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For the more than 300 million people who suffer migraines, the excruciating, pulsating pain that characterizes these debilitating headaches needs no description. For those who do not, the closest analogous experience might be severe altitude sickness: nausea, acute sensitivity to light, and searing, bed-confining headache. “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing,” wrote Joan Didion in the 1979 essay “In Bed” from her collection The White Album....

After a year and a half characterized by a devastating pandemic and a Herculean effort to develop several highly effective vaccines, this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was something of a surprise. It was awarded for discoveries related to how the human body senses temperature and touch. The prize went to David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif....

Picture a living thing—say, a dog. Now imagine a hammer. You just activated two different areas of your visual cortex, the brain region that processes eyesight. Thinking of a dog activates an area that deals with animate objects, whereas a hammer excites one that processes inanimate things. Now a new study shows something surprising: the same thing would have happened even if you had never seen a dog or a hammer before....

Powered by the company’s own BE-3 engine, the rocket kicked off the launchpad yesterday (Nov. 23) at 11:21 a.m. Central Time, carrying the New Shepard space vehicle. The stunning feat was captured in an amazing test flight video released by the company. Shortly after liftoff, the rocket separated from the vehicle. In the past, a spent rocket would fall back to Earth like a stone, having completed its one and only flight....

WASHINGTON—President Bush this week vetoed legislation that would have lifted limits on federally funded research on embryonic stem cells. Angry congressional advocates immediately pledged to override the veto (although they acknowledge they are still shy of the two thirds majority needed) and took new steps to free up federal monies for such research, which holds the promise of new treatments for debilitating diseases from Parkinson’s to diabetes. Just a day after the president nixed the measure, the Democratic-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee added a provision to a money bill that would allow taxpayer dollars to be spent on stem cells extracted from embryos before June 15....

John D. Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, replies: A cautious answer is that psychologists still are not sure whether adults can enhance their emotional intelligence. Current research suggests, however, that people can almost surely increase their emotional competence. To explain the distinction, I first need to define these terms. Emotional intelligence is the ability to reason about emotions and emotional information, which includes recognizing, understanding and managing feelings in ourselves....

SHANGHAI – Seven years after Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea called on the world to combat climate change by saving vanishing forests in the tropics, the marriage between emissions trading and forest protection has grown into something more than wedding vows, but it is still far away from generating a baby.\ That marriage was blessed by an international mechanism called REDD, short for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation....

Experts agree that Neandertals hunted large game, controlled fire, wore animal furs and made stone tools. But whether they also engaged in activities deemed to be more advanced has been a matter of heated debate. Some researchers have argued that Neandertals lacked the know-how to effectively exploit small prey, such as birds, and that they did not routinely express themselves through language and other symbolic behaviors. Such shortcomings, so the story goes, put the Neandertals at a distinct disadvantage when anatomically modern humans possessing these skills invaded Europe—which was a Neandertal stronghold for hundreds of thousands of years—and presumably began competing with them....

By Erica Check Hayden of Nature magazineScientists have identified the molecular players central to an incurable brain injury common in premature babies, and have shown how such injuries might one day be treated, sparing people from lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy.In babies born before their lungs are fully developed, lack of oxygen can disrupt nerve cells’ ability to make a protective coating, called myelin, that makes up the brain’s ‘white matter’....

NEW DELHI, May 27 (Reuters) - A heat wave in India has killed more than 1,100 people this week as temperatures soar above 47 Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit), and doctors’ leave has been cancelled to help cope with the sick. May and June are India’s hottest months, with temperatures regularly pushing above 40 Celsius. But meteorologists say the number of days when temperatures approach 45 Celsius has increased in the past 15 years....

