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The US National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates major train accidents but has no power to regulate, has been calling for railroads to implement an automated Positive Train Control system for 45 years. Congress finally mandated that it be deployed by the end of 2015. But the railroads say that they need a little more time. “You and I can open the garage door, and arm the house alarms from our iPhone, but the railroad industry, which is a multibillion dollar industry, refuses to invest in public safety unless there’s a fundamental change that requires them to,” says Robert Pottroff, who for years has represented victims of train accidents and their survivors in cases against the railroads....

Imagine standing in an elevator as the doors begin to close and suddenly seeing a couple at the end of the corridor running toward you. Even before they call out, you know from their pace and body language they are rushing to get the same elevator. Being a charitable person, you put your hand out to hold the doors. In that split second you interpreted other people’s intent and took action to assist; these are instinctive behaviors that designers of artificially intelligent machines can only envy....

Solutions: Let’s consider the world from the point of view of some immortal X. We will prove the following statement: Regardless of how many other immortals N there are, if their total power is Tot then X’s chances of winning are P(X)/(P(X) + Tot) regardless of the order of duels. The statement is clearly true if there is just one other immortal (i.e. N =1). We will prove that if it is true for all immortals up to N = k, then it is true for all up to N = k+1....

A little bit of nature can calm even the most stressed populations of people, according to a study conducted on prisoners in solitary confinement. In the experiment, researchers found that prisoners who watched videos with nature scenes felt less stressed and weren’t as violent as those who didn’t. The team, led by ecologist Nalini Nadkarni at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, published their findings on September 1 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment....

A cutting-edge NASA satellite has provided one of the most detailed looks yet at glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. The findings are clearer than ever: Both ice sheets are losing billions of tons of mass into the ocean each year, contributing significantly to global sea-level rise. The results were published yesterday in the journal Science by a team of researchers from around the country, led by Ben Smith of the University of Washington....

After 20 years of planning, developing and constructing, astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have finally released the first image captured by the new Large Binocular Telescope, an instrument with a light-gathering power 24 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. The so-called LBT, an American-German-Italian joint venture stationed on the 3,190-meter-high Mt. Graham in Arizona, will be able to image planets circling distant stars and is poised to help answer fundamental questions about the universe, including how galaxies, stars and planets evolved from the big bang....

Antimatter is notoriously volatile, but physicists have learned to control it so well that they are now starting to harness it as a tool for the first time. In a project that began last month, researchers will transport antimatter by truck and then use it to study the strange behaviour of rare radioactive nuclei. The work aims to provide a better understanding of fundamental processes inside atomic nuclei and to help astrophysicists to learn about the interiors of neutron stars, which contain the densest form of matter in the Universe....

From Nature magazine. Comet ISON entered the annals of astronomical history on the night of 28 November, when it flew past the Sun and, latest updates suggest, emerged in tatters on the other side after many skywatchers had given it up as dead. Still, the most recent images hint that most of ISON’s nucleus disintegrated as the comet approached the Sun, leaving only a slim chance there will be anything left to see with the naked eye over the Northern Hemisphere in coming weeks....

An annoying mosquito bite might feel a lot different to us than a painful bee sting, but scientists have long debated the relationship between itch and pain, as the two sensations have often been thought to use some of the same sensory pathways. But new research, published today in Science, reveals that—at least in mice—itch and pain do, in fact, use different neurons and possibly even different cellular pathways. Zhou-Feng Chen, an associate professor of developmental biology, psychiatry and anesthesiology at Washington University in Saint Louis, had been part of a group that first discovered the gene that allows mice to feel itchiness (GRPR or gastrin-releasing peptide receptor) in 2007....

Fibers twisted together to form string might not sound like bleeding-edge technology. But with string, or cordage, one can make bags, nets, rope and clothing. We use it to lace our shoes, floss our teeth, suspend bridges, transmit electrical power—the list goes on and on. Naturally, archaeologists have been eager to trace the origins of this pivotal innovation. But doing so is a difficult business because ancient string was made from perishable materials that have mostly been lost to time....

