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Would you ride in a Google-branded driverless car? The Internet giant announced on its blog that it’s building newer, cuter prototypes of its fully autonomous, self-driving autos to give everyone access to car rides without the fuss of parking. In a video posted along with its blog post, Google showed how people, from seniors to moms, could benefit from a self-driving car. In some cases, these new cars could even drive better than some humans, as one couple in the video noted....

Life as a single seaweed along a rocky coastline can be tough. Though there are plenty of potential partners out there, stalks of these large algae are stuck in place, and possible mates often keep their reproductive structure hidden. For the red seaweed Gracilaria gracilis, which grows in scraggly clumps, this is a particular problem. Its male gametes, or spermatia, lack flexible flagella to propel them through the water. “Without the ability to swim, the sperm needs to navigate its way to the female plants in some other way,” says Myriam Valero, an ecologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research....

By Mari Saito TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s nuclear regulator has criticized the operator of the stricken Fukushima plant for incorrectly measuring radiation levels in contaminated groundwater at the site. Almost three years since the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi station, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) still lacks basic understanding of measuring and handling radiation, Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) Chairman Shunichi Tanaka said on Wednesday. The utility has been widely criticized for an inept response to the March 2011 disaster....

If the Perseverance rover finds evidence for microbes on Mars, our self-esteem will not be affected since it is obvious that we are more intelligent than they are. But if the rover bumps into the wreckage of a spacecraft far more advanced than we ever produced, our ego will be challenged. Illusory superiority and unjustified hubris are deeply rooted in human nature. They led the Nazi regime during World War II to trigger the death of more than 70 million people or 3 percent of the world population in 1940—an order of magnitude more than the death toll caused so far by the coronavirus....

At Sunday’s World Cup Final, German soccer player Christoph Kramer knocked his head against an Argentine opponent’s shoulder with such force that Kramer spun to the ground and fell face down. The blow was one of many at this year’s competition, which further fueled a rising debate about concussion, the damages of fútbol versus football and the best response to head injuries. Part of the challenge in understanding these injuries is how varied they can be....

Such humble notices starkly contrast the superhero-like self-portraits in online dating venues, where every woman seems to be attractive, fit and 29 and each man is wealthy, tall and toned. But all lovelorn writers share a goal: telegraphing their worth (whether by self-abasement or by self-promotion) to potential partners. In his article “The Truth about Online Dating,” psychologist Robert Epstein takes a look at what modern courting reveals about us. Turn to page 28....

President Obama tied climate change to soaring economic hope rather than damaging catastrophes in his final State of the Union address, delivered to a nation that remains gripped with partisan rancor over the basis for climbing temperatures. He only indirectly mentioned the global agreement reached last month in Paris, defying predictions that he would tout the deal as a cornerstone of his legacy to combat carbon dioxide emissions in a period of record warmth worldwide....

The expansion of human populations has left animals such as white-lipped peccaries, jaguars, giant anteaters, white-tailed deer and tapirs isolated throughout Panama, a study recently published in Conservation Biology found. The nation represents the narrowest portion of a system of protected areas and connecting corridors that extend through the length of Central America and part of Mexico, known as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC). To assess the health of the corridor, the paper focused on nine species of medium-to-large terrestrial mammals and determined their connectivity—defined as current population distributions in different habitats, movement among habitats and the capability to interbreed....

Twenty-two psychiatrists and psychologists, including some of the field’s most prominent thinkers, are calling on the American Psychiatric Association on Thursday to substantially revise its controversial Goldwater rule, which bars APA members from offering their views of a public figure’s apparent psychological traits or mental status. In a letter to be delivered to the APA, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, one of the world’s leading experts on the psychological effects of war and political violence; Philip Zimbardo of the “Stanford prison experiment”; violence expert Dr....

Ketamine, a psychoactive ‘party drug’ better known as Special K, has pharma­ceutical companies riding high. Used clinically as an anaesthetic in animals and humans, it has proved an extremely effective treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and suicidal behaviour. It also works incredibly fast. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which generally take weeks to start working, ketamine lifts depression in as little as two hours. “It blew the doors off what we thought we knew about depression treatment,” says psychiatrist James Murrough at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City....

