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By Dana Feldman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Los Angeles has banned the use of bullhooks, pitchforks, baseball bats and other goads that circus trainers use to control elephants and other exotic animals, delighting campaigners and angering showmen. Animal rights groups such as PETA and celebrities - including actress Kristen Bell, comedian Sarah Silverman and singer Ke$ha - have campaigned against the use of the prods that they say amounts to torture, Los Angeles City News Service said....

As the 2012 transit of Venus rolled around, I got caught up in the excitement. Which led me to read The Day the World Discovered the Sun, a new account of the arduous attempts by the scientific community to observe the two Venus transits of the 1760s. (My ensuing audio interviews with author Mark Anderson are archived at www.ScientificAmerican.com/podcast.) Until I read the book, I never knew how much I had in common with 18th-century French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche....

Standing on the seashore, watching waves roll in from over the horizon—it is easy to see the ocean as something timeless. Our ancient ancestors certainly did. In numerous creation myths, a watery abyss was present before the emergence of land and even light. Today we realize that Earth’s global ocean has not been around forever. Its water—as well as every drop of rain, every gust of humid air and every sip from your cup—is a memory from eons ago, when the seas literally fell from the sky....

When the U.S. military abandoned Camp Century, a complex of tunnels dug into the ice of northwest Greenland, in the mid-1960s, they left behind thousands of tons of waste, including hazardous radioactive and chemical materials. They expected the detritus would be safely entombed in the ice sheet for tens of thousands of years, buried ever deeper under accumulating layers of snow and ice. But a new study suggests that because of warming temperatures that are driving substantial melting of the ice, that material could be exposed much, much sooner—possibly even by the end of this century—posing a threat to vulnerable local ecosystems....

The highly contagious COVID Omicron variant is shattering new U.S. daily case records. With Omicron carrying a risk of breakthrough infection five times higher than that of the Delta variant, we are witnessing a significant impact on the American workforce in all sectors. The increase in cases among essential workers has sidelined many health care workers, resulted in thousands of holiday flights being canceled, and once again disrupted our supply chain....

Although humans share most of their genes—and many analogous diseases—with chimpanzees, these close relatives are not likely to blame for the menace of human malaria, according to new genetic research. Malaria kills some one million people worldwide each year and sickens another 350 million to 500 million. In recent years the origins of this disease, the most common and deadly form of which is from the protozoan parasite Plasmodium falciparum carried by the Anopheles mosquito, had been winnowed down to the chimpanzee....

When plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) start hitting the road later this year, most drivers will plug into a normal 110-volt outlet when not driving in order to trickle charge life back into their car’s battery. Whether this is a feasible model is an open question, with some consumers concerned that trickle charging may not be fast enough to sufficiently recharge batteries between trips. Without a charged battery, PHEVs rely on their internal combustion engines, something hybrid drivers aim to avoid....

Archaeologists who work in the Arctic are typically spoiled with pristinely preserved artifacts, but recently the blessing of ice has become a curse: the researchers are struggling to save the wealth of delicate material that is emerging from melting permafrost and eroding coastlines because of climate change. In northern Alaska there is only one full-time archaeologist: Anne Jensen, a senior scientist at Ukpeavik Iñupiat Corporation, one of the largest companies owned by Alaskan natives....

Many once thought that mushrooms spread by passively dropping their spores, after which the reproductive packets would hopefully get picked up by a gust of wind, and carried thither and yon. But new research shows mushrooms take a more active role in spreading their seed: They “make wind” to carry their spores about, said UCLA researcher Marcus Roper. Mushrooms create air flow by allowing their moisture to evaporate. “A mushroom is essentially doing less than nothing to protect its water from evaporating off,” Roper told LiveScience....

MONROVIA, Calif .— NASA’s next major interplanetary mission is the Mars 2020 rover. The robot explorer is expected to touch down on the Red Planet in February 2021, but there is one key detail that remains to be decided: Where exactly it will land. Wherever the rover finds itself in 2021 will likely shape the future of Mars exploration for decades to come. Besides poking around its landing site for signs of past habitability and Martian life, the rover will also select and cache samples for an eventual return to Earth at some yet-to-be-determined date....

