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The waiter places a perfectly grilled, prime-grade beefsteak before you and then reveals that it came from a cloned steer. Do you eat it? For most Americans, the answer is no. A survey conducted by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that the thought of dining on meat from animals copied via manual transfer of cell nuclei just does not sit well with six in 10 of us. Blame ethical or religious concerns or mistrust of the meat industry, but the idea of cloned meat elicits distaste even in many confirmed carnivores....

Your ZIP code can signal a lot about your health — including how consistent you are in taking your pills. STAT wanted to know: Where in America are people most likely to take their prescription drugs? And where are they least likely? For a window into these broader patterns, we turned to a 2016 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which looked at 18.5 million seniors taking medication for high blood pressure....

Emerging victorious from a campaign in which he called climate change a hoax, promised to reinvigorate coal mining and vowed to overturn major international agreements and domestic regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, President-elect Donald Trump’s next target in his political denial of human-driven global warming might be NASA’s $2-billion annual budget for Earth science. Trump himself has been relatively mum about his plans for NASA. But in an op–ed published weeks before the election, two Trump space policy advisors—the former congressman Robert Walker and the economist Peter Navarro—wrote that the agency is too focused on “politically correct environmental monitoring” of climate change....

Between 1650 and 1749, fires raged across western North America from what is now British Columbia down into northern Mexico. In contrast, the following century saw scattered, sporadic wildfires. By combining tree-ring records stretching back 450 years as well as fire-scar data from more than 4,700 burned trees, scientists have now created an extended log of the climate in the western U.S. and its attendant wildfires. And this record has revealed that temperature shifts in the waters of the northern Atlantic help determine the scale and intensity of western wildfires....

It took a mere 85 million years—the geologic blink of an eye—for animals to evolve and radiate out over much of the world’s land and oceans. Although fossil records and molecular biology have provided much information on the spread of animal life, scientists have not been able to figure out exactly what sparked this massive diversification. New research shows that nutrient-rich runoff from massive melting glaciers may have provided the extra energy needed to fuel this dramatic evolution....

Physicists find God particle! That has become a common headline since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva began turning out data. Researchers have been more cautious and have completely disavowed the ridiculous name used for the Higgs boson, but we agree that the LHC indeed turned up a new particle last summer. Another common conclusion from the LHC work is that the U.S., the world leader in physics for the past century, has passed the torch to Europe and that U....

The following is an editorial from Nature magazine, reposted here with permission. It was originally posted May 2 with the title, "Publishing risky research."This week sees the online publication of the paper 'Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets' by the Japanese–US team headed by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M. Imai et al. Nature 10....

Sometimes, just thinking you are receiving treatment is enough to make you feel better, a phenomenon known as the placebo effect. Scientists have long wondered what causes this outcome, the magnitude of which is not the same for all people. A new brain imaging study suggests that the body’s natural painkillers, endorphins, play a significant role. Previous studies had shown general changes in brain activity associated with the placebo effect by using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and scientists had hypothesized that the brain’s opioid system was involved....

These hobby and commercial quadcopters are amazingly stable and simple to fly, thanks to incredible advances in sensors and electronics. Most can take off and land automatically—you just tap a button, and they can hover at eye level, motionless, even in a 30-mile-an-hour wind, awaiting your next command. What makes these drones so powerful, and so contentious among the public, is also one of the things that makes them so enchanting: their cameras....

Without policies to protect the world’s most vulnerable from crop failure, natural disasters, waterborne diseases and other impacts of climate change, 100 million more people could sink into poverty by 2030, the World Bank said. The report unveiled yesterday is one of a growing number of high-level studies linking poverty to climate change. This one, World Bank officials said, goes further by combining findings from household surveys in 90 nations with modeling results on the impact of rising global temperatures on food prices, heat waves, floods, droughts and diseases....