FEBRUARY 1956 EMANCIPATING SCIENCE–“Racial segregation was a major theme at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Atlanta. Four affiliates of the A.A.A.S. had refused to go to Atlanta. Some prominent Negro scientists also boycotted the meeting. Negroes who attended were unrestricted at official functions of the convention but were barred from white hotels and restaurants. A submitted resolution said in part: ‘It is necessary and desirable that all members may freely meet for scientific discussions, the exchange of ideas and the diffusion of established knowledge…....

At the time of Sedna’s discovery in 2003, it was the farthest body ever seen in our planetary club. Its peculiar path—it never ventures near the giant planets—suggested an equally peculiar history. How did it get there? The sun may have snatched Sedna away from another star, new computer simulations show. A clue to Sedna’s past came in 2012, when observers spotted a second and even smaller object with a similarly elongated and remote orbit....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Each year, 4 million people visit Yosemite National Park in California. Most bring back photos, postcards and an occasional sunburn. But two unlucky visitors this summer got a very different souvenir. They got the plague. This quintessential medieval disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and transmitted most often by fleabites, still surfaces in a handful of cases each year in the western United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....

According to a new survey, fewer than half of the U.S. medical schools queried have policies in place to safeguard against improper financial links with drug companies. And it is not clear whether those with such safeguards actually enforce them. The findings come from the first national survey to examine the potential for what are called institutional conflicts of interest (ICOI) between pharmaceutical manufacturers or other for-profit groups and academic medical research centers that oversee drug testing on human subjects....

The ice covering Antarctica got its start on the top of a high peak in the Gamburtsev mountains about 43 million years ago, according to a new study published today in Nature. Using simple radar to peer through the ice, researchers have gained new insights about the hidden mountains—and the formation of the ice that entombs them. The ice, which can be as thick as 10,285 feet (3,135 meters) today, likely started to appear as a result of global climate change about 43 million years ago and has encased the continent for the last 14 million years, the paper notes....

By Maggie Lu YueyangSYDNEY (Reuters) - An Antarctic blizzard has halted an Australian icebreaker’s bid to reach a Russian ship trapped for a week with 74 people onboard, rescuers said on Monday.The Aurora Australis had to return to open waters about 18 nautical miles from the stranded Akademik Shokalskiy because of poor visibility, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), which is co-ordinating the rescue, told Reuters.The Australian vessel had reached as close as about 10 nautical miles from the trapped ship before turning back....

Fog often leads to serious, costly collisions and accidents—particularly around airports, piers and highways. Monitoring visibility conditions in real-time could improve public safety and save tens of millions of dollars in the transportation sector alone. But conventional fog-detection systems—including satellites, visibility sensors and human observations—can suffer from poor spatial resolution, high cost or low sensitivity near the ground, where monitoring is most critical. Now engineers Noam David and H. Oliver Gao, both then at Cornell University, have developed a way to use signal data from cell-phone towers to detect atmospheric conditions that are conducive to fog....

Apparently, the New World isn’t all that intrepid explorer Christopher Columbus discovered; seems we may also have him to thank for spreading the pathogen that causes syphilis—along with news of the Americas—to Europe. A new study provides what scientists say is the most convincing evidence to date that the Italian adventurer and some of his crew contracted the disease during their voyage to the New World—and unwittingly introduced it to the old one circa 1493....

Travelers to the tropics usually try to avoid consuming the local microscopic flora responsible for “Montezuma’s revenge” and other, more life-threatening intestinal illnesses. But an Australian research team thinks the best way to protect against those harmful gut bacteria may be to swig more bacteria: specifically, a benign strain of Escherichia coli genetically engineered to absorb other bacteria’s toxins. James C. Paton and his colleagues at the University of Adelaide altered a harmless strain of E....

Feeling uncertain about who you are and what you want to do with your life? Such doubt may lead you to sympathize with \a radical or extremist group, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Groups that rally around radical beliefs may provide a searching person with the sense of self and social identity they are lacking. Michael Hogg, a psychologist at Claremont Graduate University, and his colleagues increased feelings of doubt in a group of college students by asking them to write down several things about which they felt uncertain....