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The ethical and policy ramifications of deploying science and technology in the service of society hold the same importance as the act of invention itself. Getting antiretroviral treatments to HIV/AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa. Ensuring that the world’s largest chip manufacturer takes every possible step to reduce the company’s environmental footprint. Lending the currency of one’s celebrity (as well as cold, hard cash) to a global campaign to abolish smoking. Leadership in these realms requires vision and imagination that transcends mere engineering ingenuity....

Billows of fire and smoke filled the air above Florida’s Kennedy Space Center as the countdown clock reached zero. Flanked by two rocket boosters and strapped to the back of a giant red fuel tank, the space shuttle blasted off. Within seconds, the shuttle disappeared from sight. In just over 8 minutes, it reached outer space. But NASA’s launches left more than a legacy of space exploration. Before leaving Earth’s atmosphere, each space shuttle spewed thousands of pounds of metals and other chemicals into the air....

Sociologists have long firmly held that marital bliss is high in the very early years of marriage, declines with the coming of children and rises in later years when children have left home. Happiness thus follows a U-shaped trajectory over the life of a marriage, as shown in the chart. This belief derives largely from studies that employ a technique–the cross-sectional survey–unsuited to constantly changing phenomena such as marriage because it measures attitudes at only one point in time....

Most everything in the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy—two invisible, mysterious materials that scientists know very little about. Physicist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan will present a public lecture tonight at 7 P.M. Eastern time that will be broadcast live on this Web page, which will follow the hunt for these unseen entities via experiments in laboratories, satellites and colliders around the world. “If we take everything from our daily experience, everything that we know about, it’s made of atoms and all of that adds up to only 5 percent of the universe....

On the island of Flores in Indonesia, villagers have long told tales of a diminutive, upright-walking creature with a lopsided gait, a voracious appetite, and soft, murmuring speech. They call it ebu gogo, “the grandmother who eats anything.” Scientists best guess was that macaque monkeys inspired the ebu gogo lore. But last October, an alluring alternative came to light. A team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavating a cave on Flores unveiled the remains of a lilliputian human–one that stood barely a meter tall–whose kind lived as recently as 13,000 years ago....

On Friday evening, at the start of a long holiday weekend, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel warning for pregnant women and those trying to get pregnant: stay clear of places where Zika virus is present. The warning about the mosquito-borne illness encompasses 14 countries and areas, which include: Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico....

Scuba-diving archaeologists have unearthed artefacts from an ancient butchering site that seem to settle a debate about when humans spread across the Americas. Working in the murk of a river in Florida, the team found stone tools dating back 14,550 years that could have been used to carve up ancient elephant-like beasts called mastodons, whose remains have been recovered from the same site. The findings, published today in Science Advances, add to ever-growing evidence that humans were living in much of the Americas well before the cultural group known as Clovis were present about 13,000 years ago....

Following the warmest two years on record and spikes in violence that fueled a global refugee crisis, climate scientists on Monday reported that armed fighting is prone to follow droughts, heatwaves and other weather-related calamities in turbulent countries. Nearly a quarter of deadly armed conflicts in the countries with the most diverse ethnic makeups from 1980 to 2010 were found to have occurred at around the same time as an extreme weather event....

A series of dark, craggy pinnacles rises 80 meters above the grassy plains of Namibia. The peaks call to mind something ancient — the burial mounds of past civilizations or the tips of vast pyramids buried by the ages. The stone formations are indeed monuments of a faded empire, but not from anything hewn by human hands. They are pinnacle reefs, built by cyanobacteria on the shallow sea floor 543 million years ago, during a time known as the Ediacaran period....

At the dawn of 2017 the Danish parliament struck a blow for transgender rights and became the first country to remove trans people’s classification as “mentally ill.” In this New Year’s Day move the government took official action to destigmatize transgender individuals, separating them from any association with words such as “problem,” “disorder” or dysphoria. Words matter, says Linda Thor Pedersen of rights organization LGBT Denmark. “It was very important,” she says, “that terms like “incongruence,” “disturbance” and “problem” were left out of the code title used by the country’s medical community to track care....

