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A surprising number of African-Americans believe the government is trying to keep them in check through birth control. Public health researchers Sheryl Thorburn of Oregon State University and Laura M. Bogart of Rand Corporation surveyed 500 African-Americans across the U.S. They found that 34 percent agreed that “whites want to keep the numbers of black people down.” And 14 percent thought that “the government is trying to limit the black population by encouraging the use of condoms....

Billions of years before humans developed hard drives, evolution chose DNA to store its most precious information: the genetic code. Over time DNA became so proficient at this task that every known life-form on earth uses it. With recent technological breakthroughs that allow us to easily “read” and “write” DNA, scientists are now repurposing this age-old molecule to store new types of information—the kind that humans are generating at an exponential rate in the age of big data....

The coast of the West Antarctic landmass is one of the most desolate places on the planet. For 1,000 kilometers, it is buried under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a series of interconnected glaciers the size of western Europe that slowly slides off the continent into the sea. As the ice crosses the end of the buried land, it becomes a flat shelf hundreds of meters thick that extends hundreds of kilometers farther out to sea, floating on the water....

THE BIOMEDICAL WORLD IS AWASH IN DATA. We have terabytes of genomic information from mouse to human, troves of health metrics from clinical trials, and reams of so-called real-world data from insurance companies and pharmacies. Using powerful computers, scientists have scrutinized this bounty with some fine results, but it has become clear that we can learn much more with an assist from artificial intelligence. Over the next decade deep-learning neural networks will likely transform how we look for patterns in data and how research is conducted and applied to human health....

Dear EarthTalk: In renovating a vacation cabin, I discovered carpenter ants working their way through the walls. Is there any way to responsibly get rid of the pests without using noxious chemicals that could potentially harm my family? – Curran Clark, Lummi Island, WA Carpenter ants may seem small and look harmless, but they can do serious damage to anything wooden in your home, including not only furniture but also the very framing and walls that hold up the house....

MARCH 1 How does the human brain process fear? Neuroscientist Joseph E. Le­Doux of New York University will reveal what we know about the biological underpinnings of fear and memory during a lecture hosted by the Oregon Health & Science University. The lecture is part of a series leading up to Brain Awareness Week (March 15–21), which inspires events worldwide. This year O.H.S.U. is hosting seven weeks of activities, including talks by leading brain researchers and science writers such as Jonah Lehrer (a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind), a workshop for teachers, a brain fair and a scientific meeting....

Researchers call it sheer coincidence that a newly discovered piece of space junk is officially designated WT1190F. But the letters in the name, which form the acronym for an unprintable expression of bafflement, are an appropriate fit for an object that is as mysterious as it is unprecedented. Scientists have worked out that WT1190F will plunge to Earth from above the Indian Ocean on November 13, making it one of the very few space objects whose impact can be accurately predicted....

Physicists routinely describe the universe as being made of tiny subatomic particles that push and pull on one another by means of force fields. They call their subject “particle physics” and their instruments “particle accelerators.” They hew to a Lego-like model of the world. But this view sweeps a little-known fact under the rug: the particle interpretation of quantum physics, as well as the field interpretation, stretches our conventional notions of “particle” and “field” to such an extent that ever more people think the world might be made of something else entirely....

By Riley SnyderRENO, Nevada (Reuters) - A couple and four young children missing in frigid weather since they went on an outing to play in the snow on Sunday were found alive in a remote mountain range in Nevada on Tuesday huddled in their overturned vehicle, a sheriff’s dispatch supervisor said.The couple had taken their two children and the woman’s niece and nephew, who range in age from 3 to 10, to an abandoned mining camp in the Seven Troughs range of northwestern Nevada, Pershing County dispatch supervisor Sheila Reitz said....

A test version of SpaceX’s new astronaut taxi, dubbed the Crew Dragon, suffered some kind of an anomaly during an engine test Saturday (April 20) at the company’s facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. According to Florida Today, large plumes of smoke were seen emanating from the area, indicating something had gone wrong. There were no injuries caused by the anomaly, which is now under control, according to officials with the 45th Space Wing based at the Air Force station....

