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What happens when you take cells from frog embryos and grow them into new organisms that were “evolved” by algorithms? You get something that researchers are calling the world’s first “living machine.” Though the original stem cells came from frogs—the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis — these so-called xenobots don’t resemble any known amphibians. The tiny blobs measure only 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) wide and are made of living tissue that biologists assembled into bodies designed by computer models, according to a new study....

By Jennifer Dobner SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - A red rock pinnacle popular with climbers and named for its snakelike shape has been beheaded in the Utah desert, federal land managers said on Tuesday. The Cobra was one of dozens of rock formations in the Fisher Towers region of the Colorado River Special Recreation area near Moab, about 400 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. Sometimes called hoodoos, the red-orange sandstone rocks have been sculpted over the past million years by wind and water erosion into spires, towers and pedestals....

1971 How Birds Breathe “A bird’s respiratory system can deliver enough oxygen for the animal to fly at altitude. How do the birds do it? The bones of birds contain air. This is true not only of the larger bones but also often of the smaller ones and of the skull bones. Birds have two lungs that are connected to the outside by the trachea, but in addition they are connected to several large, thin-walled air sacs that fill much of the chest and the abdominal cavity....

In some regions of India, a married woman will return to her mother’s house for the last trimester of pregnancy and the birth of her child. But in Mettur, pregnant women are advised by their doctors to stay away. “Black wind” from a coal yard wafts constantly across poor neighborhoods, settling on rooftops, walking paths and even indoor furniture. People complain of asthma, wheezing and frequent colds. In its bid to industrialize, India relies heavily on energy from coal....

A deluge of high-energy physics data is headed toward servers in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month. That’s because the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now says it plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) soon for a run that could last as long as two years at a collision energy of seven TeV (tera–electron volts, 3.5 TeV per beam). As CERN ramps up the world’s most powerful particle accelerator to operate well beyond its previous best performance, the lab’s computer systems must likewise be tuned so they can properly capture and analyze all of this new output....

Pollution in the atmosphere is having an unexpected consequence, scientists say—it’s helping to cool the climate, masking some of the global warming that’s occurred so far. That means efforts worldwide to clean up the air may cause an increase in warming, as well as other climate effects, as this pollution disappears. New research is helping to quantify just how big that effect might be. A study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a degree to 1 degree Celsius....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. Several media outlets this week have covered hints and speculation that two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines—probably ones being tested by Moderna and by Pfizer in thousands of people—could be approved on an emergency basis in October or November by the U....

Why sleep has restorative—or damaging—effects on cognition and brain health has been an enduring mystery in biology. Researchers think cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) may flush toxic waste out, “cleaning” the brain and studies have shown that garbage clearance is hugely improved during sleep. They were not sure exactly how all this works, however, or why it should be so enhanced during sleep. One aspect of sleep that is well understood is how the slow electrical oscillations (or “slow waves”) that characterize deep, non-REM sleep contribute to memory consolidation, the process whereby new memories are transferred into long-term storage....

Colorful Origins ACCORDING TO “Illusory Color and the Brain,” by John S. Werner, Baingio Pinna and Lothar Spillmann, an object’s color is made relatively stable by the brain despite environmental changes. I am partially color-blind and have observed that when looking at a particular object in natural light, the vividness of its color will be affected by my proximity to it. Furthermore, in my trade as an electrician, I have found that the use of a flashlight shined on color-coded wires at close range assists in their discernment....

Energy Secretary Rick Perry entrenched himself as an opponent of the Paris climate agreement yesterday, reversing his earlier position. At a White House Cabinet meeting, Perry told President Trump that he defended the United States’ withdrawal from the global accord while meeting with energy ministers last week in China and Japan. “They needed to hear why America was stepping away from the Paris accord, and they did,” Perry said. “And how America is not stepping back, but we’re stepping into place and sending some messages....

