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After collaborating on two books showcasing extinct and endangered birds, legendary cartoonist Steadman and filmmaker Levy have paired up again to create this eccentric, wildly imaginative collection of illustrations of other critically endangered animals. Steadman’s drawings are nonconformist, splotched with color and a delightful overlay of finger-painting-like splashes and precise ink drawings. Levy’s descriptions detail each creature’s environment and the threats to its survival. The depictions of insects—the little mother moth, the Greek red damsel, the monarch butterfly—are particularly lavish, and an eerie bleakness is infused in the portraits of the snow leopard and giant panda....

The U.S. could save more than $1 trillion over the long term by removing roughly 1 million homes from flood-prone areas and relocating residents to higher ground, according to a massive new study funded by the government. The 658-page report suggests that modest government programs to buy and raze houses in flood zones should be greatly expanded to reduce looming losses driven in part by climate change. Buyout programs run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the states have struggled because of funding limits, the reluctance of homeowners to move and the substantial paperwork required to relocate residents....

The desertification of northern Africa may have started 7 million years ago, or more than twice as long ago as earlier estimates of the Sahara’s age, climate simulations suggest. The findings also hint that this shift in climate would have been triggered by the gradual shrinking of the Tethys Sea, the predecessor of today’s Mediterranean. The sands of the Sahara may seem timeless, but most geological data suggests that the world’s largest non-polar desert formed between 2 million and 3 million years ago, about the same time as cycles of ice ages began plaguing the Northern Hemisphere....

Being accustomed to the sound of a person’s voice makes it easier to hear what she is saying. New research shows that simply being used to watching somebody’s soundless lip movements has the same effect. A research team at the University of California, Riverside, asked 60 volunteers to lip-read sentences from silent videos of a person talking. Then they listened to an audiotape of sentences spoken in a background of noise and were asked to identify as many words as they could....

Research suggests that a growing number of seniors continue to be sexually active, and in doing so, they stay healthier and happier. Although seniors are often hesitant to discuss intimate issues with their doctors, a new study suggests that older adults have been turning to online communities to get the answers and support they need from one another. Sexual activity among older adults is commonplace—more than half of men and one third of women in their 70s, some married and some not, reported having sex at least twice a month in a 2015 study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior....

Add another credential to oxytocin’s impressive resume: the hormone crucial for bonding also reduces the calories people consume when they are snacking for pleasure, making it a possible therapeutic target for obesity. German researchers gave a group of men a dose of oxytocin thought to be roughly the amount released by the brain after breast-feeding or sex, according to lead author Manfred Hallschmid of the University of Tübingen. These men and another group who took a placebo then had a chance to eat as much as they wanted at a breakfast buffet, and later the same day they were offered snacks....

A parasite that has plagued the human race since antiquity is poised to become the second human disease after smallpox to be eradicated. “We are approaching the demise of the last guinea worm who will ever live on earth,” says former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center has spearheaded the eradication effort. Unlike polio’s high-profile eradication program, the mission to eliminate guinea worm disease has largely been off the public’s radar....

If one were to sketch a family tree of eastern U.S. power plants, the Gallatin Fossil Plant outside Nashville, Tenn., and the Big Sandy Power Plant in eastern Kentucky might be distant cousins. Separated by 300 miles of Cumberland Plateau, the two hulking coal burners share lineage as power plants that helped industrialize the South after World War II. The plants’ respective owners, the Tennessee Valley Authority and American Electric Power Co....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - As soccer has soared in popularity in recent decades, concussion rates for youth players have also surged, a U.S. study suggests. Researchers examined data on high school soccer players from 2005 to 2014 and found non-concussion injury rates declined for boys and were little changed for girls. But concussions increased in both male and female players. The significant rise in concussion rates “could be mainly due to a better recognition of concussion by medical and coaching staff,” study leader Dr....

(Reuters Health) - Deaths from cardiac-related causes tend to spike around the holidays, and the cold weather may not really be to blame, a recent study suggests. To rule out the potential influence of freezing temperatures, researchers examined data on more than 738,000 deaths from 1988 to 2013 in New Zealand, where Christmas comes during the summer. Overall, about 197,000 of these fatalities were heart-related. Outside of the hospital, there were 4....

