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It’s always been with us and has gone by varied names, including shell shock and Vietnam Veterans Disorder, both associated with traumatizing experiences on the battlefield. Today the condition now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is also diagnosed in people who have never seen active combat, but it remains more common among those who bear the psychic scars of war. For U.S. veterans of recent wars, including Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Vietnam, the lifetime prevalence of PTSD is from 10....

I AM A NEW AGE SKEPTIC. I used to be a New Age cynic, so this change shows how far I have come in opening my mind to things I do not understand. I no longer dismiss channeling and crystals and acupuncture as so much hocus-pocus, nor do I embrace these practices. I simply await proof. I have to admit, though, that there is one New Age practice that has always had some intuitive appeal to me, and that’s feng shui....

Every winter the seasonal flu vaccine gets reformulated. The World Health Organization recommends which viruses to put into the vaccine to impart immunity against the strains that are considered most likely to spread. For example, this year’s vaccination cocktail will include the antigens isolated from flu strains first spotted in the Solomon Islands, Wisconsin and Malaysia. This continual updating results from the flu virus’s ability to mutate in response to the human body’s immune defenses....

By Toni Clarke and Anjali Athavaley (Reuters) - The U.S. government is set to publish sweeping new rules on Tuesday that will require chain restaurants to disclose calorie counts on menus, establishing a national standard that pre-empts the current patchwork of state laws and applies to restaurant chains with 20 or more outlets. The new standards, which are part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, were announced by the Food and Drug Administration and also apply to large vending machine operators....

In a step toward greater energy efficiency, North Carolina-based Cree Inc. this week launched a series of LED light bulbs, the least expensive of which is below $10. Cree calls its new product “the biggest thing since the light bulb.” The company says that the new bulb looks like and lights up like the ubiquitous incandescent bulb, which the company’s Vice President of Corporate Marketing Mike Watson said is key to its appeal....

In the beginning, the universe was a void full of energy but without form. And so it remained for many millions of years–exactly how long is still a major mystery of cosmology–until the first stars condensed from the fog of matter and lit up with a blue nuclear glow. Telescopes are just like time machines: the farther out in space they look, the further back into the past they peer. But even the best optical telescopes cannot make out what the universe was like at an age of less than one billion years....

Key concepts Brain Cognition Learning Memory Introduction What did you have for breakfast last Monday? What color is the floor in your favorite classroom? If you don’t remember the answer to these questions, that’s okay! Your brain is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Our brains are nearly perfect storage devices, and part of their perfection is that they know what information to store and what to throw away....

Seven particles captured by a NASA probe could be the first known samples of interstellar dust to be brought back to Earth. For the past eight years, a team of researchers — with the help of citizen scientists around the world — have been scanning and analysing the samples brought back to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft. Interstellar dust flows continuously into the Solar System, but it is extremely sparse, so capturing particles is difficult....

As the sun went down on a recent Friday, the hospital clinic buzzed with activity. “Loads of patients turned up without appointments,” says Sarah Tabrizi, a neurologist at University College London. It wasn’t just the typical post-holiday rush. Many rushed in, Tabrizi suspects, after hearing news last month about a potential new therapy for Huntington’s disease, a brain disorder that cripples the body and blurs speech and thinking, sometimes not too long after a person’s 30th birthday....

In 2014 Americans filled more than 170 million prescriptions for acid blockers known as proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) to treat gastric conditions, including indigestion, peptic ulcers and acid reflux. These medications are among the top 10 prescribed in the country as a class and are also available over the counter. Surveys suggest that they are widely overused, and in such cases, the drugs may do more harm than good. In fact, two new studies found that PPIs alter gut bacteria in ways that could increase the risk for dangerous intestinal infections, adding to a body of research highlighting the drugs’ adverse effects....

