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Originally posted on the Nature news blog Japan’s hugely controversial ‘scientific whaling’ program is not actually scientific and must be stopped, the International Court of Justice ruled today. The judgement represents a victory for Australia, which brought the case against Japan, and the conservationists and researchers who have for years maintained that this whaling program was merely a commercial hunt given a veneer of legality through science. Since the late 1980s Japan has aimed to catch hundreds of minke whales, plus smaller numbers of other species, in the waters around Antarctica....

Editor’s Note: The extended Q&A with Jeremy Nicholson mentioned in the July magazine can be found here. Jeremy Nicholson was only trying to be thorough. It was 1981, and the young biochemist was using a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which can identify chemicals based on the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. In particular, Nicholson wanted to study how red blood cells absorb cadmium, a metal that causes cancer. Realizing that he would achieve the best results if he could mimic the cells’ natural environment, he added a few drops of blood to the cells and ran the test....

The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain’s knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby....

Darrell Moore is typically a honeybee guy. He’s been studying them for 40 years. But a few years ago, his colleague Thomas Jones asked for his opinion about some weird spider behavior. Jones studies social behavior in the orb weaver spiders that his undergraduate students collect near their East Tennessee State University campus. Spiders are both predators and prey. Their aggression and passivity fluctuate depending on hormone levels that determine whether they are more likely to eat or be eaten....

We often casually say that we are “hardwired” to feel certain ways or to have specific responses to events. But what do we really know about that neural wiring? How does it wend through the gelatinlike brain that contains all our hopes and dreams, all that makes us who we are? First of all, the telecom analogy isn’t that far off. Our nervous system uses the fibers known as axons to ferry information, in the form of electrical signals, among nerve cells....

New diagnostic tests for common foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Escherichia coli may hinder the ability of public health officials to detect multistate outbreaks. The problem is an inability to trace contamination to its source. In 2009 Alicia Cronquist, an epidemiologist with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment noticed that several rural clinics in her state had switched from traditional laboratory tests that relied on growing a culture to rapid nonculture tests....

Adapted from Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, by Ray Jayawardhana, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), HarperCollings (CA), Oneworld (UK). Copyright © 2013 by Ray Jayawardhana. In the wee hours of February 24, 1987, atop Cerro Las Campanas in Chile, Ian Shelton decided to develop the final photographic plate of the night before heading to bed....

EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION In “Bringing Darwin Back” [Special Education Report 2018], Adam Piore discusses how a majority of American teachers do not fully teach evolutionary theory. He also reports on groups promoting strategies for preparing teachers to do so in communities that are biased against the subject. To teach evolution effectively and productively, the sequence of topics should be changed. The first should be ecology and then genetics, with the latter’s last chapter covering evolution....

Glass is strong—until it shatters. If it could stretch more like a rubber band, glass could be used in shatter-proof windows and flexible electronic displays or fashioned into mechanical sensors that could operate at the high temperatures encountered in such fields as aeronautics. Materials scientists led by Seiji Inaba of the Tokyo Institute of Technology have created the first such elastic glass. Glass is typically made up of phosphorus- or silicon-based molecules tightly bound to one another in orderly but noncrystalline three-dimensional structures....

Key concepts Visual search Perception Distractions Reaction time Introduction Have you ever wondered what makes you notice a certain person or object when you’re rushing along in a crowd? Why do some things stand out whereas others melt into the background? In this activity you can explore the psychology of how things get noticed by studying how our brains help us perform a visual search. Specifically, you’ll look at how changing the number and type of visual distractions affects a person’s ability to find what they’re looking for....

This year was quite an eventful one in spaceflight, with many vessels launching toward the heavens — and a few crashing back to Earth. Here’s a rundown of the top 11 spaceflight stories of 2011, from the last mission of NASA’s venerable space shuttle program to China’s first-ever docking of two spaceships in Earth orbit: Satellites falling from the sky The sky wasn’t really falling in autumn 2011; it just seemed that way, with two defunct satellites plummeting to Earth out of control within a month of each other....

For Tangier Island, Va., lifelong resident Claudia Parks, climate change is a direct threat to her golf cart. As flooding and erosion have worsened on the Chesapeake Bay island in recent decades, the tour director with a broad smile avoids certain saturated roads at least 15 times in the spring and fall during tidal events on her regular work route. That involves getting visitors past the local ice cream shops, white picket fences and marshy hills that dot this car-free fishing community....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. By Antoine Wystrach, University of Sussex How intelligent are animals? Despite centuries of effort by philosophers, psychologists and biologists, the question remains unanswered. We are inclined to tackle this question using a top-down approach. It seems intuitive to start with our own assumptions about human intelligence, and design experiments that ask whether animals possess similar anthropomorphic abilities....

E-cigarette giant Juul Labs said Wednesday that it is suspending all of its U.S. advertising and will not lobby against a recently proposed ban on all flavored vaping products, a dramatic shift for a company that has shelled out millions on promoting its products and fighting policies that would restrict their sale. The company also announced in a statement that its chief executive officer, Kevin Burns, is stepping down and will be replaced by an executive at Altria, a part-owner of Juul....

Supplementing the human brain with computer power has been a staple of science fiction. But in fact, researchers have taken several steps in melding minds with machines, and this spring a team from the University of Southern California may replace damaged brain tissue in rats with a neural prosthesis. For the past few years, researchers have demonstrated the ability to translate another creature’s thoughts into action. In 2000 neurologist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University wired a monkey with electrodes so that its thoughts could control a robotic arm....

From what politicians and commentators say in the media, the U.S. would seem torn asunder over the matter of climate change. Not so, according to an assessment of 21 surveys encompassing almost 20,000 people in 46 states, which found ample agreement about global warming and what to do about it. In each state, a majority of those polled believe that temperatures are rising and that human actions are part of the cause (first two questions above)—and this consensus holds for residents of states that voted strongly Republican in the 2012 presidential election (red)....

Every minute in 2018, Google conducted 3.88 million searches, and people watched 4.33 million videos on YouTube, sent 159,362,760 e-mails, tweeted 473,000 times and posted 49,000 photos on Instagram, according to software company Domo. By 2020 an estimated 1.7 megabytes of data will be created per second per person globally, which translates to about 418 zettabytes in a single year (418 billion one-terabyte hard drive’s worth of information), assuming a world population of 7....

Pity the hadrosaur. The duck-billed dinosaur had no horns, armor or tusks for defense when Tyrannosaurus rex was on the hunt. And it was too big to escape by climbing a tree or burrowing into the ground. To top it all off, the herbivore was slow of foot. Luckily, the layout of a hadrosaur’s leg and tail muscles may have helped it escape the massive jaws of tyrannosaur predators. T. rex would win in a sprint, but a hadrosaur would outrun it in a longer race, paleontologist W....

‘Tis the season for giving thanks and sharing blame. The supercomittee, the White House, “the One Percent,” Greece, Italy—the accusations seem to be swirling everywhere this fall. So in the spirit of sharing guilt, we thought it might be fun to ask a physician, Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan, to help us re-examine a more classic case of finger-pointing: Is turkey the sole culprit behind our drowsy spells after Thanksgiving dinner?...

Beresheet, a modest Israeli spacecraft with the audacious aim of making a soft landing on the moon, came close but ultimately failed in its goal on Thursday. The probe crashed on the lunar surface after engine and communication troubles arose shortly before its planned touchdown. The vehicle, engineered by an Israeli nonprofit organization called SpaceIL, would have been the first private spacecraft to make a lunar landing—and would have made Israel only the fourth country to do so, after the U....