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A variety of types of blue-green algae all produce the same molecule, a potential neurotoxin, a new report suggests. The results, published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represent the first time that unrelated species of cyanobacteria have been found to produce the same potentially hazardous substance. Cyanobacteria can produce a wide range of molecules that are harmful to humans, but which species generate which compounds has so far been quite unpredictable....

After 64-year-old Diana Nyad completed her 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida in September 2013, she was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey on her Super Soul Sunday show in what was to be a motivational reflection on the triumph of will over age. When Nyad announced, “I’m an atheist,” Oprah responded quizzically: “But you’re in the awe.” Puzzled, Nyad responded: “I don’t understand why anybody would find a contradiction in that. I can stand at the beach’s edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist—go on down the line—and weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity....

It seems a truism that science and technology function best when new discoveries and ideas can circulate freely and find the widest audience. But governments and businesses face constant pressures toward secrecy. Ideally, society should strike a balance between transparency in government and the privacy that citizens have come to expect, between openness in research and the protections that commercialization requires. Individuals and companies have launched initiatives recently that enhance open access in many welcome ways....

MOROCCO A single-file line of traveling trilobites, all facing the same direction, were caught in a sediment avalanche 480 million years ago. Scientists uncovered the ancient arthropods in a formation they described as similar to modern-day migrating spiny lobsters. U.S. Alaska’s northern fur seals are gathering in large numbers on Bogoslof Island, the tip of an active volcano that last erupted in 2017. More than 36,000 pups may have been born on the island in 2019, amid mud-spewing geysers....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. I got an email from Tech Talker listener Travis. He was concerned after hearing a news story in which a hacker accessed a home’s security camera that was acting as a baby monitor. Travis wants to get a baby monitor for his child, but is unsure on how to secure it so that this doesn’t happen to him....

By Malia Mattoch McManus HONOLULU (Reuters) - State scientists and officials are warning some residents of Hawaii’s Big Island that their homes could be jeopardized by a lava flow from Kilauea Volcano that is moving through a forest preserve toward their neighborhood. A U.S. Geological Survey scientist said that while the lava flow did not pose an imminent threat to residents of the Kaohe Homesteads of the island’s Puna area, it was less than 2 miles (3 km) away and appeared to be advancing....

The great spine-chilling Tyrannosaurus rex has a reputation for having killed its prey in cold blood. But was this ancient dinosaur really a cold-blooded ectotherm? Strong evolutionary links among reptiles (ectotherms), birds (mostly endothermic, or warm-blooded) and dinosaurs make it hard to conclude whether nonavian dinosaurs were also unable to regulate their own internal body temperatures. A new method of studying the chemical bonds in a mineral found in the teeth and bones of animals might finally offer a way to settle the debate....

Physicists have chilled molecules to just a smidgen above absolute zero—colder than the afterglow of the Big Bang. Scientists have created such superchilled atoms, these are the coldest molecules (which are two or more atoms chemically connected) ever created, the scientists said. The achievement could reveal the wacky physics thought to occur at jaw-droppingly cold temperatures. At normal everyday temperatures, atoms and molecules whiz at superfast speeds around us, even crashing into one another....

Underground tunnels crisscross the border between the U.S. and Mexico, and the U.S. government is looking for better ways to stop the smugglers who build and use them. Soon the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the help of Lockheed Martin, may hand a new tool to the U.S. Border Patrol to aid in finding and plugging these tunnels: ground-penetrating radar. “It’s a game of cat and mouse between us and the smugglers,” says Mark Qualia, a spokesperson for the Border Patrol....

This year is slated to be one of the most charred on record, as wildfires have burned more than 7.5 million U.S. acres to date. In order to assess this damage historically, a group of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently created a framework to assess the importance of fire throughout human evolution. Jennifer Balch, a postdoctoral associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UCSB, has co-authored a paper that presents an assessment of how humans’ relationship with fire has shaped community and world development – from the controlled fires of hunter-gatherers to the combustion of fossil fuels....

