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It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb—who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota—reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard....

Why do top athletes suddenly develop “the yips,” a tendency to choke under pressure? —Matthew Robison, Contoocook, N.H. Jürgen Beckmann, chair of the Institute of Sport Psychology at the Technical University of Munich, explains: A single short putt is necessary to win the tournament, but suddenly the golfer’s hands cramp up, and the putt goes wide. According to several studies, as many as 48 percent of serious golfers have experienced such motor skill failures, known as the yips....

The differences between wind turbine and ceiling fan blades arise from the contrasting design criteria: the wind turbine is intended to capture high-velocity wind to generate electricity efficiently; the ceiling fan needs to move air at low velocity with inexpensive components. To keep drivetrain costs low, a wind turbine must capture the energy in fast-moving air and rotate at relatively high speed—within limits, so as to avoid excessive noise generation. (Slow rotation would increase the torque and require heavier and more expensive drivetrain components....

Most of us learn how to ride a bike during childhood. But as we grow older, many of us stop riding and put those once-beloved bikes in storage. Years later, when we discover these relics and hop on, it’s as if we never stopped biking. This is surprising because our memories let us down in so many other instances, such as remembering the name of a place or a person we once knew or where we put our keys....

Is it true that people can have a midlife crisis, or is it a myth? —Paul Graham, Pleasantville, N.Y. David Almeida, professor of human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University, responds: MANY PEOPLE EXPECT that midlife brings forth inevitable crisis, but that idea is not supported by social science. In fact, only 26 percent of adults older than 40 reported having a crisis, according to a recent study. That is not to say that the middle-aged do not experience challenges and psychological distress, but these feelings tend to be brought on by stressful events, such as health problems or losing a parent—not by age alone....

New evidence suggests the first known black hole is bigger than previously thought, which may force scientists to reconsider their understanding of how giant stars give rise to black holes. Scientists think stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to a few times the sun’s mass, form when giant stars die and collapse in on themselves. The first black hole ever discovered was Cygnus X-1, located within the Milky Way in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan....

A long-running dispute about how fast our universe is expanding just became even more entrenched. New and more precise measurements of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, have only strengthened the differences between two independent methods of calculating the expansion rate. This impasse may soon force cosmologists to reexamine the “standard model” of cosmology, which tells us about the composition of the universe (radiation, normal matter, dark matter and dark energy) and how it has evolved over time....

Dean Pomerleau can still remember his first tussle with the black-box problem. The year was 1991, and he was making a pioneering attempt to do something that has now become commonplace in autonomous-vehicle research: teach a computer how to drive. This meant taking the wheel of a specially equipped Humvee military vehicle and guiding it through city streets, says Pomerleau, who was then a robotics graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....

This year’s election faced an unprecedented kink: hacking. Wikileaks published hacked emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, for example, and Russian hackers were accused of compromising state election systems. Now some wonder whether hackers targeted the actual Nov. 8 vote results, shifting them in favor of Donald Trump in swing states where the vote was expected to be close. New York Magazine reported Tuesday that experts were urging the Clinton campaign to challenge the results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania....

NANTES, France—The shape of Comet Hartley 2 has inspired a number of colorful descriptors—it’s been called a pickle, a peanut, a dog bone and a bowling pin. But none of those shape analogues shares what may be a defining characteristic of Hartley 2—its two lobes now appear to be made of different material. The end pieces of the comet may have formed separately before merging to create the odd-shaped object, researchers ventured here this week at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress....

By Barbara Casassus of Nature magazineVariable energy sources such as wind and solar power could provide 19-63% of required electricity in many countries if the technical and market hurdles are overcome, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). This upbeat view contrasts with what most other experts have said to date.The main difficulty in achieving figures like the IEA’s are obstacles to integrating VRE sources into power systems. The most important hitches are congested grids and rigid markets....

A first-of-its-kind gene therapy received approval from the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday to treat a rare, inherited form of childhood blindness. The FDA marketing clearance of Spark Therapeutics’s Luxturna is historic for scientific and financial reasons. Luxturna is the first gene therapy approved in the U.S. that targets a disease caused by mutations in a specific gene. A Spark spokesman said the company will not disclose the Luxturna price tag until early January....

A theory long on the fringes of petroleum science gained some support from new research this week, but it is probably not enough to launch the concept into the mainstream. The idea: What if fossil fuels were not fossil after all? What if hydrocarbons could form from chemical reactions deep inside the earth, rather than from the “pressure cooking” of organic matter? “[Abiogenic] origin of oil has been proposed by many before, but there are arguments pro and contra,” said Alexander Goncharov, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution....

The atmosphere is barreling toward a 4-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of this century – a world in which some nations may simply be unable to cope with or recover from disasters, a sweeping new World Bank study warns. If a 4-degree rise over preindustrial temperatures happens, the results for developing nations will be devastating. Warming over land could reach as high as 10 degrees Celsius, or about 18 degrees Fahrenheit....

Fireflies produce a chemical reaction inside their bodies that allows them to light up. This type of light production is called bioluminescence. The method by which fireflies produce light is perhaps the best known example of bioluminescence. When oxygen combines with calcium, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and the chemical luciferin in the presence of luciferase, a bioluminescent enzyme, light is produced. Unlike a light bulb, which produces a lot of heat in addition to light, a firefly’s light is “cold light” without a lot of energy being lost as heat....

In 2012 a villager walking through the forest in Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve came across a young male lion caught in a poacher’s snare. The lion lay on the ground, a noose of thick wire squeezing its lower torso. Conservation workers later freed the animal, but most lions are not so lucky. “Poaching has been a major issue over the years,” says Natasha Ribeiro, who has studied illegal hunting in Niassa Reserve and is a forest ecologist at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique....

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Schools were to stay closed and travel warnings were issued along Mexico’s southern Pacific coast on Monday as a region still reeling from record flooding battened down the hatches against a major hurricane moving toward the shore.Raymond, a category three hurricane, was blowing winds of up to 120 miles per hour early on Monday, more than 100 miles offshore, and forecasters said it could head west later this week without hitting land....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. While President Donald Trump has not shied away from offering suggestions on how to prevent school shootings—including one controversial idea to arm teachers—what often gets overlooked in the conversation is research on the subject that has already been done. This research includes one major study of school shootings conducted in part by the very agency charged with protecting the president of the United States himself—the U....

Having emerged as a popular technology for making phone calls—often free of charge—via one’s PC, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is set to stake its claim on the mobile market. Mobile VoIP may not replace cell phones in the immediate future, but it will give callers the ability to bypass cellular networks wherever they have access to a Wi-Fi network. Luxembourg-based Skype, Ltd., a division of online auctioneer eBay, has been pushing over the past year to deliver more of its VoIP services to mobile callers through a partnership with wireless network equipment maker NETGEAR, Inc....

Rats learn to navigate new spaces by replaying memories in reverse order, a study released in February suggests. After exploring an environment such as a maze, rats typically pause to eat, groom or rub their whiskers. Researchers had ignored such behavior because it seemed unimportant —rats being rats. But a pair of investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to see what the rat brain is doing during these interludes....