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Building a detector the size of a 10-story building two kilometers underground is a strange way to study solar phenomena. Yet that has turned out to be the key to unlocking a decades-old puzzle about the physical processes occurring inside the sun. English physicist Arthur Eddington suggested as early as 1920 that nuclear fusion powered the sun, but efforts to confirm critical details of this idea in the 1960s ran into a stumbling block: experiments designed to detect a distinctive by-product of solar nuclear fusion reactions–ghostly particles called neutrinos–observed only a fraction of the expected number of them....

LONDON (Reuters) - Sperm counts in men from America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have dropped by more than 50 percent in less than 40 years, researchers said on Tuesday. They also said the rate of decline is not slowing. Both findings – in a meta-analysis bringing together various studies – pointed to a potential decline in male health and fertility. “This study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp ongoing drop in sperm count,” said Hagai Levine, who co-led the work at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Jerusalem....

Editor’s Note: Reprinted with permission from Last Stand: Ted Turner’s Quest to Save a Troubled Planet, by Todd Wilkinson and Ted Turner. Published by Lyons Press, April 2013. This essay is excerpted from the chapter, “Ark of the Underdogs.” Swinging open a screen door, releasing the aroma of roasting pheasant from the kitchen behind him, Ted Turner steps out onto a prairie farmhouse porch to soak in a sunset. With a glass of wine in hand, he leads his guests on a short trek into the backyard....

If the predictions are to be believed, this could be a rip-roaring Nobel Prize season. Each year, Nobel soothsayers offer preseason prophecies about who will win the awards, which are announced in early October. This year’s crop of predictions is wading into controversial territory. Several have homed in on CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing—a relatively quick and easy method for altering genomes—as a possible winner. In physics, predictions are coalescing around a team at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that, earlier this year, ended a century-long quest to detect the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein....

According to the models of the United Nations (UN), the world’s population will reach 8 billion today—a mere 12 years since it passed 7 billion, and less than a century after the planet supported just 2 billion people. The latest UN population update, released in July this year, also revises its long-term projection down from 11 billion people to 10.4 billion by 2100. Demographers will never be sure if 15 November really was the Day of Eight Billion, as the UN has named it, but they do agree on one thing....

By Janet FangTo follow the scent trail left by their prey across the ocean, sharks swim in the direction of the nostril that sniffed the odor first, scientists have found. Their research challenges the classic notion that sharks orient themselves based on the differences between odor concentration received at each nostril.Shark prey–whether living, injured or dead–leaves behind swirling odor plumes that break apart with distance. The latest work, published online June 10 in Current Biology, suggests that when a shark moves into a patch of odor, the smell hits one nostril before the other–and that tells the shark to turn either left or right....

What is oxytocin? You know those warm and fuzzy feelings you get when you cuddle a puppy, hug your friend, or kiss your partner? That’s oxytocin at work. You may already have heard of oxytocin—what people have called the love hormone, cuddle hormone, or even the moral molecule. This is because oxytocin has been in the headlines, gaining a reputation for making people more trusting, generous, and even more in love....

Risperidone, the first drug approved for children with autism and the most widely used, improves some children’s behavior but can have severe sideeffects, suggests an informal analysis of the drug’s use. The drug effectively treats the explosive and aggressive behavior that can accompany autism. “It has pretty big effects on tantrums, aggression and self-injury,” says Lawrence Scahill, professor of pediatrics at the Marcus Autism Center at Emory University in Atlanta, who has conducted clinical trials of risperidone....

In case you didn’t hear the news, there was a major shake-up in the competitive SCRABBLE world last summer in Buffalo. Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, a 24-year old graduate student from Portland, Oregon, won the $10,000 first prize at the National SCRABBLE Championship, making him the youngest American to ever win the tournament. But the big news was that the win ended Nigel Richards’ run of four titles. Richards, a reclusive New Zealander, is widely regarded as the best SCRABBLE player of all-time—the “Michael Jordan of the game,” as one co-competitor put it....

