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When a human body calls it quits, it can take as few as 30 seconds for blowflies to begin feasting on it. For the next several hours to days, a carnival of blowflies, other flies and beetles make the departed their personal bed-and-breakfasts. A determination of that succession of insects is one of the tools that crime-scene investigators (CSIs) use to estimate the postmortem interval (PMI), or the time elapsed since death....

There are approximately 30 billion square feet (2.8 billion square meters) of expansive, flat roofs in the U.S., an area large enough to collect the sunlight needed to power 16 million American homes, or replace 38 conventional coal-fired power plants. By covering these roofs with large, flat arrays of cylindrical thin-film solar cells (think massive installations of fluorescent tubes, only absorbing light rather than emitting it), Fremont, Calif.–based Solyndra, Inc., hopes to harness that energy....

RIO DE JANEIRO—When the Olympics kick off Friday, ailing athletes will go to a sparkling new clinic built just for the games. Sick tourists, meanwhile, will be sent to a public hospital whose cramped communal quarters may come as a surprise. Municipal Hospital Souza Aguiar, housed in a gloomy 1960s building in downtown Rio de Janeiro, is one of five public hospitals officially designated to accept Olympic tourists. Spectators who attend the opening and closing ceremonies—as well as other sports in the Maracanã Olympic Zone, including soccer, track and field, and archery—will be directed to Souza Aguiar....

Apart from some rear-guard behaviorists, few people hesitate to ascribe empathy to their dogs. But then dogs are man’s best friend, freely credited with lots of human sentiments. For as much as we empathize with our canines, we have been stingy about recognizing empathy elsewhere in the animal kingdom, reserving it as a human trait. This belief is changing, however, as a growing line of research demonstrates not just empathy’s existence in other animals but its subtleties and exceptions as well....

Unhappiness is often viewed as something to be prevented, avoided or eliminated. Yet recent studies reveal that for some people, feeling good is what scares them. Recognizing this fear and targeting it with therapy may be a critical first step before other mental illnesses can be treated. People fear positive emotions for many reasons, such as feeling unworthy or believing good fortune inevitably leads to a fall, according to two new studies....

Last November in the town of Wuzhen, China hosted its first large international summit on Internet governance and cybersecurity. Many felt the step was long overdue. After all, China has the world’s largest population of Web users—more than 600 million and climbing. Internet players of this stature have a responsibility to shoulder some of the burden of leadership. Right? Apparently not everyone thinks so. One of the major stories surrounding the event was the lack of senior U....

The Oasis Within The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being by Daniel J. Siegel. W. W. Nor ton, 2007 ($26.95) For thousands of years, spiritual traditions around the world have emphasized the importance of living “mindfully”—using prayer and meditation techniques to free ourselves from daily distractions, enabling us to look inside ourselves, to become sensitive to what is happening around us and to live compassionately. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that these practices have a positive influence on people’s emotional lives and physical health, but science has only recently begun to investigate their effects....

One of neuroscience’s foundational experiments wasn’t performed in a Nobel laureate’s lab, but occurred in a railyard in 1848 when an accidental explosion sent a tamping iron through 25-year-old Phineas Gage’s forehead. Gage survived, but those studying his history detailed distinct personality changes resulting from the accident. He went from even-tempered to impulsive and profane. The case is likely the earliest—and most famous—of using a “lesion” to link a damaged brain region to its function....

Political ideology helps determine whether homeowners respond to voluntary energy conservation programs, two University of California, Los Angeles, economists have found. In a study published last month on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn concluded that providing feedback on energy use can actually backfire with some conservatives. Costa and Kahn merged utility data from 80,000 homes with corresponding voter registration and donation records. The economists found that a Democratic household with green bona fides – paying for electricity from renewable sources, donating to environmental groups and living in a neighborhood of fellow liberals – will reduce its consumption by 3 percent in response to feedback....

Anthony Chan spent two years creating the first five monkeys in the world to be genetically engineered with human mutations — in this case, for Huntington’s disease. But three of the five monkeys, reported in 2008, developed severe symptoms of Huntington’s much more quickly than anticipated, and had to be killed within a month of birth. Viruses used to introduce the relevant gene had inserted extra copies randomly, intensifying the symptoms — and highlighting the method’s limitations in creating animal disease models....

