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A new pilot study shows that eating right, exercising and reducing stress may help keep chronic diseases at bay by switching on beneficial genes, including tumor-fighters, and silencing those that trigger malignancies and other ills. “We found that simple changes have a powerful impact on gene expression,” Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco (U.C.S.F.), said during a news conference....

The geometric shapes of plateaus, peaks and outcrops of bare brown rock look over endless valleys of olive-yellow grasslands. Their austerity and majesty—along with the herds of guanacos and wild horses—announce that this is a decidedly Patagonian landscape. At the top of one of the hills Marcelo Leppe contemplates the slope of loose soil at his feet. It is covered with clear stones arranged haphazardly. The sunset’s oblique light illuminates the pieces protruding from the sands, suddenly revealing their true identities....

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - The Florida health department said on Wednesday it is investigating another two cases of Zika not related to travel to a place where the virus is being transmitted, raising the possibility of local Zika transmission in the continental United States. The health department said it has identified an additional case of Zika in Miami-Dade County, where it was already investigating a possible case of Zika not related to travel, and another case in Broward County, where it has been investigating a non-travel related case....

By Verna Gates Bristol Tenn. (Reuters) - A variety of sunflower found in some Southern states and two other rare plants were designated on Friday as endangered species by the U.S. federal government. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the whorled sunflower, Short’s bladderpod and fleshy-fruit gladecress for protection under the Endangered Species Act because populations of the three are dwindling to critical levels. The agency blamed the trend on a loss of natural habitats due to construction, damage from off-road vehicles and fluctuating water levels, as well as competition from invasive, non-native plants....

Editor’s note (4/2/2017): This week marks the 100-year anniversary of the U.S. entry into the First World War. Scientific American, founded in 1845, spent the war years covering the monumental innovations that changed the course of history, from the first tanks and aerial combat to the first widespread attacks with chemical weapons. To mark the centennial, we are republishing the article below and many others. For full access to our archival coverage of the Great War sign up for an All Access subscription today....

Judith Keppel was a single question away from taking home £1 million. She was in the final round of a British quiz show, and she had to face one last challenge to become the show’s first victor: “Which king was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine?”After a brief discussion with the show’s host, Chris Tarrant, she settled on Henry II. Then Tarrant asked her the killer question, the moment when contestants often agonize the most: “Final answer?...

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineThe world’s largest laser has just put a little more zing in its zap. On 15 March, the 192 laser beams of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, fired a record 1.875-megajoule shot into the laser’s target chamber, surpassing its 1.8-megajoule design specification. The shot, which was just a demonstration and did not incorporate a target, nonetheless represents a milepost in an effort to get past the break-even point – ignition – in coaxing fusion energy from a tiny frozen fuel pellet....

A week after the most recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was declared over, the country has confirmed it has found more cases of the disease. The new cases are in a province at the opposite end of the country from the earlier outbreak, making it unclear if this is a new epidemic or a continuation of the previous one. But a statement from the ministry of health on Wednesday said the distance of more than 1,500 miles suggests these cases are not linked to the outbreak in Bikoro....

Lithium ion batteries that can be stretched by 600% have been unveiled by scientists in China. In the future, the fibre shaped batteries could be woven into textiles to satisfy the ever-growing requirement for wearable devices. Huisheng Peng and colleagues at Fudan University made the superelastic batteries by winding two carbon nanotubes–lithium oxide composites yarns, which served as the positive and negative electrodes, onto an elastomer substrate and covering this with a layer of gel electrolyte....

The Samoan moss spider, the world’s smallest arachnid at a third of a millimeter, is nearly invisible to the human eye. The largest spider in the world is the goliath bird eater tarantula, which weighs 142 grams and is about the size of a dinner plate. For reference, that is about the same difference in scale between that same tarantula and a bottlenose dolphin. And yet the bigger spider does not act in more complex ways than its tiny counterpart....

Sucking up CO2 A Swiss company is set to become the first firm to capture carbon dioxide from the air and sell it on a commercial scale, a stepping stone to larger facilities that could one day help to combat global warming. Around July, Climeworks will start capturing some 75 tons of CO2 per month at its plant near Zurich, then selling the gas to nearby greenhouses to boost crop growth....

WASHINGTON—The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday suggested a Trump administration proposal that would define someone’s sex at birth risked heightening stigma around transgender people. The director, Robert Redfield, did not directly criticize the proposal. But when asked whether any such effort might hamper efforts to treat HIV, especially among transgender women, he replied: “We need to understand that stigmatizing illness, stigmatizing individuals is not in the interest of public health....

More than a thousand Turkish university staff have been ordered to resign their faculty leadership positions—and others expect to be sacked—in the aftermath of the country’s failed coup on July 15. As president Recep Tayyip Erdoan continues to clamp down on political opposition, the Turkish Council of Higher Education (YÖK) has called for all 1,577 of the country’s university deans—the staff that head up each institution’s various academic faculties—to leave their posts....

By Mark Muhumuza KAMPALA (Reuters) - Thousands of cancer patients in Uganda will be left untreated for months after the nation’s only radiotherapy machine broke down, triggering public criticism about underfunding in the health system weeks after the president’s re-election. The device, bought in 1995 and sited at the main Mulago referral hospital, stopped working early in April, Christine Namulindwa, the cancer unit spokeswoman told Reuters. A new machine was bought in 2013 but the government delayed allocating 30 billion shillings ($8....

Most people don’t think of turtles as being exceptionally chatty—or even making sounds at all. But research published today in Nature Communications reveals that at least 50 turtle species vocalize—and that several other types of cold-blooded vertebrates previously assumed to be silent do so, too. The finding has broader implications because of the evolutionary history of the species studied. The fact that these supposedly silent species all use sounds to communicate allowed researchers to trace vocalizations back to a common vertebrate ancestor that lived 407 million years ago....

Children and Adolescents (under 19 years old) Prevalence: 17 percent of children aged 9 to 12 7.5 percent of teenagers aged 13 to 18 Risk factors: Maternal infection during pregnancy. Intense trauma, such as extreme bullying or sexual abuse. Some researchers believe the voices may be a coping mechanism. Outcomes: The majority of adolescents who hear voices do not go on to develop psychosis; most children do not suffer significant behavioral or emotional consequences....

More than half of American adults take vitamin pills. I’ve watched in wonder as some of my more health-conscious friends kick off their morning with an impressive array of multicolored supplements: A, C, D, calcium, magnesium, you name it. And it’s not just my friends: data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) indicate a trend away from all-in-one multivitamins and toward specific supplements—especially fish oil and vitamin D....

Linda Kenney, a professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, says something has to be done about the “dumbing down of science” by politicians. After reading about a group called 314 Action working to elect scientists to public office, it did not take much for Kenney to open her wallet. Now Kenney says she donates about $100 monthly to the group. “This is way overdue,” she says....

Nearly one in 10 older adults in the U.S. have osteoporosis, according to a new government report. The findings showed that 16 percent of women and 4 percent of men ages 50 and older have osteoporosis, a condition in which bones become thinner and less dense over time, the report from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. “Knowing how many people have osteoporosis is important because it puts people at a higher risk for fractures,” said Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist at the CDC who did not work on the new report....

Arctic sea ice continues to suffer long-term declines—and many scientists are concerned the region is inching toward a future that will see no ice cover during the warmest months. Ice-free summers could help accelerate climate change in the rapidly warming Arctic, scientists say, and have profound consequences on the region’s delicate ecosystem, from algae to polar bears. As a result, researchers are carefully monitoring the life cycle of Arctic sea ice to keep tabs on how it’s responding to climate change....