That’s the approach Google appears to be taking with the launch of Android Pay, a new mobile-payments system that closely mimics the Apple Pay platform launched last fall.

Scrambling to play catch-up, Google crucially has cut partnerships with a slew of big retailers including Macy’s, Best Buy, Walgreen, Whole Foods and McDonald’s

That list of retailers looks a lot like Apple Pay’s, and cutting those partnerships is something that the search giant’s flopped Google Wallet system failed to do when it was launched in 2011.

Washington insiders are trusting the media more, though they are sometimes overwhelmed by it, the fifth edition of National Journal’s Washington in the Information Age study found.

Conducted via online survey over the course of four weeks among 1,200 Washington insiders, the study included more than 120 Capitol Hill staff members, more than 600 respondents from the private-sector public affairs community and nearly 400 federal executives.

Respondents to the survey expressed higher levels of trust in individual media sources across the board since the last time the survey was conducted in 2012

The university-led collaborative administers web-based tests that purport to reveal whether a person is unknowingly biased about a wide range of issues.

Much has been written on the effects of implicit bias and how the often-unconscious attitudes and beliefs that nearly all of us hold foster our comprehension of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and a host of other social constructs

With all this angst rattling in my head, I took the test. It began innocently enough, with a series of questions that allowed me to state whether I had any known biases toward skin tones. I answered as honestly as possible but feared my conscious choices tilted toward skin tones similar to my own chocolate-colored skin.

Antoine Louveau was looking through his microscope at thin membranes that protect the brain when he saw something that absolutely shouldn't be there: a lymphatic vessel.

The lymphatic system is part of the circulatory system but, instead of blood, it carries lymph — a clear liquid that ferries immune cells and rids the body of toxins and waste. As a 2009 research review notes, it is "an undisputed anatomical fact" that the brain is the only major organ that lacks a direct connection to the lymphatic system.

The elusive lymphatic vessel hid in plain sight, throughout decades of research, because it was very small and tucked behind a major blood vessel.

MANY people doubt what they read and hear in the news. In the United States, for example, a 2012 Gallup poll asked people “how much trust and confidence” they had in the accuracy, fairness, and completeness of the news reports of newspapers, TV, and radio. The answer from 6 out of 10 people was either “not very much” or “none at all.” Is such distrust justified?

Many journalists and the organizations they work for have expressed a commitment to producing accurate and informative reports. Yet, there is reason for concern. Consider the following factors:

MEDIA MOGULS. A small but very powerful number of corporations own primary media outlets.

The Obama administration on Thursday announced what appeared to be one of the largest breaches of federal employees’ data, involving at least four million current and former government workers in an intrusion that officials said apparently originated in China.

The compromised data was held by the Office of Personnel Management, which handles government security clearances and federal employee records. The breach was first detected in April, the office said, but it appears to have begun at least late last year.

There seems to be little doubt among federal officials that the attack was launched from China, but it was unclear whether the attack might have been state sponsore

Researchers have developed a cheap and rapid test that reveals a person’s full history of viral infections from a single drop of blood.

The test allows doctors to read out a list of the viruses that have infected, or continue to infect, patients even when they have not caused any obvious symptoms. The technology means that GPs could screen patients for all of the viruses capable of infecting people

When a droplet of blood from a patient is mixed with the modified viruses, any antibodies they have latch on to human virus proteins they recognise as invaders. The scientists then pull out the antibodies and identify the human viruses from the protein fragments they have stuck to.

Though investment had declined under the previous government, all the major parties said some warm words on the topic. Going beyond that vague-but-positive consensus would have required pinning politicians down to specific pledges

There are also important discussions to be had about how funding is managed and distributed, and how such decisions are made. In arguments about levels of funding, expect most researchers to agree that more is better – no surprise there, and the quality of the arguments deserves scrutiny.

