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But now investigators are getting results in a matter of hours instead of months. And instead of just being a resource for prosecutors at trial, the NIBIN "match" is being used by investigators to generate leads, despite uncertainty about the precision of the match.

NIBIN was started in 1999 and has primarily been used by forensics examiners to testify at trial about the likelihood that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. But that's all changing now.

But some defense attorneys challenge the notion that the markings are unique, and the FBI says even expert testimony can't make that claim with certainty.

After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA’s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback on Saturday. A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.

NASA officials, however, said that it was too early to predict delays, if any. “I don’t think at this point that we have enough information to know,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference after the test. “It depends what the anomaly was and how challenging it’s going to be to fix it.”

The rocket, known as the Space Launch System, has yet to travel to space, and Saturday’s test was intended to be a key milestone. For the first time, the four engines on the booster stage were set to be fired for about eight minutes, simulating what they would do during an actual launch.

Meltdowns, common as they are among young children, are a complicated physiological response related to the brain’s threat detection system. Mid-freakout, it’s helpful for parents to understand what’s going on beneath the surface, then to mitigate the “threat” by establishing a sense of safety.

temper tantrum involves two parts of the brain: the amygdala, which is primarily responsible for processing emotions like fear or anger; and the hypothalamus, which in part controls unconscious functions like heart rate or temperature.

“When you have a fire burning in your house, you don’t want to sit and ponder, you want your body to fire on all cylinders so you can escape,”

admitted to burning down three predominantly African American churches

admitted to burning down three predominantly African American churches

in an effort to raise his profile as a ‘Black Metal’ musician by copying similar crimes committed in Norway in the 1990s,”

This year has tested our collective mental health again and again — from fears over the coronavirus to the isolating effects of social distancing, the reckoning on racial injustice, financial struggles, natural disasters and a contentious presidential election just weeks away.

This year has tested our collective mental health again and again — from fears over the coronavirus to the isolating effects of social distancing, the reckoning on racial injustice, financial struggles, natural disasters and a contentious presidential election just weeks away.

While many people with pre-existing anxiety report their symptoms have worsened in 2020, there’s also a subset who say they’ve been less anxious.

Quinn Norton

The day before Valentine’s Day, social media created a bizarro-world version of me. I have seen strange ideas about me online before, but this doppelgänger was so far from resembling me that I told friends and loved ones I didn’t want to even try to rebut it. It was a leading question turned into a human form. The net created a person with my name and face, but with so little relationship to me, she could have been an invader from an alternate universe.

It started when The New York Times hired me for its editorial board. In January, the Times sought me out because, editorial leaders told me, the Times as an institution is struggling with understanding how technology is shifting society and politics. We talked for a while. I discussed my work, my beliefs, and my background.

the countries participating in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to a common target: to hold the rise in global average temperature “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The lower end of that range, 1.5˚C, has become a cause célèbre among climate activists.

If we had peaked and begun steadily reducing emissions 20 years ago, the necessary pace of reductions would have been around 3 percent a year, which is ... well, “realistic” is too strong — it still would have required rapid, coordinated action of a kind never seen before in human history — but it was at least possible to envision.

it is not the job of those of us in the business of observation and analysis to make the public feel or do things. That’s what activists do.

“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” Kierkegaard wrote in contemplating the paradoxical nature of time half a century before Einstein forever changed our understanding of it. As relativity saturated the cultural atmosphere, Virginia Woolf was tussling and taffying with time’s confounding elasticity, the psychology of which scientists have since dissected. We are beings of time and in time — something Jorge Luis Borges spoke to beautifully in his classic 1946 meditation on time: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

“It was really moving to Texas that set me on this path of figuring out how to communicate about climate change,” she told me. “I was the only climate scientist within two hundred miles.”

She records the questions she is asked afterward, using an app, and the two most frequent are: “What gives you hope?” and “How do I talk to my [blank] about climate change?

