A data transmission problem? (Wikipedia/BigRiz)

Although still awaiting full confirmation, a breaking news report in Science (and Nature , see below) indicates that the measurement of an apparently faster-than-light travel time for muon-neutrinos generated at CERN and detected at the Gran Sasso laboratory – which hit the world headlines back in September 2011 – may have been due to a problematic physical connection between a fiber-optic cable and an electronics card in a computer.

OPERA apparatus. Credit: CERN

One of the biggest stories in science last year was the announcement by a European physics collaboration that neutrinos can seemingly travel faster than light. Most physicists were skeptical of the result , which would upend a well-tested tenet of modern physics namely, that nothing outpaces light. And the researchers on the OPERA experiment that made the measurement were themselves very cautious, stating only that they had found a discrepancy that they could not get rid of.

It’s easy to find an online test that will purportedly tell you how happy you are. But how happy are the people of an entire nation? And which nation’s people are happiest ?

That’s hard to measure. So for decades world organizations like the United Nations that concern themselves with improving people’s well-being have used a single proxy for happiness: gross domestic product, or GDP. The loose logic is that as people attain a higher standard of living, they will feel less burdened by basic survival and have greater means for everything from decent food to recreation.

The detector at the Gran Sasso end of the OPERA experiment. Credit: OPERA

The faster-than-light neutrinos seen by the OPERA particle physics experiment last year may have just been explained. By a loose cable. I wish I was joking.

From Nature magazine.

The most common types of ingested birth control contain estrogen. But the hormone doesn’t just prevent human babies. It may be lowering numbers of frog babies, too. Because estrogens can travel unaltered through a woman’s system, and back into the environment--where they interfere with the courtship of frogs.

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine

At last, a member of the celebrated sirtuin family of proteins has been shown to extend lifespan in mammals -- although it's not the one that has received the most attention and financial investment.

By Zeeya Merali of Nature magazine

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine

The 21st-century equivalent of the cavalry has come charging in to rescue cities in China and South Asia in their battles against air pollution and global warming. And it's also beginning to help out on the traffic-choked streets in London, New York, São Paulo and Los Angeles.

In the classic 1936 cult film Reefer Madness , well-adjusted high school students who try marijuana suddenly sink into a life of addiction, promiscuity, aggression, academic failure, homicide and mental illness. The movie concludes with the ominous warning that “The dread marijuana may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter ... or yours ... or YOURS!” Newspaper headlines of the day often reflected a similar sentiment. On February 10, 1938, a headline in the Beloit (Wisc.) Daily News read, “Authorities Warn against Spread of Marijuana Habit--Insanity, Degeneracy and Violence Follow Use of Weed.”

Climatologist Michael E. Mann is most famous for what he calls one of the “least interesting” aspects of his work. In the 1990s he used data from tree rings, coral growth bands and ice cores as proxies for ancient temperatures, combining them with modern thermometer readings. This annual record of temperature variations over the past millennium offered insights into natural climate cycles. As an “afterthought,” he included a graph of average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere going back to the 1400s in a 1998 paper (he later extended it to A.D. 1000). That “hockey stick” graph, which shows temperatures bouncing up and down before rapidly rising more recently, became an icon of climate change.

It's well known that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, a swirl of stars in an extended, many-armed disk . But the structure of the galaxy is far from two-dimensional. Above and below those familiar spiral arms is a lesser-known feature, a spherical swarm of stars that makes up a halo around the disk.

Otherwise titled: Your mouse sounds JUST like his dad!

As an editor at Scientific American Mind, I get a sneak peak at a menu of surprises about us people, that is that each issue has to offer. As the March/April Mind makes its debut, I wanted to share my favorite brain food from its cognitive kitchen. Here are three not-to-miss messages from its pages. Later this week, I will unveil more of what s in store for readers.

An internationally recognized water and climate change expert admitted yesterday that he lied about his identity to obtain internal funding and strategy documents from the Heartland Institute.

By Zoë Corbyn of Nature magazine

Babies inoculated with a commonly used five-in-one vaccine to protect against a range of potentially lethal childhood diseases face up to a six-fold increased risk of fever-associated seizures on the day they are vaccinated, according to a study of nearly 380,000 Danish children.