A study of more than 100 screenings of 16 different films in a cinema in Mainz, Germany, showed that these human emissions vary predictably during a film; chemists could identify specific scenes through the quantities of certain airborne compounds. During the study 9,500 oblivious cinema goers sat down to watch films like The Hunger Games 2, Walking with Dinosaurs and The Little Ghost. The air composition inside the cinema was measured every 30 seconds using a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS) hooked into outgoing air vents....

From plants and crustaceans to birds and mammals, species across the food chain in the United Kingdom are shifting how they respond to seasonal changes, and British researchers say climate change is a major reason why. Stephen Thackeray, a lake ecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Lancaster, England, said not all species were responding to environmental changes in the same way. The predatory species at the top of the food chain were changing the timing of their seasonal activities more slowly in response to warmer temperatures than other organisms....

Louis Pasteur opened a glass flask on Montanvert Glacier in the French Alps in 1860 and collected some air. A few days later the bottom of that flask was teeming with goo—proof to Pasteur and his colleagues that there was something in the air, something invisible but quite real. Today we understand what that invisible stuff is—microbes aloft in our atmosphere—but despite the more than 150 years that have passed since Pasteur’s experiment, scientists are just beginning to understand how microorganisms in the air affect life on earth....

Profiting from climate change denial just got a little bit more difficult. The Google ads team announced yesterday it will “prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” The policy changes apply to Google advertisers, publishers that run Google ads and YouTube creators. Google LLC plans to implement the new rules next month, when world leaders are planning to attend a United Nations conference aimed at accelerating action to fight climate change, and could put pressure on advertising rival Facebook Inc....

New observations from a NASA spacecraft show that the huge asteroid Vesta is a battered protoplanet left over from the solar system’s early days, with a unique mix of characteristics unknown from any other space rock. Scientists had thought that Vesta, the second-largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, probably started down a planet-forming path shortly after the solar system’s birth. Data gathered by NASA’s Dawn probe have now confirmed that suspicion, researchers announced in a raft of studies that came out today (May 10) in the journal Science....

Name: John Dabiri Ttile: Associate professor of aeronautics and bioengineer­ing, California Institute of Technology 2010 MacArthur fellow Location: Pasadena, Calif. What do you do every day? Quite a few different things. On a given day we could be working on wind energy or working with the navy on underwater vehicles. We have, in our laboratory, live jellyfish in the upstairs labs and, downstairs, robotic vehicles that we design. We study biological systems and try to steal ideas from nature to apply to technology....

In the theaterlike darkness of the international Center of Photography in New York City, black-and-white ghosts of New England’s mid-19th-century Boston Brahmins stared out from behind the glass-and-rosewood frames. These were the works of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, the Rembrandts of daguerreotypy—the first practical form of photography. A demure bride in white silk crepe fingered her ribbons; the stern and haughty statesman Daniel Webster glared from behind his brow....

For the past 200 million years New England has been a place without intense geologic change. With few exceptions, there have been no rumbling volcanoes or major earthquakes. But it might be on the verge of awakening. Findings published this January in Geology show a bubble of hot rock rising underneath the northern Appalachian Mountains. The feature was first detected in 2016 by EarthScope, a collection of thousands of seismic instruments sprinkled throughout the U....

Humanity is upsetting not just levels of carbon in the air but those of nitrogen as well. Although the burning of fossil fuels is known to release nitrogen oxides that can excessively fertilize ecosystems or react with other compounds to form smog and acid rain, researchers have had difficulty pinpointing the extent to which people have disrupted nitrogen levels in the atmosphere. To investigate, scientists at Brown University and the University of Washington analyzed an ice core from Greenland, which trapped nitrate deposits over the past three centuries....

Thanks to pollution, a day at the beach can be an expensive affair. A study of two California beaches indicates that illnesses associated with swimming in contaminated waters cost the public more than $3 million annually. Ryan H. Dwight of the University of California at Irvine and his colleagues quantified the health burden associated with swimming in polluted waters using a survey of beachgoers who reported whether or not they had experienced symptoms of gastrointestinal or respiratory distress, or eye, ear or skin infections after swimming....