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The Coast Guard says it’s making good progress in the Arctic, an unusually upbeat assessment after years of warning that a warmer North Pole will attract more ships than the coasties can handle. Those new assurances were cold comfort to lawmakers and experts at yesterday’s House Transportation subcommittee hearing, who portrayed the United States as lagging behind other global powers that recognize climate change will transform the Arctic into a critical hub for shipping, fishing and drilling....

If the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates diagnosed you with fetor hepaticus (bad liver breath), it would not be an insult but a friendly warning. It meant the scent of your breath indicated you were going into liver failure. Much of ancient Greek medical knowledge has fallen into obscurity, but using the breath as an indicator of health remains. Researchers have for years worked to develop accurate, inexpensive and portable electronic olfactory sensing technology that can be used to detect and monitor asthma, kidney disease, high cholesterol and a number of other conditions....

Neurodegenerative diseases were once considered disorders of the mind, rooted in psychology. Now viruses rank among the environmental factors thought to trigger brain-ravaging diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and Alzheimer’s disease. Human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6), in particular, has been linked to MS in past studies. Neuroscientist Steven Jacobson and his colleagues at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke have determined that the virus makes its entry to the human brain through the olfactory pathway, right along with the odors wafting into our nose....

On a civic scale, health brings wealth. And no society can be healthy without the proper disposal of human waste. The filthy fact is that what might seem like common convenience to many folks in developed areas is still out of reach for a significant portion of Earth’s residents. The World Health Organization predicts that in four years 2.7 billion people around the globe will still lack access to basic sanitation....

By Emma MarrisEndlessly energetic scholar David Sloan Wilson is best known for his work on group selection–the idea that natural selection can operate on traits that improve the success of groups rather than individuals.As well as running a cross-disciplinary evolutionary studies program from his home institution of Binghamton University in New York and opening the Evolution Institute think tank to inform public policy, he recently began studying altruism in Binghamton neighborhoods and is promoting the field of evolutionary religious studies....

The marked slowdown in the past decade of the warm Atlantic Ocean currents that bring mild weather to northwestern Europe may be caused by natural variation and not anthropogenic climate change, as has been previously suggested. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is part of the great ocean ‘conveyor belt’ that ceaselessly circulates sea water, heat and nutrients around the globe. In particular, it transports large amounts of warm water from the tropics to the poles, warming the British Isles and maritime northern Europe along the way (see ‘Current affair’)....

Factories in Russia increased their production of industrial waste products and then claimed millions of carbon credits for destroying them after an international trading scheme went into effect. Evidence published in Nature Climate Change reveals that several Russian chemical plants increased production of highly potent greenhouse-gas waste to “unprecedented levels” after they could reap financial benefits from their disposal. Carbon credits grant nations the right to emit gases that contribute to global warming....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineEarly next year, a drug for cystic fibrosis is expected to come before the US Food and Drug Administration for approval. It is a moment that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) will have waited 12 years and invested US$75 million to witness. Approval of the drug, VX-770–developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with support from the foundation–would provide a new treatment for patients, and a revenue stream for the charity....

The Outer Space Treaty (OST) turns 50 this month. The foundational 1967 pact establishes space as “the province of all mankind” and forbids the nearly 100 states that have ratified or acceded to it from colonizing celestial bodies or using them for military operations. The agreement is taking on renewed relevance with the looming prospect of asteroid mining—a possibility that was barely imaginable when the treaty was forged but is now a near reality....

Genetic engineering could play a role in making crops more resilient to climate change, but more research is still needed to understand the technology’s potential uses, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday. In a sweeping 400-page report, the country’s top scientific group found there was not evidence to support claims that genetically modified organisms are dangerous for either the environment or human health. At the same time, the introduction of genetically engineered crops had little apparent influence on the rate at which agricultural productivity was increasing over time....

Vaccines are key to ending the pandemic, experts say, but vaccinations alone will not be sufficient. Pharmaceutical companies have been racing to find new life-saving therapies to treat COVID, which could also help break the chain of viral transmission in the population. Now two powerful new “game-changing” antiviral drugs will help accomplish that, according to researchers. Clinical trials of both drugs were halted early because they were so much more effective than a placebo....

Charles Darwin once wrote in his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy and love.” That was in 1872. Now, nearly 150 years later, researchers have discovered more evidence that Darwin might have been onto something. Bumblebees seem to have a “positive emotionlike state,” according to a study published this week in Science. In other words, they may experience something akin to happiness....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It (University of California Press, April 4, 2011). Elena Githeko was normally energetic and chatty. But on a Tuesday morning in 2003, Elena’s mother, Anne Mwangi, found her daughter quiet and listless, her forehead warm with fever. Anne thought it was just the flu, so she did what any concerned mother would do: she stayed home from work to care for her daughter....

My research and work on what we call “racial microaggressions” began through a series of lifelong experiences and observations of interpersonal racial encounters. For example, I am a second-generation Asian American, born and raised in the U.S. Yet despite that fact, I receive constant compliments for speaking “good” English. On crowded New York City subway trains, with all seats taken, I noticed that there would always be an empty one next to a Black passenger....

They say that the early bird catches the worm. The truth, of course, is a bit more complicated. Garden songbirds have one task during the winter, which is to survive long enough to breed during the spring and summer. Small birds can lose up to 10 percent of their body weight in a single night, so they need to eat well every day. But if they pack on too much weight, they might slow down, leaving them vulnerable to predators such as the sparrow hawk....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter are in a critical condition in a hospital in Salisbury, UK, following exposure to an unknown nerve agent. Several locations in the city have been cordoned off and decontaminated since the pair were found unconscious on a park bench on March 5. But what are nerve agents exactly and how do they affect the body?...

An international team of astronomers has discovered a new class of stars–massively compressed old neutron stars that seem inactive but for intermittent bursts of radio waves. Dubbing them rotating radio transients (RRATs), the researchers note that their isolated outbursts last for as few as two milliseconds and are separated by gaps as long as three hours. “These things were very difficult to pin down,” says Dick Manchester of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Australia Telescope National Facility....

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny,’” Isaac Asimov once said. Well, something seriously funny is going on in theoretical physics these days. A recent conundrum about black holes is threatening to overturn some of the most basic tenets of physics, and many scientists are nothing but thrilled. “To me it’s the best thing that’s happened in awhile,” says University of California, Berkeley, physicist Raphael Bousso of the so-called “black hole firewall paradox,” which concerns what happens at the boundary of a black hole....

OCEAN GLOW I read Michelle Nijhuis’s article “The Mystery of Milky Seas” with great interest. I was in the U.S. Navy in 1975, and my ship was doing a cruise in the Indian Ocean early that year. We encountered the kind of bioluminescence Nijhuis describes, which was truly amazing. The experience was not just limited to watching the ocean: We had a lot of fun with this phenomenon by filling buckets of seawater with our fire mains and then spilling them across the deck....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Paleontologists like us are used to working with fossils that would seem bizarre to many biologists accustomed to living creatures. And as we go farther back in Earth’s history, the fossils start to look even weirder. They lack tails, legs, skeletons, eyes…any characteristics that would help us understand where these organisms fit in the tree of life....