Scientists

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus's "The Plague. " It wasn't that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn't done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them. The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?"

Most Massachusetts residents have probably never heard of the spadefoot toad — so named for its oddly shaped feet. Perhaps that's not surprising, since it's considered the Bay State's rarest frog species, is active mainly at night, and spends much of its life underground. But students at Concord's Thoreau Elementary School have gotten to know the unusual little amphibians by raising spadefoot tadpoles as part of an ongoing conservation project with local biologists. "The students feed the tadpoles and toadlets, help put the terrarium together, investigate what the...

Days after state environmental officials found unacceptable noise levels from wind turbines in Falmouth, they are considering new regulations that would require the state to review potential noise issues before wind turbines are built in Massachusetts. The state might also conduct sound studies in other communities, such as Fairhaven and Kingston, where residents, as in Falmouth, have complained about newly installed turbines, officials said. A panel of independent scientists and doctors, convened by the state to look at the effects of wind turbines on the health of nearby residents, urged the...

LONDON - Iran said Tuesday that it had executed a man accused of being an Israeli intelligence agent responsible for the assassination of one of its nuclear scientists, Iranian state media reported. Press TV, a satellite broadcaster, identified the man as Majid Jamali Fashi and said he had been convicted of killing the scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, in January 2010. Mohammadi was a 50-year-old professor at Tehran University whose role in Tehran's nuclear program was unclear.

I t starts with a few forgotten names, missed appointments, and words lost on the tip of your tongue. Is it lack of sleep, our crazy lives, or something more ominous? Most people experience memory losses as they slip past their mid-30s and beyond. Memory mistakes ignored earlier in life suddenly seem worrisome, particularly for women — or at least women tend to talk about their anxiety more than men. Researchers have long dismissed these common complaints as "just" signs of aging, and too minor to merit serious study.

THE SCIENTIFIC community finds itself at the beginning of its own Arab Spring. At stake are values that all Americans hold dear: the free flow of information and the continued betterment of human life. Success is by no means guaranteed, but it's an important protest movement in which Boston should play a special role. The central character in this emerging drama may seem an unlikely villain: Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based publisher of scientific journals, including the prestigious titles Cell and Lancet, which give researchers a platform to share their most important advances.

It is a seductively simple idea: human traits, ranging from smoking to loneliness to obesity, are contagious, spreading through social networks like the flu. When a Harvard professor and a California political scientist made this case in a series of articles published in top academic journals since 2007, their work became front page news and the subject of a popular book, and it quickly disseminated into popular culture. Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School made it onto Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people, while his collaborator,...

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is shutting down a prominent laboratory after the death of the high-profile scientist who oversaw the research. In most fields, that would be the end of the story: An employee passes away, she is replaced, and, professionally speaking, everyone moves on. But in academia, things are rarely so simple. And Lynn Margulis's death last year at 73, from a stroke, has presented UMass with a dilemma: What to do with the colleagues and equipment, not to mention unfinished work, she left behind?

WASHINGTON - Mountaintop coal mining - in which peaks are blasted off and stream valleys buried under tons of rubble - is so destructive that the government should stop giving out new permits to do it, a group of scientists said in a paper released yesterday. The group, headed by a University of Maryland researcher, did one of the most comprehensive studies to date of the controversial practice, also known as “mountaintop removal.’’ Afterward, they did something that scientists usually don’t: step beyond data-gathering to take a political stand.

Researchers are predicting a "moderate" red tide this year, which they say could close shellfish beds on between 126 and 250 miles of New England coastline. The research by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is based on how much of the toxic red tide algae they found in its dormant state in the Gulf of Maine last fall. The dormant "cysts" act like seeds for the next year's bloom. The researchers then combine the cyst data with computer simulations of various conditions that affect the algae's growth, such as winds and currents.

Iran has hanged a man who was sentenced to death for the 2010 killing of a nuclear physicist, state TV reported Tuesday. Majid Jamali Fashi, who had been accused of being an agent of the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, was hanged in Tehran on Tuesday morning, the broadcast said. Tehran University physics professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi was killed by a bomb-rigged motorcycle that exploded outside his house as he was leaving for work in January 2010. He had no publicly disclosed links to Iran's nuclear program.

