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A new paper by Natural Resources Defense Council says hydraulic fracturing (fracking) generates massive amounts of polluted wastewater in in the Marcellus Shale that threatens the health of drinking water supplies, rivers, streams, and groundwater - and that federal and state regulations have not kept pace with the dramatic growth of fracking and must be strengthened to reduce the risks of health issues throughout the Marcellus region.

If bugs have their own Tori Amos, she is likely writing about sexual conflict and how reproduction exists at all given that it can be so costly, especially to females. One aspect of this conflict concerns how females respond to increased mating events that are of more benefit to males than to themselves. New work discusses how some males, instead of mating conventionally, take the awkward step of piercing and penetrating their mate through her body wall. This mating behavior is known as traumatic insemination and it potentially comes at a great physiological cost to the female.

Many proteins and other functional molecules in our bodies display a striking characteristic: They can exist in two distinct forms that are mirror images of each other, chirality or "handedness", like your right hand and left hand, and each of our bodies prefers only one of these molecular forms. Researchers have been exploring how and why chirality arises, and new findings on the physical origins of the phenomenon were published in Nature Communications. 

Pentamodes, proposed in 1995 by Graeme Milton and Andrej Cherkaev, have been purely theoretical but three-dimensional transformation acoustics ideas, for example inaudibility cloaks, acoustic prisms or new loudspeakers, could become reality in the near future.The mechanical behavior of materials like water (or even gold) is expressed in terms of compression and shear parameters. For examples, water as an incompressible fluid that can barely be compressed in a cylinder is described through the compression parameter, but that it can be stirred in all directions using a spoon is expressed through the shear parameters.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) wants to develop a solid-state laser weapon prototype that will demonstrate multi-mission capabilities aboard a Navy ship, officials announced May 8.In case you were worried that America was only 25 years ahead of the rest of the world in military capability, this is good news.The proposed solid-state laser weapon would help sailors defeat small boat threats and aerial targets without using bullets. So, people who hate bullets will be thrilled.ONR will host an industry day May 16 to provide the research and development community with information about the program. A Broad Agency Announcement is expected to be released thereafter to solicit proposals and bids.

Poor people in developing nations have been caught in a cultural tug-of-war over how to best keep them from dying of Malaria.  What they need to break the impasse between anti-science acolytes who think "Silent Spring" had any science in it and corporate chemical manufacturers is...a fashion show.Frederick Ochanda, postdoctoral associate in Cornell's Department of Fiber Science&Apparel Design and a native of Kenya, teamed up with Matilda Ceesay, a Cornell apparel design undergraduate from Gambia, to create a hooded bodysuit embedded at the molecular level with insecticides for warding off mosquitoes infected with malaria, a disease estimated to kill 655,000 people annually on the continent.

Here's a pretty good kickstart for a science resume; inventing a disease-fighting, anti-aging compound using nano-particles from trees at age 16.

The so-called 'reality-based community' hates popular culture, unless they like it ironically. Sports most of all.But, argues George Washington University Professor of Anthropology Jeffrey P. Blomster, the ballgame is associated with the rise of complex societies, so understanding its origins also illuminates the evolution of socio-politically complex societies.

The sexual maturation of female mice has been linked to longevity by researchers. They had previously established that mouse strains with lower circulating levels of the hormone IGF1 at age six months live longer than other strains. In new work, scientists report that females from strains with lower IGF1 levels also reach sexual maturity at a significantly later age. The researchers conclude that IGF1 may co-regulate female sexual maturation and longevity. They showed that mouse strains derived from wild populations carry specific gene variants that delay sexual maturation, and they identified a candidate gene, Nrip1, involved in regulating sexual maturation that may also affect longevity by controlling IGF1 levels.

Over the past century, 70 percent of beaches on the islands of Kaua'i, O'ahu, and Maui have had long-term erosion, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of Hawai'i (UH) report released today.They studied more than 150 miles of island coastline (essentially every beach) and found the average rate of coastal change – taking into account beaches that are both eroding and accreting – was 0.4 feet of erosion per year from the early 1900s to 2000s. Of those beaches eroding, the most extreme case was nearly 6 feet per year near Kualoa Point, East O'ahu.

You're in luck. To the consternation of advertisers, we gather almost no information about you so if you are concerned about outsiders learning a lot about you from your visit to this article, fear not.  If we were that clever, this site would make a lot of money.What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” - like sharing music and book choices with the Internet - isn’t really frictionless – it forces on us the new frictions of worrying who knows what we’re reading and what our privacy settings are wherever and however we read electronically. It’s also not really sharing; real sharing is conscious sharing, a recommendation to read or not to read something rather than a data exhaust pipe of mental activity. 

Integrated circuit techniques can do just about anything - perhaps even help cure sepsis.Margination is natural phenomenon where bacteria and leukocytes (white blood cells) move toward the sides of blood vessels. Now it's the inspiration for a novel method of treating sepsis, a systemic and often dangerous inflammatory response to microbial infection in the blood.