Those hoardings are coming down now, which makes the whole thing seem more approachable - as does the fact that a couple of physicists from my department have won access to the labs there. It will be a huge concentration of resource - intellectual and financial

Pluto’s moons have been tracked closely for the first time, showing that they tumble unpredictably rather than keeping one face fixed on their host planet.

Astronomers also observed that Pluto, whose status was downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, might be better regarded as a binary dwarf as it is locked in orbit with its largest moon, called Charon.

“Like good children, our moon and most others keep one face focused attentively on their parent planet,’ said Douglas Hamilton, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the study. “What we’ve learned is that Pluto’s moons are more like ornery teenagers who refuse to follow the rules.”

ccording to the old saying, the eyes are windows into the soul, revealing deep emotions that we might otherwise want to hide.

Although modern science precludes the existence of the soul, it does suggest that there is a kernel of truth in this saying: it turns out the eyes not only reflect what is happening in the brain but may also influence how we remember things and make decisions.

Our eyes are constantly moving, and while some of those movements are under conscious control, many of them occur subconsciously.

On June 16, Pope Francis is expected to release an encyclical letter on the environment, the Catholic Church’s strongest statement to date on the moral issues associated with climate change. It’s a move that has environmentalists very excited — and one GOP presidential nominee less than thrilled.

“When we get involved with controversial and scientific theories, I think the Church is not as forceful and not as credible,” Santorum continued. “I’ve said this to the Catholic bishops many times — when they get involved in agriculture policy, or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the Church’s main message is, that we’re better off sticking to the things that are really the core teachings of the Church as opposed to getting involved in every other kind of issue that happens to be popular at the time.”

By releasing an encyclical on climate change, the Catholic Church isn’t involving itself in controversial science — it’s reiterating what a majority of scientists already know: that the climate is changing, and that humans are the cause.

The leading US scientific organization, responding to concerns expressed by scientists and ethicists, has launched an ambitious initiative to recommend guidelines for new genetic technology that has the potential to create "designer babies."

The technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, allows scientists to edit virtually any gene they target

Although the embryos were not viable and could not have developed into babies, the announcement ignited an outcry from scientists warning that such a step, which could alter human genomes for generations, was just a matter of time.

Most of us take it for granted that math works—that scientists can devise formulas to describe subatomic events or that engineers can calculate paths for space­craft.

As a working theoretical astrophysicist, I encounter the seemingly “unreasonable effectiveness of math­ematics,” as Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner called it in 1960, in every step of my job.

Plenty of good things are done in the name of religion, and plenty of bad things too. But what is religion, exactly — is it good or bad, in and of itself? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a generous, surprising view.

Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for "thinking the improbable" by looking at how the human frame of reference limits our understanding of the universe.

The College Board, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1926 to make higher education accessible to more Americans, introduced the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and, after World War II, the advanced placement (AP) test.

Students who score three of five points on the AP test are credited with completing a two-semester introductory college course in subjects like English, math and history. But revisions are coming, and they’re not going to result in better education.

Periodically, the College Board publishes new frameworks to alert schools to changes in AP tests. The latest American history framework has raised a raging controversy over what should be taught in AP U.S. history classes.

If the condescending views of John Cregan about the increasing interest in teaching Latin (Letters, 29 May) are correct, one wonders why the Iris project has had such success in expanding its work across the country and why Barbara Bell’s splendid Latin course for younger children, Minimus, has just exceeded worldwide sales of 150,000.

John Cregan’s description of Latin as “a waste of time” is contradicted by the recent growth of its use in state primary schools;

furthermore his “dead” language remains in evidence all around us

Some modern languages vital to the UK's economic future could be lost from schools in England, Labour has warned.

Exam boards have announced plans to drop qualifications in languages such as Portuguese and Turkish.

The government said its reforms did not stop boards developing qualifications in any language they chose.

Modern foreign language learning in secondary schools in Wales is "declining rapidly" according to a major study

The education minister has now announced "a radical and new approach" including schools which will be centres of excellence.

In 2005, 12,826 children studied a language at GCSE, but by 2014 the number had fallen by a third to 8,601.