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Sometimes it’s easy to tell when a romantic relationship is about to take a dive. It doesn’t bode well if you would rather sort socks than go out on a date or if neither of you can think of much to say. Another bad sign is when—consciously or not—you associate your lover with words like “death” and “attacking.” In a recent study using a word-association task, psychologists at the University of Rochester asked 222 men and women—all of them married, engaged or in committed relationships—to do some computerized word-sorting....

Armand Thibault looked out over the Pacific’s rumbling winter waves from his balcony in Neskowin, Ore. “The predicted high tide today is a 10.1 [feet],” he relayed via YouTube on Friday, January 29. “I’m very glad we don’t have a storm surge behind this one. Tomorrow is supposed to be a 10.2, so it should be interesting.” Fortunately, Neskowin didn’t experience a storm surge on Saturday either. But like a growing number of seaside towns along the Pacific Northwest coast, it is only a matter of time before another storm blows extreme waves across their coastlines and adds to already massive flooding and erosion....

Most of us recognize that obesity is not a benign condition. Diabetes, arthritis, plus heart, liver and gallbladder diseases commonly plague folks who carry major excess poundage. Less familiar is the risk of cancer. Being overweight or obese has been linked to at least 13 types of cancer. Obesity more than doubles the risk of the most common forms of uterine and esophageal cancer. It raises the risk of tumors of the colon, gallbladder, kidney, liver, pancreas, upper stomach and brain membranes by 50 to 80 percent compared with adults at a healthy weight, and it ups the odds for multiple myeloma and cancers of the breast, ovary and thyroid....

You may think of the North Pole only as the top of the world—its northernmost point and, if you’re younger, Santa’s home. But it turns out there are a host of “north (and south) poles” on our planet. First, and most simply, there is a town in Alaska called “North Pole” which isn’t near any of the other north poles (but it does get snow and receives a lot of mail addressed to Santa Claus)....

The Winners:Our demise would be good news for many species. Below is a small sample of the animals and plants that would benefit from the disappearance of humans.BIRDS: Without skyscrapers and power lines to fly into, at least a billion birds would avoid breaking their necks every year.TREES: In New York, oaks and maples, along with the invasive Chinese ailanthus, would claim the city.MOSQUITOES: As extermination efforts cease and wetlands rebound, great clouds of the insects would feed on other wildlife....

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions rose by a striking 3.4 percent in 2018, in the midst of an otherwise downward trend since 2005, a new analysis suggests. It’s likely the second-largest emissions jump since 1996, topped only by a 3.6 percent spike in 2010. The findings were published Monday by the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, largely drawing on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The uptick occurred during one of the biggest years for coal plant closures on record....

Every day, it seems, some new algorithm enables computers to diagnose a disease with unprecedented accuracy, renewing predictions that computers will soon replace doctors. What if computers could replace patients as well? If virtual humans could have replaced real people in some stages of a coronavirus vaccine trial, for instance, it could have sped development of a preventive tool and slowed down the pandemic. Similarly, potential vaccines that weren’t likely to work could have been identified early, slashing trial costs and avoiding testing poor vaccine candidates on living volunteers....

The world’s leading climate scientists kicked up a storm in 2007, when they issued their best estimates of how quickly the oceans would swell as the globe warms. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that sea levels would rise by somewhere between 18 and 59 centimeters by the last decade of this century — an upper limit that seemed far too low to other scientists, given the pace of melting in Greenland and other changes....

In public, companies try to trot out any hint of a success story—real or imagined. At SXSW this week, Google took a different tack: It talked all about its failures. Google has plenty to crow about: It has controlled the web search and search advertising business for years, it racked up $66 billion in revenue last year, and it gets an average of 5,000 job applications a day. It has upset countless industries, from mobile phones to TV....

As California’s record-breaking drought continues, organic farmers are facing shortages that could jeopardize their production of beef, milk and cheese. The Golden State’s third straight year of dry weather is forcing farmers to make tough choices. Dairy and cattle farmers are the first to feel the squeeze of water shortages, as their cows need to eat year-round, while plant growers typically have until mid-March to make planting decisions. “Everyone knows it’s going to be bad,” said Dave Kranz, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, which has 78,000 members....