For a ship that sank 80 years ago, the SS Virginia has traveled a fair distance: the oil tanker has moved more than 10 kilometers since it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1942. The shipwreck, located off the coast of Louisiana, is riding lobes of mud moving over the seafloor. These mudflows occur because the Mississippi River is continuously dumping vast quantities of sediments—more than 550 million metric tons each year—into the Gulf of Mexico, and earthquakes and storms occasionally set some of that material moving en masse....

James Frazer’s classic anthropological study The Golden Bough contains a harrowing chapter on human sacrifice in rituals of crop fertility and harvest among historical cultures around the world. Frazer describes sacrificial victims being crushed under huge toppling stones, slow-roasted over fires and dismembered alive. Frazer’s methods of analysis wouldn’t all pass muster among anthropologists today (his work was first published in 1890), but it is hard not to conclude from his descriptions that what industrialized societies today would regard as the most extreme psychopathy has in the past been seen as normal—and indeed sacred—behaviour....

Small levels of global warming can increase the likelihood of extreme events, new research warns. That’s prompting scientists to question how accurately disasters in the recent past can be used to predict extreme events today. A study published Wednesday in Science Advances suggests that some research attributing climate change to individual disasters has underestimated the probability of certain extremes in the last decade. That’s especially true of unprecedented hot and wet events....

Latin America and the Caribbean could meet 100 percent of their electricity needs with renewable energy, a new Inter-American Development Bank study finds. From Mexico to Chile, countries already are producing higher levels of clean power, but the study notes the region still has a long way to go. Last year just 5.4 percent of the $244 trillion global renewable energy investment went to Latin America. But with Latin America’s economy expected to grow 3 percent annually, the study argues that the region will need to nearly double its installed power capacity to about 600 gigawatts by 2030 at a likely price tag of $430 billion....

For years, the human brain has been compared to a computer—but it is a computer without a wiring diagram. Researchers simply do not know how the billions of neurons in the brain are connected to one another, and without this information they cannot fully understand how the brain’s structure gives rise to perception and behavior. Now, for the first time, scientists have found a way to track the connections between a single neuron and other cells—a discovery that could eventually lead to a 3-D map of the brain’s wiring....

Next time you get annoyed when you discover an army of ants marching through your kitchen pantry, think about this: these tiny insects could teach you how to make better decisions in your social, private and professional life. Sounds crazy? Not according to scientist and journalist Len Fisher. In his new book, The Perfect Swarm, he introduces us to the modern science of complexity—how intricate patterns grow out of simple rules....

An innovative technique to accelerate particles could lead to smaller, cheaper and more energetic particle smashers. Publishing in Nature today, researchers working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, have shown that an experimental way of accelerating electrons, known as plasma wakefield acceleration, is efficient enough to power particle accelerators. The technique, which has been under development for more than 30 years, drives electron bunches to higher energies by making them ‘surf’ on the electromagnetic wake of their predecessors....

Because of its ability to see more deeply into spacetime than any instrument before it, the Hubble Space Telescope has completely transformed the way we see the universe—and ourselves. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), often called “the next Hubble,” promises to do even better. Slated to launch later this year, JWST will peer farther into the universe than any optical or infrared telescope before it and could show us galaxies in their infancy, probe potentially habitable worlds and explore the mysteries of dark energy....

Aren’t the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope absolutely stunning? We were thrilled and hopeful when JWST finally launched last Christmas Day after decades of delays, and the first images and data from the telescope are even more fascinating than astronomers anticipated. In our special report, journalist Jonathan O’Callaghan shows how these images of the most distant galaxies ever seen are already changing cosmologists’ understanding of the universe’s early history....

There might be no natural limit to how long humans can live—at least not one yet in sight—contrary to the claims of some demographers and biologists. That’s according to a statistical analysis published Thursday in Science on the survival probabilities of nearly 4,000 ‘super-elderly’ people in Italy, all aged 105 and older. A team led by Sapienza University demographer Elisabetta Barbi and University of Roma Tre statistician Francesco Lagona, both based in Rome, found that the risk of death—which, throughout most of life, seems to increase as people age—levels off after age 105, creating a ‘mortality plateau’....