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A new federal analysis gives all but a handful of states the lowest possible rating on the quality of their building codes, showing a widespread failure to protect people against windstorms and flooding through up-to-date building standards. The Federal Emergency Management Agency categorized each state based on the stringency of its building codes—and put 39 states in the lowest category. FEMA also rated each state on a 100-point scale. Nineteen states received a score of 0, including some of the nation’s most disaster-prone states such as Louisiana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania....

Peruvian mathematician Harald Helfgott gained worldwide attention in 2013 when he solved a 271-year-old problem: the so-called Goldbach’s weak conjecture, according to which every odd number greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three prime numbers—such as: 3 + 3 + 5 = 11 and 19 + 13 + 3 = 35. But Helfgott, 38, went even farther back in time and conceived an improved version of the sieve of Eratosthenes, a popular method for finding prime numbers that was formulated circa 240 B....

Although planetary rings are extremely common in our solar system—every gas giant circling our sun has one—they’ve proved harder to spot around worlds orbiting other stars. That’s a shame, because studies of ring systems around younger worlds could help clarify what the giant planets of our nearly five-billion-year-old solar system looked like in their first few million years. More than two decades of planet hunting have revealed just one ringed exoplanet—a super-size version of Saturn that researchers have only just begun to study using very large telescopes....

Editor’s note: This article is the last of a three-part series by John Carey. Part 1, “Storm Warning: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change,” was posted on June 28. Part 2, “Global Warming and the Science of Extreme Weather,” was posted on June 29. Extreme weather events have become both more common and more intense. And increasingly, scientists have been able to pin at least part of the blame on humankind’s alteration of the climate....

SUBSIDIES AND HORMONES In “How to Fix the Obesity Crisis,” David H. Freedman proposed behavior modification as a solution, but it cannot be applied to 200 million overweight people. Freedman also seems to support subsidies for fruits and vegetables and other government-sponsored programs. But where is the money going to come from? For decades now the U.S. government has subsidized corn production. Corn is used as inexpensive feed to fatten cows in feedlots and to make a cheap sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup....

The discovery that a compound in red wine may provide a healthier and longer life had guaranteed popular appeal, but the suggestion has been attacked from all sides. One such skirmish — a debate about the hypothesized benefits of one particular compound — may now be resolved. In Science this week, researchers show that the compound, called resveratrol, acts directly on a protein that has been linked to cell metabolism and inflammatory diseases....

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures by Ben Mezrich. Atria, 2017 ($26) What if extinction weren’t permanent after all? Several years ago pioneering Harvard University geneticist George M. Church (who serves on Scientific American’s advisory board) and his colleagues launched a project to resurrect the famous woolly mammoth by splicing its preserved genetic code with that of an elephant. Animals like the mammoths, which adapted to live in steppe habitats, prevent tree growth and turn and stomp topsoil, exposing the earth underneath to the cold winds of the region, thereby lowering the ground temperature and preserving the underlying permafrost (and the potent greenhouse gas methane locked within it)....

As an undergraduate at the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology, I was taught that archaeology was ultimately about “the mind behind the artifact.” It was about the person who made the ancient object I happened to be studying. That perspective seemed easy enough when I contemplated the simple chipped stones that represent most of human prehistory. The minds responsible for those artifacts, I naively thought, must have been pretty simple....

As an editor, I’ve read thousands of pieces of writing. Yet some manage to stand out vividly, such as one column, “Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness,” penned almost 20 years ago by the late Harvard University paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould for Natural History magazine. We tend to remember the bad encounters we have had with other people, Gould noted, such as the time a driver rudely cut you off in traffic and then yelled at you on top of it....

NORDEN, Calif.—On a frosty evening in the Sierra Nevada, smoke curling from the chimney of the Clair Tappaan Lodge is a welcome sight to chilly snowshoers and cross-country skiers. Gathering by the massive stone hearth at this landmark Sierra Club mountain hostel, guests relax in the warmth and aroma of the crackling log fire. Those same woodsy scents waft across the wintry north, as millions of fireplaces and wood stoves are lit by people seeking an environmentally friendly source of heat and ambience....

