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Guardian staff Sunday 3 January 2016 22.28 EST Last modified on Tuesday 5 January 2016 11.48 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 104,402 104k Comments 1,300 rounded-icon inline-bookmark inli

Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.

The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.

“If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.

When I asked Dave Adams, the food scientist who founded Savoury Systems, why actual meat is such an inferior source for the chicken flavor that, strangely enough, goes into chicken, he gave me the same answer Wright did. Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,” he said. And chicken — even tasteless, scrap stuff — is more expensive than soy.

The flavoring game wasn’t always so sophisticated. When it began in Europe in the 19th century, companies imported spices and procured plants such as lemongrass, which yielded citronella oil, ideal for concentrating into lemon flavor. These essential oils went mostly into fragrances, medicines and candies. As the field of chemistry progressed in the latter half of the century, European scientists, particularly Germans, figured out how to synthesize flavors and fragrances from chemicals instead of having to wrench them from natural materials.

No script is necessary because they rarely deviate from how things are supposed to go. Tepid small talk about drink selection — “What is this?” “Like, a margarita” — moves on to “Where are you from?” followed by a pause for menu consideration, then onto job talk and canned flattery like “How are you single?” The blind dates eventually converge on what feel like serious topics, though the same ones come up almost every night of the week: past relationships, kids, priorities. “I just want love,” Betty says. “Connection, chemistry, love.” A minute later, Tiffany explains the importance of the “three C’s”: “compatibility, chemistry and connection.”

Not only do the daters skew toward the kinds of people you commonly see on the apps — youngish, professional, fluent with an iPhone — but they’re also eager to filter their options with getting-to-know-you questionnaire material, the sort of information that you want to find out at some point but that wouldn’t necessarily come up were you to meet by chance

What seems uniquely contemporary about “Dating Around” is the rote, bored way people enact these norms, as if they have no choice — or rather because they have so much of it

Researchers have recreated the chemistry of atmospheres on distant planets for the first time in the lab, according to two new papers. They found that hazes, such as the hydrocarbons that shroud Saturn's moon Titan, can be produced on a class of exoplanets known as super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.Chemical hazes and clouds can influence surface temperature and the potential for a planet to support life.

"Clouds and hazes determine the temperature and the chemistry of the atmosphere, and also how deep we can look into a planet's atmosphere," explained Dr Helling. "Exoplanet clouds can be made of sparkling minerals, in addition to the photochemical hazes just produced in the lab."

Distinctive gas mixtures, each rich in hydrogen, water or carbon dioxide, were exposed to a cold plasma discharge. This initiated chemical processes very like the polar aurorae visible in our own Solar System.

Aristotle, Greek Aristoteles, (born 384 bce, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece—died 322, Chalcis, Euboea), ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history.

He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy.

Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts,

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it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.

The 2016 Nobel laureates for physics, medicine and chemistry: all men, at least 65 years old and mostly over 72.

In Stark's words, "Christian theology was necessary for the rise of science." Science only happened in areas whose worldview was shaped by Christianity, that is, Europe. Many civilizations had alchemy; only Europe developed chemistry. Likewise, astrology was practiced everywhere, but only in Europe did it become astronomy.That's because Christianity depicted God as a "rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being" who created a universe with a "rational, lawful, stable" structure. These beliefs uniquely led to "faith in the possibility of science."So why the Columbus myth? Because, as Stark writes, "the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three centuries, been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack of faith."

The details of the discussions on “The McLaughlin Group” weren’t nearly as important as the chemistry and the pacing. Unlike it gray competitors, “The Group” was as much about the speed of the discussion as the intensity. Under McLaughlin’s lash, the panel churned through multiple topics in minutes, establishing the modern standard.

McLaughlin taunted the panelists to elicit counter-opinions, and he demanded predictions — creating, in short, the kind of speculative, subjective conversations that political junkies and sports fans adore. Who cared whether all the guessing and opinion-mongering probably influenced no one and ultimately meant nothing but a good show?

Some critics, including Germond, were appalled by what the show had wrought. They thought it trafficked in superficiality and oversimplification, reducing complicated policy questions to a point-scoring exercise. No less a critic than President Reagan said “The Group” had turned the traditional Sunday morning talk show into “a political version of ‘Animal House.’ ”

The surprise to Dr. Clapham was how closely the findings from the Great Dying matched today’s trends in ocean chemistry. High concentrations of carbon-based gases in the atmosphere are leading to warming, rapid acidification and low-oxygen dead zones in the oceans.

he and Dr. Langdon noted that carbon was being injected into the atmosphere today far faster than during the Permian extinction. As Dr. Knoll put it, “Today, humans turn out to be every bit as good as volcanoes at putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

A comprehensive new review of research on episodes of carbon-driven disruption of ocean and climate conditions over the last 300 million years shows the power of a big pulse of carbon dioxide to profoundly affect the environment.The review, which is being published in the journal Science on Friday, concludes that the human-driven buildup of carbon dioxide under way now appears to be far outpacing past natural events, meaning that, for ocean chemistry particularly, the biological implications are potentially enormous — and laden with the kind of uncertainty that is hard to see as a source of comfort.

