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Tanning beds can ring up a steep bill—a whopping $343 million each year in medical costs in the US alone. Indoor tanning has long been tied to skin cancer, the most common type of cancer in the US. It’s estimated that 30 million people—nearly 25 percent of whom are teenagers—head to tanning beds at least once a year. And the health care costs of the habit can add up, health economists report in a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of Cancer Policy....

The mystery of why Mercury’s magnetic field is so weak may just have been solved: It is being stifled by the solar wind, researchers think. Mercury and Earth are the only rocky planets in the solar system to possess global magnetic fields, and for years scientists have puzzled over why Mercury’s is so flimsy. Roiling molten iron cores generate magnetic fields, and given how extraordinarily iron-rich Mercury is for its size — its metallic heart may comprise two-thirds of Mercury’s mass, twice the ratio for Earth, Venus or Mars — the innermost planet should have a magnetic field 30 times stronger than what spacecraft such as NASA’s MESSENGER probe have detected so far....

A listener writes: “I have recurrent problems with candida or yeast. I have seen articles stating that I should eat less sugar and avoid foods that contain yeast, such as bread. How accurate is this advice?” I’m so glad you asked! There is a confusing mix of true and false information about candida diet and nutrition. Let’s sort fact from fiction. Candida albicans is a type of yeast that is commonly found both on and in the human body, where it generally causes no problems....

Ask scientists who favor precision medicine for an example of what it might accomplish, and they are likely to tell you about ivacaftor, a new drug that has eased symptoms in a small and very specific subset of patients with cystic fibrosis. The disease stems from any of several defects in the protein that regulates the passage of salt molecules into and out of cells. One such defect prevents that protein from reaching the cell surface so that it can usher salt molecules back and forth....

Elsinore, in northern Denmark, was once one of the wealthiest cities of Europe. Its wealth derived from its location and a subtle threat of force. You see, its cannons dominated the narrow body of water called the Oresund. Any ship of size passing from the Atlantic into the Baltic had to pass the line of sight of those cannons. Elsinore took advantage of this strategic position, starting in 1429, by charging a toll called the Sound Dues....

By Dan WhitcombLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A wildfire raged out of control in the high desert east of Los Angeles on Wednesday, injuring two firefighters and one civilian and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents of three small communities.The fire broke out shortly after 2 p.m. near a back-country road south of Banning, about 90 miles outside Los Angeles in Riverside County.Within hours it had blackened more than 5,000 acres, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Daniel Berlandt said....

Seeing is smelling for a camera system developed by scientists in Japan that images ethanol vapour escaping from a wine glass. And, perhaps most importantly, no wine is wasted in the process. Kohji Mitsubayashi, at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, and colleagues impregnated a mesh with the enzyme alcohol oxidase, which converts low molecular weight alcohols and oxygen into aldehydes and hydrogen peroxide. Horseradish peroxide and luminol were also immobilised on the mesh and together initiate a colour change in response to hydrogen peroxide....

A new generation of COVID booster shots are now available to most people 12 years of age and older in the U.S. The Food and Drug Administration authorized new formulations of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines for use as a single booster dose just a few weeks ago. That decision was quickly endorsed by an immunization advisory panel at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The updated boosters target the newer, widely spread Omicron subvariants of the COVID-causing virus, BA....

In May 2020, a scientist named Rick Bright, who was leading the COVID-19 vaccine development at the Department of Health and Human Services, filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging that he had faced retaliation for raising alarms about shortages of critical supplies and the president’s promotion of potentially dangerous and unproven drug remedies for the virus. In October, he resigned, stating that he could no longer work for an administration that ignored scientific expertise, overruled public health guidance, and disrespected career scientists....

Climate change just got another telling visual courtesy of the famed temperature spiral creator. But rather than a graph, it’s a series of 167 maps. Alone, they each tell the story of whether a year was mostly hot or mostly cold or mostly average. Together, they show unequivocally how much our planet has warmed since the 1850s, including the rapid rise over the past three decades. Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, is responsible for the latest visual....

A total of 203 people have won the Nobel Prize in physics, but only two were women (Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963). Many scientists say those numbers point to a fundamental problem with the prizes and how they are awarded. Science writer and physicist Matthew Francis wrote on his blog, Galileo’s Pendulum, that the prize favors men of European descent, and European and American researchers in general....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. The World Food Prize laureates for 2013 were announced in June. They are Marc van Montagu, Mary-Dell Chilton and Rob Fraley. These scientists played seminal roles, together with the late Jeff Schell, in developing modern plant molecular modification techniques. Fraley is chief technology officer of Monsanto. Chilton is a Distinguished Science Fellow at Syngenta. Montagu founded Plant Genetic Systems (now part of Bayer CropScience) and CropDesign (today owned by BASF)....

Despite a string of funding challenges in the past year, the picture is not bleak for the carbon capture and sequestration industry. That message is in a new report being released this morning from the Global CCS Institute, an Australia-based organization that studies the industry. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) involves the capture of carbon dioxide from power generators or industrial factories and storage of the captured gas underground. In its annual assessment of CCS projects around the world, the institute said that 2011 was a year of “measured progress....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. For an explanation of why vaccines, in general, do not protect us for at least several days or even weeks after a final shot, see Katherine J. Wu’s 3/17/21 piece at The Atlantic. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says we should not start to change our behavior, e....

Deicing Antarctica has lost a significant amount of ice in the past few years, find Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr of the University of Colorado at Boulder. They used measurements taken from April 2002 to August 2005 by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). It consists of two orbiting satellites whose separation is affected by slight gravitational tugs caused by the shifting of mass on the earth’s surface. The changes can be measured to an accuracy of one micron....

Editor’s note: Chris Berdik’s Mind Over Mind examines the myriad effects of expectations—whether the eager eyes of sports fans on a key player, anticipating a sip of expensive wine or the mysterious medical efficacy of a placebo. In this excerpt, Berdik describes a peculiar contagion that some scientists attribute to the placebo’s harmful counterpart, the nocebo effect—in which our expectations cause harm. Excerpted from Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations, by Chris Berdik....

The Egyptian town of Mallawi is not on the main tourist beat, given its location 260 miles and a seven-hour train ride north of the temple complexes at Luxor. But one of us (Symons) traveled there in May 2013 with Robert Cockcroft, a postdoctoral researcher in her laboratory, hoping to see one of the oldest astronomical records in the world. The record, which had been described only vaguely, was indeed there, but to their astonishment, it was not the only one....

“Put a human in the sea, and they are pretty useless,” says marine ecologist Kelly J. Benoit-Bird of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “They can’t breathe. They can only see as far as the end of their outstretched arm. They can’t make any sense of the sounds they hear.” Maybe that’s why, since humans have been on Earth, the sea has been an enigma to us. The oceans cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface, and by volume they provide 99 percent of the planet’s living space....

For patients with Parkinson’s disease, deep-brain stimulation (DBS) offers relief from physical symptoms. This surgical procedure involves implanting ultrathin wire electrodes into a specific area of the brain. To treat Parkinson’s, surgeons target a brain structure called the subthalamic nucleus, near the center of the brain. Electrodes, sometimes referred to collectively as a “brain pacemaker,” deliver high-frequency electrical pulses that interfere with neuronal activity in the targeted brain tissue. To date, more than 100,000 Parkinson’s patients have been treated in with this technique....

By Kagondu Njagi NAIROBI, May 31 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As they struggle to deal with more extreme weather, a range of food crops are generating more of chemical compounds that can cause health problems for people and livestock who eat them, scientists have warned. A new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says that crops such as wheat and maize are generating more potential toxins as a reaction to protect themselves from extreme weather....