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Blockchain has gone mainstream. Last year 16 percent of Americans claimed to have speculated in cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology, and this year’s Super Bowl broadcast included several ads for crypto markets. But even as their cheerleaders encourage others to dabble in cryptocurrencies, their worth remains dubious. Their values are quite volatile, and as unregulated assets, they leave average investors vulnerable to crashes and scams. Just as worrisome, creating these digital resources guzzles energy at a prodigious rate, contributing to climate change....

A brilliant, bright-green meteor blazed through the sky just north of Milwaukee early this morning (Feb. 6), and likely sprinkled space rocks into Lake Michigan. The falling space rock likely burned up in the sky about 10 to 20 miles (16 to 32 kilometers) north of Milwaukee, or about 100 miles (160 km) north of Chicago, according to the American Meteorological Society (AMS). More than 220 people have filed reports with the AMS claiming to have seen the fireball at about 1:25 a....

By Christine StebbinsCHICAGO (Reuters) - Abnormally dry areas expanded in the U.S. western Corn Belt, including the top crop state of Iowa, over the past week to put much of the corn crop at risk, according to a weekly drought report.The U.S. Drought Monitor, issued by state and federal climate experts, said dry conditions in the U.S. Midwest for the week ended Thursday, reached 18.94 percent, up from 7.16 percent a week earlier....

CLIMATEWIRE | Category 6 hurricanes don’t exist on paper. The wind scale used by meteorologists tops out at Category 5, representing storms with sustained winds of 157 mph or more. But researchers at Florida International University plan to create a Category 6 storm in a lab, mimicking conditions they expect to see as climate change drives more extreme weather. The university, which is also home to the National Hurricane Center, is coordinating a team of international experts to design what will be one of the world’s most advanced hurricane simulators, one that can simultaneously produce real-world extreme conditions from wind, rain and storm surge....

Producing many a tear in the kitchen, onions may now add some flavour to the robotics community as scientists in Taiwan have created an artificial muscle made from gold-plated onion skin. A part of soft robotics research, artificial muscle technologies have witnessed a boom in recent years as scientists look at new ways to interact with and manipulate our environment—be it through medical implants or industrial robotics. Such technologies are often manufactured using polymers or pneumatic cylinders, but recent attention has focussed on exploiting natural products such as cellulose....

Record-breaking rainfall and flooding may happen more frequently across the United States even if the Paris climate targets are met, new research suggests. Extreme rainfall events that currently might have only a 1-in-500 chance of happening in any given year—dubbed “500-year” events—may be up to 50 percent more likely under 2 degrees Celsius of climate warming. And the risk of 1,000-year events may increase by twofold to fivefold. The study, published earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters, found that the risks will likely increase the most on the East Coast, in the southern Great Plains and in the southern Rocky Mountains....

by Haim Watzman A handful of ancient human remains from Israel garnered a huge burst of media coverage this week, as claims that the finds could “rewrite the history of human evolution” were quickly followed by a backlash from the blogosphere. Many of the initial reports were based on a Tel Aviv University press release about a paper published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Israeli and Spanish scientists....

On March 23, 2020, with the deadly coronavirus reported in 167 countries and territories, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire to support a public health response. It was the first global ceasefire appeal since the agency was founded in 1945, in the aftermath of World War II. “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war,” Guterres said. “End the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world....

Cases of malaria, dengue fever, Zika and other serious illnesses have reached alarming levels in Venezuela and are spilling over into neighboring countries, according to several recent studies. These so-called vector-borne diseases—transmitted by mosquitoes or other organisms—have increased by as much as 400 percent in Venezuela in the last decade, according to a review study published in The Lancet in February. Spiraling economic and political turmoil have worsened the situation, as has the government’s apparent hostility toward researchers who publish epidemiological data—with reports of pro-government paramilitary groups smashing labs and even stealing experimental mice....

Update, 7 December (1:40 a.m. BST): Japan’s Akatsuki mission has entered orbit around Venus. The spacecraft burned its engines as planned on December 7 and was captured by Venus’s gravity, says team member Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Over the next two days, mission scientists will track the spacecraft and determine how closely the orbit matches what scientists had hoped for. That information is expected to be released at 6 p....

