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There was nothing outwardly unusual about the man who showed up at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center on June 27, 2005. Like thousands of other clinic patients, Benjamin Adoyo (not his real name) was a sleepwalker. A 26-year-old college student, originally from Kenya, Adoyo had been wandering at night since childhood. Lately, though, the behavior had been getting worse. Adoyo had gotten married in February, and his wife would wake to him shaking her while looming over their bed and babbling unintelligibly....

LONDON (Reuters) - The world’s major economies are falling further behind every year in terms of meeting the rate of carbon emission reductions needed to stop global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees this century, a report published on Monday showed. The sixth annual Low Carbon Economy Index report from professional services firm PwC looked at the progress of major developed and emerging economies toward reducing their carbon intensity, or emissions per unit of gross domestic product....

UFOs have been back in the news because of videos initially leaked, and later confirmed, by the U.S. Navy and officially released by Pentagon that purportedly show “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP) in our skies. Speculations about their nature have run the gamut from mundane objects like birds or balloons to visitors from outer space. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to say what these actually are, however, without context. What happened before and after these video snippets?...

One September evening amateur astronomer Victor Buso hauled his 40-centimeter telescope up to his rooftop observatory in Rosario, Argentina, and pointed it at a relatively nearby galaxy called NGC 613. He says he chose it at random, remarking that “among the ones that were in that part of the sky, NGC 613 has a beautiful shape with ringlets of bright and dark clouds.” Photographing a galaxy requires a lot of light-gathering; Buso spent an hour and a half braving city lights to create an exposure of the spiral galaxy and its twisting arms....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. This week, we will finally see the launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. Long delayed, DSCOVR is an observational mission to the Lagrangian point 1, or “L1,” a unique point between the sun and Earth (approximately 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, toward the sun) where the gravitational pull of each sphere is equally balanced by the other....

Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of The Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.) A new database pools health registry data from seven countries, dramatically boosting sample sizes for epidemiological studies of autism. The virtual tool, built by an international consortium of researchers, allows them to effectively compare data across populations. “This is a first for autism,” says Diana Schendel, professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Aarhus University in Denmark, who spearheaded the project....

By Jane Qiu Growing environmental costs and energy demands have persuaded China’s leaders that the country cannot sustain its breakneck economic growth. In a speech on Saturday at the annual National Party Congress in Beijing, Premier Wen Jiabao announced ambitious five-year goals for increasing energy efficiency and curbing carbon emissions – and a reduced target for economic growth.In the past five years, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) has increased at an average rate of 11....

Climate change will be a major factor in the future of power lines, natural gas pipelines, fuel depots and rail tanker cars, according to the Department of Energy’s first installment of its Quadrennial Energy Review (QER), released yesterday. The 348-page document, stemming from the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan, focused on how hydrocarbons and electrons get from point A to point B, mapping out the current state of affairs and recommending pathways to ensure that energy reliably gets from producers to end-users in the coming decade....

A novel fungus may be devastating bats in the northeastern U.S. In the past two years several species have displayed unusual behavior such as flying during the winter when they should be hibernating. Census counts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont have revealed that populations have thinned by at least 75 percent. A clue has been a white, powdery organism on the muzzles, ears and wings of the dead and dying bats, creating what is called white nose syndrome....

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote. That line must have zoomed through 5,000 audience brains when, at Google’s developer conference in May, CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated a new artificial-intelligence product called Google Duplex. What Duplex does is to make reservations at restaurants and hair salons—by placing a phone call to their human receptionists. It perfectly impersonates a human voice, complete with “ums,” hesitations and realistic inflections....

You tried so hard. But you failed. You did not pass the test, you performed poorly in the interview or you missed your project goal at the office. Why? Is it that you were not capable? Or could something more subtle—and worrisome—also be at work? As it turns out, research shows that such performance failures cannot always be attributed simply to inherent lack of ability or incompetence. Although some have jumped to the highly controversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong....

“Dr. John D. Quackenbos, of Columbia University, has long been engaged in experiments in using hypnotic suggestion for the correction of moral infirmities and defects such as kleptomania, the drink habit, and in children habits of lying and petty thieving. Dr. Quackenbos says, ‘I find out all I can about the extent of a patient’s weakness. For each patient I have to find some ambition, some strong conscious tendency to appeal to, and then my suggestion, as an unconscious impulse, controls the moral weakness by inducing the patient to further his desires by honest means....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Nutrition Diva listener Rona writes: “My health coach says that I should avoid milk because it is acidic and, contrary to common belief, will actually deplete the calcium in my bones. I have always believed that milk was a good source of calcium. In fact, I insist that my children have at least 2 servings of milk a day!...

NEW YORK—The city that never sleeps was mostly asleep. The bars were closed. But at 4:45 A.M., inside a library on Columbia University’s Manhattan campus, Michael Tuts was getting ready to pop the champagne. The physicist had good reason to celebrate. The massive team of scientists of which he is a part—3,000 researchers working on the ATLAS experiment at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider—had just announced the discovery of a new particle....

System and method for aquaculture of marine life-forms: Live corals make a stunning addition to marine aquariums, but harvesting mature coral from the wild threatens rare reef ecosystems. Coral cultivation or aquaculture could help, especially in the U.S., where hobbyists buy approximately 80 percent of the live coral sold in the world. The challenges to culturing corals include generating the kind of multidirectional, strong currents created by waves and tides, which are necessary for reef organisms to thrive....

Key concepts Physics Volume Air pressure Vacuum Introduction Have you ever been helping in the kitchen and found yourself with a recipe that calls for egg whites? Do you use the eggshell to separate the egg yolk from the egg white? Instead of using the shell to separate them, you can use science! In this activity you will use simple tools to explore how physics can help you do everyday tasks—such as separate egg yolks from egg whites....

PARTICLES OF MATTER: QUARKS These particles make up protons, neutrons and a veritable zoo of lesser-known particles. They have never been observed in isolation. Electric charge: +2/3 Mass: 2 MeV Constituent of ordinary matter; two up quarks, plus a down, make up a proton. Electric charge: -1/3 Mass: 5 MeV Constituent of ordinary matter; two down quarks, plus an up, compose a neutron. Electric charge: +2/3 Mass: 1.25 GeV Unstable heavier cousin of the up; constituent of the J/theta particle, which helped physicists develop the Standard Model....

Cooking rice by repeatedly flushing it through with fresh hot water can remove much of the grain’s stored arsenic, researchers have found—a tip that could lessen levels of the toxic substance in one of the world’s most popular foods. Billions of people eat rice daily, but it contributes more arsenic to the human diet than any other food. Conventionally grown in flooded paddies, rice takes up more arsenic (which occurs naturally in water and soil as part of an inorganic compound) than do other grains....

Texting has become the most popular form of communication among people under 30. One recent study found that students spend less than six minutes, on average, on schoolwork before being distracted by social media and texting. For a small percentage of teens, texting becomes compulsive—they may try to text less and fail or feel anxiety and frustration if they are kept away from texting. A new study from the American Psychological Association evaluated how 211 girls and 192 boys communicated via text and found notable gender differences in overall behavior and compulsive use:...

In 2003, Donald Kennedy, then editor in chief of the journal Science, wrote an editorial called, “Forensic Science: Oxymoron?” He answered this question, in effect, “yes.” Unfortunately, the answer remains much the same today. Forensic experts continue to employ unproven techniques, and courts continue to accept their testimony largely unchecked. However, courts have recently begun to recognize the scientific limitations of one forensic field: firearms identification, in which an examiner visually compares fired bullets or cartridge cases and opines on whether the items were fired by the same gun....