Cornell University’s plan for a new high-tech, applied-science campus on an island in New York City’s East River moved to the next phase on Monday when the city kicked off a seven-month review process to determine whether NYC Tech can break ground on its first building in 2014. Pending approval, that building will be a five-story, 14,000-square-meter academic center consistent with the school’s hands-on approach to learning. The energy-efficient building will include just six classrooms, devoting most of its area to open work spaces where lessons can be transformed into entrepreneurial ideas and prototypes....

(Reuters Health) - A large organization of cancer doctors has issued a call to action to minimize alcohol consumption. With a newly released position paper, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) hopes to draw attention to the strong links between drinking alcohol and risks for several types of cancer. “People are not aware of this,” said Susan Gapstur, a vice-president of the American Cancer Society who was not involved with the position statement....

Although the question of whether there is a gender difference in math seems like a simple one, the answer is complicated. Overall there are only small differences in boys’ and girls’ math performance; those differences depend on the age and skill level of the student, what type of math they are attempting and how big of a dissimilarity is needed to say that boys’ and girls’ math performance is truly different....

Melting on the Greenland ice sheet is already happening at some of the fastest rates in centuries, and it’s only speeding up as the climate continues to warm. Now, a pair of new studies help explain why. Rainfall is becoming increasingly common over parts of Greenland, one paper found, and it’s helping trigger sudden melting events that cause large amounts of ice to liquify and run off the edge of the ice sheet....

The sweeping reefs growing off 200 steamy miles of remote Australian coastline—from Cairns to Cape Melville, home to sugar farms and dive resorts—contained some of the least damaged corals growing in one of the world’s best marine parks. Until now. In stunning new findings that have laid bare the limitations of marine parks as defenses against rapid environmental change, more than half of the corals surveyed in large chunks of this pristine stretch of the Great Barrier Reef are expected to soon be dead....

My hometown of Los Angeles is home to the earliest reported earthquake dating back to 1769 (and, of course, many more since then). The largest recorded earthquake in the worldoccurred in Chile in May of 1960 measuring at a magnitude of 9.5 moment magnitudes. A single earthquake can cause destruction costing hundreds of millions of dollars to repair and, far more importantly, can end in fatalities. In 2009, scientists in Italy were convicted of manslaughter for failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake that killed more than 300 people....

Key concepts Physics Surfaces Surface tension Hydrophilic Hydrophobic Introduction Have you ever tried to catch a bubble without popping it? It’s hard! What materials can you use to successfully catch a bubble? Do some materials work better than others? Try this project to find out. Background Bubbles are fun and beautiful—but also fragile! A bubble is made from a thin film of soapy water with air inside. Many different things, such as contact with a solid surface, can cause the film to break, popping the bubble....

From the seas to mountain peaks, humans have colonized almost every inch of Earth’s surface. Now, humans may soon be able to routinely venture below the planet’s surface, at least if the military has any say in the matter. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its latest challenge, called the Subterranean or “SubT” Challenge. The global competition asks entrants to develop systems that can help humans navigate, map and search in underground locations that are normally too perilous to visit....

Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it really be done? Is it possible to build a machine that would transport a human being into the past or future? For decades time travel lay beyond the fringe of respectable science. In recent years, however, the topic has become something of a cottage industry among theoretical physicists....

“Estrogen deficiency” is a common phrase. It is often used to describe people who are one year or more beyond their last period. However, estrogen deficiency has been diagnosed in 13- or 14-years-olds who have just experienced their first period. Or in a thin or stressed university student whose menstruation suddenly stopped. It could also be found in a teenager who is eventually diagnosed as having polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) after persistent adolescent acne, unwanted facial hair and irregular periods....

A woman in Canada narrowly missed being struck by a meteorite that crashed through her roof and landed on her pillow. Ruth Hamilton, a resident of Golden, British Columbia, was asleep in her bed on the night of Oct. 3 when she was jolted awake by an explosive bang, as something plummeted through the roof and showered her with debris, Hamilton told Victoria News on Oct. 8. She jumped out of bed and turned on the light, discovering a rock lying nestled between her pillows, right next to the spot where her head had been moments earlier....