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A sleepy New Jersey town has popped onto people's radar screens because it has the oldest running nuclear power plant in the United States -- and, some say, the most dangerous.

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets'reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.

Plastic may compete with paper in the grocery line, but it doesn't have to compete with the world's food supply, according to University of Florida researchers. They've developed a way to produce plastic that doesn't use valuable natural resources, such as food or fuel, for raw materials. The new method uses a strain of bacteria to create bioplastic from discarded plant material, such as yard waste.

With today's crops, it would be possible to feed the 2050 global population of nine billion people. But agricultural land will have to be used optimally. And this demands solid economic and institutional preconditions. Food prices will probably eventually rise. This was discussed by Professor Martin van Ittersum on 12 May 2011 at the ceremony at which he accepted the post of Professor of Plant Production Systems with a personal chair at Wageningen University.

Research being carried out at Carlos III University of Madrid analyzes the key factors in climate change and the risks to public policies that it implies. This study approaches the issue from the perspective of Sociology, Economics and Law.

ew research from the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is helping Duvas Technologies Ltd (Duvas) to develop improved air quality monitoring instrumentation. Currently over 1bn people a year suffer from respiratory disease associated with pollution, and according to the World Health Organisation, over 3m a year die from its effects. Duvas is planning to help provide technology to understand and address this problem.

In an event flanked with all the electric cars that have recently come to market, and a handful of those that are poised for sale later this year, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa flipped the switch May 13 on the 500th electric-vehicle charging station installed by Coulomb Technologies as part of its ChargePoint America network.

If internal and international migrants comprised a nation, it would be the third most populous country in the world, just after China and India. Thus, there can be little doubt that population mobility is among the leading policy issues of the 21st century. However, policies to protect migrants and global health have so far been hampered by inadequate policy attention and poor international coordination. This is the conclusion of a new article in PLoS Medicine arguing that current policy-making on migration and health has been conducted within sector silos, which frequently have different goals. Yet, population mobility is wholly compatible with health-promoting strategies for migrants if decision-makers coordinate across borders and policy sectors, say the authors, who are also serving as guest editors of a new series in PLoS Medicine on migration & health that launches this week.

Germany on Monday announced plans to become the first major industrialised power to shut down all its nuclear plants in the wake of the disaster in Japan, with a phase-out due to be wrapped up by 2022.

New research focusing on the Houston area suggests that widespread urban development alters wind patterns in a way that can make it easier for pollutants to build up during warm summer weather instead of being blown out to sea.

Construction can resume on a massive Southern California solar energy project after wildlife officials determined it will not jeopardize the threatened desert tortoise, federal officials said Friday.

There are many avenues of research being pursued in the quest for new power sources, but the most far-out idea is (literally) space-based solar power. Traditional solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays are attractive for a number of reasons, but there are also a number of problems with them. An interesting variation on the traditional, ground-based solar PV is discussed in detail in a recent article over at The Oil Drum. The article discusses the prospect of placing the PV arrays in orbit as geosynchronous satellites that collect solar power and beam it back down to ground stations as microwave energy.

Does climate change seriously threaten to wipe out the human species if left unchecked? Examining our evolutionary past suggests it might once have been the perfect catalyst for our extinction. But now?

The US president has urged Chinese leaders to implement policies to help create a more balanced economic relationship between Washington and Beijing. Barack Obama also raised concerns about the human rights situation in China in talks with Wang Qishan, the Chinese vice-premier, and the state councillor, Dai Bingguo, at the White House in Washington on Monday. Obama and the Chinese leaders discussed ways of working together to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programmes, the White House said in a statement.

Any architect recognizes the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), lead by star architect Rem Koolhaas, as one of the most important and thought-provoking architectural firms in the world. The counterpart to OMA's architectural practice is AMO, a design and research studio that specifically focuses on areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture, such as media, politics, sociology, technology, fashion or graphic design. Remarkably, it seems AMO is getting more and more active in developing complex-scale, mass-medium data graphics. In February of this year, they presented the "Energy Report" for the WWF, a comprehensive study claiming that the world can be 100 percent reliant on renewable energy by 2050.

Not all research papers receive their own hashtag on Twitter. But #arseniclife (as it was dubbed in tweets) was no ordinary paper.

For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent.

In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors. The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University's Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

The website titled "Visualizing Our Future Selves"[news21.com] attempts to answer the question how the dramatically aging demographics in the US will change over the next 40 years. It is an example of a 'personalized' visualization of sorts, in that users are asked to submit their personal demographic data, such as birth year, race, state, living situation and gender. The resulting diagrams then reveals country-wide statistical information in the context of one's own situation, divided into 4 different groups: Population, State, Health and Finances. Accordingly, the application shows an animated population pyramid, a population age density map of the US, a disease (e.g. cancer, heart disease, diabetes) prevalence forecast, and an income versus expenditure comparison filtered by several demographic variables.