At age 18, Erica Hernandez tried to kill herself—twice. Depressed and plagued by family problems, she first took “every pill in the house,” she says. Then she attempted to drink herself to death. But whether through luck or indecision, her attempts were not drastic enough to end her life before help arrived. Now age 31, Hernandez has found “peace” through her church and a parent-child psychotherapy group she has joined. Every year millions of people around the world try to kill themselves—and nearly one million of them succeed....

With the election cycle in full swing, it’s open season for journalists hell-bent on catching candidates out in lies and misrepresentations. In a world that has become relentlessly “truthy,” to borrow Stephen Colbert’s apt neologism, we need journalists, scientists and other experts to stand up for facts and keep the public debate honest. But when it comes to climate change, there is a tricky gray zone between facts and expert judgments....

Call your computer program a “bot” and people are going to make certain assumptions, many of them negative. Twitterbots have become notorious over the past few years for their propensity to remove the human element from the microblogging service—automatically generating posts, following users and retweeting messages. Microsoft’s Tay, touted as artificially intelligent, proved anything but last month after users turned it into a trash-talking chatbot, prompting the company to quickly take it offline....

Could gene editing spell the end of heart disease, inherited high cholesterol and diabetes? Qiurong Ding, professor at the laboratory of human genetics and metabolic diseases at the Institute for Nutritional Sciences in Shanghai, China, uses stem cells to study new ways of curing life-threatening illnesses. Ding is a World Economic Forum Young Scientist who will be speaking at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, from June 26 to 28....

Growing up in the world of academia, it was impossible to miss the issue of representation in my field. I just had to look around at the faces walking the halls of the elite institutions I was lucky to inhabit. I worked as an undergrad in Yale’s psychology department, where one out of 31 current faculty members is Black. I did my Ph.D. in MIT’s brain and cognitive sciences department, where one out of 57 professors was Black....

Comic-book fans know well that the most sought after editions are those in which a superhero appears for the first time. A comic book published in 1962 featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man, for example, recently sold at auction for $122,000. Sadly, publications representing the first appearance of an important scientific fact generally do not command similar prices, but to scientists these firsts are equally treasured. Just such a moment occurred in 1995, when Abraham “Avi” Kupfer of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver stood before an unsuspecting group of a few hundred immunologists gathered for one of the prestigious Keystone symposia, named for a U....

The stable isotope ratio of carbon is often used as an indicator of life in old rock samples. A high carbon-12 to carbon-13 ratio suggests the carbon has been processed by living organisms, because some metabolic enzymes involved in fixing inorganic carbon ‘prefer’ carbon-12. In this case, the carbon sample came from two microscopic specks of graphite embedded in a sliver of zircon, one of hundreds of zircons from the Jack Hills of Western Australia, which are thought to contain some of the oldest minerals on Earth....

The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way is preparing to gobble up a tasty gas cloud in a cosmic meal astronomers are eager to witness. Most galaxies are thought to host humongous black holes at their cores, and the Milky Way’s, which is called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star”) contains about 4 million times the mass of our sun. It’s about to add a tiny bit more mass to its girth, when it swallows a cloud on a collision course with it....

Tricycle accidents requiring a visit to the emergency room peak when children reach age 2, a new study finds. The most common ER-worthy injuries from tricycles in the study were injuries to the head, according to the research published today (Sept. 14) in the journal Pediatrics. Most kids showed up at the ER with cuts, although some had internal damage. Most deaths involving tricycles occurred when children fell into swimming pools while riding unsupervised, the researchers also found, leading to an important take-home message for parents....

A concentration of one part per billion is like a pinch of salt in 10 tons of potato chips—and scientists can now find radioactive particles at concentrations millions of times smaller. In the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, researchers describe successfully detecting radioactive uranium and thorium hiding among something like a million billion other atoms. The ability to spot these tiny amounts of radioactive elements, which occur naturally in metals such as gold that are often used in laboratory instruments, could have big consequences for particle physics....