings beyond our comprehension. And mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike can be drawn in by the purely aesthetic appeal of these expressions, whose graceful and sometimes inscrutable symbols combine in visually satisfying ways....