And then there was one. The last known Rabb’s fringe-limbed tree frog ( Ecnomiohyla rabborum ) now lives by himself at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia after the zoo euthanized the only other member of its species.

The euthanized frog, another male, had been experiencing a “marked decline in health and behavior” according to a Zoo Atlanta news release . Scientists made the decision to end its suffering and preserve its genetic material for future studies.

About 300 million years ago, volcanic ash buried a tropical forest located in what is now Inner Mongolia, much like it did the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

It's no secret cigarettes can yellow your teeth. But tobacco smoke has another, unseen effect. It can wipe out the healthy bacteria in your mouth, leaving the field open for pathogenic bugs--like the kind that cause gum disease. So says a study in the journal Infection and Immunity . [Purnima S. Kumar et al., " Tobacco smoking affects bacterial acquisition and colonization in oral biofilms "]

By Bruce Olsen

From Nature magazine

Dawn Higginson thought it was strange when she learned that some diving beetles produce sperm that fuse together at the head like Siamese twins. But when the postdoctoral researcher from the University of Arizona began asking why such conjugate gametes form, things only got even stranger. The sperm of the diving beetle, which gets its name from its ability to swim underwater, occur in many shapes and forms. Whereas a few species make standard tadpole-shaped swimmers, others generate sperm that stack together like traffic cones to form long, many-tailed filaments. Some species even generate two different types of sperm that work together to navigate through the female's fertilization duct.

STINSON BEACH, Calif. -- The Pacific Ocean laps against a seaside property in the small Northern California town. If it comes a foot closer, it will breach the black-painted concrete wall that surrounds the wooden house on three sides.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/vladacanon

Scary antibiotic-resistant infections aren’t just lurking in the hospital anymore. They’re in gyms, at the beach , and increasingly, on the farm.

Scanning tunnelling microscope image of a silicon surface lithographically prepared for two electrodes and a single transistor atom in the center. Credit: ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication, at UNSW

The shift from fragile, bulky vacuum tubes to solid-state transistors paved the way for the information age. And the steady downsizing of transistors has made the devices of the information age ubiquitous, thanks to processors that become smaller, cheaper and faster with each passing year. Now a group of physicists has demonstrated how far that downsizing can proceed by shrinking transistors down to the atomic scale.

By Declan Butler of Nature magazine

By Sharon Levy of Nature magazine

This article is the sixth and probably last article in a minseries of six articles ( see the first , second , third , f ourth and fifth articles here) about civilization, fungus, and alcohol.

Very little is known about the beginning of the story of humans and yeast. Did it start in one place? Did it start in many? Did yeast independently colonize human settlements (and beer, wine, sake, bread and the rest)? Or was it one beginning that, with the spread of culture and humans, led to the rest? What is known is that with yeast, things changed. A single species of yeast, one out of thousands, ferments our beer, wine, bread, rum, and even a fairly long list of fermented foods and beverages of which you have never even heard. Because of this species, our cultures changed. Our diets changed. Agriculture arose or changed. Our bodies may even have changed. The yeast, throughout this change, has benefited far more than we have. There are more individual yeast organisms in wineries and breweries in France than there have been humans on Earth. It has been suggested that the differences among human populations in their response to alcohol is, in part, a function of the evolution of some but not all human populations in response to yeast and alcohol. Surprisingly little work has been done on the big questions in the story of yeast and humans. Although, yeast has been one of the best-studied laboratory organisms, the study of its history and tangled relationship with humans is nascent. For all of these reasons, when it came time to conclude this series, although I had said I would write about the story of yeast, I had second thoughts. I was not sure how to conclude. So little is known that the story of yeast and humans from the yeast’s perspective I felt more an urge to go do a study on yeast than to summarize its story. It needed meat, or at least malt. One can only say so many times that much remains to be learned. Instead of writing, I decided yesterday to go with my family to the Dordogne valley in France, not far from where we are now staying in Toulouse ,to explore. The trip, and some good French wine would clear the mind.

By Neal Ungerleider

By now, you have probably heard the call by democrats and environmentalists to end the $4 billion in subsidies for big oil.