Robots race to the moon for $20-million prize The race to be the first to land a robot probe on the moon—and collect the $20 million grand prize attached to that feat—has tightened significantly as 10 teams announced they will contend for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Entrants include Astrobotic Technology, Inc. (made up of engineers from the University of Arizona, Carnegie Mellon University and Raytheon Missile Systems Co.), Quantum3 Ventures (a private Washington, D....

Back in December 1959, future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gave a visionary and now oft-quoted talk entitled Theres Plenty of Room at the Bottom. The occasion was an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology, Feynmans intellectual home then and mine today. Although he didnt intend it, Feynmans 7,000 words were a defining moment in nanotechnology, long before anything nano appeared on the horizon. What I want to talk about, he said, is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale…....

Ocean water expands as it soaks up heat from a warming atmosphere. Add in water from melting glaciers and ice sheets, and the global mean sea level will most likely rise by anywhere from 1.4 to 2.8 feet (43 to 84 centimeters) by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This gradual swelling will stress coastal cities, which are already seeing more sunny-day “nuisance flooding” at high tide. But the bigger threat is from waves and storm surges, which are amplified by higher sea levels....

For more than 160 million years, pterosaurs soared over the earth. They were as much a part of the Age of Reptiles as dinosaurs were, and they were the first vertebrates to fly by flapping. But how did these leathery-winged creatures evolve to take to the air in the first place? Paleontologists have puzzled over this question for more than a century. Thanks to new fossil evidence from locales as far apart as New Mexico and Argentina, the forerunners of pterosaurs are finally coming into view....

Key concepts Animation Perception Optical illusions Human behavior Introduction Have you ever you have ever been tricked by an optical illusion? Optical illusions can be fun, but they are also quite scientific. In this activity you will investigate the phenomenon of apparent motion by making your own flip-book animations. Background When you perceive an object visually, an image of that object is projected onto the back of your eye (specifically, the retina)....

A new study shows that subconscious signals interfere with concentration, causing people to become easily distracted and falter on even the simplest of tasks. When people concentrate, they focus on the task at hand and filter out information irrelevant to what they are doing. A new report, however, published in this week’s Science, says that sometimes unrelated info slips through, even if it is not consciously processed. “Our results contradict the general view,” says lead author Yoshiaki Tsushima, a graduate student in psychology at Boston University....

ANIMAL BONDING The Horse Boy PBS, May 11 at 10 P.M. EST pbs.org/horse-boy After countless modern medical treatments failed to help their autistic son speak, Rupert Isaacson and his wife, Kristin Neff, looked for hope in the untested. The Isaacson family’s adventure, depicted in the PBS documentary The Horse Boy, began when two-year-old Rowan suddenly changed. He stopped speaking words he’d earlier known, retreated into himself and erupted into frequent tantrums....

Scientists have stumbled on a chemical in the body that could one day prevent or reverse diseases linked to obesity. Researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health (H.S.P.H.) report in Cell that palmitoleate, a newly discovered hormone produced by fat cells, is also a fatty acid. (Most hormones are proteins.) They believe that if they can increase its production, they may be able to stave off metabolic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease (caused by hardening of the arteries) and so-called fatty liver, an often asymptomatic disease that can lead to damage of the organ as well as cancer....

When the Obama administration thawed relations with Cuba in 2014, Jiri Hulcr, an entomologist at the University of Florida, and a team of researchers began an unprecedented scientific endeavor: to discover the island’s potentially invasive pests and gauge the state of Cuba’s biosecurity, with funding from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The teams’ findings—yet to be published—are worrying. Not only were Cuban scientists largely unaware of potentially destructive pests already on the island—such as unknown species of borer beetles—but their technological capabilities for screening imports were also woeful....

LAS VEGAS — It’s a study that probably couldn’t be conducted anywhere other than this hot spot for professional combatants, where marquee fights are about as common as Celine Dion concerts. Researchers have enrolled close to 700 mixed martial arts fighters and boxers, both active and retired, in the past six years. The ambitious goal: to learn to identify early signs of trauma-induced brain damage from subtle changes in blood chemistry, brain imaging, and performance tests — changes that may show up decades before visible symptoms such as cognitive impairment, depression, and impulsive behavior....