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Robert Edwards has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work to develop in vitro fertilization (IVF), the Nobel committee announced Monday. The procedure allows a human egg to be fertilized outside of the body and then implanted in a woman’s; it has been used as a treatment for infertility for more than three decades. Edwards, a professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, began research on the problem of infertility in the 1950s....

Loneliness is bad for our health, according to a robust body of research. And isolation is known to shorten lives—but experts were not sure if the real culprit was the pain and stress of loneliness, as opposed to a lack of social connectedness. Now psychologists have untangled the two factors and discovered that even superficial contact with other people may improve our health. Led by Andrew Steptoe of University College London, the study surveyed 6,500 people aged 52 or older about their social contacts and experiences of loneliness....

In February of last year, 64 healthy adult Kenyans checked into a university residence in the coastal town of Kilifi. After a battery of medical tests, they proceeded, one by one, into a room where a doctor injected them with live malaria parasites. Left untreated, the infection could have sickened or even killed them, since malaria claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. But the volunteers—among them casual laborers, subsistence farmers, and young mothers from nearby villages—were promised treatment as soon as infection took hold....

The virus that causes COVID-19 is a prolific sack of genes that targets not just humans but nonhuman animals as well. And just as humans and animals can infect one another, animals can also infect other animals, says Amélie Desvars-Larrive, an epidemiologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Scientists have learned a lot about how COVID spreads in humans but less about how it spreads between animals. To make it easier to study the connections among humans, animals and the virus, Desvars-Larrive and a team of researchers gathered scattered reports of COVID-infected mammals from all over the world to create a public database....

A pair of security researchers in England recently released a draft of a paper that documents what they describe as the “first real-world detection of a backdoor” in a microchip—an opening that could allow a malicious actor to monitor or change the information on the chip. The researchers, Sergei Skorobogatov of the University of Cambridge and Christopher Woods of Quo Vadis Labs in London, conclude that the vulnerability made it possible to reprogram the contents of supposedly secure memory and obtain information about the internal logic of the chip....

By most estimates, our galaxy is a bustling place. Given its hundreds of billions of stars—each accompanied by whirling planets, asteroids, comets, and more—one would expect objects to occasionally be flung into interstellar space. The first of them was found in 2017: officially called 1I/2017 U1 but better known as ‘Oumuamua, it was discovered by chance as it swooped past our sun on an outbound trajectory that rapidly took it beyond the reach of Earth’s best telescopes....

The remains of a brewery in the southernmost settlement of an ancient Peruvian empire appears to provide proof that women of high rank crafted chicha, a beerlike beverage made from corn and spicy berries that was treasured by the Wari people of old as well as their modern day descendants. Decorative shawl pins, worn exclusively by high caste women, littered the floor of the brewery, which was capable of producing more than 475 gallons of the potent brew a week....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Britain on Tuesday became the first country to allow a “three-parent” IVF technique which doctors say will prevent some inherited incurable diseases but which critics see as a step towards creating designer babies. The treatment is known as “three-parent” in vitro fertilization (IVF) because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos, would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor. It is designed to help families with mitochondrial diseases, incurable conditions passed down the maternal line that affect around one in 6,500 children worldwide....

Physicist Wanted: On Monday a law firm helping the National Football League investigate the New England Patriots for possible cheating brought out the big scientific guns, calling for Columbia University physicists’ help. They needed to determine the extent that the weather conditions at the American Football Conference Championship game on January 18 could have impacted a football’s internal pressure and whether it could be to blame for 11 of 12 Patriots footballs being suspiciously underinflated during their trouncing of the Indiana Colts....

When the World Health Organization declared on January 14 that the spread of Ebola had been halted in West Africa, it cautioned that cases of the virus might yet re-emerge. That is exactly what has happened in Sierra Leone, where a new death from Ebola was announced hours after the WHO’s statement. Health officials told reporters that a 22-year-old woman had died in Magburaka after falling ill in Baomoi Luma, near the border with Guinea....

