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A new study suggests the long-held industry assumption that bisphenol-A breaks down safely in the human body is incorrect. Instead, researchers say, the body transforms the ubiquitous chemical additive into a compound that might spur obesity. The study is the first to find that people’s bodies metabolize bisphenol-A (BPA) — a chemical found in most people and used in polycarbonate plastic, food cans and paper receipts — into something that impacts our cells and may make us fat....

Many cosmologists now accept the extraordinary idea that what seems to be the entire universe may actually be only a tiny part of a much larger structure called the multiverse. In this picture, multiple universes exist, and the rules we once assumed were basic laws of nature take different forms in each; for example, the types and properties of elementary particles may differ from one universe to another. The multiverse idea emerges from a theory that suggests the very early cosmos expanded exponentially....

Droughts conjure images of vast expanses of hard, cracked soil and parched plants, but new research suggests that disastrous dry spells can develop over the wettest place of all: the ocean. Low-moisture air masses sometimes form and migrate thousands of kilometers over the sea, similar to the way hurricanes behave. These dry-air regions are less coherent, changing shape as they develop, however, and they move much slower. Some take more than half a year before they hit land, where they can destroy crops and threaten water security....

As Dr. Ruth Berggren digests the calamity affecting her new home state of Texas, she admits to some PTSD. In 2005, she was an infectious-disease doctor at the nearly 3,000-bed Charity Hospital in New Orleans, one of a small number of physicians left managing patients and performing triage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She spent weeks and months dealing with the aftermath, before moving to Texas, where she heads the University of Texas-San Antonio’s Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, part of its Health Science Center....

In Room 67 of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Francisco Goya’s Saturn enthralls viewers with a scene of abomination.The painting depicts the Greek myth of Cronus (Saturn in the Roman version), who ate his children for fear of being overthrown by them. Critics have interpreted Goya’s rendition—the cannibal god shown wide-eyed with apparent horror, shame and madness as he devours his son—as an allegory of the ravages of war, the decay of Spanish society, the artist’s declining psychological state....

Some three billion years ago, when Earth was a sprightly ocean world dotted with protocontinents and inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, a pair of black holes spiraled together and collided in a far-off region of the universe, leaving behind a single black hole some 50 times heavier than our sun. Emitting no light, the entire affair should have remained forever lost to the void. Instead, the invisible violence of the pair’s final moments and ultimate merging was so great that it shook the fabric of reality itself, sending gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime—propagating outward at the speed of light....

Donald Trump’s new energy adviser calls himself a climate skeptic, but he may urge the billionaire celebrity to address climbing temperatures through a hands-off government approach. Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said yesterday he’s preparing at least two white papers on energy policy for the presumptive Republican nominee, who is scheduled to address an oil and gas conference in North Dakota later this month. Cramer, who has expressed support for a small carbon tax to replace the Clean Power Plan, said he may offer Trump advice on climate change that challenges the candidate’s assertions about it being a hoax promoted by Democrats....

The Soloist Paramount Pictures. DVD available Fall 2009 In 2005 LA Times columnist Steve Lopez befriended a homeless schizophrenic cellist named Nathaniel Ayers. Lopez often wrote about Ayers for the Times, introducing many readers to the reality of schizophrenia and the desperate plight of the Los Angeles slum known as Skid Row. The Soloist, based on Lopez’s book of the same name, translates Lopez’s powerful depiction of mental illness and urban desolation into a moving film....

A Japanese spacecraft orbiting the moon recently made a surprising find: oxygen that came from Earth. Scientists think this oxygen could provide a historical record of our planet’s ancient atmosphere. Few reliable clues exist as to the early history of Earth’s atmosphere and rocky surface because geologic activity has erased detailed evidence over time. Also wiped out are snapshot details that could be gleaned from meteorites made of material that formed around the same time and from similar material as Earth....

How many oil slicks are there in the ocean? Where are they, and where did they come from? These seem like simple questions, but with 139 million square miles of ocean, keeping an eye on these slippery streaks on the sea surface is no mean feat. Now, however, researchers have used the unique capabilities of satellites to assemble what they say is the first global map of oil slicks. Their results, published on Thursday in Science, suggest that oil covered a total area more than twice the size of France between 2014 and 2019 and that the vast majority came from human-linked sources....

