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DENVER – The widespread impacts of September’s extraordinary rainfall in Colorado’s Front Range, from landslides to peak river flows, are still being cataloged by scientists across the state. Colorado’s landscape is known for its dramatic topography, and that topography also made the land’s response to significant rainfall dramatic. Massive landslides, which tore up roads, destroyed buildings and killed three people, were just one example. U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jonathan Godt showed a map of the area where flood-related landslides occurred....

Amid all the political battlefronts in the effort to reform our multi­-trillion-dollar health care system, some of the most potentially worthwhile initiatives have received little notice—and the notice they have received has threatened to undo them. Each of the health care bills under consideration as we went to press creates a government-supported institute to oversee research comparing the effectiveness of existing medical treatments and practices. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 also allotted $1....

Ebola, smallpox, plague—the rogue’s gallery of highly infectious deadly pathogens is frighteningly long and their potential for havoc is great, which is why they can only be studied within the tightly controlled confines of a biosafety level 4 (BSL4) facility. The precautions make work in a BSL4 extremely demanding, slow and physically taxing, which is one reason such research lags behind studies of less-lethal organisms. An Australian research team, however, recently reached a milestone when it became the first to screen and catalogue all of the genes activated by a BSL4 pathogen when it infects human cells....

The first match of the men’s football World Cup kicked off in Qatar on 20 November, when the temperature was expected to be around 30 °C and humidity approaching 60%. When Qatar first won the bid to host the tournament 12 years ago, extreme heat was one of several concerns; since then, the average annual temperature in the country has risen by around 1°C. The 2022 tournament is the first to be held in November, to avoid Qatar’s hot summer....

By Anthony Esposito and Rosalba O’Brien SANTIAGO (Reuters) - A major earthquake of magnitude 8.2 struck off the coast of northern Chile on Tuesday, causing five deaths and triggering a tsunami that pounded the shore with 2-meter-tall waves. Officials said the dead included people who were crushed by collapsing walls or were killed by heart attacks. The government evacuated Chile’s northern coast and President Michelle Bachelet declared the area a disaster zone, promising troops and police reinforcements to maintain public order while damage was repaired after landslides blocked roads....

With the passing of the summer solstice, the days are now getting shorter in the northern hemisphere. But the dog days of summer are still ahead for much of the country, as NCDC explains: The new analysis and map are based on climate data from 1981-2010, what NCDC dubs “climate normals.” Most locations in the U.S. still have a ways to go before their usual warmest day of the year according to the NCDC....

Residents of 23 US states can buy medical marijuana to treat everything from cancer pain to anxiety, but US scientists must wade through onerous paperwork to score the drug for study. Their sole dealer is the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has a contract with the University of Mississippi in Oxford to produce marijuana for research purposes. The agency has long faced complaints that its marijuana is too weak to represent what is sold on the street, and contains low levels of the non-psychedelic chemicals that show therapeutic promise for conditions such as epilepsy and chronic pain....

Electrical outages affecting some four million Texans over the past week are raising tough questions about the state’s power system, which operates somewhat like a rogue nation within the U.S. The winter storm that broke the grid may prove to be the event that forces the state to reform its grid management practices to better anticipate extreme weather events and also to end its isolation and connect to other multistate power grids around the country....

After winning the US presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden moved quickly to begin naming the experts who will advise him on a range of issues—including science. He immediately announced a task force of public-health specialists who will counsel him on a strategy to curtail the coronavirus pandemic, and he created a new position on the White House National Security Council devoted to climate change. Scientists have welcomed Biden’s swift actions in picking advisers with strong backgrounds in research and evidence-based policy....

Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes by Viki McCabe Oxford University Press, 2014 Sometimes our theories about the world take on a life of their own. We take them so seriously that we ignore the properties of our environment that generated those theories in the first place. A cognitive psychologist and visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, McCabe believes this tendency often gets out of hand, contributing to many of modern society’s tragedies and ills: the Great Recession of 2008, for example, driven by a focus on derivatives rather than by the actual value of commodities, or the death of more than 1,000 people in Hurricane Katrina, caused by faulty theories about the effectiveness of levees instead of observations about how complex natural drainage systems work....

