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From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Sometime in late 2013, a mosquito-borne virus called chikungunya appeared for the first time in the Western Hemisphere. Chikungunya, or “chik,” as it’s called, rarely kills its human hosts. But it can cause fever, rash and debilitating joint pain. In the two years since it first arrived in the Caribbean, chik has spread wildly across the Americas. It is now suspected of having infected over 1 million people in 44 countries and territories, creating a hemisphere-wide horde of mosquito-borne suffering....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. If the omicron variant of the coronavirus is different enough from the original variant, it’s possible that existing vaccines won’t be as effective as they have been. If so, it’s likely that companies will need to update their vaccines to better fight omicron. Deborah Fuller is a microbiologist who has been studying mRNA and DNA vaccines for over two decades....

Mozilla has introduced Collusion, an add-on for the Firefox browser that shows you how companies are tracking you as you surf the Web. A cool visual demonstration of the software illustrates all the links that form as you crisscross just a few popular sites online, including IMDb, the New York Times and the Huffington Post. The software shows the connections among sites you visit and third-party tracking and advertising networks such as DoubleClick and Scorecard Research....

IN THE 2003 MOVIE, The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays a former U.S. Army captain named Nathan Algren, an alcoholic and mercenary who in the 1870s goes to Japan to work for the Emperor Meiji. The young emperor is facing a samurai rebellion, and Algren trains a ragtag bunch of farmers and peasants in modern warfare, including the use of rifles. When Algren is captured by the samurai, however, he is gradually converted to their ways and ends up fighting alongside the warriors in a losing battle against the Imperial Army he helped to create....

Jupiter’s beauty is more than skin deep. That’s the latest result from Juno, a NASA spacecraft in orbit around the gas giant since 2016. Besides its Great Red Spot, Jupiter’s most eye-catching features are its alternating longitudinal bands of light and dark clouds. Thought to be as old as the planet itself, these bands are sculpted by high-speed winds whipping around the orb in opposite directions, and constitute the “face” Jupiter presents to the outside world....

In March 2019, a violent tornado plowed through eastern Alabama, flattening houses and demolishing mobile homes. Twenty-three people were killed including four children, ages 10, 9, 8 and 6. Exactly one year later, on March 3, 2020, a tornado gusting at 170 mph ripped through central Tennessee, killing 19 people. Four of the victims were children between the ages of 2 and 7. The twisters spiraled along the ground for only minutes, but they are the two deadliest natural disasters in the United States since the start of 2019....

Eighteen years ago, in a laboratory at the University of Parma in Italy, a neuroscientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and his graduate students were recording electrical activity from neurons in the brain of a macaque monkey. It was a typical study in neurophysiology: needle thin electrodes ran into the monkey’s head through a small window cut out of its skull; the tips of the electrodes were placed within individual neurons in a brain region called the premotor cortex....

OTTAWA, May 18 (Reuters) - More than a third of all North American bird species are at risk of becoming extinct unless significant action is taken, scientists who are part of a tri-nation initiative said on Wednesday, adding that ocean and tropical birds were in particular danger. The study, compiled by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative and the first of its kind to look at the vulnerability of bird populations in Canada, the United States and Mexico, said 37 percent of all 1,154 species on the continent needed urgent conservation action....

Today most people in the richer parts of the world think of tuberculosis, if they think of it at all, as a ghost of history. Throughout ancient times the tenacious bacterial infection consumed the bodies of untold millions, rich and poor, filling their lungs with bloody sputum. As TB spread in the centuries that followed, it continued to attack across economic and class lines, affecting both the famous and the obscure....

(ISNS) – The goal of every movie is for the audience to suspend its collective disbelief and become immersed in the world created on screen. With special effects breakthroughs continuing to raise the bar for movie audiences, the technical folks behind the scenes are convening on Saturday to celebrate the science and engineering advances in moviemaking. Audiences know that Daniel Day-Lewis is not really Abraham Lincoln and that Anne Hathaway is not Fantine, but when they watched “Lincoln” or “Les Miserables,” they believed....