GUADELOUPE A newfound, centimeter-long bacterium challenges conventional wisdom that bacteria cannot grow large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Scientists wonder whether their sulfur-rich mangrove habitat is what lets these segmented single cells reach the size of an eyelash. BRAZIL Scientists discovered that a tiny toad species’ inner ears are too small to work as internal gyroscopes, leading to terrible jumping skills. The diminutive orange amphibians somersault through the air, often landing on their backs....

Los Angeles might not end up as an island when the Big One rocks California, but any sizable seismic event on the San Andreas fault will send L.A. several meters closer to San Francisco. Scientists and the public have long expected a major quake to strike the West Coast; the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that California has a 99 percent chance before 2038 of experiencing at least a magnitude 6.7 quake—the same size as the 1994 Northridge earthquake....

Two of the nation’s essential commercial waterways face extraordinary risk from climate change and associated flooding, a new report from the nonprofit American Rivers says. In its updated list of “America’s Most Endangered Rivers,” the group says marked increases in precipitation across the Upper Mississippi and Lower Missouri rivers, combined with poor floodplain management, have placed millions of people and a multibillion-dollar economy in peril within the two basins. The Upper Mississippi and Lower Missouri are Nos....

SOCIAL MEDIA DEBATE Lydia Denworth is a little too quick to dismiss fears of the effects of social media on young people by setting up false equivalences in “The Kids Are All Right.” For instance, if fears of television have been unfounded, it doesn’t follow that fears of social media are parallel in a meaningful way. And I don’t think either that example or the others she cites have been unequivocally proved to be baseless....

People who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) were dealt another blow this week when it became clear that researchers still fail to understand the genesis of this disease. Perhaps most importantly, these patients are being advised to stop taking antiretroviral medications. Two new papers published this week in Science cast additional doubt on a two-year-old study that had linked chronic fatigue syndrome to the xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV....

COLOGNE, Germany—At Germany’s aerospace agency, the next frontier is capturing the sun here on Earth and keeping it on tap. In a 4-year-old glass and steel building near the Cologne-Bonn Airport, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany’s equivalent of NASA, are working on new ways to produce more heat than light in order to smooth over intermittency, one of the biggest drawbacks of solar power on the grid. “The focus of this organization is to test ideas as close to production as possible,” said Christos Agrafiotis, a researcher in solar chemical engineering at DLR....

Human-generated electricity was an industrial-age curiosity at the turn of the century. By 1900 alternating current (AC) electricity had been used to execute convicted murderers and to power the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair displays of such time-saving inventions as an electric stove and an electric incubator for chicken eggs. Practical uses for AC power were still fast evolving, and most families did not yet have electric lights in their homes. But battery-powered electric pranks abounded....

When we humans hear birdsong, which many have appreciated more than ever during the pandemic, we can’t help but think about parallels to human music and language. We discern distinct melodies linking the clanks and buzzes of Song Sparrow songs, sentencelike structure in the Red-winged Blackbird’s pronouncement of conk-la-ree! and a cheery whistle in the wide-open-beaked songs of the White-throated Sparrow. Birdsong, which has intrigued scientists since Aristotle’s time, is traditionally defined as the long, often complex learned vocalizations birds produce to attract mates and defend their territories....

Late Thursday night the biggest earthquake to hit Mexico in 100 years shook the country—and a large part of the globe. The magnitude 8.1 temblor was centered just off the southern end of Mexico’s Pacific coast. It was stronger than the 1985 quake that killed thousands of people in Mexico City. Last night’s quake took 32 lives, according to news reports, and the toll may rise. The quake happened about 54 miles offshore of the southern state of Chiapas, just to the east of an undersea geologic feature called the Middle America Trench....

There’s something wrong with the brain banks created to study the dangers of repeated trauma to the head: Almost all the brains donated so far belonged to men. It’s just one example of how the study of brain trauma in women lags behind—even though women get concussions at higher rates than men in many sports and may suffer more severe and persistent symptoms. “If concussion is the invisible injury, then females are the invisible population within that injury,” said Katherine Snedaker, a licensed clinical social worker from Norwalk, Conn....