Astronomers have seen it coming. Starting this summer—possibly this month—a large cloud of gas and dust and perhaps a star will begin to ricochet through the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, the home of a supermassive black hole. The ensuing celestial fireworks should reveal much about the mysterious central core of the galaxy, a region kept shrouded in darkness by dust and distance. Scientists have long wondered why the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, unlike the black holes at the center of other large galaxies, is perplexingly quiet....

Top 10 Most Tech-Friendly Seattle San Francisco Bay Area Los Angeles Austin, Texas Orlando, Fla. Raleigh-Durham Pittsburgh New York City Boston Washington, D.C. In order to rate cities on their technology access and geek friendliness, Wired magazine combined several factors, including stores that sell tech gadgets, availability of free wireless Internet access, technology jobs, highly ranked engineering schools, and the presence of an “active geek community.” The magazine concluded that the list above constitutes America’s “top tech towns”....

It is not an easy thing to stare at my Zoom self, meeting after meeting, day after day. This unflattering yawn, that stray wisp of hair I cannot touch again without seeming nervous or vain, these chins. Watching ourselves is exhausting but also compelling. Thinkers both ancient and modern have grappled with why. Mirrors are strange because they produce the image of another body moving in perfect synchrony with your own—something you never experience otherwise....

Atlantic cod is yet another species being threatened by climate change. According to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warmer summer waters off the Norwegian coast are dwarfing the growth of the fish. The researchers culled data from surveys dating back to 1919 along the Norwegian coast of the Skagerrak, a triangle of water between Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Over 91 years, ecologists had carefully measured and recorded the sizes of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in the fall....

A rise in pollutants from forest fires in the Pacific Northwest has begun to reverse a decade of clean air gains in the U.S., according to a new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Western forests have become increasingly dry as the climate changes, resulting in larger plumes of smoke moving eastward annually across the U.S. Altogether, these plumes expose as many as 130 million people in the Pacific Northwest, central U....

Is it worse to be swallowed by the sea or racked by famine? As climate change tightens its grip on the world, institutions charged with protecting the most vulnerable nations could be faced with just such a question. Because there is no international consensus for ranking the possibilities of future devastation – and because there are limited dollars lined up to help cope with climate change – some countries already are battling over who will be considered most vulnerable....

David Hysell, an associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, explains. This phenomenon can be especially frustrating when maintaining good reception requires the listener or viewer to remain posed in an awkward position. It is not limited to hands but can involve the entire body as well as other objects located nearby. In fact, even an airplane flying overhead can influence the reception of radio and TV signals, giving rise to a sort of raspy interference....

Powerful earthquakes like the 6.2-magnitude temblor that rocked central Italy early this morning (Aug. 24) are surprisingly common in the region, geologists say. The shaking was caused by movement in the Tyrrhenian Basin, a seismically active area beneath the Mediterranean Sea. Here, the ground is actually spreading apart, said Julie Dutton, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. The same underlying geology was responsible for the devastating 2009 earthquake in the city of L’Aquila, just 34 miles (55 kilometers) away from today’s quake....

When zapped with the world’s strongest x-ray laser beam, big atoms within some molecules do something very strange: They behave a bit like minuscule “black holes,” sucking in electrons from the molecules around them, a new study has found. But rather than just teaching us more about the cosmos, these findings may help with something a lot closer to home. Researchers think this tactic could let scientists better analyze viruses, bacteria and other tiny complex structures here on Earth....

Green New Dealers found themselves at loggerheads last week. Members of the nascent movement agree that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is an urgent priority. But how, exactly, to do it causes friction. Particularly vexing is the role of nuclear power in America’s future clean energy mix. For now, the debate on Capitol Hill is academic. There will be no “Green New Deal” as long as President Trump occupies the White House and Sen....