Kaveh Daneshvar was thrilled when he was invited to speak at a molecular biology meeting next month in Banff, Canada. Daneshvar, a molecular geneticist, is finishing a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and is preparing to go on the job market. He hoped that the conference talk would give him much-needed exposure to leaders in his field. But that now seems impossible: if Daneshvar, an Iranian citizen, leaves the country, he may not be able to return....

Life, for better or worse, is full of endings. We finish school, get a new job, sell a home, break off a relationship. Knowing that a phase is soon coming to an end can elicit the best in us, as we try to make amends for errors past and avoid last-minute regrets. We might try to visit that local museum, or make time for happy hour drinks with a longtime coworker, or be more generous with our praise to a partner....

By Julie Steenhuysen (Reuters) - A company formed by genome pioneer Craig Venter will offer clients of a South Africa-based insurance company whole exome sequencing - sequencing all protein-making genes in the human genome - at a price that marks yet another dramatic decline in the cost of gene sequencing, the two companies said on Tuesday. Venter’s company, Human Longevity Inc, will provide the tests at a cost of $250 each through a special incentive program offered by Discovery Ltd, an insurer with clients in South Africa and the United Kingdom....

Alain Hubert slowly made his way down an icy crevasse on Antarctica’s Princess Rangnhild Coast to a large plain of snow and ice early last month. Spread across the frozen tundra before him, 9,000 members of a never-before-visited colony of emperor penguins huddled together for warmth against the subzero temperatures of the world’s coldest continent. Hubert, a Belgian expedition leader and engineer for the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Polar Research Station, says he decided to go looking for the emperor penguin colony after coming across a satellite map estimating its location....

Levels of highly toxic mercury contamination in Atlantic bluefin tuna are rapidly declining, according to a new study. That trend does not affect recommended limits on consumption of canned tuna, which comes mainly from other tuna species. Nor does it reflect trends in other ocean basins. But it does represent a major break in the long-standing, scary connection between tuna and mercury, a source of public concern since 1970, when a chemistry professor in New York City found excess levels of mercury in a can of tuna and spurred a nationwide recall....

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a win for the Obama administration on insurance coverage for contraception under Obamacare, a U.S. appeals court on Friday ruled that Catholic non-profit groups’ religious rights were not violated by a compromise already achieved on the volatile issue. Catholic groups had sued over the compromise, saying they should not have to pay for or facilitate access to contraception or abortion, but a judge wrote in the ruling that under the compromise, “the regulations do not compel them to do that....

Utilities have begun offering direct rebates for electric vehicles in an effort to jump-start sluggish sales in an emerging car market that stands to benefit them financially. Electric companies in Vermont and California have offered customers $450 to $1,200 off their electric bill if they buy a plug-in car. Others have partnered with Nissan to offer $10,000 in rebates. With sales of electric vehicles barely cracking 1 percent nationally, it’s a sign that proponents are increasingly willing to sweeten the deal for prospective owners....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Our hands are so important to everyday life. We write, eat, work, hold our children, and even talk with our hands. We generally take them for granted, until something happens and we are no longer able to use them as we did before. By far the most common ailment affecting my patients’ hands is carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), which causes tingling and numbness in the fingers....

One of mathematical biologist Lewi Stone’s typical papers bears the title: “The Feasibility and Stability of Large Complex Biological Networks: A Random Matrix Approach.” But the academic, who holds appointments at Tel Aviv University and RMIT University in Melbourne recently went in for a change of pace: This month Science Advances published his study titled “Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense Kill Rates During the Nazi Genocide.” Stone’s analysis of deportation train records indicates about a quarter of Holocaust deaths was concentrated in a single period, from August through October 1942, at three camps in Poland....

Who were the first Americans and when and how did they get here? For decades archaeologists thought they knew the answers to these questions. Based on the available evidence, it seemed big game hunters from Asia known as the Clovis people were the first to blaze that trail, trekking across the now submerged land mass of Beringia to enter the New World around 13,000 years ago. But starting in the early 2000s signs of an earlier human presence in the Americas started to crop up, eroding support for the so-called Clovis first model....