This month’s feature article by Kate Wong, “Lucy’s Baby,” represents something both very old and very new. The old has been christened Selam, a tiny being who was born 3.3 million years ago but did not live past her third birthday. Contrary to the nickname by which she has also come to be well known, Selam was most definitely not a child of Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis female whose skeleton was famously unearthed in 1974–Selam predated Lucy by more than 100,000 years....

Obama administration officials this morning announced a plan under which the oil and gas industry would have to cut methane emissions by 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025. U.S. EPA will issue new regulations this summer under the Clean Air Act, and a final rule would be in place in 2016. This would mark the first time that methane, a potent greenhouse gas that has a global warming potential 86 times that of carbon dioxide on a 20-year time scale, would be regulated under the Clean Air Act....

Tempers are running hot in science (as they are in the U.S. at large) as the field embarks on a long-overdue conversation about its treatment of women and people of color. In June 2020, for example, thousands of researchers and academics across the globe—as well as the preeminent journals Science and Nature—stopped work for a day to protest racism in their ranks. The American Physical Society endorsed the effort to “shut down STEM,” declaring its commitment to “eradicating systemic racism and discrimination” in science....

CLIMATEWIRE | Greenhouse gases trapped 49 percent more heat in 2021 than in 1990, as emissions continued to rise rapidly, according to NOAA. NOAA released its “Annual Greenhouse Gas Index” last week. The index is based on thousands of air samples collected globally over each of the last 63 years; this observational method means it “contains little uncertainty,” according to the agency. “Our data show that global emissions continue to move in the wrong direction at a rapid pace,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad....

Initially published in book form as Futures from Nature, this is the first time this collection has been available as an eBook. A unique blend of satires, vignettes, fictional book reviews, science articles and journalism, Nature Futures offers an eclectic mix of ideas and attitudes about the future. With contributions from: Arthur C. Clarke; Bruce Sterling; Charles Stross; Cory Doctorow; Greg Bear; Gregory Benford; Oliver Morton; Ian Macleod; Rudy Rucker; Greg Egan; Stephan Baxter; Frederik Pohl; Vernor Vinge; Nancy Kress, Michael Moorcock, Vonda N....

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.—Earth’s nearest neighbor, the moon, is far from being a “been there, done that” world in space science and exploration. That’s the message from scientists and engineers at NASA’s Lunar Science for Landed Missions Workshop, recently held here at the space agency’s Ames Research Center. Between 1969 and 1972 a dozen U.S. astronauts voyaged there to scout stretches of the desolate, crater-pocked landscape as part of NASA’s Apollo program....

Robots are notoriously lousy jumpers. Some can jump high, but not repeatedly, over a short period. And vice versa. Duncan Haldane, a roboticist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, realized one implication of this shortcoming—many existing bots cannot maneuver large gaps and high hurdles at, say, a disaster site where they are doing rescue work. So Haldane turned to the animal kingdom to study nature’s best jumpers, hoping to select one as a model for a more agile, autonomous machine....

Paleontologists in Japan have unearthed the jaw of a primitive mammal from the early Cretaceous period. The pint-size creature, named Sasayamamylos kawaii for the geologic formation in Japan where it was found, is about 112 million years old and belongs to an ancient clade known as Eutherian mammals, which gave rise to all placental mammals. (A clade is a group of animals that share uniquely evolved features and therefore a common ancestry....

Few phenomena have created as divisive a rift recently among health professionals as the so-called “obesity paradox,” the repeated finding that obese people with certain health conditions live longer than slender people with the same ailments. And when a January meta-analysis involving nearly three million research subjects suggested that overweight people in the general population also live longer than their slimmer counterparts, the head of Harvard University’s nutrition department, Walter Willett, called the work “a pile of rubbish....

Summers in the nation’s first and oldest national park are rapidly heating up, new research finds. For the last two decades, Yellowstone National Park has been warming at its most intense rates in at least 1,250 years. 2016 was the warmest the region had seen since 770. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used data from tree rings to reconstruct more than a millennium of summer temperatures in the Yellowstone region....