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It was the closest that physicist Pablo Jarillo-Herrero had ever come to being a rock star. When he stood up last March to give a talk in Los Angeles, California, he saw scientists packed into every nook of the meeting room. The organizers of the American Physical Society conference had to stream the session to a huge adjacent space, where a standing-room-only crowd had gathered. “I knew we had something very important,” he says, “but that was pretty crazy....

This past June, Connecticut and Maine became the first states to pass bills requiring labels on all foods made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In November 2012 California voters rejected the similar Proposition 37 by a narrow majority of 51.4 percent. “All we want is a simple label/For the food that’s on our table,” chanted marchers before the elections. The issue, however, is in no way simple. We have been tinkering with our food’s DNA since the dawn of agriculture....

If you were wondering how many Americans think coal-fired power plants should cap emissions, how much they worry about climate change or even how often they talk about it, well, there’s a map for that. The Yale Climate Opinion maps, which offer some of the most detailed information available on how people across the U.S. view climate change, just got their first update in two years. The interactive maps, which hadn’t changed since 2014, use survey data to determine climate change beliefs, risk perception and policy support for climate-related policy at the state and local level....

MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII — Whether it’s the noxious gases rising from the Kilauea volcano, or the lively coral reefs that sprawl across the seafloor around the island chain, Hawaii’s ecosystems are under some serious scientific scrutiny this month. Researchers are here gathering data using NASA’s high-altitude airplanes, outfitted with cameras that capture visible light as well as infrared radiation. One airplane, the ER-2, can soar to 67,000 feet, or “the edge of space,” as NASA systems engineer Michael Mercury put it....

SUTHERLAND, South Africa—High on an arid plateau, an international group of visiting astronomers stands squinting into a simmering orange sunset. Giddy just to be here, they scramble atop a cluster of ancient volcanic boulders to peer over the edge of a vast camouflage green overlook. They have been attending an international conference in Cape Town on communicating astronomy with the public and are only too excited to finally be on the grounds of Africa’s premier astronomical observatory....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan highlights a number of serious problems: a public health outbreak, inadequate urban infrastructure, environmental injustice and political failures. But when it comes to recovery, the central challenge, and one that has received relatively little attention, is our lack of useful information and understanding. Who is most at risk?...

The U.S. celebrated when new coronavirus vaccines were developed at record-breaking speed. And in December the candidates from Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna were quickly approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. But two months later, only 10 percent of Americans have received at least one shot. And fewer than 3 percent of them have received both of the necessary doses. Many feel frustrated with the slow distribution process and confused about how to sign up for shots....

While political debate over stem cells continues, the science has made tremendous strides during the past 18 months. In the frenzy of activity, Woo Suk Hwang has stood out for the impact his team from Seoul National University has had on the still nascent field. Hwang has achieved remarkable progress in a short period. In February 2004 Hwang and his research group reported the first embryonic stem cell line derived from a cloned human embryo....

Name: Arun Majumdar Title: Director, Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy Location: Washington, D.C. What is ARPA–e’s mandate? The wise thought leaders who created ARPA-e felt that a place to go and try out a new, high-risk idea did not exist. [That is] what ­ARPA-e was created for. We are saying that if energy is the next industrial revolution and if we are going to be competitive in this globally competitive world, and we are falling behind right now, gosh, let’s go for it....

CLIMATEWIRE | Climate adaptation comes in myriad shapes and sizes. In Westchester County, N.Y., it could take the form of bored-out concrete domes that look more like D-Day bunkers than green infrastructure. The unusual shoreline structures — essentially half-spheres with port-sized holes — are turning up in tidal areas along the Atlantic Coast to help reduce the scouring effect of waves and storm surges on fragile marsh and shoreline habitat. Westchester County hopes to deploy the structures known as “reef balls” as part of a Long Island Sound “living shoreline” project in Rye, N....

