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General chemistry has a terrible reputation on most college campuses. It’s seen as a killer—a place where dreams of careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) go to die. Now the data have spoken, and their message is clear: the bad rep is justified. And the numbers are especially bleak for students who are underrepresented in STEM. Women, underrepresented minority racial and ethnic groups, individuals from low-socioeconomic-status households and students who will be the first person in their family with a four-year degree are all getting pounded in general chemistry....

Here is a plumbing problem: Pump water through a series of flexible microscopic tubes in a way that helps identify which pieces of DNA a protein will stick to. It may sound esoteric, but researchers have devised just such a system to help solve a fundamental problem in biology—how a cell takes shape from a fluctuating network of genes and proteins. The device is a unique example of microfluidics technology, sometimes called a lab-on-a-chip, that pushes water around in microscopic tubes and reservoirs made from the same cellophanelike plastic as soft contact lenses....

The crown of a prehistoric tree found in a sandstone quarry in Gilboa, N.Y., has shed light on the look of the world’s earliest forests believed to have thrived during the Devonian period between 360 million and 397 million years ago. The 2004 discovery of this 380-million year-old, six-foot uppermost portion of an ancient tree trunk allowed paleobotanists to create a composite picture of the entire plant when they put it together with fragments of a trunk found a the same site a year later and with tree stumps recovered more than 130 years ago in another rock quarry 10 miles away....

NASA dares anyone to examine airline safety data This week’s awkward NASA news: The space agency released survey data from interviews with airline and other pilots that it said last year would reveal safety problems severe enough to damage the airline industry. Unfortunately for safety watchdogs, the responses, collected from nearly 26,000 airline pilots and 5,000 general aviation pilots between April 2001 and December 2004, were scrambled and redacted—to preserve the anonymity of respondents and their employers, NASA said—as well as published as documents rather than spreadsheets, which would have allowed others to sift the information for trends....

North Korea officially acknowledged the failure of its latest rocket launch Friday (April 13) in a rare admission from the reclusive nation, which defied international warnings not to launch what the United States and other countries saw as a missile weapons test. According to a brief statement from state-run Korean Central News Agency, North Korean scientists and engineers will review the Unha-3 rocket failure to determine what went wrong. The statement was released more than four hours after the failed Unha-3 rocket launch, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, which published the account....

If your loved one claims to “only have eyes for you” this Valentine’s Day, it might be truer than you think. Research shows that people in a committed relationship who have been thinking about their partner actually avert their eyes from attractive members of the opposite sex without even being aware they are doing it. Psychologist Jon Maner of Florida State University and his colleagues flashed pictures of faces on a computer screen for half a second, following it immediately with a square or circle, which participants had to identify by pushing the correct button....

SAN DIEGO – The white Toyota Scion xB parked in a corner of the vast convention center here doesn’t look too unusual, until you notice the fat cable plugged into its bright orange front grille. But its owners say it might be the smallest unit of California’s electrical grid. The car, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, has been retrofitted by AC Propulsion to respond to signals from the California Independent System Operator – giving it the ability to send power from its battery back to the grid....

Being kind to yourself is a surefire way to improve your mental health and reach your goals, a growing body of work suggests. Now research has revealed an easy way to boost this self-compassion—by showing kindness to others. Self-compassion is distinct from self-esteem, a trait that can shade into narcissism. Nor should it be confused with self-pity or self-indulgence. “Self-compassion is treating yourself with the same kindness and care you’d treat a friend,” says Kristin Neff, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the leading researcher in the growing field of self-compassion....

LAS VEGAS, NEV.—Sony Corp. chairman and chief executive Sir Howard Stringer today shared the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show here with a roster of stars, including actor Tom Hanks, Disney and Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter, TV doctor and Oprah fave Mehmet Oz, former Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson, Dreamworks’s chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and singer Usher. (What were the chances of them all being in Las Vegas on the same day?...

When a piece of clothing wears out or goes out of fashion, it often gets tossed in the trash; clothes made up 9 percent of all municipal solid waste produced in the U.S. in 2014, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And the impact of what we wear goes well beyond clogged landfills. The European Commission (pdf) has also linked modern clothing industry practices—often described as “fast fashion,” due to the speed and volume at which garments are produced and marketed—to high energy and water use, significant greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution....

