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Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of COVID-19 is its startling range of severity: from completely asymptomatic to deadly. Starting early in the pandemic, researchers identified factors that put people at risk of a serious case of the disease, such as advanced age, having certain chronic diseases and being male. But these demographic trends do not get at the biological mechanisms that actually cause a life-threatening infection. Nor do they explain why some young, fit, healthy people become mortally ill from the SARS-CoV-2 virus....

Here’s a mysterious truth that scientists have known since 1983: Protons and neutrons act differently when they’re inside an atom, versus floating freely through space. Specifically, the subatomic particles that make up those protons and neutrons, called quarks, slow down massively once they’re confined to a nucleus in an atom. Physicists really didn’t like this, because neutrons are neutrons whether they’re inside an atom or not. And protons are protons. Both protons and neutrons (which together make up the class of particles called “nucleons”) are made up of three smaller particles, called quarks, bound together by the strong force....

The first 2020 presidential debate did not go well for Donald Trump. Viewers were turned off by the president’s constant hectoring of Joe Biden. And many were alarmed when he not only declined to denounce white supremacists but went so far as to tell a far-right neofascist group to “stand by.” Polling by FiveThirtyEight revealed that 50 percent of people who watched the event rated Trump’s performance as “very poor.” But while Biden clearly won the debate, this does not mean he will win the election....

To anyone who’s aware that efforts to develop Alzheimer’s drug treatments have met failure after failure, and to have therefore decided that prevention is the only hope, a U.S. panel of experts issued a sobering message on Thursday: Don’t count on it. From physical activity to avoiding high blood pressure to brain training, a 17-member committee assembled by the National Academies of Sciences concluded, no interventions are “supported by high-strength evidence....

“In an unchanging world, you don’t see a lot of emerging disease,” epidemiologist William Karesh told Scientific American contributor Lois Parshley during her reporting for this special section, The Future of Medicine 2018. The world, of course, is changing fast. In the U.S., growing economic inequality is driving a resurgence of deadly hepatitis, Legionnaires’ and other infections. Globally, climate change and unchecked urbanization are creating conditions in which diseases emerge faster and spread farther....

Key concepts Chemistry Reactions Supersaturation Nucleation Introduction You’ve probably seen the reaction that happens when you add Mentos candy to a bottle of diet soda. The resulting eruption can be powerful enough to be dangerous, and is the source of many online videos! Although many people are familiar with this reaction, few of them understand the science behind why it takes place. Mentos plus soda is not actually a chemical reaction but rather a physical one called nucleation....

For more than a decade, researchers have sought to solve the puzzle of fast radio bursts, millisecond chirps of radio waves that seem to appear at random in the sky, likely from unknown sources millions or even billions of light-years away. Theorists have many ideas for what causes them, including stellar flares, cataclysmic mergers of neutron stars and evaporating black holes. They have so many ideas, in fact, that the theories for FRB sources have long outnumbered the recorded bursts....

A few years ago then 28-year-old Michelle Rapp, a Cornell University graduate, experienced a series of unfortunate events. First, she lost her job in a mass layoff at a San Francisco start-up. Then, anxious to get back to work, she took a physically demanding job at a Chinatown tea shop—but weeks later she threw out her hip while carrying boxes up the store’s steps. Unable to walk and go on job interviews and feeling stressed and demoralized, she immersed herself in a cerebral and competitive card game, Magic: The Gathering....

Mark Denison began hunting for a drug to treat COVID-19 almost a decade before the contagion, driven by a novel coronavirus, devastated the world this year. Denison is not a prophet, but he is a virologist and an expert on the often deadly coronavirus family, members of which also caused the SARS outbreak in 2002 and the MERS eruption in 2012. It is a big viral group, and “we were pretty certain another one would soon emerge,” says Denison, who directs the division of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center....

Just as the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 approaches new highs in some parts of the country, hospital data in Kansas and Missouri is suddenly incomplete or missing. The Missouri Hospital Association reports that it no longer has access to the data it uses to guide state coronavirus mitigation efforts, and Kansas officials say their hospital data may be delayed. The Trump administration this week directed hospitals to change how they report data to the federal government and how that data will be made available....