At least 12.3 million people are subjected to some form of forced labor. Meanwhile those who exploit them clear $44 billion in profits, rivaling the performance of the world’s oil companies. These estimates come from a groundbreaking study conducted by the International Labor Organization (ILO), an arm of the United Nations. The ILO classifies forced labor into three categories: economic, state-imposed and sexual. Economic exploitation, which accounts for 64 percent of the world total, occurs mostly in less developed countries and tends to affect the most marginalized, such as the lower castes of India and Pakistan and the indigenous peoples of Nepal and Brazil....

Our September 2009 special issue on origins contains articles on 57 innovations and insights that shape our world today. They include some big ones, like the origin of life, the universe and the mind; sobering stories, like mad cow disease and HIV; and whimsical tales, like paper clips and cupcakes. This past week, we’ve posted a dozen additional online-only origins: the open-plan office space, fruit ripening, malaria, the computer mouse, atmospheric oxygen, hatred, wine, dogs, rubber boots, zero and, of course, Scientific American ....

Claims that swordfish court their mates date back to the 19th century, but science had never confirmed the phenomenon. Now, Spanish scientists have documented this reproductive behavior, including the first photographs showing a male circling a female as she prepares to lay millions of eggs for fertilization. The photos, taken from a boat in incredibly clear water and published in a recent issue of Revista de Biología Marina y Oceanografía (Journal of Marine Biology & Oceanography), are poignant: From 10 meters underwater fishermen hoist a female, whose body cavity is visibly dilated to release eggs, to the surface....

Don’t let the pretty tangerine and lemon-yellow glow in the brain pictures fool you. If its inventors are right, an elegant new neuroimaging tool provides more than fetching pictures: It shows for the first time where genes are being turned on or off in living brains, scientists reported on Wednesday. Until now, gene activation in human brains could be detected only in dead ones. By revealing DNA’s on-off choreography in brains that are still thinking, feeling, and remembering, the new technique promises to reveal genetic underpinnings of mental health and, perhaps one day, detect the earliest hints of a brain being gripped by Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, or other diseases....

Last fall my Harvard University class and I went through an exercise to help the students understand how the world might address the climate crisis and keep the average global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius. Guided by John Sterman, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students pretended to be climate negotiators, offering or blocking climate policies. Then, using En-ROADS, a computer simulation of the effects of climate policies that Sterman co-developed, they were able to see the consequences of their proposals on the 2100 average global temperature....

A fear of punishing heat waves has led the International Olympic Committee to split next year’s Summer Games between two cities. The IOC said yesterday it would relocate the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games’ men’s and women’s marathon to Sapporo instead, a city some 500 miles farther north, several degrees cooler than Tokyo in the summer and much less humid. The race walking competitions will also be held in Sapporo. Sapporo was the first city in Asia to host a Winter Olympics in 1972, but it has never hosted a summer event....

A recently declassified U.S. government plan for how to react in the face of a pandemic flu has some scary, but realistic predictions. According to a 2009 Department of Defense plan, if a flu pandemic strikes, about 30 percent of the U.S. population could fall ill, with 3 million hospitalizations and 2 million deaths. Basic services, such as medical care or essential supply deliveries, will probably be disrupted. In the plan, the government also says it assumes that a vaccine against a completely new flu strain wouldn’t become available for several months....

Health-care and emergency workers will this week begin providing medical and food aid for 25 affected villages, after a flurry of studies showed high levels of mercury in people, fish and sediments in the Madre de Dios region. The government estimates that some 48,000 people across 85,301 square kilometres have been affected. “We now know with certainty what the source of the exposure is,” says Peru’s deputy health minister, Percy Minaya....

People who are intrigued with physics are somewhat intrigued with computer science, too, but they are crazy about fashion. Who knew? Hilary Mason did. At Scientific American’s request, the chief scientist at bitly (www.bitly.com), which shortens URLs for Web users, examined 600 science Web page addresses sent to the company’s servers on August 23 and 24. Then she tracked 6,000 pages people visited next and mapped the connections. The results revealed which subjects were strongly and weakly associated....

By Alister, Doyle,, Environment and Correspondent OSLO, April 25 - Industrialized nations’ greenhouse gas emissions fell by 1.3 percent in 2012, led by a U.S. decline to the lowest in almost two decades with a shift to natural gas from dirtier coal, official statistics show. Emissions from more than 40 nations were 10 percent below 1990 levels in 2012, according to a Reuters compilation of national data submitted to the United Nations in recent days that are the main gauge of efforts to tackle global warming....