Science News

Since the dawn of personal computing, the mouse has served as the link between human and machine. As computers have become ever more powerful and portable, this basic interface of point-and-click has remained tried, true and little changed.

Here are five emerging technologies likely to shake up how we get computers to follow our commands.

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Caribbean weather experts launched a task force Friday to provide Haiti storm forecasts amid fears the 2010 hurricane season could devastate the countrys already fragile infrastructure.

Several other countries offered storm tracking and communications equipment as well as personnel to rebuild the quake-ravaged islands forecasting capability.

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Climate change is here and scientists need to do a better job of explaining it to the public, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.

“Scientists have seriously underestimated the importance of explaining what we know about climate in a way people can understand,” she said.

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Heavy rain and melting snow have caused severe floods across a region of Kazakhstan neighboring China, flooding villages and killing around two dozen people, officials said Friday.

A dam at the Kyzyl-Agash reservoir in the eastern Almaty region ruptured Thursday, pouring water into several nearby villages and affecting 3,000 residents, the Emergency Services Ministry said.

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Gerard Fryer got paged about 20 times early Thursday morning Hawaii time, signaling a large earthquake had occurred in Chile and there was a potential for a tsunami.

“Since then Ive pretty much been calming peoples ragged nerves,” Fryer told LiveScience. “Private citizens in Chile were calling us because they are alarmed.

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Tornadoes have struck parts of Arkansas, injuring four people and destroying a handful of homes.

The National Weather Service says another person suffered a leg injury in a tornado in Center Hill in northeast Arkansas.

Emergency Management spokeswoman Renee Preslar says three people suffered major injuries Wednesday in a tornado that destroyed a house near Pearson in northern Arkansas.

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First the ground shook in Haiti, then Chile and now Turkey. The earthquakes keep coming hard and fast this year, causing people to wonder if something sinister is happening underfoot.

More people are moving into megacities that happen to be built on fault lines, and they’re rapidly putting up substandard buildings that can’t withstand earthquakes, scientists say.

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Colds are not the only things that spread. Scientists are finding obesity, workplace blame, smiling, loneliness and now cooperation are also contagious. In fact, cooperation and “paying it forward” by one person can infect dozens if not hundreds of people, a new study of social networks finds.

A paper explaining the study is published in the March 8 early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Is he trustworthy? Forget what the songs say about his kiss, and check out the breadth of his cheekbones.

In a computerized game, broad-faced men were more likely to exploit others for personal monetary gain, explained lead researcher Michael Stirrat of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. And other players expected this behavior.

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Melbourne was bracing for more bad weather Sunday after a “beast of a storm” ripped through Australias second largest city, bringing with it hailstones the size of tennis balls.

“The weather system that brought the damage to Melbourne is known in meteorological terms as a supercell thunderstorm, an organised beast of a storm that once it gets going tends to last more than your average thunderstorm,” he said.

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