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In New York City, land of the ubiquitous yellow taxi, cabbies and other motorists find themselves with a bit less room to operate these days. The city closed several blocks of Broadway in 2009 to create a pedestrian plaza around Times Square—a much-publicized experiment that in February became permanent policy, even though it did not improve traffic flow as much as hoped. The Big Apple has also dabbled in shorter-term but larger-scale street closures, barring cars on a stretch of streets leading from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on a series of summer Saturdays in 2008 and 2009....

Too often new parents feel terrified—and not just about the daunting prospect of raising a child. Many of them must grapple with a gut-wrenching decision: How quickly can they leave their newborn to get back to their job? Few can afford to go without salaries for long or to weaken their future wage-earning potential by leaving their job altogether. Americans face such dilemmas because 88 percent of the private U.S. workforce is ineligible for paid family leave....

The great Greek scientist, engineer and mathematician Archimedes left us two quotes that ring through the centuries. His study of levers is said to have led him to remark, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” And the famous Eureka! (“I have found it!”) came from his discovery, allegedly while taking a bath, that the volume of an irregularly shaped object could be determined by submerging it and measuring how much water it displaced....

On that cool blue morning 10 years ago when everything changed, Les Robertson was half a world away, hosting a dinner at a Hong Kong restaurant. The rattling of cell phones left on the table—“a detestable habit”—was the first indication that something had struck one of the Twin Towers. Robertson, the revered engineer responsible for their structural design, was at first unconcerned. “I just assumed that a helicopter had run into the Trade Center,” he said recently, speaking from his 47th-floor office, which looks out over Ground Zero....

The HIV pandemic has historically been thought of as either concentrated in specific populations—such as gay men, injection drug–users, sex workers—or generalized across the entire population in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. But as more and better epidemiological data has become available, the evidence is clear: men who have sex with men (MSM), regardless of whether or not they identify as gay, also are at the core of those generalized epidemics....

Key concepts Temperature Heat Perception Sensory nervous system Introduction Have you ever tried to guess the temperature of the water in a swimming pool? On a hot day the water might feel chilly at first, but once you’re immersed in the water you don’t notice its temperature as much. On a cool day, though, the pool water that is the same temperature might feel quite comfortable from the very start. Is our body equipped to tell absolute temperature?...

The first computer virus wasn’t much of a threat. Created by a mischievous Pittsburgh high school student, Elk Cloner annoyed unwitting Apple II users with a brief poem extolling its power to proliferate: It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes it’s Cloner! The year was 1982. The IBM personal computer had only been born the year before (its first virus would not crop up until 1986), the worlds of science and business had yet to adopt computer technology on a wide scale and computer users were primarily a gaggle of tech-savvy hobbyists who swapped files by floppy disk....

When a group of people works to complete a task, a leader usually emerges. New research shows such leaders are not necessarily more intelligent than the other group members, but rather they simply speak up more often. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, gave groups of college students 45 minutes to lay the groundwork for a business and then asked the students to rate one another on intelligence, judgment and other traits....

Dec 29 (Reuters) - The Scottish government said a confirmed case of Ebola was diagnosed in Glasgow. The patient was a health care worker was helping combat the disease in west Africa, the government said. (http://bit.ly/1CPZxW9) The patient has been isolated and is receiving treatment in the specialist Brownlee Unit for Infectious Diseases on the Gartnavel Hospital campus. The World Health Organization on Monday said the number of people infected by Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - the worst affected by the outbreak - has passed 20,000, with more than 7,842 deaths in the epidemic so far....

Long before the earliest animals swam through the water-covered surface of Earth’s ancient past, one of the most important encounters in the history of life took place. A primitive bacterium was engulfed by our oldest ancestor — a solo, free-floating cell. The two fused to form a mutually beneficial relationship that has lasted more than a billion years, with the latter providing a safe, comfortable home and the former becoming a powerhouse, fueling the processes necessary to maintain life....

