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PET THEORIES I enjoyed the stories in “The Psychology of Pets” package very much. As a dog owner and dog lover, I have always tried to make the distinction between dogs genuinely picking up on human emotions and looking to help versus them relieving their own stress and anxiety. Either way, the relationship humans share with other animals is awesome! Peter Stratakos via e-mail Plenty of people don’t love pets. Thousands and thousands of pets are dumped at pounds or animal shelters every year....

Not all revolutions start big. In the case of quantum mechanics, a quiet one began in 1964, when physicist John Bell published an equation. This equation, in the form of a mathematical inequality, proposed a test to address deep philosophical questions that troubled many of the early founders of quantum mechanics. The issue was whether particles separated by vast distances could retain a connection so that measurements performed on one would affect the other....

“Star Trek” actress Grace Lee Whitney — who played Janice Rand, yeoman to Captain Kirk — has died at age 85. According to the Associated Press, Whitney died peacefully in her home in Coarsegold, California, on May 1. “Condolences to the family of Grace,” her co-star, William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk, post on Twitter. “She was a constant shining smile over the years every time our paths crossed.” Whitney was written off the original series (1966-1967) after eight episodes — and a harrowing sexual assault by a studio executive, which she describes in the opening of her 1998 autobiography, “The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy....

Antidepressants are some of the most commonly prescribed medications out there. More than one out of 10 Americans over age 12—roughly 11 percent—take these drugs, according to a 2011 report by the National Center for Health Statistics. And yet, recent reports have revealed that important data about the safety of these drugs—especially their risks for children and adolescents—has been withheld from the medical community and the public. In the latest and most comprehensive analysis, published last week in BMJ (the British Medical Journal),a group of researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen showed that pharmaceutical companies were not presenting the full extent of serious harm in clinical study reports, which are detailed documents sent to regulatory authorities such as the U....

Scientists who traveled to the Arctic on a NASA research cruise last summer were looking for signs of climate change. What they found was a secret world hidden beneath the region’s cap of sea ice. During their travels through the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska, they were stunned to find massive blooms of phytoplankton under the ice – in water so teeming with the microscopic plant life that it turned an opaque, vivid green....

Senate accusations of prejudice have forced a US government agency to defend its actions over a proposed tightening of regulations concerning industrial workers’ exposure to deadly silica dust. The row blew up late last year when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began a public consultation on setting new limits for working with the dust, which is a major hazard for construction workers, causing serious lung disease. The agency ruffled feathers in the Senate when it asked that those submitting evidence should declare their funding sources....

Editor’s note (8/15/16): U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won his 23rd gold medal last night during the 400-meter medley relay at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The following article was originally published following Phelps’s successful performance at the 2008 Games in Beijing. Now that Michael Phelps has won an unmatched eight gold medals in this year’s Olympic Games, lots of journalists are asking what gives Phelps such a leg up on the competition (legally, of course, though allegations of doping have tainted other Beijing Olympians)....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog Germany’s science funding may look healthy to outsiders, but its research ministry seems to have stretched its cash too thinly. Last week, it decided that helping to fund the world’s biggest radio telescope — to be built in South Africa and Australia by 2024 at a cost of more than €1.5 billion (US$2 billion) — was one international mega-project too many. On June 5, it said it would pull out of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), to the dismay of German astronomers, who say that they were not consulted and are hoping to reverse the move....

CLIMATEWIRE | Flood risk around the world is rising as the planet warms, and millions of people living in poverty are in danger because of it. A study published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications found that at least 170 million people worldwide face both extreme flood risk and extreme poverty. By the World Bank’s definition, that’s people living on less than $1.90 a day. The new research, led by World Bank economist Jun Rentschler, overlays global flood maps with global poverty data....

Our nervous system is like a tapestry of sorts, woven with interconnecting threads. These threads, the thin fibers known as axons that extend out from neurons, carry electrical information from individual nerve cells to other neurons that receive the signals. Long-range projecting axons, like the structural “warp” threads in a textile, interweave with the brain’s own version of crossing, or “weft” fibers: axons that wind back and forth over short distances, transmitting signals to perform computations....

I was late for lunch. At the time, I was juggling a teaching position with my work as public engagement fellow and running a journal; I’d made an appointment to meet a new graduate student assistant—but time got away from me. I was out of breath by the time I arrived, head still spinning with the effort of code-switching from one role to the next. It would take a few minutes to pull myself together, but the student was already there....

Life in the city can be taxing. City dwellers often face higher rates of crime, pollution, social isolation and other environmental stressors than those living in rural areas. For years studies have consistently linked the risk of developing schizophrenia to urban environments—but researchers are only beginning to understand why this association exists. Addressing the link is increasingly urgent: According to a recent U.N. report, the proportion of people living in cities will rise from 54 percent of the world’s population in 2014 to 66 percent by 2050....

A recently unearthed extinct human species—perhaps the most primitive ever discovered—had hands and feet adapted for a life both on the ground and in the trees, researchers say. This finding sheds light on how early humans experimented with a variety of designs, scientists added. And though the international teams of scientists are not certain how this extinct human would have walked, they say the swagger would have been quite different from ours....

If skies are clear this weekend, be sure to take a few moments to gaze upward. You just might be lucky and catch a glimpse of a spectacularly bright meteor from the Taurid meteor shower. While most meteor displays last about a week, the Taurids have perhaps the longest duration of overall visibility. Meteors from this particular stream begin appearing in mid-October and continue into mid-November. November 5 through 12 is traditionally the period when these slow and majestic meteors are at their best....

STANFORD, Calif. – Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow. They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer’s side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod’s vibrations....

Austin, a fluffy white-and-black Old English sheepdog, was still a puppy when his owners called the University of North Carolina’s Francis Owen Blood Research Laboratory in Chapel Hill four years ago. After deciding that the children were finally old enough to get a dog, the family had quickly bonded with the rambunctious pup. But within six months of bringing Austin home, they had spent US$10,000 on veterinary bills to deal with extreme bleeding from small scrapes....

▪ Feed the World As a retired farmer, I know that the information in “Grassoline at the Pump,” by George W. Huber and Bruce E. Dale, about agricultural residues is false in a most dangerous way. There is NO extra residue from the corn harvest. Sure, you can take it away and use it to create fuel. But that residue is desperately needed right where it fell, to renew the soil....

Climate change is driving up the number of forest fires ignited by lightning, and it’s pushing them farther north, to the edges of the Arctic tundra, researchers say. Lightning-caused fires have risen 2 to 5 percent a year for the last four decades, according to a paper published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change. And as thunderstorms intensify and become more frequent, fires are increasingly occurring in the boreal forests, and even on the permafrost tundra....

LIMA, Peru – Rays of sunshine in recent days broke through the blanket of smog that hangs over this bustling city of ancient adobe pyramids and chic fusion eateries. But diplomats and activists here for U.N. climate change talks say the brightening weather is inversely proportional to the gloomy mood descending over the negotiations. Ministers arriving in the South American capital this week will find little trace of the cheer that marked the summit’s opening days last week....

When the Grizzly Giant sprouted from the ground in what is now Yosemite National Park, the Roman Republic was nearly two centuries away from forming, Buddhism would not develop for at least more than a century, and the geoglyphs making up the Nazca Lines of southern Peru would not be etched for around 200 years. At an estimated 2,700 years old (and possibly even older), this giant sequoia is one of the oldest trees in the world—a majestic specimen of a remarkable redwood species that has evolved to withstand the flames that periodically sweep through its environment....