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization will next month launch a strategy to stop cholera transmission by 2030, it said on Monday, as an unprecedented outbreak in Yemen raced towards 700,000 suspected cases with little sign of slowing down. The WHO is also trying to keep the lid on a flare-up in Nigeria while tackling many entrenched outbreaks in Africa and an epidemic in Haiti, where almost 10,000 people have died since 2010....

By the time the 48-year-old man showed up at a clinic in New York City he had been sick for almost two weeks. A blotchy, red rash still blanketed his torso and his body ached. He had just gotten over a triple-digit fever, intense lower back pain and a painful eye infection. Five weeks earlier he had embarked on a long vacation to South America and Polynesia but during his trip he had felt fine....

You’ve probably heard of the fitness bands such as the UP band and the Fitbit. But wristbands are just the warm-up act. Here’s what else is coming down the pike. Spree Headband: This $300 band (also available as a baseball cap) does more than keep the sweat out of your eyes when you’re running, walking, biking, weight lifting or skiing. It also monitors your heart rate, body temperature, distance, time, calories burned and speed....

The Colchester Zoo in England is home to a community of mandrills, the largest of the monkeys. One of these mandrills, a female named Milly, began covering her eyes with her hand when she was three. A dozen years later Milly and her zoo mates continue to perform this gesture, which appears to mean “do not disturb.” The signal is the first gesture with cultural roots reported in monkeys. Culture accounts for behavioral differences that are geo­graphic, rather than genetic or environmental....

As the vast majority of businesses and states have tried to reopen and people rush back to public life, they’ve run headlong into the trap of “getting back to normal.” They didn’t realize we’re heading into a period of waves of restrictions once again, due to many states reopening too soon. Indeed, some of the states to open early onward have already reimposed some restrictions, showing that, as I predicted in a newspaper editorial back in early March, we will be facing rolling waves of restrictions and shutdowns until we have a vaccine, and that we need to focus much more on virtual interactions....

George Floyd could not breathe. Like other Americans now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, he gasped horribly for air before his world went dark. Unlike them, his agony was not born from a lung-ravaging virus. He was strangled. He was killed in public, with the weight of anti-Black hatred kneeling terribly—almost boastfully—down on his neck. Weeks before, and miles away, a comparison of public parks in New York shows the tale of two cities....

WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has reversed a plan to temporarily ban a plant that some users suggest could be an alternative to powerful and addictive opioid painkillers. In a notice set to be published Thursday in the Federal Register, the agency said it was withdrawing its plan to add two psychoactive components of the plant, known as kratom, to the list of the most dangerous drugs. Advocates urging the DEA to leave kratom off its list of controlled substance have argued that it can be used as a nonaddictive painkiller or can help wean people off other, addictive pain medications....

Our creative powers may explain why we have been around for the past 40,000 years and Neandertals have not. Also, traits that stand out in modern humans may provide clues as to why we have maneuvered a helicopter on Mars while chimpanzees have only engaged in the most basic tool use. We bear a trace of Neandertal legacy in our genome, a bequest from ancestral interbreeding. But some experts argue that, on balance, the sharper innovative capacities of Homo sapiens contributed to pushing our hominin cousins over the extinction cliff....

The dawn of dairy farming in Europe occurred thousands of years before most people evolved the ability to drink milk as adults without becoming ill. Now researchers think they know why: lactose tolerance was beneficial enough to influence evolution only during occasional episodes of famine and disease, explaining why it took thousands of years for the trait to become widespread1. The theory — backed up by an analysis of thousands of pottery shards and hundreds of ancient human genomes as well as sophisticated modelling — explains how the ability to digest milk became so common in modern Europeans, despite being almost non-existent in early dairy farmers....

Medicine Gene Therapy Is Coming of Age Various approaches are approved for treating blood cancers and a few rare disorders—they may soon become standard care November 1, 2021 — Lauren Gravitz Medicine The Definition of Gene Therapy Has Changed Over the past few years, the discipline has evolved in significant ways November 1, 2021 — Esther Landhuis Medicine The Quest to Overcome Gene Therapy’s Failures Tragic side effects plagued the field’s early years, but researchers are finding ways to minimize the risks...