Cells that break away from a cancerous tumor and circulate in the bloodstream are a serious threat to helping cancer spread, or metastasize, throughout the body. Finding these circulating tumor cells (CTCs), however, can be like searching for a particular needle in a stack of needles. One milliliter of blood contains about five billion red blood cells, 10 million white blood cells and only 10 tumor cells. Yet early cancer detection and treatment is a person’s best chance of survival, And because metastasis is responsible for 90 percent of cancer deaths, researchers have spent decades trying to develop blood tests that can effectively spot CTCs before they can form new tumors....

By crushing Earth’s lightest element with mind-boggling pressures, scientists have revealed an entirely new state of matter: phase V hydrogen. The squished hydrogen is a precursor to a state of matter first proposed in the 1930s, called atomic solid metallic hydrogen. When cooled to low enough temperatures, hydrogen (which on Earth is usually found as a gas) can become a solid; at high enough pressures, when the element solidifies, it turns into a metal....

Frontiers are in short supply. No explorer will again catch that first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean with “wild surmise,” take the first steps on the moon, or arrive first at the Challenger deep – the remotest corners of the earth are now tourist attractions. Even in science, great mysteries have fallen – life itself has gone from being the subject of metaphysical speculation about vital substances to the biophysical understanding of cellular processes....

What’s the best way to find out what crows living in the South Pacific really do when people aren’t watching? Equip them with mini-cameras and have them make their own home-, er, nest-movies, of course. University of Oxford zoologists are hoping that this hands-off approach to studying New Caledonian crows—aka Corvus moneduloides—will lead to a wealth of information about these infamous aviators, known to be one of the few nonhuman species to use tools to accomplish daily tasks....

Last month, staffers at The Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, experienced the latest low point in the American newspaper business: days after mourning the loss of their editor, Kevin Kaufman, their owner (the hedge-fund-owned Digital First Media) announced another round of painful layoffs. The past few decades have been similarly tragic for American local media: longstanding newspapers, big and small, have closed in unprecedented numbers; Americans are turning away from local news sources and towards online and nationally televised programs to learn about politics; and even local television news is focusing on national partisanship and politics, as Sinclair Broadcasting acquires more affiliates....

As many as eight out of every 100 children in the U.S. suffer from food allergies, a rate that rose 18 percent between 1997 and 2007. Although some outgrow these reactions, many are plagued for life with symptoms that range from a tingling, itchy mouth to tightening airways and a potentially fatal drop in blood pressure. Until now, the only way to prevent allergic reactions has been to avoid the offending foods, which can be difficult because traces of nuts, wheat and dairy lurk in many products....

Local police confiscate a suspected drug dealer’s phone—only to find that he has called his mother and no one else. Meanwhile a journalist’s phone is examined by airport security. But when officials look to see what is on it, they find that she has spent all her time at the beach. The drug dealer and the journalist are free to go. Minutes later the names, numbers and GPS data that the police were looking for reappear....

There are plenty of reasons why we need to bring this pandemic to a swift end. With each day, thousands more people die, and hundreds of thousands more become infected, while the ongoing disruption to daily lives, business, trade and travel is costing countless people their jobs as more businesses go under and economies continue to sink. But another important and less talked-about reason why we need to end it sooner rather than later is that the longer this crisis continues, the weaker we will be when it comes to fighting the next one....

A tiny microbe one day could devour the millions of metric tons of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, that pile up in landfills each year. Researchers in Japan have discovered the world’s first PET-eating bacterium, a critter that uses PET as its major carbon and energy source. Each year, plastic manufacturers pump out more than 45 million metric tons of PET to make water bottles, salad domes, peanut butter jars, and other products—all of which sport a stamp with the number one inside a recycle symbol....

California is set to pass a bill that would allow payments over and above ‘direct expenses’ to be made to women who donate eggs for research. The bill promises to increase the supply of eggs to scientists studying reproduction, but will not eliminate restrictions on research supported by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San Francisco, a major funder of stem-cell research in the state. After passing in the California State Assembly on 2 May, the bill is likely to be subject to a vote in the state senate as early as Thursday, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, which represents fertility clinics and researchers, and pushed for the bill....