A scientist accused of stealing secret recipes from a Utah chemistry company has pleaded guilty to a federal charge. Prabhu Mohapatra entered the plea Friday in U.S. District Court to one count of unlawful access to a protected computer. The Deseret News reports (http://bit.ly/JOw00o ) prosecutors agreed to drop 25 other charges against him in exchange for the plea. The 42-year-old Mohapatra, who worked for North Logan-based Frontier Scientific Inc. from 2009 to 2011, admitted to accessing a company chemical resource notebook and emailing...

Science from Scientists, a 10-year-old Boston education nonprofit, has received $650,000 from iRobot Corp., Google Inc., Comcast Corp., and others, and is launching a television program on Friday meant to boost science and math education in the state. "The Dr. Erika Show," hosted by Science from Scientists founder Erika Ebbel Angle and airing on the Comcast On Demand video service, focuses on science, technology, engineering, and math -- known as the STEM subjects. The show launched Friday at a STEM panel at iRobot headquarters in Bedford that included executives from the...

Scientists are hoping that one of the world's largest frogs is singing songs of love on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat and not just singing in the rain. Mating calls would mean the so-called mountain chicken frogs are looking to breed and hopefully dodge extinction. But scientists say the whooping calls they make by night could also be due to the rainy season. The mountain chickens are the offspring of dozens of frogs weighing up to two pounds (0.9 kilograms) that were airlifted to Britain and Sweden in 2009 in hopes of saving them from a deadly...

CAMBRIDGE — The acclaimed French-Canadian director-playwright-performer Robert Lepage is known for his ingenious, sometimes controversial, use of technology in such productions as "The Andersen Project," a multimedia solo show recently seen at ArtsEmerson, and Wagner's "Ring" cycle, currently at the Metropolitan Opera, with a 45-ton set dubbed "the machine. " Even the name of Lepage's Quebec-based company suggests his affinity: Ex Machina. Last week, Lepage spent three days talking to and working with kindred spirits at the Massachusetts Institute of...

The driver's seat is a fascinating setting in which to study HUMAN DECISION MAKING. Where else do you have people practicing a highly learned activity with a major safety implication involved with failure? Hands-free technology can allow a driver to keep both hands on the wheel. However, it may not offer all the SAFETY ADVANTAGES that many believe. The act of conversing can be quite demanding. The type of conversation plays a role. A quick call home to say I'm running late is far less absorbing than a discussion surrounding a complex business decision.

New U.S. postage stamps are giving science fans a chance to send letters and recall pioneering researchers at the same time. The four-stamp set of forever stamps sell at the current first-class rate of 44-cents each. They went on sale nationwide Thursday. Honored on the stamps are pioneering botanist Asa Gray and three Nobel prize winners, chemist Melvin Calvin; physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer and biochemist Severo Ochoa.

NEW YORK -- Scientists say they've identified two variants of a single gene that might raise a child's risk of autism by twofold or more. The variants are fairly common and can't bring on the disease by themselves, the researchers said. Scientists believe several genes, perhaps five to 10, have to work together to produce autism. Previous studies have identified variants in other genes that might contribute to the disease but none has been proved to do so. Finding autism-related genes might help scientists develop treatments for the perplexing disorder.

A botanist and plant biologist by academic training, Harold E. Kazmaier attended a job fair for scientists in the early 1970s after the greenhouse where he worked in his home state of Ohio closed. Offered a job with the recently created Environmental Protection Agency, Dr. Kazmaier moved his family east to Massachusetts and settled in Wilmington. He started work in the summer of 1972, assigned to the EPA's Region 1, which covers New England. "He was part of the first wave of scientists at the EPA," said his daughter Kathleen Christianson of Mansfield.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is shutting down a prominent laboratory after the death of the high-profile scientist who oversaw the research. In most fields, that would be the end of the story: An employee passes away, she is replaced, and, professionally speaking, everyone moves on. But in academia, things are rarely so simple. And Lynn Margulis's death last year at 73, from a stroke, has presented UMass with a dilemma: What to do with the colleagues and equipment, not to mention unfinished work, she left behind?