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Members of the board say they have reviewed the E.P.A.’s scientific research on the public health impact of leaking underground fuel tanks, the toxicity of the chemicals used to clean up oil spills, and the effects of the spread of bark beetles caused by a warming climate. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A larger, corresponding panel, the 47-member Science Advisory Board, advises the agency on what areas it should conduct research in and evaluates the scientific integrity of some of its regulations.

Both boards, which until now have been composed almost entirely of academic research scientists, have long been targets of political attacks. Congressional Republicans and industry groups have sought to either change their composition or weaken their influence on the environmental regulatory process.

“In recent years, S.A.B. experts have become nothing more than rubber stamps who approve all of the E.P.A.’s regulations,” Mr. Smith said at a House hearing in February. “The E.P.A. routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government. The conflict of interest here is clear.”

At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.

But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.

From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.

The term "synesthesia" comes from the Greek words syn, which means "together", and aisthesis, which means "sensation." Synesthesia is a perception in which stimulating one sensory or cognitive pathway  causes experiences in another sense or cognitive pathway. In other words, a sense or concept is connected to a different sense or concept, such as hearing a color or tasting a word. The connection between pathways is involuntary and consistent over time, rather than conscious or arbitrary.

Types of SynesthesiaThere are many different types of synesthesia, but they may be categorized as falling into one of two groups: associative synesthesia and projective synesthesia. An associate feels a connection between a stimulus and a sense, w

There are at least 80 known types of synesthesia, but some are more common than others: Chromesthesia: In this common form of synesthesia, sounds and colors are associated with each other. For example, the musical note "D" may correspond to seeing the color green.Grapheme-color synesthesia: This is a common form of synesthesia characterized by seeing graphemes (letter or numerals) shaded with a color. Synesthetes don't associate the same colors for a grapheme as each other, although the letter "A" does appear to be red to many individuals. Persons who experience grapheme-color synesthesia sometimes report seeing impossible colors when red and green or blue and yellow graphemes appear next to each other in a word or number. Number form: A number form is a mental shape or map of numbers resulting from seeing or thinking about numbers.Lexical-gustatory synesthesia: This a rare type of synesthesia in which hearing a word results in tasting a flavor. For example, a person's name might taste like chocolate.Mirror-touch synesthesia: While rare, mirror-touch synesthesia is noteworthy because it can be disruptive to a synesthete's life. In this form of synesthesia, an individual feels the same sensation in response to a stimulus as another person. For example, seeing a person being tapped on the shoulder would cause the synesthete to feel a tap on

European plane maker Airbus EADSY -0.02% SE said Wednesday it plans to cut production of its flagship A380 superjumbo and A400M military transport aircraft, threatening thousands of jobs, though overall strong demand for airliners may mitigate staff cuts.

But Airbus’s A380 has missed out on the boom. Airlines worry that they won’t be able to fill an aircraft that seats more than 500 passengers. Plus, the superjumbo carries a price tag of $445.6 million before typical discounts,

Emirates Airline, the world’s largest by international traffic, in February signed an order for 20 A380s with an option for 16 more.

About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health — especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression — are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters.

Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.

The loneliness of older adults has different roots — often resulting from family members moving away and close friends passing away. As one senior put it, “Your world dies before you do.”

In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom.

after using ThinkUp for about six months, I’ve found it to be an indispensable guide to how I navigate social networks.

Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and Facebook can change your life, and other people’s lives, in important, sometimes unforeseen ways.

The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting.“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.

Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.

Eight years later, the educator Barbara Bryant Solomon, writing about American black communities, gave this notion a new name, “empowerment.” It was meant as an ethos for social workers in marginalized communities, to discourage paternalism and encourage their clients to solve problems in their own ways. Then in 1981, Julian Rappaport, a psychologist, broadened the concept into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless; it placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.

are we losing the power to retain knowledge? The short answer is: No. Machines aren’t ruining our memory. Advertisement The longer answer: It’s much, much weirder than that!

we’ve begun to fit the machines into an age-old technique we evolved thousands of years ago—“transactive memory.” That’s the art of storing information in the people around us.

frankly, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. We’re good at retaining the gist of the information we encounter. But the niggly, specific facts? Not so much.

New particles may yet be discovered, and even new laws. But it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.

What makes “Mind and Cosmos” worth reading is that Dr. Nagel is an atheist, who rejects the creationist idea of an intelligent designer. The answers, he believes, may still be found through science, but only by expanding it further than it may be willing to go.

“Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning,” he wrote, “but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that the tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”

For some Louisiana public school students, their science textbook is the Bible, and in biology class they read the Book of Genesis to learn the “creation point of view.”

