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It’s not a great time to be a scientist studying fusion. U.S. experiments such as the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility are losing funding (SN: 4/20/13, p. 26), while a $20 billion international project called ITER is delayed and over budget. Clery, a science writer, chronicles these setbacks, along with 70 years’ worth of others, in efforts to harness the process that lights...

European family ties are knotty I have trouble understanding “Europeans are one big family” (SN: 6/15/13, p. 8). It says that every person living in Europe today shares a common set of ancestors. First, what does “set” mean? “Set” implies there are certain common characteristics of the members, but people living in Europe 1,000 years ago had only one thing in common: living in Europe. Second...

For nearly a decade, neuro­scientist Li-Huei Tsai and her colleagues have been studying senile mice. In a lab at MIT her team has genetically fast-forwarded the mice into a condition much like dementia: They have problems making new memories and retrieving old ones. The mice forget how to navigate water mazes they had mastered; they don’t recognize signs of imminent danger they had once...

It may have taken billions of years for them to get here from deep space, but four recently detected radio signals disappeared only milliseconds after arriving at Earth. The fleeting signals, only the second detection ever of radio bursts emanating from beyond the Milky Way, could help scientists understand the vast unexplored areas that separate galaxies.

Picked up by an international...