The five major oil companies that have a significant presence in the United States – Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and Conoco – are some of the biggest businesses in America, and have some of the highest gross profits of all U.S. Companies. They can probably afford to pay a little bit more in taxes. But does it make sense to repeal the tax breaks for the oil industry?

New research points to an ancient energy tradeoff that meant more fuel for brains, and less fuel for muscles.

Human brain

Squid can save energy by flying rather than swimming, according to calculations based on high-speed photography.

By Andrew Quinn

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/sjlocke

The number of people who die from HIV-related causes each year in the U.S. is now down to about 12,700 from a peak of more than 50,000 in the mid-1990s thanks to condom education and distribution campaigns, increased testing and improved treatments. But now a different infectious disease is quietly killing even more people than HIV is: Hepatitis C .

LIMA (Reuters) - Flooding rivers in Peru and Chile have ruined houses, displaced people, and turned up something more sinister: land mines, which closed the border between the two countries on Monday.

Heavy summer rains, which meteorologists attribute to a series of low pressure systems that originated in the southern Atlantic Ocean this month, have wiped out crops in Peru and swollen rivers in northern Chile.

Anti-personnel and anti-tank mines laid around Chile's Lluta river watershed in the 1970s, when tensions ran high between the two countries, have also surfaced, officials said.

Imagine a planet where jellyfish rule the seas, giant rodents roam the mountains and swarms of insects blur everything in sight. It may sound far-fetched, but enough global warming is likely to change the distribution of wildlife on Earth. While species that are under threat, such as the polar bear , seem to get all the attention, others are beginning to thrive like never before.

This article is the fifth ( see the first , second , third and f ourth articles here) in a miniseries of six articles that will be posted over six days about civilization, fungus, and alcohol.

They found themselves, like any first creatures, lost. Without means, they were unable to survive by anything other than what was in the immediate surroundings. They ate what grew. They planted nothing. They never left home. There were many dire moments, until they found the animals. The first time would have been accidental. A young one caught an animal and rode it out somewhere, the way a storybook character might ride a boat down the river and out to sea.

“This is Friendship 7 . Have beautiful view of the African Coast.”

Image courtesy of Shelby Temple

Octopuses are purportedly colorblind, but they can discern one thing that we can’t: polarized light . This extra visual realm might give them a leg (er, arm) up on some of the competition.

After the furies of birth, the mature cosmos now evolves more slowly. Stars will continue to form for as long as another 100 trillion years (about 10,000 times the present age of the universe), which leaves plenty of time for slow-building cosmic phenomena to occur.

On March 1, 1962, thousands of people lined New York City s Broadway. Some climbed into an unfinished building to use it as a makeshift grandstand. They all wanted a glimpse of a real life hero. In the back of a car driving slowly down the street sat John Herschel Glenn Jr., smiling and giving onlookers a thumbs up. He looked just like an astronaut should. Nearly five foot ten inches of trained muscle, his receding red hair cut close to his head accented his ruddy face that was freckled from months of running on the beach in Florida. His wife Annie, whom he met when both were toddlers, sat next to him beaming.

Time’s seemingly inexorable march has always provoked interest in, and speculation about, the far future of the cosmos. The usual picture is grim. Five billion years from now the sun will puff itself into a red giant star and swallow the inner solar system before slowly fading to black. But this temporal frame captures only a tiny portion--in fact, an infinitesimal one--of the entire future. As astronomers look ahead, say, “five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years,” as humorist Douglas Adams did in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe , they meet a cosmos replete with myriad slow fades to oblivion. By then the accelerating expansion of space will have already carried everything outside our galaxy beyond our view, leaving the night sky ever emptier. Lord Byron captured the prospect of such a celestial wasteland in his 1816 poem “Darkness”: “The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space.”

Fifty years ago Monday (Feb. 20), John Glenn made history by circling the Earth three times.

"Game over" for climate change . So opines NASA climatologist Jim Hansen when it comes to the development of the Canadian tar sands. And one big way to unleash the estimated 170 billion barrels of heavy oil stuck in Alberta's sands is to build a pipeline to the world's biggest oil consumer: the U.S.