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Aging causes significant changes in visual perception, even in healthy people with no dementia or eye disease. As a result, many people struggle with simple daily activities as they age—things like driving safely, walking on uneven ground or negotiating stairs. Unfortunately, the mechanisms underlying age-related defects in perception are not well understood. Few studies have investigated the kinds of perceptual changes that occur through adulthood, particularly in older individuals, and even fewer have correlated those changes with brain function and eye movements....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. We here at Everyday Einstein were lucky enough to ask Bill Nye our burning questions about climate change. In Bill’s new book, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World, he talks about why the climate change crisis is calling today’s youth to action to create a healthier, cleaner, smarter world....

Bugged: The Insects Who Rule the World and the People Obsessed with Them by David MacNeal. St. Martin’s Press, 2017 ($25.99) During the steamy summer months many people dream of a world without mosquitoes, ants and other pesky bugs. But remove all the insects, which comprise about 75 percent of species in the animal kingdom, and the world as we know it could not exist. Insects bind together nearly every ecosystem by pollinating 80 percent of food plants and recycling dead organic matter....

A lot of people believe that eating more frequently boosts your metabolism. I debunked this in the first year of the Nutrition Diva podcast, which was (can you believe it?) ten years ago. The research that I reviewed back in 2008 for my episode on Metabolism Myths simply didn’t support the notion that you could burn more calories simply by dividing your daily intake into smaller, more frequent meals. But our understanding of human nutrition is constantly evolving and it’s always worth revisiting those stances in light of newer evidence....

Of all the potential actions in Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency, none will have more long-lasting effects than those on climate change. Just four days after the Paris climate agreement went into force—the first comprehensive global deal to reduce heat-trapping pollution—the U.S. elected a president who has called climate change a hoax and vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord. Trump has said he would block the Clean Power Plan, which would reduce utilities’ greenhouse gas emissions and is at the heart of the U....

Three years ago astrophysicist Tom Collett set out to test a theory. Not just any theory, but one that sets scientists’ expectations for how the universe operates at large: Einstein’s general relativity. First published in 1915, the theory mathematically describes how gravity emerges from the fundamental geometry of space and time, or spacetime, as physicists call it. It postulates that dense objects, such as Earth and the sun, create valleylike dips in spacetime that manifest as gravity—the force that binds together a galaxy’s swirling stars, places planets around suns and, on Earth (or any other planet), keeps your feet on the ground....

SEATTLE—Commercial fisher Ellie Kinley first laid eyes on the rogue Atlantic salmon early last Monday when her son sent her a photo of them. Those seven farmed fish should not have been in the nets. Kinley and her family are members of the Lummi Nation, a coastal tribe near Bellingham, Washington. They were fishing for chinook or king salmon, the largest Pacific species. The tribe passed along news of the Atlantic salmon to state officials, and that’s when the Lummi learned about the escape....

The already parched U.S. Southwest is drying up even more, at least in early spring, because of climate change. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters shows that since 1978, the jet stream that brings rainstorms from the Pacific over the western U.S. has been shifting northward—and so has the rain and snow. “That northward shift in the storm track is tied to reduced early spring precipitation, especially over the southwest U....

Sharks and their relatives face an existential crisis unprecedented in their 420 million years on the planet. A global trade in products from these animals fuels the capture of tens of millions of individuals a year. Strong demand combined with poor fishery regulation and high levels of incidental catch have resulted in many populations being overfished, with some now facing extinction. Many activists argue a total ban on shark fishing is the only solution to slow or halt the decline....

When House Democrats pass legislation next month that would slash prescription drug spending to the tune of $1 trillion, they’ll have John and Laura Arnold to thank. The Texas billionaires, who in recent years have used their wealth to turbocharge America’s drug pricing debate, have brought their advocacy to a peak as Congress edges closer to enacting drug-price reforms. Last month, commercials cut by an Arnolds-backed political group aired on network television during the World Series....

I take inspiration where I can get it. My girlfriend recently alerted me to a viral video in which a teenage girl complains about mathematics. “I was just doing my makeup for work,” Gracie Cunningham says while dabbing makeup on her face, “and I just wanted to tell you guys how I don’t think math is real.” Some of the math she’s learning in school, Cunningham suggests, has little to do with the world in which she lives....

