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[An edited transcript of the interview follows.] Do you really think love is a mental illness? Love can be a powerful and destabilizing experience. People often experience it as not wholly pleasant. You could say that ideas of romantic love are fundamentally delusional because the beliefs associated with romantic love just don’t correspond with reality. This idea that there is one special person out there who you are destined to meet—that is such a strong belief and clearly untenable....

Before the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, Volkswagen’s U.S. chief, Michael Horn, patiently answered testy questions from lawmakers indignant over the company’s deception in its clean credibility. “I would like to offer a sincere apology for Volkswagen’s use of a software program that served to defeat the regular emissions testing regime,” Horn said to a packed committee room. The software fooled EPA emissions testers into thinking that Volkswagen’s diesel engines produced less emissions of nitrogen oxides than they released in the real world....

Friday, April 22nd is Earth Day, so in honor of Mother Earth, let’s discuss one of the biggest issues facing our home planet—fresh water shortages—and how a material called graphene may be able to help. Our global thirst for fresh water is rising by an estimated 170 billion gallons each year. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population are predicted to have problems accessing fresh water, a problem being exacerbated by global warming and continued population growth....

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park will be stripped of Endangered Species Act safeguards this summer, U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced on Thursday in a move conservation groups vowed to challenge in court. Dropping federal protection of Yellowstone’s grizzlies, formally proposed in March 2016 under the Obama administration, was based on the agency’s findings that the bears’ numbers have rebounded sufficiently in recent decades....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Yellowstone National Park, which sits atop one of the world’s largest super-volcanoes, was struck on Sunday by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake, the biggest recorded there since February 1980, but no damage or injuries were immediately reported. The tremor, a relatively light event by seismic standards, struck the northwest corner of the park and capped a flurry of smaller quakes at Yellowstone since Thursday, geologists at the University of Utah Seismograph Stations said in a statement....

That’s not the first time a big electronics company has refused to cooperate with the law on privacy grounds. You may recall that last year the FBI asked Apple to give it backdoor access to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, and Apple refused. (The FBI was able to gain access to the phone’s data through other means.) In the Arkansas case, the police ended up striking possible gold, not with the Echo but with Bates’s smart water meter....

Listener Lou wrote in and asked, “How do I let go of guilt? I feel guilty about everything, even things I haven’t done!” Lou notes that she was pretty horrible as a teenager and hasn’t been able to forgive herself for being so selfish and careless back then. She also worries that she’s equally awful now and just isn’t aware of it, all of which leads her to feel—you guessed it—guilty!...

The “War on Drugs” has failed, particularly with regard to the spread of HIV in middle-income nations and some developing nations in Asia. The disease is now starting to bleed into Africa as well. The spread of HIV among injection drug users is a most crucial issue in middle-income countries: poor nations simply cannot afford so expensive a vice on a large scale, and affluent nations often have instituted harm-reduction policies, such as needle exchange and opioid substitution programs, to mitigate the health risks...

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crewed vehicle aced a crucial safety test this morning (Nov. 4) in the New Mexico desert. Called a pad abort test, the drill checked the vehicle’s ability to carry astronauts to safety should engineers notice an anomaly with the rocket that could endanger a launch. That scenario means that during a pad abort test, the capsule has to quickly pick up enough speed to carry humans to safety, starting from a standstill....

The African Stenocara beetle has become mildly famous for using its wings to capture vapor molecules in the parched Namib Desert air and to herd them into a droplet that rolls into its mouth. Now two Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors have devised a material that mimics this action and goes a step further, which may lead to a range of long-anticipated products that manhandle fluids. Chemical engineer Robert E. Cohen and materials scientist Michael F....

The goal of antiaddiction vaccines is to prevent addictive molecules from reaching the brain, where they produce their effects and can create chemical dependencies. Vaccines can accomplish this task, in theory, by generating antibodies—proteins produced by the immune system—that bind to addictive particles and essentially stop them in their tracks. But challenges remain. Among them, addictive molecules are often too small to be spotted by the human immune system. Thus, they can circulate in the body undetected....

But with this convenience comes a cost. Cities around the world are suffering from more congestion and pollution as a growing number of delivery vehicles choke their streets. Until now, these impacts have been tough to quantify. But a new report attempts to provide one of the first comprehensive analyses of the congestion and carbon emissions stemming from delivery services worldwide. The report from the World Economic Forum, released today, looks at the rise of e-commerce in cities such as Los Angeles, London and Singapore....

Dolphins’ “signature whistles,” which they use like names to identify themselves to others and convey personal information, have long been known as one of the most complex forms of animal communication ever studied. New research quantifies just how much these calls can vary between individuals and situations. Experts can determine a dolphin’s signature whistle over time by listening as it calls out to its peers. The animals vary these whistles widely, repeating sections in loops, altering the pitch, and adding and deleting short segments....

Sometime between three million and two million years ago, perhaps on a primeval savanna in Africa, our ancestors became recognizably human. For more than a million years their australopithecine predecessors—Lucy and her kind, who walked upright like us yet still possessed the stubby legs, tree-climbing hands and small brains of their ape forebearers—had thrived in and around the continent’s forests and woodlands. But their world was changing. Shifting climate favored the spread of open grasslands, and the early australopithecines gave rise to new lineages....

SAN FRANCISCO — Deadly heat waves, Alaskan wildfires and sunny day tidal flooding are some of the events that scientists are increasingly linking to human-caused global warming. Climate change made 2015 the hottest year on record, and it contributed to the severity of heat waves in India, Pakistan, Europe, East Africa, East Asia and Australia, according to the research of 118 scientists from 18 countries released yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....

Scientists in the US have developed their very own pair of rose-tinted spectacles by adapting Google Glass to measure the chlorophyll concentration of leaves. Aydogan Ozcan and his research group at the University of California are passionate about creating new technologies through innovative, photonic methods and are well acquainted with the possibilities of wearable technology in scientific research. Chlorophyll concentration is a handy metric for monitoring plant health and the system devised by Ozcan’s team combines Google Glass with a custom made leaf holder and bespoke software to determine just that....

By Nichola GroomLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Honda Motor Co Ltd’s Accord was named Green Car of the Year on Thursday, the editor of the Green Car Journal announced at the L.A. Auto Show.The Accord won in large part because it offers high fuel economy ratings for gasoline, gasoline-battery hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions of the venerable sedan, said Ron Cogan, editor of the Green Car Journal.“This year’s winner offers something for everyone,” he said....

Pet hamsters probably carried the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 into Hong Kong and sparked a human COVID-19 outbreak, according to a genomic analysis of viral samples from the rodents. The research confirms earlier fears that a pet shop was the source of the outbreak, which has so far infected about 50 people and led to the culling of some 2,000 hamsters across the city. Hamsters are highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and so are a popular model for studying the virus....

Imagine playing Scrabble without being able to rearrange the tiles on your rack or designing a building without sketching ideas or making models. Such a thought exercise shows the importance of environmental interaction in human thinking. But many cognitive tests meant to predict real-world achievement measure only what people can process inside their head. A new type of IQ test that lets takers “externalize” their problem-solving predicts school grades better than the original version it was based on, a recent study found....

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith says Microsoft asked the Justice Department to let it divulge more information to clear its name – but was rebuffed last week.(Credit:Getty Images)Microsoft on Tuesday asked the Obama administration to allow it to reveal details about how it responds to orders from the U.S. government for user account data.Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, sent a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder this afternoon saying there is “no longer a compelling government interest” in preventing companies “from sharing more information” about how they respond....