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By Barbara ListonORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Guess who’s coming to dinner? In the leafy far suburbs of Orlando, the uncomfortable answer increasingly is a Florida black bear.Calls about bears, including reports of sick or injured ones, more than quadrupled in Florida over the past decade, according to statistics maintained by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In 2012 alone, the commission received 6,159 calls - an average of 17 a day....

Key concepts Chemistry Food science Freezing Solution Introduction Do you enjoy ice-cold drinks? A slushy is about as close as you can get to liquid ice: colder than water but more drinkable than ice! Using some common household items, a little bit of patience and the help of science, you can make this delicious, sweet drink at home. Try this activity, and you will be rewarded with a delightful treat! Background A slushy is a dense, ice-cold beverage that resembles the thickness of melting snow....

The virus took its time crossing the Atlantic. And when the first patient suffering from Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) finally did turn up in the U.S., he made his way, improbably, to Munster, Ind., population 23,413. A week later a second appeared, flying from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the home of the Magic Kingdom—Orlando, Fla. Both men are doctors who work in Saudi hospitals, the best places in the world right now to avoid if you do not want to catch what is officially known as the MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV)....

It is time to face reality, California Institute of Technology theoretical physicist Sean Carroll says: There is just no such thing as God, or ghosts, or human souls that reside outside of the body. Everything in existence belongs to the natural world and is accessible to science, he argues. In his new book “The Big Picture: On the Origin of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself,” out this week from Dutton, Carroll describes a guiding philosophy along these lines that he calls poetic naturalism....

Imagine the following transformation. A pea-sized chunk of your skin breaks apart in a dish of salts and serums. The mixture is infected with viruses that make some cells smaller, more circular, and clump together. They’ve turned into stem cells. Then, a bath of other salts, serums, and factors coax them into becoming mature neurons. The neurons divide and organize themselves into three dimensional spheres. Inside the spheres, the neurons layer themselves like the neurons in your cerebral cortex....

On Feb. 27, 2018, I got an email from the Heritage Foundation, alerting me to a news conference that afternoon held by Republican attorneys general of Texas and other states. It was referred to only as a “discussion about the Affordable Care Act lawsuit.” I sent the following note to my editor: “I’m off to the Hill anyway. I could stop by this. You never know what it might morph into....

“Memory”, wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the diary that we all carry about with us”. Perhaps, but if memory is like a diary, it’s one filled with torn-out pages and fabricated passages. In January, a group of New York University neuroscientists led by Daniela Schiller reported in the journal Nature that they had created fearful memories in people and then erased them. Besides being rather cool, the result provides new insight into how to treat traumatic memories in people....

The tick hunter was hopeful he had found the cause of the disabling illness, recently named Lyme disease, that was spreading anxiety through leafy communities east of New York City. At a government lab in Montana, Willy Burgdorfer typed a letter to a colleague, reporting that blood from Lyme patients showed “very strong reactions” on a test for an obscure, tick-borne bacterium. He called it the “Swiss Agent.” But further studies raised doubts about whether he had the right culprit, and 18 months later, in 1981, Burgdorfer instead pinned Lyme on another microbe....

Ethical Conundrums: Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them by Joshua Greene Penguin Press: 2013 We begin on a serene pasture inhabited by a tribe of shepherds. Motivated by personal wealth, one by one the herders begin adding more sheep to their individual flocks. Soon enough the once lush meadow is overrun, and ultimately the sheep destroy it. Such is the tragedy of the commons, the idea that people acting out of self-interest will deplete shared resources to the detriment of the group....

Eat your heart out, Tatooine: A newly discovered alien planet has not one, not two, but three suns in its sky. While scientists know of many planets with two suns, a planet with three bright stars in its sky is much rarer. The newly found distant world, known as KELT-4Ab, orbits one star. That star in turn is orbited by a nearby pair of stars. The twin stars are close enough to the planet to appear about as bright as the full moon in the sky, new research has revealed....

