Scientific American

Turkey hunting in Texas dried up along with the state's water due to the epic drought of 2011. And while the drought has relented, turkey season hasn't been the same.

Residents of Manhattan will not just sweat harder from rising temperatures in the future, says a new study; many may die.

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service .

Identification and treatment issues surrounding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are challenging enough. Now research is shedding light on long-term outcomes for people with ADHD. A May 20 study in Pediatrics reports that men who had ADHD in childhood are twice as likely to be obese in middle age, even if they no longer exhibit symptoms of the disorder.

Artists and material scientists alike bend, melt and mold materials into useful and aesthetically pleasing forms. But nothing human hands have made can match the intricacy of convoluted corals or the delicate and unique geometry of a snowflake. In a study published yesterday in Science researchers exploited nature’s sculpting methods to create visually stunning 3-D structures that may change the way nano- and micro-materials are made.

Hot on the heels of detecting the two highest-energy neutrinos ever observed, scientists working with a mammoth particle detector buried in ice near the South Pole unveiled preliminary data showing that they also registered the signal of 26 additional high-energy neutrinos. The newfound neutrinos are somewhat less energetic than the two record-setters but nonetheless appear to carry more energy than would be expected if created by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere--a prodigious source of neutrinos raining down on Earth. The particles thus may point to unknown energetic astrophysical processes deeper in the cosmos .

A portrait of John James Audubon shows the artist and naturalist in a dark wolf-skin cloak, cradling a gun and sporting curly dark hair that was likely smoothed back with bear grease. The picture was painted during Audubon's 1826 trip to England and Scotland, when he was playing up his role as the American woodsman to raise money for his opus, The Birds of America . Once completed, the collection included 435 prints of birds flying , eating, perching and fighting. Audubon is still lauded for his contributions to the fields of ornithology and art.

From Nature magazine

From Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD , by Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller. Copyright © Synergetic Press, May 15, 2013.

On a rooftop in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, two students are collecting soil samples from boxes planted with species from two native plant communities: Hempstead Plains, which are grasses belonging to a prairie community originally found on Long Island, and Rocky Summit grasslands,which grow on the tops of mountains and ridges throughout southern New England and all of New York State. They carefully place the dirt from the soil core into a plastic bag and seal it up to be taken to the lab for analysis.

Out of sight (and smell), natural gas slowly bubbled up into Norma Fiorentino’s private water well near the town of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania--in the heart of the new fracking boom in the U.S. Then, on New Year's Day 2009, when a mechanical pump flicked on and provided the spark, Fiorentino's backyard exploded. She and many others blame the blast on fracking --the colloquial name for the natural gas drilling process that combines horizontal drilling and the fracturing of shale deep underground with high-pressure water to create a path for gas to flow back up the well. [More]

From Nature magazine

From Nature magazine

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have touched 400 parts per million for the first time in at least 800,000 years. The jagged saw-toothed line of the Keelings' father-and-son measurements climbed above that milestone briefly this month before the budding growth of the Northern Hemisphere's spring began sucking CO2 back out of the sky. But human greenhouse gas pollution looks set to continue to rise--and photosynthetic plants on land or at sea can only do so much. As greenhouse gas levels increase further, could machines help wash the skies of the excess CO2? [More]

From Afghanistan to Somalia, the struggle to eradicate polio continues to lurch along in fits and starts. The past few days have brought a modicum of good news and some potentially quite bad news.

In the 1960s widening U.S. Highway 27 just north of Tallahassee cut Florida's Lake Jackson into two sections. When water levels fell too low in either part, thousands of turtles, frogs, snakes and alligators would hit the road to head for the other side--where cars and trucks often hit the animals . In February of 2000 Matt Aresco, then a PhD student at The Florida State University in Tallahassee, drove through and was stunned at the sight of dozens of crushed turtles. For the next five weeks he patrolled the road between the lakes, once counting 343 dead turtles in 10 days. "It was so heartbreaking to see dozens of turtles, animals that could be 50 or 60 years old, smashed before they make it two feet onto the road," he says.

From Nature magazine

The Amazon Basin is the epicenter of the world’s hydropower plants--the same gushing rains that give the region its lush foliage make it a prime destination for developers seeking to capitalize on this allegedly renewable energy source. But the long-term sustainability of these projects, which use the natural flow of water to generate electricity, is now under scrutiny.

LONDON Around 20 percent of the snow cover in North America's greatest mountain range has been lost because of warmer springs in the last three decades.

From Nature magazine