As part of President Obama’s plans to combat climate change, the White House announced a program on Friday for the U.S. Department of Energy to train 75,000 people to work in the solar power industry by 2020, many of whom will be part of a military veterans jobs initiative called Solar Ready Vets. The announcement comes as the solar industry in the U.S. booms, adding more than 30,000 people to its workforce between 2013 and 2014....

The first clue came in 2008, recalled George Rose, a marine biologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, when he saw the cod aggregating in large numbers offshore during the spawning season. It was a sight he had sorely missed in 15 years. In the early 1990s, cod fisheries suffered such a dramatic collapse that they emerged as an aquatic poster child for fisheries mismanagement, according to Rose. In a paper published yesterday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Rose and his colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, document the comeback of the Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and Labrador over the past decade....

Do you have a plan to save money, exercise more or call your mother? Making those plans concrete might help you achieve those goals but at the cost of some flexibility, according to a study published in the February issue of Social Cognition. E. J. Masicampo, a psychologist at Wake Forest University, studies implementation intentions. These plans take a specific “if-then” form, such as “if I am near a phone, then I will call my mother....

In the senior community where my mom lives, death is a frequent visitor. When we talk about a recent loss, the story is often the same: her neighbor fell, and things got worse from there. Falls are the seventh-leading cause of death for adults aged 65 and older in the U.S., and their prevalence has jumped more than 30 percent in recent years, according to a 2018 report from the U....

Researchers have had a notoriously difficult time predicting how much flooding a given area will experience in the wake of a storm. Now a team led by researchers at Western Carolina University has developed a Web site and smartphone app that may help. The scientists gathered storm-surge data going back 65 years at more than 3,400 sites along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and are making it available just in time for the June 1 start of the Atlantic hurricane season (see http://stormsurge....

After the death of her mother, Rosie had a fitful night, tossing and turning and getting up frequently. That afternoon, Rosie, 20, and her mother’s long-time companion, Blossom, 50, had tended to her mother as she lay dying, frequently stroking her hands and arms. Blossom’s son had arrived just around the time of death and checked the body, shaking a lifeless arm. For days after the death, the three of them were relatively quiet, had little appetite and avoided the place where Rosie’s mom had died....

Bankruptcy rates in the U.S. have been growing for more than two decades despite generally rising levels of personal income. The most prominent explanation puts the blame squarely on credit cards, which became vastly more popular in the past 30 years. University of Pennsylvania law professor David A. Skeel, who has done the most comprehensive recent analysis of the subject, notes that a 1978 Supreme Court decision allowed credit-card companies to charge the interest rate allowed in their state of incorporation....

The heart of wearing Google Glass isn’t merely the wish to be at the forefront of technology – it’s the excitement of seeing what you can get away with. And so it was that last month New York web developer Patrick Hill decided he’d see if he could slide past the doorman of a strip club wearing Google Glass. Accompanied by a New York Post reporter, Hill tried to enter the VIP club in Manhattan....

For Native Americans, kya (the turtle) symbolizes wisdom. For Europeans, bears are an important element of their history. What animals mean the most to you, and why do they hold such significance? Cultures worldwide have empowering relationships with wild animals and knowing those animals promotes a deeper connection to spirituality, geography and pride. For Black people, our connection to nature and the cultural significance of mammals comes from traditions practiced during the slavery era and continues into modern-day pop culture....

When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and pledged that “the bird is freed” last week, Felix Ndahinda saw a threat rising on the horizon. Ndahinda has trained in international law and works in Tilburg, the Netherlands, as a consultant on issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. He has already seen what a ‘free’ Twitter can do. For years, he has been tracking the social-media hate speech that swirls amid armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo....