China's top cyberspace regulator announced on Monday the launch of a two-month nationwide special campaign to regulate the network environment for the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, addressing problems such as fan conflicts involving insults and comment manipulation. According to the notice released by the secretary bureau of the Cyberspace Administration […]

The notoriously intricate strategy game Go has a new champion. AlphaGo, Google’s Go-playing computer program, has topped Lee Sedol, the world’s reigning player, in a five-game match played over a week in South Korea. The program, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, learned to play Go by watching human experts and by playing millions of games […]

For Wisconsin’s snowshoe hares, climate change now ranks as an even bigger menace than the bulldozing, paving and other destructive things people have done to northern forests. Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin […]

NEW YORK — Sometimes forgetting can be harder than remembering. When people forced themselves to forget a recently seen image, select brain activity was higher than when they tried to remember that image. Forgetting is often a passive process, one in which the memory slips out of the brain, Tracy Wang of the University of […]

Tadpoles don’t cry to get their way. But some of them sure can beg. Each bout of hungry-baby drama among mimic poison frogs (Ranitomeya imitator) occupies both parents for hours. The tadpoles get so crazy-frantic that researchers wanted to know whether the begging is an honest call for help or a histrionic scam. Frogs can […]

A mushroom whose genes have been edited with molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 doesn’t need to be regulated like other genetically modified crops, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said April 13 in a letter to the mushroom’s creator. The edible fungus is the first CRISPR-edited crop to clear USDA regulation. Yinong Yang, a plant pathologist […]

Smartphone-toting pilgrims regularly stream into northern Cambodia from all over the world. Their destination: Angkor Wat, a medieval temple that’s famous for massive towers and majestic stone carvings of Hindu gods, spirits and mythological battle scenes. The site, considered the world’s largest religious monument, drew more than 2.3 million visitors in 2014. Angkor Wat’s sightseers […]

Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) make carnivory look cool. But the genes that make it possible have roots in herbivory. Though modern flytraps eat insects, their ancestors probably didn’t. In search of clues to this transition, Rainer Hedrich of the University of Wurzburg in Germany and his colleagues looked at protein production patterns in in different […]

Giraffes’ genes tell a not-so-tall tale about growing necks to great lengths. Tweaks to genes important for development may account for both the giraffe’s stature and turbocharged cardiovascular system, researchers report May 17 in Nature Communications. Researchers compiled the genetic instruction book, or genome, for both the giraffe and the okapi, its short-necked closest living […]

A notorious Alzheimer’s disease villain may also be a germ-busting superhero. Amyloid-beta gums up the brains of people with Alzheimer’s but also takes out dangerous brain invaders, scientists report May 25 in Science Translational Medicine. As strong as steel, tough strands of A-beta protein imprison pathogens that threaten the body and brain, experiments in mice […]