The beauty of looking in the rock record is you don’t have to run a computer model to see what’s going to happen. You see the whole thing. When you put say 2,000 gigatons [billion tons] or thereby of carbon into the atmosphere rapidly a certain number of things happen. It gets hot. The oceans get acid. They run short of oxygen and as a result quite a number of animals become extinct. And in the rock record what you see subsequently is the extinction event is recorded, and you see the draw-down over a period of 100,000 or 200,000 years of the carbon from the atmosphere, which is manifested on the floor of the ocean as a development of a carbon-rich mudstone. It’s just a very fine-grained rock. It’s just a stinking black mud laid down on the floor of the ocean.

The people who are saying to us, we’re carrying out an experiment with Earth and we don’t really know the outcome, well that sounds dramatic but strictly speaking it’s not true. Earth itself has run the experiment several times — 183 million years ago, something very comparable.The fascinating thing that seems to be emerging is, as we look at … the 1,000-year timescales going back to 183 million years, other past warming events where we get these black mudstones, we find that whatever the starting conditions, amazingly you get the same outcome. Every time you pull this particular carbon trigger at a certain rate and dump it into the atmosphere, that’s what you get.

Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.

Dr. Clapham and his co-author, Jonathan L. Payne, a Stanford geochemist, concluded that animals with skeletons or shells made of calcium carbonate, or limestone, were more likely to die than those with skeletons of other substances. And animals that had few ways of protecting their internal chemistry were more apt to disappear. Being widely dispersed across the planet was little protection against extinction, and neither was being numerous. The deaths happened throughout the ocean. Nor was there any correlation between extinction and how a creature moved or what it ate. Instead, the authors concluded, the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures. They also concluded that all these stresses happened rapidly and that each one amplified the effects of the others. That led to a wholesale change in the ocean’s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said.

So what happened 252 million years ago to cause those physiological stresses in marine animals? Additional clues from carbon, calcium and nitrogen isotopes of the period, as well as from organic geochemistry, suggest a “perturbation of the global carbon cycle,” the scientists’ second paper concluded — a huge infusion of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean.

scientists suspect that the answer lies in the biggest volcanic event of the past 500 million years — the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia. The eruptions sent catastrophic amounts of carbon gas into the atmosphere and, ultimately, the oceans; that led to long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water

three years, one long and bitterly contested GOP primary, and a running-mate-selection process away, but it's fun to speculate. Plus there's already some evidence of their chemistry between Chris Christie and Susana Martinez.

“I love his authenticity, I love who he is,” she told the New York Times. “I will support Governor Christie in anything he decides to do in life.”

Christie spent the final weeks of the race trying to run up his margin of victory in order to reinforce his case for a 2016 presidential run. Martinez's job was to show up in heavily Hispanic areas like Union City and help turn out the Latino vote.

The falling price of oil has at least brought some relief to drivers. Indeed, it is widely assumed that tumbling oil prices will put a dent in the sales of electric cars

Electric vehicles are unlikely to fall too far out of favour in the short term, partly because they are hardly in favour. Of the 1 billion vehicles on the world’s roads fewer than 1m are powered by electricity alone.

Electric cars attract some buyers not because they are cheap but because they are expensive. They serve as a badge for committed greens to demonstrate to the world that they care about the environment, no matter what the cost.

Pakistan attack: Gunmen kill 19 at Bacha Khan University

One Pakistani Taliban commander said the group had carried out the assault, but its main spokesman denied this.The group killed 130 students at a school in the city of Peshawar, 50km (30 miles) from Charsadda, in 2014.

The attackers struck at about 09:30 local time (04:30 GMT), apparently climbing over a back wall under cover of the thick winter fog.

There is no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence and big data, but models are the source of the real power behind these tools. A model is a decision framework in which the logic is derived by algorithm from data, rather than explicitly programmed by a developer or implicitly conveyed via a person’s intuition. The output is a prediction on which a decision can be mad

Once created, a model can learn from its successes and failures with speed and sophistication that humans usually cannot match

Building this system requires a mechanism (often software-based) to collect data, processes to create models from the data, the models themselves, and a mechanism (also often software based) to deliver or act on the suggestions from those models.

Mr. Obama’s presidential science advisory committee has been the most active in history, starting 34 studies of subjects as varied as advanced manufacturing and cybersecurity. Scientists on the committee said they worked so hard because Mr. Obama was deeply engaged in their work.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Mr. Obama listed science as one of the few subjects he intended to pursue after the presidency.

“The conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying,” Mr. Obama said. Of the potential breakthroughs in genomic sequencing, “That’s just an example of something I can sit and listen and talk to folks for hours about,” he said.

The close juxtaposition of these two ends of the historian’s spectrum has made me reflect on the nature of history as a discipline

raw data historians dredge up from archives requires many filters and processes to become the finished product

Extracting that raw data and conveying it in meaningful terms to an audience require very different skill-sets