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One Sunday in November 20-year-old Alani Murrieta of Phoenix began to feel sick and left work early. She had no preexisting medical conditions but her health declined at a frighteningly rapid pace, as detailed by her family and friends in local media and on BuzzFeed News. The next day she went to an urgent care clinic, where she was diagnosed with the flu and prescribed the antiviral medication Tamiflu. But by Tuesday morning she was having trouble breathing and was spitting up blood....

On the Internet, ads are a real problem. They’re a problem for us, the people, and not just because they clutter up our Web pages; they also cost us money (in mobile data charges), battery life and time. As much as 79 percent of the time it takes for a news Web site to load on your phone is waiting for the ads to arrive, according to a New York Times analysis....

Bea writes: “Can you comment on research showing that creatine supplements can improve cognitive function in vegetarians? Do I need to worry about my vegan diet hurting my brain?” If you’ve heard much about creatine, you’ve probably heard it in the context of enhancing athletic performance. My colleague, Brock Armstrong, recently devoted an episode of the Get-Fit Guy podcast to the potential uses of creatine to build muscle. But creatine has also been investigated as potential a nootropic....

More than a million people in Northern California lost power yesterday in an intentional blackout that reveals the stunning measures utilities and state officials will take to ameliorate the risk of wildfire as the effects of climate change become more apparent. Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which provides electric service to 5.4 million customers in California, said it cut power to 800,000 of them to protect people, work crews and property from a potential outbreak of wildfires....

A federal court judge yesterday threw out lawsuits from two California cities seeking to make oil companies pay for worsening sea-level rise and other climate change impacts. Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted the request from five oil companies seeking dismissal of the cases brought by San Francisco and Oakland. They were suing Chevron Corp., BP PLC, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, arguing that the companies make and sell products that when combusted create a public nuisance....

By Andrew M. Seaman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - As attitudes and laws in the U.S. have become more tolerant of marijuana, the proportion of adults using and abusing the substance at least doubled between 2001 and 2013, according to a new study. Although marijuana dependence and abuse was found to be on the rise, that is largely due to the overall increase in new users, researchers note, while existing marijuana users experienced a 15% decline in pot-related disorders....

Here’s how to make a powerful solar cell from nanowires: First, arrange microscopic flecks of gold on a semiconductor background. Using the gold as a foundation, build wires roughly 1.5 micron tall out of chemically tweaked compounds of indium and phosphorus using heat and vacuum pressure. Keep the nanowires in line by etching them clean with hydrochloric acid and confine their diameter to 180 nanometers. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter....

After her children were exposed to COVID, Megan, a woman in Illinois, took them to get tested. A rapid test from the local drugstore might have sufficed, but her son Brennan really did not like the nasal swab—it tickled, it was sometimes painful, and it was just not a fun experience. So Megan took her children to a testing site where Brennan spat into a tube that was then sent off to a lab for processing....

Harlem and the South Bronx have some of the highest asthma rates in New York City. And these predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods—studded with smokestacks and crisscrossed by gridlocked highways—are emblematic of a large body of research showing clear racial disparities in exposure to air pollution. A study published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA shows that even though black and Hispanic people in the U....

A brine pool is a rare and bizarre anomaly of nature: water so dense with salt that it won’t mix with seawater and forms a clearly defined “lake” on the ocean floor, becoming a toxic environment where few organisms survive. Now researchers have discovered a unique brine pool in an arm of the Red Sea that preserves sediments revealing a pristine, 1,000-year history of flash floods, tsunamis and earthquakes. Brine pools form in places where a sea was cut off from other oceans in the deep past and evaporated, leaving behind subsurface salt deposits....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The automobile is a killer. In the U.S., 36,675 people died in traffic accidents in 2014. The year before, 2.3 million people were injured in traffic accidents. During the past decade, over 438 U.S. municipalities, including 36 of the 50 most populous cities, have employed electronic monitoring programs in order to reduce the number of accidents....

Women certainly know when they experience one, but science, on the other hand, knows surprisingly little about the female orgasm. Most studies have looked at animals rather than humans, focusing on how sensory information flows to and from the sex organs. Now a new study suggests that a woman’s orgasms have more to do with her brain than with her body. Not only do neural networks play a large role, but the feelings a woman has for her sexual partner are tied to just how good her orgasms are....

From The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life, by Alex Bellos. Copyright © 2014 Alex Bellos. Excerpted with permission by Simon & Schuster. One response to numbers is affection. After counting, calculating and quantifying with our numerical tools it is common to develop feelings for them. Jerry Newport, for example, loves some numbers like friends. I had not realized the depth of our collective number love, however, until I conducted an online experiment, asking members of the public to nominate their favorite numbers and explain their choices....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. At the end of the last episode on how to calculate probabilities, I assigned you a little project about flipping 1, 2, 3, and finally 4 coins at once. Your first goal was to use a probability tree—or any other method you like—to figure out how many possible outcomes there are in each case....

Editor’s note: The original 60-Second podcast version is here Schizophrenia typically shows up in young adults. For men it tends to emerge around 20 to 28 years and peak onset for women is between 26 to 32 years. But what triggers the disease during this time? Well past studies have shown that mutations in a gene called DISC1 are linked to schizophrenia. DISC1 enables a guide to new nerve cells—sort of like a traffic cop—sending them to the right place to make the right connections to other cells....

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Facebook offered a deep dive into its its News Feed ranking algorithm on Tuesday, expounding on why it moves up old stories and how it picks which stories it thinks you want to see. Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager in charge of News Feed ranking, explained how Facebook sorts through the “tens of thousands” of potential posts users put on Facebook each day. While there is a median of 1,500 potential stories that a user can see daily, Facebook inserts about 300 based on an algorithm that guesses how interested you will be in a post by factoring users’ reactions to previous posts and the users....

I taught a class a few years ago at Columbia Business School called “What Makes a Hit a Hit—and a Flop a Flop.” As a grizzled 25-year veteran of tech product reviews, I intended to bestow my hard-won wisdom on this group of young, idealistic entrepreneurs-to-be. I shared, for example, the story of the Storm, which was the first touch-screen BlackBerry phone. BlackBerry rushed it out the door, riddled with embarrassing bugs, hoping to catch the 2008 holiday season....

A new genus and species of extinct saber-toothed cat has been found in Polk County, Fla., scientists say. The fossil, which is 5 million years old, is related to the well-known carnivorous predator Smilodon fatalis from the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles. The group of saber-toothed cats called Smilodontini was thought to have originated in the Old World and later migrated to North America, but the new species’ age suggests the group evolved in North America, researchers reported March 13 in the journal PLOS ONE....

We all know the basics of being healthy: eat well, exercise, and get some rest (especially when you’ve got your country’s 500th anniversary to plan, your wedding to arrange, your wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it) because, as they say, if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything. But how to improve the health that happens between our ears? Today, we’ll do a checkup of seven beliefs emotionally healthy people hold....

His finalist year: 1992 His finalist project: Teaching a computer to simulate how insects might learn to walk What led to the project: Ben Raphael was “very into artificial intelligence” and robots in general as a child. But rather than becoming obsessed with Isaac Asimov novels as many kids do, “I was more science nerd than a science fiction nerd,” he says. He read as much as he could about neural networks—basically, complex computer programs that simulate how the brain and nervous systems solve problems....