A close-up look at a protein cog in the sugar-building machinery of spinach has taken us a step closer to enhancing food-crop yields. Using the finest-resolution imagery available from electron microscopy, researchers have traced the contours of a key complex in this machinery called cytochrome b6f. Understanding the design of this protein complex could help scientists redesign it for greater crop efficiency in spinach or other plants, the research team says in a paper published on November 13 in Nature....

In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Processby Dan Simon .Harvard University Press, 2012 ($45)Ten years into serving a life sentence for the rape of Jennifer Thompson, Ronald Cotton stepped out of prison a free man. It took that long for DNA evidence to exonerate Cotton, refuting a weak case built mostly on eyewitness accounts. According to Simon’s new book In Doubt, despite advances in DNA forensic technologies, eyewitness testimony remains the most common way to nab criminals in the Anglo-American justice system....

Patients with Parkinson’s disease often have trouble with walking. Either they cannot take the first step, or they cannot stop moving when they reach their destination. The problem is not with the steps themselves but with starting and stopping the action—a pervasive difficulty that affects every aspect of daily life. Now research has finally pinpointed the neurons in the brain that initiate and end movements. Rui Costa of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program in Portugal and Xin Jin of the National Institutes of Health designed a task for mice that was the equivalent of taking eight steps....

“This is a case about Harvard’s decade-long failure to protect students from sexual abuse and career-ending retaliation.” That is the first sentence of a federal lawsuit filed on February 8 by three graduate students against Harvard University, accusing the university’s officials of enabling abusive behavior by John Comaroff, a professor in the anthropology department. The university disputes the claims. The groping, the intimidating talk of rape, and the unwanted attention Comaroff is accused of are all appalling....

High in the Cederberg Mountains of South Africa grows a bristly shrub that embodies the tug-of-war taking place between industrialized and developing nations over the value of genetic resources—the genes found in plant, animal or microbial cells used for research as well as in commercial products, such as enhanced seeds and naturally derived cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The leaves of rooibos, translated from Afrikaans as “red bush,” are sipped in ruby-hued teas around the world but were previously sought by early settlers for their capacity to heal skin and reduce inflammation....

Deaths Yesterday: 231 (149 Alabama) Deaths This Month: ~282 SPC Tornado Reports Yesterday: 164 SPC Tornado Reports This Week: 329 (276 in 3 days; 232 in 2 days) SPC Tornado Reports This Month: ~818 LSR Funnel Cloud Reports Yesterday: 55 “Reports” may contain multiple reports of the same tornado, and is therefore not comparable to previous historical extremes such as the 148 confirmed tornadoes during the Super Outbreak. “Yesterday” is defined as 12Z 4/27 to 12Z 4/28....

Fifty years ago this summer, Melanie Dreher, a registered nurse and young graduate student in anthropology, landed in rural Jamaica to study how people there were using cannabis. It was the same summer of the moon landing and Woodstock, where “400,000 of my best friends were having a good time,” she said. Dreher didn’t really want to be in Jamaica. But doing fieldwork in an unfamiliar place was required by her Columbia University doctorate program, and for Dreher, who had never been to Jamaica or used cannabis, this assignment met that criteria....

The Trump administration released two highly anticipated policy documents Wednesday that, if finalized, would facilitate the importation of cheaper drugs from abroad—though both represent early first steps toward that goal. The drafts create two pathways for importation. One would let states, drug wholesalers, or pharmacies apply to import certain drugs from Canada, pending a sign-off from the Department of Health and Human Services. A second would let drug makers import their own products sold in other countries....

Chemo brain is a mental cloudiness reported by about 30 percent of cancer patients who receive chemotherapy. Symptoms typically include impairments in attention, concentration, executive function, memory and visuospatial skills. Since the 1990s researchers have tried to understand this phenomenon, particularly in breast cancer patients. But the exact cause of chemo brain remains unclear. Some studies indicate that chemotherapy may trigger a variety of related neurological symptoms. One study, which examined the effects of chemotherapy in 42 breast cancer patients who underwent a neuropsychological evaluation before and after treatment, found that almost three times more patients displayed signs of cognitive dysfunction after treatment as compared with before (21 versus 61 percent)....