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Technology plays a major role in alerting flight crews to potential aircraft problems, guiding them through stormy weather and protecting them from unruly or dangerous passengers. The recent tragedy of Germanwings Flight 9525, however, makes it clear that, no matter how simple or sophisticated a technology, the human factor is pivotal in determining the likelihood that a flight will end with a safe landing. Stuff does happen, but flying is still an extraordinarily safe experience....

No, no and no. —In the past three months have you had ear or body piercing? —From 1980 to the present, did you receive a blood transfusion in France, Ireland, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands? —In the past three months have you received money, drugs or other payment for sex? Those are just three of a blizzard of questions to which I respond by clicking the “no” button on the screen....

The Ojibwe people of modern-day Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin have for 1,000 years adhered to a spiritual prophecy to live “where food grows on the water.” That food is native wild rice, or “manoomin” in the Anishinaabe language of the Ojibwe. But with an increasingly unpredictable climate across the “Five Freshwater Seas,” as the Great Lakes are known, the Ojibwe’s ancient wild rice traditions are being undermined. So is the prophecy that ordained it....

As told to Scientific American When a family member dies, we the Diné, whom Spanish conquistadors named the Navajo, send a notice to our local radio station so that everyone in the community can know. Usually the reading of the death notices—the names of those who have passed on, their ages, where they lived and the names of their matrilineal and patrilineal clans—takes no more than five minutes. It used to be very rare to hear about young people dying....

Wewito Piyáko Asháninka, a member of the Indigenous Asháninka people, inspects an arrow. His daughter, wife and son surround him. Historically, the Asháninka traded heavily with the Incan empire, providing the mountain-dwelling Inca with forest products such as feathers, cotton and fine wood in exchange for metal and wool. The Suruwahá people live in massive communal houses some 100 feet tall, nearly the height of a 10-story building. Each house, or oca, is named for its “owner” and architect—in this case, a man named Kwakway....

Everyone knows that language is a great tool for communication, but scholars have debated for centuries whether it also plays an important role in learning. A new study supports this notion by showing that linguistic information boosts people’s ability to sort objects. A team led by Gary Lupyan, then at Carnegie Mellon University, asked volunteers to categorize 16 “aliens” that appeared on a computer screen as good guys or bad guys....

By Gwenaelle Barzic and Sudip Kar-Gupta PARIS, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Social media companies Facebook , Google and a group of news organisations launched an initiative on Monday to tackle fake news stories in France, with the media in the spotlight as the country’s presidential election approaches. Facebook said it would work with several leading French news organisations, including Agence France-Presse, BFM TV, and newspapers L’Express and Le Monde to ensure that false news items were not published on its platform....

Pioneering molecular biologist Sydney Brenner has died, aged 92. Among Brenner’s most notable achievements was turning the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm into a model system for human-disease research in the 1960s and 1970s, which sparked a new field of research. For this feat, he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with biologists John Sulston and Robert Horvitz. Brenner chose the worm because it was more complex than other well-understood organisms, such as bacteria, yet still simple enough to study in depth....

Key concepts Physics Chemistry Density Gas Introduction If you’ve ever accidentally let go of a helium-filled balloon while outdoors, then you know that some gases are less dense than others. In the case of your helium balloon, it most likely floated away before you could catch it because helium is much lighter (or less dense) than the air in our environment. We don’t often think about gases having density—but they do!...

Anyone who has spent an afternoon puzzling over IKEA furniture parts will appreciate how tempting it would be to let a robot do the job. The Swedish company’s complex DIY kits are something of a benchmark for roboticists, who have worked for years to build automatons smart and dexterous enough to fit screws and wood pegs into holes. Engineers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have now assembled a STEFAN chair using a two-armed robot, whose sensors and programming enabled it to fit most of the pieces together without human help....

Everyone’s brain is different. Until recently neuroscience has tended to gloss this over by averaging results from many brain scans in trying to elicit general truths about how the organ works. But in a major development within the field researchers have begun documenting how brain activity differs between individuals. Such differences had been largely thought of as transient and uninteresting but studies are starting to show that they are innate properties of people’s brains, and that knowing them better might ultimately help treat neurological disorders....

This year the Nobel Committee decided to honor a physics discovery that benefits us all: lightbulbs. The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their discovery of blue light–emitting diodes (LEDs), which have enabled modern energy-efficient light sources. “Something like a fourth of our electricity consumption goes to illumination,” Nobel Prize committee member Olle Inganäs of Linköping University in Sweden said during a press conference October 7 announcing the award....

(Credit: Samsung) Update (11:00a.m. PT): The Galaxy S5 has officially launched. Check out CNET’s complete coverage (including hands-on video and photos.) Samsung will be unveiling the Galaxy S5 at a press event later on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and to whet our appetites, one Twitter account is showing off some images. A Twitter account going by the name @SaudiAndroid has leaked several images of what it claims is the new Galaxy S5....

Just weeks after Pres. Donald Trump declared North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat to the world, satellite images revealed the country has spent the past several months upgrading its ability to make solid-fuel ballistic missiles. Much of the work took place in May—shortly after a meeting between North and South Korean leaders that supposedly ended with a mutual commitment to officially end the Korean War and eliminate nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula....

The leader of the current mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is hitting back against the suggestion that he or one of his crewmates might have caused the orbiting lab’s recent air leak. “I can unequivocally say that the crew had nothing do with this,” NASA astronaut Drew Feustel, commander of the ISS’ Expedition 56, said during a space-to-ground interview with ABC News, Florida Today reported yesterday(Sept. 11). “I think it’s absolutely a shame and somewhat embarrassing that anybody is wasting any time talking about something that the crew was involved in....

The eradication of Guinea worm, thought to have been within grasp, is now at least several years away because of a major setback in the North African country of Chad, according to global health experts and others. With human cases tumbling in recent years—only 11 so far in 2016, down from an estimated 3.5 million in 21 countries in 1986—it had been assumed that the eradication effort was on the verge of consigning Guinea worm to the annals of history....

Stem cell scientists are often irritated by the way people confuse their work with cloning, even though cloning plays no part in most ES cell research today. One reason for confusion is simply that both fields involve creating embryos. Another may be an accident of timing: human ES cells were first cultured soon after the birth of Dolly, and commentators immediately pointed out the potential for combining the two discoveries. The term “therapeutic cloning” was coined to describe the creation of a cloned embryo as a source of ES cells; the embryo is destroyed in the process....

The irony is that, to make his case, he used his own general theory of relativity and gravitation, published in 1916–the very theory that is now used to argue that black holes are not only possible but, for many astronomical objects, inevitable. Indeed, a few months after Einstein’s rejection of black holes appeared–and with no reference to it–J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland S. Snyder published a paper entitled On Continued Gravitational Contraction....

Digging foundations for temples or schools, harvesting rice in paddy fields: these are some of the ways that the decaying remains of Vietnam War victims still turn up, 40 years after the conflict ended. Now an effort has begun that will use smart DNA technologies to identify the bones of the half a million or more Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who are thought still to be missing. It is the largest ever systematic identification effort; only the identification of more than 20,000 victims of armed conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s comes close....

What I found most interesting was how they operate in a laboratory created entirely around statistics. Every clue Watson answers creates an enormous spreadsheet, and each of the variables can be tweaked, tested, refined, and then tested again in a blind batch, to see whether the adjustment affects a broader sampling. I imagine it’s a bit like the continuous process improvement made famous by Japanese auto manufacturers. But at least they’re building cars....