One of the biggest diet and nutrition trends these days is intermittent fasting. Every week, I hear from listeners wanting to know my thoughts on it. I’ve mentioned intermittent fasting on the podcast before, in an episode on the health benefits of fasting. But that was way back in 2011. At that point, the research was still quite preliminary and most of it had been done in rodents. Nonetheless, researchers were excited about the potential for intermittent fasting to prevent or reverse diabetes, weight gain, DNA damage, and other artifacts of aging....

Councilmembers of an island town in Georgia met in a police station near sandy beaches last week to mull a plan for coping with worsening floods. The meeting followed unprecedented king tide floods in the fall that inundated the island and nearby Savannah, and shut down the highway that connects them. “We’ve had more frequent flooding in areas that haven’t flooded before,” said Jason Buelterman, mayor of the beach town on the eastern shore of Tybee Island, where the population of a few thousand residents swells each summer with vacationers....

The wind industry is growing, literally. American wind developers are installing increasingly large turbines, capable of generating twice as much power as their predecessors and opening up new areas of the country to wind development. The trend arrives at a critical time for the industry. The production tax credit, a federal subsidy, is set to end at the end of the year. But unlike in previous years, when wind development ground to a halt when subsidies dried up, industry representatives are predicting only a modest slowdown....

It is lunchtime on a Sunday in January. At a long table inside a delicatessen in midtown Manhattan, a group of young people sit together over sandwiches and salads. Most of them have their phones out. One boy wears headphones around his neck. But there is less conversation than you might expect from a typical group of friends: One of the boys seems to talk only to himself, and a girl looks anxious and occasionally flaps her hands....

Researchers have for the first time shown that as many as 1.3 million cases of cancer a year may one day be successfully treated or even prevented by targeting and destroying the viruses that cause them. Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City say the finding could pave the way for conquering human cancers that are linked to preexisting viral infections, among them liver cancer (caused by the hepatitis B and C viruses), cervical cancer (from human papillomavirus) and lymphomas caused by the Epstein–Barr virus....

Solar power is great for converting light energy into electricity. But what about harnessing light energy directly? After all, photons—discrete packets of light energy—exert force themselves, albeit on a pretty small scale. In a new study, a team of researchers from Yale University and the University of Washington reports doing just that, also on a pretty small scale—vibrating a tiny mechanical object physically by shining light through it. Light-powered mechanics could form the basis for nanoscale components such as switches and routers, all operating off the grid, so to speak....

The unlikely scene that unfolded in Las Vegas yesterday looked like this: There was Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, seated before a table resembling a solar panel, ready to sign a bill restoring net metering in Nevada. Tesla Inc.’s red logo highlighted the scene. It was attached to a warehouse wall, serving as a backdrop. Nearby, a crowd of solar advocates, environmentalists and state lawmakers looked on. “I believe, humbly, it will be a national model across the country,” the governor told the crowd....

By Daniel CresseyFuelled by more than $100 million from the US economic stimulus package, an unprecedented network of underwater surveillance equipment is beginning to take shape in the world’s oceans.The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is the “single greatest step forward for ocean science in the United States for half a century”, says Tim Cowles of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, a non-profit organization that manages and coordinates the OOI from its base in Washington D....

Quantum computers can theoretically blow away conventional ones at solving important problems. But they face major hurdles: their basic computational units, called quantum bits or qubits, are difficult to control and are easily corrupted by heat or other environmental factors. Now researchers have designed two kinds of qubits that may help address these challenges. Conventional computer bits represent either a one or a zero. But thanks to an eerie quantum effect known as superposition—which allows an atom, electron or other particle to exist in two or more states, such as “spinning” in opposite directions at once—a single qubit made of a particle in superposition can simultaneously encompass both digits....

Key concepts Technology Logic Computer programming Debugging Introduction Have you ever wanted a robot assistant that could do all your household chores? Science fiction has been showing us such robots for decades, but they’re still not available! What’s taking so long? In this project you will investigate some of the challenges in programming a “robot” to do a simple household task, such as making a sandwich. Background Movies and TV are full of robots that can look, feel and act like humans....