“Fortune favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur once said. So as school revs up this month, so do SAT prep classes. Students might be surprised, however, at the amount of time dedicated to visual literacy skills. The increased focus on graphics is designed to prepare an estimated 1.6 million college-bound pupils for the first redesign of the standardized college admissions test in more than a decade. Along with other updates, test takers of the March 2016 exam will encounter graphics not only in the math section as in past years but also in the reading and writing and language portions....

FREIGHTER GAP, Wyo.—On blisteringly hot desert sands, researchers crawled on their hands and knees avoiding fist-size cacti littering the ground. Their goal: collecting bones and teeth of some of the earliest known primates to shed light on the adaptations at the root of the evolutionary lineage that led to humans. The fossils, though, are the size of a fingernail or smaller, and they are scattered over an area of about 10,000 square kilometers in the rocky desert of Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin....

If you think your morning cup of joe only has 12 ounces (35 centiliters) of water in it, you’re sorely mistaken—it has closer to 40 gallons (150 liters). Conservation scientists say it’s time consumers become aware of the quantity and source of water that goes into growing, manufacturing and shipping food. Concerns over greenhouse gas emissions have vaulted the term “carbon footprint” into mainstream vernacular. Now, by promoting the concept of a “water footprint” with the goal of including it on product labels, researchers are hoping to draw similar attention to how drastically we’re draining our most precious resource....

In the 1993 blockbuster movie “Jurassic Park,” a sleazy scientist played by Jeff Goldblum quips that “life finds a way.” For real biologists, climate change is like a massive, unplanned experiment, one that may be too fast and strange for some species to survive it. Some animals are already in the middle of it. As Arctic ice shelves melt, polar bears are ransacking seabird nests to sustain themselves. Migrating geese are exploring valuable but previously unseen real estate, due to melting permafrost....

Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal producer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday, the latest casualty in an industry that has been shaken by the recent shale gas boom, climate change policy and economics that greatly disfavor coal production. In a statement, Peabody Energy said that it will operate as usual as it reorganizes and sells its Colorado and New Mexico mining operations. The bankruptcy filing does not affect the company’s Australian mines....

Stealing a trick from a tiny, pickle-shaped creature that dwells in the depths of the ocean, scientists have designed a new polymer that, when exposed to water, can instantly change its rigidity and strength. The inventors say the innovation could be useful in biomedical applications, such as brain implants for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries or stroke. Those inserts, say some researchers, may fail because they need to be very stiff when they are “installed....

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff this week, killing all 157 people onboard and triggering a storm in the aviation industry. The aircraft was a Boeing 737 Max 8—the same type involved when Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the sea off Indonesia just five months earlier. Despite similarities between the events, aviation expert Peter Lemme believes they are unrelated. Both flights seemed to have difficulties maintaining a normal climb, and fell mere minutes after takeoff....

Programming robots that can walk, run and grasp is laborious, so researchers would prefer that they learn on their own. To solve the problem of wear-and-tear on real robots learning by trial-and-error, groups of researchers are developing ways to simulate the bots and download the skills they learn to real hardware. A new method improves these simulations with data from the real robots, closing the feedback loop. The result is robots with boosted speed and agility....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog The European Research Council (ERC) announced today that it has joined the list of more than 170 institutions to financially support arXiv, the major online repository for pre-print papers operated by Cornell University Library in Ithaca, New York. The cash involved is peanuts: $1,500 for the remainder of 2013 and $3,000 a year thereafter. (The ERC is already giving €90,000 this year to the life-sciences archive website Europe PubMed Central)....

For some, the thought of abandoning antiperspirants gives them the cold sweats. For others, it’s the thought of using them. Underarm antiperspirants guard against odor and wetness, but could the aluminum-based compounds that reduce sweat actually cause Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer? The antiperspirant finger-pointing began more than 40 years ago with new discoveries about Alzheimer’s, a progressive dementia that affects more than five million Americans. Antiperspirants use compounds—such as aluminum chloride, aluminum chlorohydrate and aluminum zirconium—to form a temporary sweat duct plug....