In the late nineties, a Gallup poll found that forty-six per cent of Democrats and forty-seven per cent of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun.

Christian Petzold likes terrible, irreversible events: accidents, suicides, eternal separations. In his melodramas, Petzold has established a fascination with the trope of love lost at the hands of misrecognition. At the crossroads of historical circumstance and feelings of personal guilt and shame, his protagonists carry burdensome secrets, with devastating consequences.

His latest film at first appears to diverge from recent work. Set in contemporary seaside Germany, Afire takes a break from the backdrops of extreme repression and deprivation that the director has favored for at least a decade

fire is really a slow build to the disaster that Petzold does so well. Only by dint of calamitous events, it seems, can Leon awaken to the reality he resolutely shuts out. The arrival of a forest fire, suddenly overwhelming the plotless plot, seems to satisfy a perverse fantasy grounded in the belief that extremity is required for a life lived fully.

A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.

Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.

The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.

Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

“social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist

The problem with anxiety — as Marcus Aurelius would acknowledge — is that, by definition, it’s irrational; in that regard, it’s not so different from the almost irresistible impulse to jump that seizes me every time I find myself on a 50th-floor balcony,

it’s uncanny how often we let ourselves out of the Garden by worrying about something that, if it did happen, would quicken us into a response much more practical than worry

All the real challenges of my, or any, life — the forest fire that did indeed destroy my home and everything in it; the car crash that suddenly robbed dozens of us of a cherished friend; my 13-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of cancer in its third stage — came out of the blue; they’re just what I had never thought to worry about

Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”

The passions of scientific debate are probably not much different from those that drive achievement in other fields, so a tragic, even deadly dispute might not be surprising.But science, creeping ahead experiment by experiment, paper by paper, depends also on institutions investigating errors and correcting them if need be, especially if they are made in its most respected journals.If the apparent suicide and Yuan’s detailed complaints provoked second thoughts about the Nature paper, though, there were scant signs of it.The journal initially showed interest in publishing Yuan’s criticism and told him that a correction was “probably” going to be written, according to e-mail rec­ords. That was almost six months ago. The paper has not been corrected.The university had already fired Yuan in December 2011, after 10 years at the lab. He had been raising questions about the research for years. He was escorted from his desk by two security guards.

Fang said retractions may be rising because it is simply easier to cheat in an era of digital images, which can be easily manipulated. But he said the increase is caused at least in part by the growing competition for publication and for NIH grant money.He noted that in the 1960s, about two out of three NIH grant requests were funded; today, the success rate for applicants for research funding is about one in five. At the same time, getting work published in the most esteemed journals, such as Nature, has become a “fetish” for some scientists, Fang said.

You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes! It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.

A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has lifted the military's ban on women serving in combat roles, potentially opening hundreds of thousands of frontline positions to women.

the president was "very pleased" with the new policy. He noted the proposal had emerged from military commanders

This decision could open more than 230,000 combat roles to women,

France’s business ecosystem thrives on contradictions — the country has some of the highest labor costs in Europe and restrictive regulations, and yet its companies regularly make the Fortune 500 list; it has highly skilled graduates and engineers but struggles to compete globally; it has an alphabet-soup of agencies intended to support fledgling businesses, but they are so lacking in coherence that they remain unheard of to many; there is a vibrant investor community ready to commit funds, but only once an entrepreneur has a proven track record; and the French embrace money, but not bling.

the French like entrepreneurs when they remain very discreet and don’t transform into a businessman. That’s where the evil begins. So they like the number two. They don’t like success. They have a problem with wealth and with money.”

French businesses have their wings clipped by onerous social charges paid to the government based on the salary of the employee. Companies need to think twice before hiring and firing, when employees are often due extensive severance benefits. They also need to coax financing from a traditionally risk-averse market and console themselves with the relatively small clout that businesses hold in government.

Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”) They tended only to bend the truth, not break it.

At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians who lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack ads. First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and professionals of all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and civil servants.

Second are changes in media regulation and ownership