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Public opinion has swung rapidly in favor of marijuana legalization, and there is growing discontent among the public and policy makers with the criminalization of low-level drug offenses. As public health researchers who have studied marijuana, alcohol and tobacco policies, we strongly favor decriminalization but are cautious about legalization. Decriminalization and legalization are separate policies relating to the removal of criminal penalties for use and the establishment of legal markets, respectively....

A surrogate presidential candidates’ debate on climate change was held at Mott house on Capital Hill, Washington, D.C., on Thursday, featuring Obama campaign representative Kevin Knobloch and former Republican congressman and Delaware governor Mike Castle. The debate was moderated by Chris Mooney of ClimateDesk Live and Shawn Otto of ScienceDebate.org, an independent initiative formed in 2007 to ask candidates for political office to address the top science questions currently facing the nation....

For more than 2,000 years Chinese healers have used herbal powders and tinctures, dust made from various animal parts and strategically placed needles to treat a host of human ailments. These are used in hundreds of nations globally, but the practice in China is perhaps the most extensive, documented and catalogued. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is based on the concept of qi, a system of energy that flows along meridians in the body to maintain health....

Downtown Muskegon, Mich., population just over 40,000 people, has one thing on New York City’s Times Square: a small-scale wind turbine powering a liquid-crystal display. Only this (smaller) billboard gives the time, temperature, wind direction and wind speed, along with the cumulative energy generated by the turbine, rather than featuring the latest ad from Samsung or Calvin Klein. It’s the first sign of what Grand Rapids, Mich.–based plastics manufacturer Cascade Engineering hopes will be a revolution in wind turbines for businesses and residences....

Google has stoked our collective imagination via relentless promotion of its Google Glass wearable computer in recent months. Thanks to a campaign of Web videos, trade show appearances and blog posts, the search giant has positioned its smartglasses as a hands-free augmented reality gadget that will allow us to share our personal experiences in real time, whether we are skydiving, skiing or handling snakes. Not surprisingly, a number of competitors have emerged, promising many of the same capabilities....

Humans are more closely related to dinosaurs than they are to octopuses. Our lineage split from that of cephalopods—the spineless class that includes octopuses, squids and cuttlefish—half a billion years ago. Octopus brains lack any of the major anatomical features of vertebrate brains, and most of the animals’ neurons are distributed across their arms rather than in their head. Yet octopuses are extremely intelligent, with a larger brain for their body size than all animals except birds and mammals....

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for their work on black holes. British cosmologist Roger Penrose will receive half of the prize, with the remaining half split between German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astrophysicist Andrea Ghez. Ghez is only the fourth woman in history to receive the venerable physics prize. “This year’s prize is about the darkest secrets of the universe,” said Göran K. Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, at a press event....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Between 9 and 18 barrels (378-756 gallons) of oil spilled into Lake Michigan from BP Plc’s Whiting refinery in Indiana after a malfunction on Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed on Wednesday. The spill occurred Monday afternoon at a recently upgraded water treatment plant located in a cove that leads into the lake, the company and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said. About 5,000 square yards of water was coated in an oily sheen and oil slicks could be seen on the shore and rocks, BP said in its initial report to the EPA....

Key concepts Temperature Physics Engineering Materials science Introduction Have you ever broken a piece of candy in half to share with a friend? Did you know you were doing a little physics activity when you were snapping that treat? You can learn even more about materials and their properties by playing around with candy in this activity. This is a fun (and tasty) way to study materials science, which includes learning how different materials break—and under what conditions....

The percent of older US adults with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, declined from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 8.8 percent in 2012, a decrease of nearly a quarter, scientists reported on Monday. Why it matters: It had been thought that the baby boomers’ march toward old age would triple the number of Alzheimer’s patients by 2050. These new numbers not only portend a lesser burden on the health care system (and families) but also suggest that something has changed over the generations—and identifying that change could drive down dementia rates even further....

The Greenland ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 400 years, new research suggests. And the melting is only speeding up. A study published this week in Geophysical Research Letters finds that melt rates in western Greenland have been accelerating for the last few decades. Melting is now nearly double what it was at the end of the 19th century, the research suggests. And the scientists say a significant increase in summertime temperatures—to the tune of about 1....

Ever feel that stress makes you more cranky, hot-headed or irritable? For men in particular, we think of stress as generating testosterone-fueled aggression – thus instances of road rage, or the need to “blow off steam” after work with a trip to the gym or a bar. On the other hand, in circumstances of extreme stress such as during natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, we hear moving accounts of people going out of their way to help others....

BAHAMAS DNA from the 1,000-year-old tooth of an indigenous Taino woman, excavated on the island of Eleuthera, suggests at least one modern Caribbean population is related to her. The finding contradicts a theory that the Taino went extinct after contact with Europeans. U.S. A viral Twitter post led to the identification of an African-American woman among a large group of men in an archival photograph from a 1971 whale biology conference in Virginia....

For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons—particles of light—has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers. Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan, both at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum computer, named Jiŭzhāng.* The result, reported in the journal Science, was 76 detected photons—far above and beyond the previous record of five detected photons and the capabilities of classical supercomputers....

Mentally simulating the actions of others is thought to be a key component of empathy. Yet new research suggests that our so-called mirror neurons may also expose hidden divisions. A study published in October in the journal PLOS ONE reveals that these copycat neurons do not reflect all people equally. Mirror neurons were discovered in the early 1990s, and their existence was a neuroscientific revelation: brain cells not only fire when we perform a given action, they also fire when we see someone else doing the deed....

“Chemists are kind of like magicians,” says H.N. Cheng, president of the American Chemical Society. “They wave a magic wand and create something new.” Now a new way of building molecules has won two chemists the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday in Stockholm that the prize has gone to Benjamin List, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Germany, and David W....

By Alister Doyle and Michael SzaboWARSAW (Reuters) - The Philippine delegate at U.N. climate talks began a fast on Monday in protest at a lack of action on global warming that he blamed for fuelling a super typhoon that has killed an estimated 10,000 people in his country.Delegates from almost 200 nations held three minutes’ silence to mourn victims of typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, at the start of November 11-22 talks to plan a U....

Tales of alien abduction and SETI’s extrasolar search for intelligent life may fuel the imagination, but astrobiologists know that the first proof that we are not alone is likely to be found in our own solar system. And rather than being a bug-eyed humanoid, E.T. will probably resemble the extremophile microbes living here on Earth. Scientists are looking to these hearty single-celled organisms for insight into how life can exist in inhospitable environments....

On November 14, 2011, Sonia Alvarado got a 5 A.M. call from the U.S. Army. Her son, Luis, had been injured by an improvised explosive device near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Sonia and her husband, Julio, both Methodist pastors, immediately flew to Germany, where their 24-year-old son lay in a hospital in a coma, tubes crisscrossing in and out of his body. The doctors told the parents to say good-bye; Luis was showing minimal brain activity....

Scientific American and Macmillan Education co-hosted a South by Southwest Edu panel and an evening event at the new Google Fiber space in Austin, Texas, on the “Science of Learning.” Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina moderated the panel, which included Macmillan Education Vice President Susan Winslow, Harvard University professor Robert Lue and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Tim Stelzer. Themes included how we can use emerging technology and data analysis to improve efficacy and apply more rigor to instructional methods in school....