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CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Enbridge Energy Partners LP has begun a new round of dredging on the Kalamazoo River, Michigan, to clean up oil from a huge pipeline spill in 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday.More than 20,000 barrels of heavy Canadian crude oil gushed into the Kalamazoo River system after multiple small corrosion-fatigue cracks caused the rupture of Line 6B in July 2010, the largest onshore oil spill in U....

The U.S. notoriously lags other countries when it comes to Internet speed. One recent report from Web analyst Akamai Technologies puts us in 14th place, far behind front-runner South Korea and also trailing Hong Kong, Japan and Romania, among other countries. The sticking point over faster broadband has been: Who will pay for it? Telecommunications companies have been leery of investing in infrastructure unless they are certain of demand for extra speed....

In 2008, Rachael French, a then-healthy 22-year-old, vacationed with friends in a cabin in the woods near Gaylord, Mich. On the last day of the trip, while at a local water park, French said she felt the sting of chlorine on an open wound, looked down and noticed a small scab on her thigh. She figured it was a spider bite. Within hours, she remembers feeling nauseated, sore and exhausted, but chalked it up to having a busy vacation....

Where, an old joke asks, does a 400-pound gorilla sleep? Anywhere it wants to, the superannuated gag answers. In keeping with that line of reasoning, a 400-pound gorilla should similarly hum anytime it wants to. The scientifically verified answer, however, is that the gorilla in question actually hums when he’s eating—if the gorilla in question is a socially prominent male, anyway, according to a study recently published in the journal PLOS ONE....

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the March 1961 issue of Scientific American. In the days when civilized men believed that the world was flat they had no reason to think about gravity. There was up and down. All material things tended naturally to move downward, or to fall, and no one thought to ask why. The notion of absolute up and down directions persisted into the Middle Ages, when it was still invoked to prove that the earth could not be round....

A cluster of new studies from states, electric utilities and environmental groups suggest that as more electricity from solar and wind power is introduced on the nation’s electric grids, a wider use of electric heat pumps will help the United States reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to near zero by 2050. The latest study, by a California research firm for three of the state’s major utilities, describes heat pumps for home heating and cooling as “the low hanging fruit when it comes to saving customers money and reducing greenhouse gas emissions....

Flying cars may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but they could help fight climate change, according to a novel new study. NASA and several companies — including Boeing Co. and Airbus SE — are racing to develop electric versions of flying cars. The technology is roughly five years away from demonstration and 10 years away from deployment. Once they become a reality, flying electric cars will produce far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional cars in certain applications, according to the study from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co....

We are the only humans, but not so long ago we had company. In the roughly 300,000 years of our existence, Homo sapiens has shared the planet with at least four other human species. In hindsight, it seems obvious why we prevailed. We were the best hunters, the smartest, the most technologically savvy. But that is only the story we tell ourselves. Some of the other human species were more technologically advanced, had been around for much longer—a million years—or had brains as big as or bigger than ours....

From Quanta (Find original story here). The connections between mathematics and music are many. For example, the differential equations of vibrating strings and surfaces help us understand harmonics and tuning systems, rhythm analysis tells us the ways a measure can be divided into beats, and the study of symmetry relates to the translations in time and pitch that occur in a fugue or canon. This video explores a less well-known connection....

As big brain-mapping initiatives go, Taiwan’s might seem small. Scientists there are studying the humble fruit fly, reverse-engineering its brain from images of single neurons. Their efforts have produced 3D maps of brain circuitry in stunning detail. Researchers need only a computer mouse and web browser to home in on individual cells and zoom back out to intertwined networks of nerve bundles. The wiring diagrams look like colorful threads on a tapestry, and they’re clear enough to show which cell clusters control specific behaviors....

Like many people—and sadly, that includes many doctors—I had some very wrong ideas about osteoporosis. Weight-bearing exercise, calcium and vitamin D, I figured, are all we really need to keep age-related bone loss in check. Drugs that treat the disease aren’t worth the risk because of hideous side effects (such as a disintegrating jawbone!). Bone density tests are something of a scam, needlessly scaring a lot of people (especially middle-aged women like me) into taking those dreaded drugs....

Do we get more when we pay more? A new study suggests that we do—our brain seems to equate price with pleasure. Twenty volunteers had their brains scanned using functional MRI while they tasted five supposedly different cabernet sauvignons, each identified by a different price. In fact, there were only three different wines, two of which were presented twice, once at a high price and once at a low price....

Whether we are watching Kobe Bryant sink a pull-up fadeaway jumper or Mikhail Baryshnikov perform a grand jeté, there is no denying our awe of people who can move in ways we cannot. Researchers recently identified the brain regions that become active when we see extraordinary postures, offering insight into how skilled athletes and performers confound us. Previous research has shown that a network of mirror neurons in the brain is activated when we watch people move in fa­miliar ways—we mentally rehearse their actions as if we were performing them ourselves....

If you could see the universe as it was about 13.8 billion years ago, it would look like a flame. Back then it was just a hot ionized fog—a plasma—still glowing from its birth in the big bang at the dawn of time. But when it was still in its infancy, a youthful 370,000 years old, everything changed. Slowly cooling as it expanded, the universe grew chilly enough for electrons in the plasma to combine with protons, forming hydrogen gas....

It is hard to watch all of the ocean all of the time, especially the deep parts where undersea volcanoes go “boom.” Submarines cannot be everywhere. Listening devices can, pretty much, because sound travels a long way in the water. But scientists have not understood which noises are associated with different kinds of eruptions: One type created by the slow release and bursting of large lava bubbles, and aother type created by a quick explosion of gas bubbles....

Editor’s Note: This article, published in the May 1959 issue of Scientific American, is a supplement to the 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago column in the May 2009 issue. Patrols of the Australian Government venturing into the “uncontrolled” central highlands of New Guinea in 1946 found the primitive people there swept up in a wave of religious excitement. Prophecy was being fulfilled: The arrival of the Whites was the sign that the end of the world was at hand....

Excerpted from A Tale of 7 Elements, by Eric Scerri. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press, June 2013. The story surrounding element 85 is one of the most complex and interesting among our seven elements (fig. 8.1). The various claims for its discovery reveal many of the nationalistic traits that we have seen in the case of other elements, most notably the controversy surrounding the discovery of hafnium, element 72....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.–At least three forms of security depend on inventing a future of cheap, clean energy: national, economic and environmental. President Barack Obama launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) in 2009 to fund innovative research in the hopes of delivering such technologies. “We need a second Industrial Revolution,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu argued. “A revolution that gives the developed and developing world the energy they want and need but that can also be clean energy....

SAN DIEGO – For plants, animals and marine life whose environment changes, their options are stark and simple: Move, adapt or die. But when the marine life in question is a coral reef cemented to the ocean floor and the threat is climate change, the outlook appears grimmer, said scientists presenting new findings here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Even small temperature rises of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in the ocean can make corals more prone to bleaching, a kind of sudden death that occurs when corals expel the algae that normally live inside them, providing them with food and their bright coloration....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It’s a lot easier to talk to a smartphone than to try to type instructions on its keyboard. This is particularly true when a person is trying to log in to a device or a system: Few people would choose to type a long, complex secure password if the alternative were to just say a few words and be authenticated with their voice....