If you give a mouse a beer, he is going to want a cookie—and another, and another. If you give a person enough beer, she might find herself wolfing down a plate of greasy nachos or some other caloric snack. A study published in January in Nature Communications helps to explain why binge drinking, in both mice and humans, so often leads to binge eating even though alcohol is, itself, high in calories....

After numerous setbacks at the turn of the century, gene therapy is treating diseases ranging from neuromuscular disorders to cancer to blindness. The success is often qualified, however. Some of these therapies have proved effective at alleviating disease but come with a high price tag and other accessibility issues: Even when people know that a protocol exists for their disease and even if they can afford it or have an insurance company that will cover the cost—which can range from $400,000 to $2 million—they may not be able to travel to the few academic centers that offer it....

Nearly two years ago one of the most iconic telescopes in the world came crashing down on itself. The Arecibo telescope—located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico—was the world’s largest single-dish telescope for most of its more than half-century of existence. A series of cable failures caused the telescope’s 817-metric-ton receiver platform to collapse onto the dish below on December 1, 2020, putting the telescope out of commission. Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF)—which owns and finances the Arecibo Observatory—announced that it would not be funding the telescope’s reconstruction....

A vaccine to protect against the most dangerous strains of human papillomavirus (HPV), which cause almost all cervical cancers, as well as many cases of other cancers and genital warts in both sexes, won the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nearly nine years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that all boys and girls aged 11 or 12 receive the shots. Vaccination campaigns, aimed largely at girls and women, have fallen short of expectations....

KISSING COUSINS HAVE MORE KIN Icelandic women born between 1800 and 1824 who mated with a third cousin had more children and grandchildren (4.04 and 9.17, respectively) than women who mated with someone no closer than an eighth cousin (3.34 and 7.31). Those proportions held up a century later, when family size shrunk. Mating with a relative might reduce a woman’s chance of having a miscarriage caused by an immunological incompatibility with her child....

THE NETHERLANDS Dutch railways mounted lasers onto commuter trains in a pilot test this winter to detect and then obliterate leaves on the tracks, which can trigger anticollision software and cause delays. RUSSIA The government will submit a proposal to the United Nations this spring claiming a large section of the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. Denmark claimed a part of the Arctic, including the North Pole, in December. JAPAN The Muscle Suit exoskeleton went on sale for about $5,000....

In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created as a joint venture between the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program to advise global leaders on the risks of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.* In 1992 the charge was made more specific, as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change defined the concept of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI) with the climate system. Scientists were asked to define the level of climate change that would constitute DAI and evaluate what its consequences might be....

At first glance, a patient in a persistent vegetative state may appear only to be resting, eyes open. But such patients show no sign of recognizing or interacting with their surroundings, and the likelihood that they ever will decreases as the months pass. Relatives and doctors face the difficult choice between continuing or ending life support, guided only by statistics and each patient’s unique clinical profile. That may soon change. Scientists at the University of Cambridge and the University of Liège in Belgium reported that they had used MRI brain-imaging technology to detect signs of awareness in a 23-year-old woman who had been in a vegetative state for five months....

NASA announced yesterday that Gavin Schmidt, an expert in climate modeling, will become the space agency’s first senior climate adviser. The new NASA position underscores the Biden administration’s push to integrate climate policy throughout the federal government. Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will serve in an acting role until he receives a permanent appointment, agency officials said. “The appointment of Gavin Schmidt will help ensure that the Biden Administration has the crucial data to implement and track its plan toward the path to achieve net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050, and a healthier, safer, more prosperous planet for our children,” said acting NASA Chief of Staff Bhavya Lal in a statement....

The newest, smallest pacemaker comes with no strings attached—literally. A research team at Rice University, the Texas Heart Institute and Baylor College of Medicine recently created a heartbeat regulator that gets its power via microwaves instead of wires. This greatly simplifies battery-replacement surgery and could reduce complications associated with conventional pacemakers. Nearly 190,000 Americans received a pacemaker in 2009, the most recent year for which data were readily available. The devices have traditionally required a battery pack, embedded just below the collarbone, with leads that thread through the veins and into the heart....