When U.S. scientists launch the first large-scale clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines this summer, Antonio Cisneros wants to make sure people like him are included. Cisneros, who is 34 and Hispanic, is part of the first wave of an expected 1.5 million volunteers willing to get the shots to help determine whether leading vaccine candidates can thwart the virus that sparked a deadly pandemic. “If I am asked to participate, I will,” said Cisneros, a Los Angeles cinematographer who has signed up for two large vaccine trial registries....

The hunt for life on other planets is due for a makeover. Although it is often confined to planets orbiting in the so-called habitable zone where proximity to their host stars makes temperatures just right for liquid water, many astronomers are beginning to think outside the “Goldilocks” box. Some wonder if previously overlooked mechanisms—including life itself—could broaden the habitable zone well beyond its current definition. Colin Goldblatt, a planetary scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, even argues that life’s ability to alter a planet’s climate poses a new paradox: A planet’s habitability could depend on whether life has already made itself at home there, a situation that would place habitability and life in a baffling chicken-or-egg scenario....

It was a routine task for any dolphin trainer. But one November day in 1980, teaching a dolphin to eat defrosted fish turned into an experience that Diana Reiss still talks about almost 30 years later. Reiss was working toward her doctorate in animal communication, and she had left the U.S. for a two-year research stay in France. On that day in November, in a small port town in the eastern Pyrenees, she was tossing fish to a captive female dolphin....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Men may not be from Mars, but – compared to women – they do communicate in very different ways. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the relationships of fathers and sons. Outwardly, many father and son pairs may appear distant and disengaged. A guy who wouldn’t think twice about hugging and kissing his mom might offer his father only a stilted handshake....

When Ebola occurred in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea between 2014 and 2016, it spread widely because those countries did not have the public health systems they needed to stop the virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with other international and national institutions, helped to supply material and expertise essential to end that outbreak. To prevent this kind of disease disaster from happening again, the U.S. government then ramped up its global infectious disease preparedness as part of a new international initiative called the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA)....

By Byron Kaye SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia faces a A$17 billion ($13.3 billion) exodus of investment from its windfarm industry because of a political deadlock, threatening to deal the country a major economic blow and kill hopes of meeting a self-imposed clean energy target. Some 44 Australian windfarm projects, about half overseas-funded, have been shelved since a new conservative government said it wanted to cut state support for the industry a year ago, with investors and operators saying they are considering either downscaling or leaving the country altogether if it succeeds....

Americans’ appetite for trucks and SUVs drove auto sales to new heights in 2016. Major automakers and analysts put the final tally slightly above 2015’s record 17.5 million vehicles sold as stronger-than-expected December sales figures rolled in yesterday. Amid low gas prices, Americans are continuing to choose bigger and less fuel-efficient trucks and SUVs over passenger cars. An increase in sales of the bigger vehicles of around 7 percent in 2016 over 2015 offset a decline of up to 8 percent in sales of small to medium-sized cars, according to data provider Autotrader....

Around 40,000 years ago, the giant kangaroo disappeared from Australia. So did Diprotodon (rhinoceros-size wombats) and Palorchestes (tapirlike marsupials) as well as supersize birds, reptiles and some 50 other so-called megafauna—big animals. And now a record of fungal spores pulled from the swamp at Lynch’s Crater in the northeastern corner of the continent reveals humans as the culprit. “The megafauna declined soon after the time that we know people arrived in the region,” explains zoologist Christopher Johnson of the University of Tasmania, lead author of the report published March 23 in Science....

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 Pick up this book during a meal, and you might find yourself pausing to marvel at the amazing properties of the steel in your fork, the ceramic of your plate, the textiles on your chair and myriad other materials. Miodownik, a materials scientist, explains the history and science behind things such as paper, glass, chocolate and concrete with an infectious enthusiasm....

You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further, that it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. So kick off your week right with this GIF-able science. Enjoy and loop on. Why Things Go Boom Credit: Alexei Y. Poludnenko, Jessica Chambers, Kareem Ahmed, Vadim N. Gamezo, Brian D. Taylor, rendering by the U....