The latest terrorism scare, involving a pair of explosive packages bound for Chicago from Yemen, has shed light on a new target for bombers—aircraft traveling to the U.S. whose cargo holds either have not been inspected, or if they have, by x-rays and bomb-sniffing dogs that are not sensitive enough to root out certain types of explosives. Would-be aircraft bombers have proved successful at smuggling pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) into aircraft cabins concealed in shoes and underwear, but fortunately have been unable to detonate this high-powered, military-grade explosive in flight....

Icelandic sunrises and sunsets have been tinged blood red, of late. Above the maritime bustle of Reykjavik’s harbour and the city’s towering concrete Hallgrímskirkja church, volcanic pollution gives the skies an eerie glow. For eight weeks, lava has been spurting out of a fissure in the ground radiating from the Bárðarbunga volcano, about 250 kilometers from Reykjavik. Sulphur dioxide has been spurting too — 35,000 tons of it a day, more than twice the amount spewing from all of Europe’s smokestacks....

SICILY—It is a sweltering summer day in July 2016 and Italy’s acclaimed forensic scientist Cristina Cattaneo’s white plastic apron is smeared with the human remains of people she desperately wants to identify. She is standing outside a camouflage army tent that doubles as a makeshift morgue at a military base in Melilli, hidden beyond the industrial ports. The sickly bitter smell of death from decomposed bodies hangs in the air, but she is so accustomed to the stench she doesn’t even wear a mask....

Former Vice President Al Gore stood before a crowd of renewables investors, analysts and clean energy industry executives and declared the electric power grid in the U.S. as much of a technological dinosaur as landline telephones. Gore, speaking in New York City at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Future of Energy Summit, asked those in the crowd to raise their hands if they had gotten rid of their landline telephones in favor of a cell phone....

When DisplayMate Technologies tested the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, the iPad Air, and Google’s Nexus 10, the Fire 8.9 “leapfrogged into the best-performing tablet display that we have ever tested,” according to the results posted Monday. The Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 significantly outperformed “the iPad Air in brightness, screen reflectance, and high ambient light contrast, plus a first-place finish in the very challenging category of absolute color accuracy,” DisplayMate continued....

From Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, by Andrew Scull. Published by Princeton University Press in arrangement with Thames & Hudson, Ltd., London. Copyright ©2015, Andrew Scull. Reprinted by permission. As civilized human beings, we like to console ourselves with visions of progress, illusory as that concept often proves to be. Perhaps we have not seen progress in the realms of literature and art (though some would dispute that claim), but surely science moves forward, and medicine too, insofar as it is a science rather than an art....

Low-cost silicon chips enable engineers to manipulate streams of electrons so that they can perform the myriad functions that make our computers, cellular phones and other consumer electronics so useful. If integrated silicon circuits could similarly create and control beams of light, they could make possible a range of inexpensive new technologies suited to many other applications. But for decades, silicon’s very nature has thwarted scientists’ dogged efforts to transform the material into a source of the necessary concentrated light....

Medical historians have recently published accounts that show neurologists were indeed complicit with the Nazis—and became victims if they were classified as non-Aryan. Heiner Fangerau, who teaches the history and ethics of medicine at University Hospital Düsseldorf—along with colleagues Michael Martin at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf and Axel Karenberg from the University of Cologne—undertook extensive research on neurologists during the Third Reich for the German Society of Neurology. Fangerau discussed new findings with Corinna Hartmann and Andreas Jahn of Gehirn&Geist, the psychology and neuroscience specialty publication of Spektrum der Wissenschaft, and the German sister publication of Scientific American....

The Autistic Brain: Thinking across the Spectrum, by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). $28. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, by Lee Smolin. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). $28. A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us about Ourselves, by Robert A. Burton, M.D. (Saint Martin’s Press, 2013). $24.99. Why Men Fake It: The Totally Unexpected Truth about Men and Sex, by Abraham Morgentaler, M....

In three new books, learn how gender shapes language and development and discover the truth behind gender stereotypes. Gender is a complex and never-ending story written over the course of a lifetime, according to neurobiologist Donald W. Pfaff in Man and Woman: An Inside Story (Oxford University Press, 2010). Male and female brains develop differently, starting in the womb. Studies show, for example, that male mice fetuses are bathed in the sex hormone testosterone, making them more aggressive than females....