Our planet is filled with marvelous science-based opportunities for improving human welfare at a tiny cost, but these opportunities are often unrecognized by policymakers and the public. There is no better example than treatment of a group of tropical diseases that maim and kill millions, but which are largely unknown to Americans and Europeans. Experts formally refer to them as the “neglected tropical diseases,” or NTDs. They are hellish infections whose combined impact on disease, disability and death rivals the impacts of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, yet they are far less known, partly because they are diseases that afflict only the poor in the tropics....

Imagine a vaccine that protects against more than a half-dozen types of cancer—and has a decade of data and experience behind it. We have one. It’s the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, and it was approved for the U.S. market back in June 2006. It can prevent almost all cervical cancers and protect against cancers of the mouth, throat and anus. It also combats the sexually transmitted genital warts that some forms of the virus can cause....

Traditional discussions of how humanity became the dominant form of life, with a population of more than seven billion and counting, have focused on competition. Our ancestors seized land, so the story goes, wiped out other species—including our brethren the Neandertals—and hunted big predators to extinction. We conquered nature, red in tooth and claw. Overall, however, this is an unlikely scenario. Our forebears were too small and vulnerable to rule the savanna....

The appearance of a years-long supernova explosion challenges scientist’s current understanding of star formation and death, and work is underway to explain the bizarre phenomenon. Stars more than eight times the mass of the sun end their lives in fantastic explosions called supernovas. These are among the most energetic phenomena in the universe. The brightness of a single dying star can briefly rival that of an entire galaxy. Supernovas that form from supermassive stars typically rise quickly to a peak brightness and then fade over the course of around 100 days as the shock wave loses energy....

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean Little, Brown, 2014 Some people’s tragedies have been science’s miracles, particularly in the field of neuroscience, where researchers have long relied on rare brain traumas to reveal the workings of the mind. “Despite the (often overhyped) advances of fMRI and other brain-scanning technologies, injuries remain the best, and only, way to infer certain things about the brain,” writes journalist Kean....

An international meeting dedicated to the conservation of Antarctica’s delicate ocean ecosystems has once again ended in deadlock. For the sixth year in a row, members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR)—part of the Antarctic Treaty System—failed to agree on any new marine protected areas in the fragile Southern Ocean. That’s despite the support of a majority of CCAMLR’s member parties. Just two nations—China and Russia—declined to support new marine protected areas, or MPAs, this year....

Before the arrival of the U.S. Army in the mid-1800s, four mountains marked the boundary of the Navajo’s ancestral homeland. Today, the tribe could draw a line around its reservation with coal. Four coal-fired power plants and three coal mines ring the Navajo Nation, a testament to the black rock’s complicated legacy on a sprawling reservation that occupies large swaths of high desert in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. But coal’s days in Navajo country are increasingly numbered....

The common housefly is a marvel of aeronautical engineering. One reason the fly is a master at evading the handheld swatter is that its wings beat remarkably fast—about 200 times a second. To achieve this amazing speed, the fly makes use of complex biomechanics. Its wings are not directly attached to the muscles of the thorax. Rather the fly tenses and relaxes the muscles in rhythmic cycles that cause the thorax itself to change shape....

The US patent office ruled on Wednesday that hotly disputed patents on the revolutionary genome-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 belong to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, dealing a blow to the University of California in its efforts to overturn those patents. In a one-sentence decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that the University of California shared with STAT, the three judges decided that there is “no interference in fact....

Police officers investigating a crime may hesitate to interview drunk witnesses. But waiting until they sober up may not be the best strategy; people remember more while they are still inebriated than they do a week later, a new study finds. Malin Hildebrand Karlén, a senior psychology lecturer at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, and her colleagues recruited 136 people and gave half of them vodka mixed with orange juice. The others drank only juice....