More than 130 years after the naming of the Plasmodium parasites behind malaria in 1890, the world now has its first approved vaccine against them. While many malaria researchers have celebrated the development, others have expressed concerns over the deployment of a vaccine with moderate efficacy. On 6 October, the World Health Organization (WHO) greenlit the vaccine — called RTS,S — and recommended its widespread use among children aged under 5 in Africa, which is home to the deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum....

Enrolment in global trials of a leading coronavirus-vaccine candidate are on hold after a ‘suspected adverse event’ in a person who received the vaccine in the United Kingdom. Scientists say that it’s too soon to say what impact this might have on the global push to develop a vaccine, but that the news highlights the importance of waiting for the results of large, properly designed trials to assess safety before approving a vaccine for widespread use....

What parents wouldn’t be tempted to lock up their preteens (“tweens”) until age 18? A study on adolescent perceptions of autonomy, however, finds that too much parental involvement is as problematic as too little. The research “highlights the difficult task that parents of early adolescents face,” says lead author Sara Goldstein, an assistant psychology professor at the University of New Orleans. The researchers queried 785 adolescents three times over four years: in seventh grade, about their social autonomy and parental relationships; in eighth grade, about peer influences; and in 11th grade, about problem behaviors such as drinking and aggression....

While the brain and spinal cord have their own squad of specialized immune cells, the peripheral immune system is armed with a larger battalion of proteins, cells and entire organs, such as the spleen, that ward off invaders. Over the past decade researchers have made great progress in understanding how the peripheral immune system affects neural activity: how immune signals that originate outside the central nervous system can affect cognitive processes, social behavior, neurodegeneration, and more....

Among primates, humans are unique in having nearly naked skin. Every other member of our extended family has a dense covering of fur—from the short, black pelage of the howler monkey to the flowing copper coat of the orangutan—as do most other mammals. Yes, we humans have hair on our heads and elsewhere, but compared with our relatives, even the hairiest person is basically bare. How did we come to be so denuded?...

No one disputes the fact that cigarette smoking kills, although many people might not realize just how lethal it really is. The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco kills up to one half of its regular users via cardiovascular disease, lung and other cancers, and respiratory illnesses. About 30 percent of current U.S. cancer deaths result from tobacco use. Electronic cigarettes, however, are taking over at an astonishing pace. They were introduced in the early 2000s, and according to some experts, sales could exceed those of traditional tobacco products within a few years....

Reducing carbon emissions in the U.S. to net zero is achievable. It’s economically sustainable, environmentally essential, technologically feasible and, with some work, even politically viable. But to have a good chance of reaching net zero, we must change the way we regulate the construction of clean energy projects. We have all of the building blocks: significant expansion of clean energy research and development in 2005, a series of policies on energy efficiency and alternative fuels in 2007, across-the-board increases in budgets for technology innovation over the past 20 years, and an unheralded “all of the above” energy bill that became part of overall federal appropriations in 2020....

Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. cannot burn much of the coal, oil and gas located within their national territories if the world wants to restrain global warming. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis aimed at determining what it will take to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius this century—a goal adopted during ongoing negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change....

Have you ever gone to the phone to call a friend only to have your friend ring you first? What are the odds of that? Not high, to be sure, but the sum of all probabilities equals one. Given enough opportunities, outlier anomalies—even seeming miracles—will occasionally happen. Let us define a miracle as an event with million-to-one odds of occurring (intuitively, that seems rare enough to earn the moniker). Let us also assign a number of one bit per second to the data that flow into our senses as we go about our day and assume that we are awake for 12 hours a day....

Some of the oldest art in human history is disintegrating, scientists say. And climate change may be hastening its demise. New research reports that ancient rock art in Indonesian caves is degrading over time, as bits of rock slowly flake away from the walls. It’s a tremendous loss for human history — some of these paintings, which depict everything from animals to human figures to abstract symbols, date back about 40,000 years....