In another email exchange with Rowland, a parent had complained that a different teacher, Cindy Tolliver, actually taught that evolution was a “fact.” This parent complained that Tolliver was “pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class.” Principal Rowland responded, “I can assure you this will not happen again.” Advertisement

permits science teachers to use supplemental materials to “critique” evolution, opening a backdoor that these teachers are using, as intended, to teach creationism. Such lessons are allowed under this Louisiana law, but they are illegal under federal law

or the second straight year, advertisers are willing to pay about $4 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, and for the umpteenth straight year, there are questions about whether Sunday represents a sensational steal or an insane rip-off.

Compared to another primetime TV commercial, there's no question: Super Bowl ads are cheap.

But compared to, say, any other sensible way of spending money, many Super Bowl ads are something like a ritual financial sacrifice, a pyre of money set on fire to please the Buzz Gods for no particular reason.

“Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”

it has taken on renewed significance as the struggles on American campuses to negotiate issues of free speech have intensified — most recently in protests at Auburn University against a visit by the white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Lanzmann’s blunt reply favored reasoned analysis over personal memory.

in just about every aspect of my life I seek order and safety.

Picture me on Tinder circa 2014.

Here are my search criteria: I’m looking for men in my area (no farther than three miles away, because traveling is such a hassle and I take too many cabs as it is) who are anywhere from two years younger than me up to 10 years older (going on the assumption that women mature more quickly than men). And for goodness’ sake, my friends would tell me, find a man who isn’t a writer — they’re way too emotionally unstable. Certainly if I could check most of those items off the checklist, I’d find love or some good enough approximation of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“This sort of vaccinated me for life against lazy, anticapitalist rhetoric, because when you see these empty shops, you see these people queuing for nothing in the street,” he said, “it became clear to me that we need private property and market institutions, not just for economic efficiency but for personal freedom.”

But his disenchantment with communism doesn’t mean that Mr. Piketty has turned his back on the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx, who sought to explain the “iron laws” of capitalism. Like Marx, he is fiercely critical of the economic and social inequalities that untrammeled capitalism produces — and, he concludes, will continue to worsen. “I belong to a generation that never had any temptation with the Communist Party; I was too young for that,” Mr. Piketty said, in

In his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Harvard University Press), Mr. Piketty, 42, has written a blockbuster, at least in the world of economics. His book punctures earlier assumptions about the benevolence of advanced capitalism and forecasts sharply increasing inequality of wealth in industrialized countries, with deep and deleterious impact on democratic values of justice and fairness.

Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

In 1935, when both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity were young, a little-known Soviet physicist named Matvei Bronstein, just 28 himself, made the first detailed study of the problem of reconciling the two in a quantum theory of gravity. This “possible theory of the world as a whole,” as Bronstein called it, would supplant Einstein’s classical description of gravity, which casts it as curves in the space-time continuum, and rewrite it in the same quantum language as the rest of physics.

His words were prophetic. Eighty-three years later, physicists are still trying to understand how space-time curvature emerges on macroscopic scales from a more fundamental, presumably quantum picture of gravity; it’s arguably the deepest question in physics.

The search for the full theory of quantum gravity has been stymied by the fact that gravity’s quantum properties never seem to manifest in actual experience. Physicists never get to see how Einstein’s description of the smooth space-time continuum, or Bronstein’s quantum approximation of it when it’s weakly curved, goes wrong.

A new study suggests that people who naturally get more REM sleep may be less sensitive to frightening things.

For the study, a team of researchers from Rutgers University sent 17 subjects home with sleep-monitoring devices—headbands that monitor their brain waves, wristbands that track arm movements, and sleep logs—and asked them to sleep as they normally would for a week. They were monitoring how much sleep they were getting—especially REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep.

Each night, most people sleep about seven or eight hours, about two hours of which is REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which the body relaxes fully and most dreams occur.

What availability bias tells us is that investors’ lingering perceptions of a dire market environment may be causing them to view investment opportunities through an overly negative lens, making it less appealing to consider taking on investment risk, no matter how small the returns on perceived “safe” investments.

“Imagine if I was a financial advisor and you came to talk to me about your risk attitude, and I started the discussion by asking you to describe how you felt in the last three years on the days when your portfolio lost 5% of its value. Then I asked you what your risk attitude was. Most people would say they don’t want to ever experience days like that again. On the other hand, what if instead I talked about people I knew who were retired and living in the Bahamas, fishing and golfing. Now your risk attitude would probably be different.”

As humans, our thinking is strongly influenced by what is personally most relevant, recent or dramatic.

On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.

These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.

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Twitter reached a $150 million settlement with the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission over alleged misrepresentations of its data privacy practices, the agencies announced on Wednesday.

The settlement, which still needs to be approved by a federal judge, would resolve claims from the government that Twitter did not adequately inform its users about how their contact information would be used to target ads rather than just secure their accounts, in violation of the FTC Act and a 2011 settlement it reached with the agency.

The agencies alleged Twitter told users it collected phone numbers and email addresses to secure their accounts with two-factor authentication, but did not disclose it also used that information to help advertisers target their messages.