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar tried to give an adrenaline shot to the U.S. offshore wind industry yesterday by speeding up the process for developers to obtain leases from the federal government. The regulatory shift could shorten the wait time for permitting wind farms by three years or more, analysts said. There are currently no offshore projects in the United States, but Salazar said he hoped to issue a new round of leases of the outer continental shelf as early as next year....

By Jo MarchantState-of-the-art X-ray scans have revealed the internal mechanisms of a corroded, barnacle-covered pocket watch recovered from a seventeenth-century wreck. The watch looks little more than a lump of rock from the outside, but the scans show that the mechanism inside is beautifully preserved, from delicate cogwheels and Egyptian-style pillars to the maker’s inscription.Researchers from the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh used the images to construct a three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of the watch’s lost workings (see video flythrough)....

This January, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, classical music’s original wunderkind, turns 260. Before his untimely death, at age 35, Mozart composed 61 symphonies, 49 concertos, 23 operas, 17 masses, and scores of other works. He was said to be composing on his deathbed. But through a dozen or so major biographies and the 1984 movie Amadeus, what has most captivated the popular imagination are Mozart’s childhood accomplishments. As the historian Paul Johnson recounts in Mozart: A Life, Mozart began playing the clavier at age 4 and was composing at 5....

The filmgoers didn’t flinch at the scene of the dapper man planting a time bomb in the trunk of the convertible, or tense up as the unsuspecting driver and his beautiful blonde companion drove slowly through the town teeming with pedestrians, or jump out of their seats when the bomb exploded in fiery carnage. And they sure as heck weren’t wowed by the technical artistry of this famous opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 noir masterpiece, “Touch of Evil,” a single three-minute take that ratchets up the suspense to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10....

In a classic 1942 experiment, American psychologist Abraham Luchins asked volunteers to do some basic math by picturing water jugs in their mind. Given three empty containers, for example, each with a different capacity—21, 127 and three units of water—the participants had to figure out how to transfer liquid between the containers to measure out precisely 100 units. They could fill and empty each jug as many times as they wanted, but they had to fill the vessels to their limits....

Antidepressants such as Prozac made serotonin a household word, and cocaine studies transformed dopamine into a synonym for pleasure. Now glutamate may finally find its fame, thanks to a new schizophrenia drug—the first ever to target this abundant neurotransmitter. The drug could usher in an era of better treatments for neurological ailments, including mood disorders, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and brain damage from stroke. Until now, clinical efforts to alter glutamate levels have failed because tinkering with this essential neurotransmitter, which excites neurons, is tricky....

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. —Theophrastus (371–287 B.C.) Ancient philosophers were far from alone in their musings about time. Playwright Tennessee Williams wrote in 1944 that time is the longest distance between two places. And the years since have proved him right. Fast travel, instant communications and express deliveries between opposite ends of the world mean, more than ever, that time is not only relative but also an illusion....

At the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, tucked away in the trees near Chiang Mai, a pair of Asian elephants gazes at two bowls of corn on the other side of a net. The corn is attached to a sliding platform, through which researchers have threaded a rope. The rope’s ends lie on the elephants’ side of the net. If only one elephant pulls an end, the rope slides out of the contraption....

The threat of chronic blackouts is sparking a rush to install battery backup systems as California homeowners try to avoid disruptive power cuts related to wildfires. Blackouts are increasingly a part of life as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. strives to avoid igniting deadly blazes with aging equipment. At fault for some of the state’s worst wildfires, the utility shut off power nine times between June and October last year in Northern California....

Occlusion training is simply a way of restricting blood flow in the veins of a working muscle in hopes to kick-start some larger gains in muscle size and strength. For example, you can wrap an elastic band around the top of your leg before doing your squat workout. It sounds crazy, and a little bit scary, but there’s definitely something to it. An article in the Military Times reported that one form of occlusion training, called Kaatsu, is “a revolutionary new training system” from Japan that is blowing fitness researchers’ minds....