Symbolic communication in the form of language underlies our unique ability to reason—or so the conventional wisdom holds. A new study published today in Science, though, suggests our capacity to reason logically may not actually depend on language, at least not fully. The findings show babies still too young to speak can reason and make rational deductions. The authors—a team hailing from several European institutions—studied infants aged 12 and 19 months, when language learning and speech production has just begun but before complex mastery has been achieved....

As the world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, some of our biggest challenges have begun to seem intractable. What should we do about uncertainty in the financial markets? How can we predict energy supply and demand? How will climate change play out? How do we cope with rapid urbanization? Our traditional approaches to these problems are often qualitative and disjointed and lead to unintended consequences. To bring scientific rigor to the challenges of our time, we need to develop a deeper understanding of complexity itself....

You may have heard of the Fitbit or the UP band: $50-ish to $100-ish wristbands that measure your steps throughout the day, like a high-tech pedometer, and display your progress as a graph on your smartphone. But this product category has exploded well beyond those common names. There’s the Nike+ FuelBand, Garmin Vivofit, the Basis Peak, the Magellan Echo, the Misfit Shine, and on and on. Health tracking is also built into the Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear watches....

Rotavirus used to infect most youngsters until a widely available oral vaccine came out in 2006. The virus, which causes severe diarrhea and thus life-threatening dehydration, still kills more than 450,000 kids globally every year, largely in Asia and Africa, because the vaccine is not always effective. Vanessa Harris of the University of Amsterdam wanted to find out why infants in those regions have such high rates of so-called nonresponders. Perhaps, she reasoned, the microbes that live in a child’s large intestine played a role....

By Heidi LedfordA wave of encouraging clinical-trial data is raising hopes for a new class of drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis. The therapies, hotly pursued by pharmaceutical companies, inhibit proteins called kinases, and aim to halt the inflammation that causes debilitating pain and eventual destruction of bone and cartilage.Leading the pack is a compound called tasocitinib, made by the New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Yesterday, at the annual American College of Rheumatology meeting in Atlanta, Ga....

Toward the end of the 20th century, the standard cosmological model seemed complete. Full of mysteries, yes. Brimming with fertile areas for further research, definitely. But on the whole it held together: the universe consisted of approximately two-thirds dark energy (a mysterious something that is accelerating the expansion of the universe), maybe a quarter dark matter (a mysterious something that determines the evolution of structure in the universe), and 4 or 5 percent “ordinary” matter (the stuff of us—and of planets, stars, galaxies and everything else we had always thought, until the past few decades, constituted the universe in its entirety)....

Cars and cities have a complicated relationship. Today, plagued with swelling road congestion and rising air pollution, we tend to think of the two as increasingly incompatible. But during the 20th century the automobile left one of the most durable marks on city planning. As Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier declared in his seminal 1925 book The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, “The motor-car … has completely overturned all our old ideas of town planning....

Floating motionless atop a tank of water in 2009, French diver Stéphane Mifsud claimed a world record for static apnea (stationary breath holding) of 11 minutes and 35 seconds. In 2010, another record setter, Ricardo da Gama Bahia of Brazil, flooded his body with oxygen for more than 20 minutes and then held his breath underwater for 20 minutes and 21 seconds. Both those achievements and many earlier records put to shame the breath-holding efforts of most people on dry land, who may nonetheless find that they, too, can hold out much longer than usual while swimming....

JAMAICA Researchers used a core sample from a two-meter-tall pile of accumulated bat guano in a Jamaican cave to track the bats’ food sources and how they adapted to changes in climate over 4,300 years. BOTSWANA Astronomers plotted a space rock’s 22-million-year voyage from the asteroid Vesta to its explosion over the Kalahari Desert in 2018. They analyzed fragments and telescope images to determine its makeup, trajectory and speed—60,000 kilometers per hour just before it hit Earth’s atmosphere....

Which is more intrusive: security screening and metal detectors every few blocks, or a drone flying high above it taking video of every little thing you do? “The best thing would have been a dog,” explains Joseph King, professor of terrorism and organized crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former chief of counterterrorism for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “They don’t need to be at a choke point; they can move through the crowd....