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Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on security and privacy during the age of drone warfare. Part one is available here. Technology, as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2001 Supreme Court opinion, has the power “to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.” Few other technologies have as much power to do this as drones. Because they can perch hundreds or thousands of meters in the air, drones literally add a new dimension to the ability to eavesdrop....

All this cocoa production does more than feed our collective sweet tooth: the five million to six million farmers in the tropics who cultivate the cacao trees from which cocoa is produced rely on the sales of the seeds to feed themselves and their families. Workers extract the seeds (often called beans) from football-shaped pods and then ferment and dry them to form cocoa liquor, butter and powder. The livelihoods of another 40 million to 50 million depend on the long production road the cacao seeds travel from farm to candy on store shelves....

How is dark matter like the Hundred Years’ War? The war lasted 116 years, and dark matter may not be dark. Conventional wisdom holds that darkness is the whole point of dark matter. Something is pulling stars and gas clouds off course; when astronomers go to look for it, they see nothing that fits the bill, so whatever it is must not emit or absorb light. In fact, if it did respond to light, galaxies would not even exist: the sea of radiation that filled the early universe would have buffeted the matter and kept it from clumping....

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others by Marco Iacoboni. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 ($25) Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick. W.W.Norton, 2008 ($25) It is no fluke that solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments we have devised. Our brains are so exquisitely calibrated to read those around us that we can hardly survive alone....

‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object discovered near the Earth, left us with more questions than answers. The visitor was first observed during its exit from the solar system, and the limited data that astronomical observatories were able to collect have proved challenging to explain. What we know is that ‘Oumuamua was neither a comet nor an asteroid, and none of the exotic theories regarding its origin to date has been able to fully explain its properties....

From the popular press to the largest health care conferences, promises of artificial intelligence revolutionizing biomedicine are ubiquitous. It often seems as if we are on the cusp of AI systems that can remotely identify a person about to get sick, make a diagnosis (no doctor needed!), select a custom AI-designed pharmaceutical and deliver it to the patient just in time—in an AI-powered self-driving car, of course. If indeed this is the future, we are far from reaching it....

CLIMATEWIRE | Extreme heat shattered records in the United Kingdom yesterday as temperatures hurtled above 104 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time since the country started keeping measurements. It may well be a startling glimpse into the country’s climate future as the planet continues to warm. Before now, the highest temperature ever recorded in the United Kingdom was 101.7 degrees, observed in Cambridge in July 2019. Yesterday, as a staggering heat wave gripped the nation, temperatures rose to 102....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan—that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes)....

When FDR famously proclaimed there is nothing to fear but fear itself, little did he know was forecasting a psychological phenomenon known asanxiety sensitivity. The term wasn’t coined until 1985, but when the concept was defined, it was kind of a big deal. I’ll stop short of calling anxiety sensitivity the mother of all anxiety disorders (which sounds like a Freudian comic book villain), but high anxiety sensitivity puts you at greater risk for developing a problem with anxiety, from panic to PTSD to phobias and beyond....

Wouldn’t it be nice if sensor networks using radio frequency (RF) signals for monitoring air quality, the structural integrity of bridges and roads, and traffic or weather conditions—creating the so-called “Internet of things”—could simply draw their power out of thin air? Now, using a technique called “ambient backscatter,” University of Washington researchers are doing just that: They have transformed existing wireless signals into both a power source and a communication medium for a sensor network....

Radar scans of Mars have revealed the first 3D look at water-carved channels buried beneath the Red Planet’s surface, researchers say. The discovery shows that a major underground channel generated by an ancient mega-flood is twice as deep as thought, and sheds light on how water shaped the surface of Mars, scientists added. Mars today is cold and dry, with most of its water locked in polar ice caps, and researchers think its surface has been largely barren for the past 2....

Last fall Apple fired executive Scott Forstall, considered by many to be a Steve Jobs protégé. His departure prompted a flurry of discussion about a formerly obscure design-industry concept that he had championed: “skeuomorphism.” In the physical world, a skeuomorph is an ornamental version of something that was, in an earlier product, a functional necessity. Fake shutter sounds in digital cameras. Fake candles in electric chandeliers. Fake grain in leatherette....

By Suzi Parker LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) - Rescue workers searched for survivors on Monday in the rubble left by a wave of tornadoes that ripped through the south-central United States a day earlier, killing at least 16 people in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Iowa. Arkansas was the hardest hit, with at least 10 people dead in central Faulkner County and four more across the state, for the first reported fatalities of this year’s U....

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities have told pilots who fly to Beijing they must be qualified to land their aircraft in the low visibility bought about by smog, state media said on Thursday, as the government tries to reduce flight delays due to pollution.Beginning January 1, pilots flying from the country’s 10 busiest airports into the Chinese capital must be qualified to use an instrument landing system on days when smog reduces visibility to around 400 meters (1,315 feet), the official China Daily said, citing China’s civil aviation regulator....

Even as President-elect Donald Trump threatens to reverse the Obama administration’s recent moves to thaw ties with Cuba after decades of frozen trade, travel and diplomatic relations, scientific collaboration is quietly steaming ahead—and many Americans are about to get their first glimpses of some of the spectacular flora and fauna that can be found nowhere else but on the giant Caribbean island. Days ago the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City opened ¡Cuba!...

When Charles Wilkinson thinks about soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) his mind jumps to a pea-size structure tucked behind the bridge of the nose and ensconced below the base of the brain. There the pituitary gland serves as the master regulator of the human endocrine system, producing vital hormones that influence growth and development—except when something goes awry. Wilkinson and a small cadre of scientists are studying whether traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by battlefield explosions can damage soldiers’ pituitary glands in ways that cause lasting health problems....

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from A Newer World—Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis, by William F. Hewitt. With permission from the publisher, University of New Hampshire Press. Copyright © William F. Hewitt, 2012. (University of New Hampshire Press is an imprint of University Press of New England, www.upne.com.) A concerted, focused, and well-funded campaign of disinformation has been waged against climate change. This attempt to discredit the science, to instill a sense of doubt about the conclusiveness and the extent of the agreement within the scientific community, is a story well told by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt....

Forty years of neurobiological research states that short-term memories are formed by modifying proteins, whereas long-term memories are shaped by new proteins. Thus, a class of drugs known to inhibit brain cells from manufacturing proteins are also known to prevent new memory formation, resulting in a form of amnesia. A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA could turn this long-held notion on its ear, paving the way to new therapies for Alzheimer’s and other diseases that cause dementia and memory loss....

Homophobes should consider a little self-reflection, suggests a new study finding those individuals who are most hostile toward gays and hold strong anti-gay views may themselves have same-sex desires, albeit undercover ones. The prejudice of homophobia may also stem from authoritarian parents, particularly those with homophobic views as well, the researchers added. “This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, ‘Why?...

By the time you read these words, winter’s grip should have mostly loosened in the Northern Hemisphere. But at its worst, this winter was brutally cold. Here in New York City on January 31, the low temperature snuck down to two degrees Fahrenheit. In Chicago, it was also two degrees—but that was the high. The low plummeted to −20. Which was two degrees warmer than the low the day before. And the wind chill in the Windy City was −51 or −52, depending on which weather station was crying out in agony....