Editor’s Note (4/9/18): This article was originally published in April 2017. It is being republished following a suspected chemical attack by Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the rebel-held suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A chemical weapons attack that killed more than 80 people, including children, triggered the Trump administration’s recent missile strikes against the Syrian government....

Even the most laid back among us crave a sense of control, and when we feel helpless we scour our surroundings for anything that will restore predictability. New research shows that when we lack control we don’t simply wait for order to return: we impose it, if only in our own minds, by imagining patterns and trends where none exist. In six experiments, psychologists Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University manipulated subjects’ sense of control....

“Additive manufacturing” offers manufacturers a powerful set of tools for making any number of products cost-effectively and with little waste, a groundbreaking development that promises to help revitalize the U.S. manufacturing sector. But what will it take to get the process out of the lab and onto the factory floor? A generous cash infusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, will help—and it is now in the offing. Pres. Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address and, more recently, his proposed budget for fiscal 2014 lift U....

SWITZERLAND The Swiss government has banned the practice of dropping live lobsters into boiling water, claiming the crustaceans can feel pain—a still debated conclusion. Cooks are now asked to stun the animals first. KAZAKHSTAN More than 200,000 critically endangered saiga antelope mysteriously died over a three-week span in 2015. Scientists now think this was caused by a bacterium that flourished because of a warmer, wetter spring and poisoned the animals’ blood....

You’ve probably heard that automation is becoming commonplace in more fields of human endeavor. Or, in headline-speak: “Are Robots Coming for Your Job?” You may also have heard that the last bastions of human exclusivity will probably be creativity and artistic judgment. Robots will be washing our windows long before they start creating masterpieces. Right? Not necessarily. In reporting a story for CBS Sunday Morning, for example, I recently visited Rutgers University’s Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Ahmed Elgammal’s team has created artificial-intelligence software that generates beautiful, original paintings....

At Perceptive Pixel’s offices on Manhattan’s West Side, Jefferson Han stands in front of a megasize multi-touch screen and runs his fingertips across the display. Each finger leaves a trail of colored pixels in its wake, causing the display to look, briefly, like it has been scratched by a set of digital claws. Han, who founded Perceptive Pixel in 2006 and serves as the company’s chief scientist, next uses his index finger to draw a loop on the 100-inch display....

By Ed Bell and Phil Saunders Like the terrestrial maps used by early navigators, maps of the other planets continue to become more and more detailed. The recent flybys of Mercury by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft have added a new level of visual detail to the closest planet to the sun, allowing astronomers to better understand its origins and evolution. And a wealth of new data should be forthcoming soon; on March 17, MESSENGER is scheduled to become the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury....

Sauropods were dinosaurs that truly lived large. This group of long-necked, four-legged herbivores, such as the celebrated species Apatosaurus and Brachiosaurus, included the largest creatures to ever walk the planet. Some grew to more than 100 feet long and weighed more than 80 tons. Now paleontologists have uncovered one of the earliest members of this storied lineage of lumbering giants: a svelte, much smaller omnivore that once darted across the floodplains of prehistoric Zimbabwe....

Scientists have found a link between neurons generated during adulthood and those that fall victim to diseases such as Alzheimer’s. According to a new report, both types of brain cells have strangely low levels of a protein known as UCHL1. The discovery that new neurons can arise in adult brains–a feat first observed in songbirds–overturned the long-held belief that a vertebrate’s complete supply of neurons is created at birth or soon thereafter....

MIND’S WHY In describing their conclusions that DNA segments, or jumping genes, that can copy themselves into different parts of the genome may be the cause of the uniqueness of individual brains in “What Makes Each Brain Unique,” Fred H. Gage and Alysson R. Muotri misrepresent the degree of similarity expected between the brains of identical twins. Their work does reveal an intriguing source of genetic variation between such brains, the significance of which remains to be elucidated....