A virtual reality war is coming between the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, and the latest edition of HTC’s head-mounted display makes it an even tougher foe. Called the Vive Pre, the device is closer to what consumers can expect when it goes on sale in April, complete with a new front camera that lets you see the real world around you as you walk around, an improved visual experience and a comfier and lighter design....

Three bones—among the tiniest in the human body—sit in your middle ear, where they transmit vibrations from the eardrum to the cochlea, significantly sharpening your hearing. Collectively known as the auditory ossicles, they are unique to mammals. Reptiles and birds all have only one middle-ear bone—the bones that would otherwise be their “ossicles” are instead fused with the joints of their jaw. Despite their size, the ossicles are such a potent evolutionary innovation that they emerged independently multiple times in mammals—not only because of the resulting boost to hearing but also because their detachment from the jaw freed those animals to adapt to a wider variety of food sources....

These days not even many politicians deny that the oceans are ill. Protecting the health of coastal waters is now a matter of national policy in dozens of countries, including the U.S., and world leaders are beginning to prescribe a revolutionary remedy that conservationists have been promoting for years: marine planning and zoning. The idea is a natural extension of management policies that have guided the development of cities and landscapes for nearly a century....

People love Wi-Fi access to the Internet. More and more, they are using the wireless connection technology at Starbucks caf¿s, in airport lounges and at home. Wi-Fi seems irresistible because it makes the Net available to users anytime, anywhere. It provides fast communications links that allow e-mail messages to appear almost instantly and Web pages to paint computer screens quickly–all with the mobility and freedom that has made cell phones nearly ubiquitous....

Dear EarthTalk: What will be the effect of all the flooding along the Mississippi River for organic farmers, given all the pollutants in the water? When they recover, can they still certify their products as organic?—Michael O’Loughlin, Tigard, Ore. The combination of record floods and record numbers of organic farms has led many to wonder about the safety of even our organic groceries. Luckily for Americans, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a policy in place to govern how farmers respond to such situations and how affected crops and fields are handled to ensure that consumers continue to have access to healthy and safe food....

One of the most fundamental questions in climate research asks the following: What will the world look like when we reach a certain point of warming? How will it change after 2 degrees? 4 degrees? Even warmer? More than a decade ago, scientists designed a set of hypothetical scenarios to help them model the climate. Their goal was to answer these very questions. Each scenario assumes a different level of future greenhouse gas emissions and global carbon dioxide concentrations, translating to different levels of warming....

People have been fascinated with the figure of the narcissistic star at least since Norma Desmond announced that she was ready for her close-up in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Norma is not alone—new research shows that celebrities of all types are significantly more vain than other people. Two University of Southern California researchers conducted the study. One of them, Drew Pinsky, appears on a syndicated radio show called Loveline, in which visiting celebrities give relationship advice to callers....

For decades a global economic system based on the conversion of nature into profit has been accelerating inequality, environmental destruction and climate change. Hundreds of millions of people are vulnerable to (seemingly) natural disasters, including pandemics caused by the emergence of novel pathogens. By exacerbating xenophobic nationalism and precipitating vaccine apartheid, COVID-19 has intensified these dangerous trends. People from the Global South have always been underrepresented at international conferences where road maps for the future are etched....

The Egyptian government’s recent move to shut down the region’s Internet service providers (ISPs) has prompted concern worldwide that surfing could be silenced by politicians or leaders in other countries, including the U.S. Adding to this fear of a so-called Internet “kill switch” are bills proposed in the past couple of years that seek to give the White House the authority to essentially disconnect the country’s electrical utilities, telecommunications lines and other critical infrastructure from the Internet in the event of a major cyber attack....

With the global population of humans well beyond seven billion, it is difficult to imagine that Homo sapiens was once an endangered species. Yet studies of the DNA of modern-day people indicate that, once upon a time, our ancestors did in fact undergo a dramatic population decline. Although scientists lack a precise timeline for the origin and near extinction of our species, we can surmise from the fossil record that our forebears arose throughout Africa shortly before 195,000 years ago....