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The origin of menopause has puzzled evolutionary biologists for the last half-century. Three new studies attempt illumination. The real question, though, is probably not: Why menopause? Rather, it is: Why do women long outlive their fertility? Human ovaries tend to shut down by age 50 or even younger, yet women commonly live on healthily for decades. This flies in the face of evolutionary theory that losing fertility should be the end of the line, because once breeding stops, evolution can no longer select for genes that promote survival....

Taxpayers in New York may soon be covering the cost of a new kind of medicine: breast milk. A bill on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s desk would require Medicaid to pay for donor breast milk for certain premature babies. The bill reflects a scientific consensus that breast milk can be essential medicine for infants on the cusp of life and death, helping to prevent infection and ensure healthy brain development....

By Reuters Staff LONDON (Reuters) - The World Health Organization called on Tuesday for the release of clinical trial results for all drugs, vaccines and medical devices - whatever the result - in the latest salvo against the withholding of data. Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director general at the United Nations health agency, said failure to disclose trial results led to misinformation and could result in skewed priorities for research and public health interventions....

Amy Nitza has spent decades helping people in crisis. The director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State University of New York at New Paltz has traveled to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, to Botswana during an HIV crisis and to Haiti to help traumatized children forced into domestic servitude. But the COVID-19 pandemic, Nitza says, is different. It keeps coming at people month after month as loved ones get sick or die, as jobs are lost, and as the actions taken to avoid infection—such as isolation from family—cause intense emotional pain and stress....

How does food’s appearance or smell influence the way it tastes? Dana M. Small, a neuroscientist at the John B. Pierce Laboratory and the Yale School of Medicine, replies: What the brain perceives as flavor is actually a fusion of a food’s taste, touch and smell into a single sensation—each not only influences flavor but is an integral part of it. Sight, though not technically part of this equation, certainly influences perception in its own way....

They predict that if present trends in greenhouse gas emissions continue, average temperatures in Brazil will be 3 to 6 degrees Celsius higher by 2100 than they were at the end of the 20th century. Rainfall patterns could change drastically, increasing by up to 30 percent in the South and Southeast, while diminishing by up to 40 percent in the North and Northeast. The forecasts, based on research over the last six years, are contained in a report that provides the most complete diagnosis yet of the future tendencies of the Brazilian climate....

Twenty years ago, cardiologist and stem-cell scientist Piero Anversa published an exciting paper. He was then a prominent researcher at New York Medical College in Valhalla, and his data in mice showed that injured hearts could regenerate with the help of stem cells taken from bone marrow1—contrary to prevailing wisdom. Myocardial infarction, commonly known as a heart attack, deprives cardiac muscle cells of oxygen, causing them to perish. The human heart responds by laying scar tissue over lost muscle....

The relative magnitudes of solar versus anthropogenic forcing of the climate There is now much better understanding of the relative roles of these forcing terms. For a start there are now decades-long, high-quality satellite solar measurements: These establish that there have been no significant changes in solar irradiance since 1979 other than the well understood11-year cycle associated with sun-spot activity. In the longer term, reconstructions suggest a solar forcing since preindustrial times less than 10 percent that of the total human-induced forcing....

On December 14, 2020, a camera onboard a satellite recorded something that looked like a brown blob streaking across South America. The video was so unexpected it might have been mistaken for a technological glitch. Individuals on the ground witnessed something more striking: a total solar eclipse, or a daytime blackout triggered by the moon blocking the sun and throwing its shadow on Earth. Though total solar eclipses happen relatively frequently—about once every 18 months—seeing them is lucky....

Like people who share news via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, cells, too, make use of multiple modes of information exchange. Some send out hormones, which travel far and wide via the bloodstream; others emit neurotransmitters, which carry signals between one neuron and another. But virtually all cells, it turns out, network with their neighbors via extensive collections of channels that directly connect the inside of one cell with the inside of the next....

Could reading a cheerful or depressing post on Facebook influence your own mood? Apparently so, according to a new study conducted by the social networking company. When Facebook removed positive posts from the news feeds of more than 680,000 users, those users made fewer positive posts and more negative ones. Similarly, when negative posts were removed, the opposite occurred. The findings provide experimental evidence that emotions can be contagious, even without direct interaction or nonverbal cues, the researchers say....

Corporate data storage grows by 50 percent yearly. Desktop hard disks routinely hold multiple gigabytes. This ocean of information would not be navigable without superior search tools. Since it went live in 1998, Google has evolved into the innovator that Microsoft and other established information technology companies now strive to match. Google has extended search capabilities that even help the user organize photographs and word-processing files on a PC desktop. Today Google’s users can do more than snag reams of data....

ONE OF THE MAIN FUNCTIONS of visual perception is to detect objects in the environment as a prelude to identifying them as prey, predators or mates. Not surprisingly, both prey and predators go to enormous lengths to conceal their physical boundaries by blending in with the color and texture of their surroundings. Indeed, we can almost think of higher visual processing in the brain as having mainly evolved to defeat camouflage....

In 1931 German physician, physiologist and biochemist Otto Heinrich Warburg won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that cancerous cells—unlike most healthy human cells, which produce energy using oxygen via respiration—favor the anaerobic process of fermentation, or the conversion of sugar into acids, gases or alcohol, even in the presence of oxygen. This has perplexed scientists ever since because fermentation is a far less efficient means of generating energy than aerobic metabolism, hence its pejorative tag as a “wasteful metabolism....

Hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean typically begins to ramp up in earnest around mid-August. But at that time this year, there wasn’t a storm to be seen anywhere across that vast stretch of ocean. Those quiet weeks capped off a nearly two-month lull that had forecasters scratching their head after initial predictions of a busy season. “It was really, really dead. We had no storms in August, which was the first time since 1997,” when a very strong El Niño cut off hurricane activity, says Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, who issues a seasonal forecast....

This time last week FBI divers were searching Seccombe Lake, a freshwater lake about three kilometers from the Inland Regional Center, the site of December 2 shooting that left 14 dead and 22 injured. Reports indicated that shooters Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook had ditched their laptop hard drive, which may contain e-mails and other evidence, in the murky water around the time of the attack. Although the search has concluded, investigators have not confirmed whether or not a drive was recovered....

PARIS—What would a green financial system that encourages net zero greenhouse gas emissions look like? It would have to reduce the risks of high-carbon assets while simultaneously scaling up capital for the low-carbon transition. But who would set the ground rules, and what role would there be for investors? It would mean a rechanneling of trillions of dollars of private capital. Can this be done in a way that doesn’t threaten the world economy?...

When Hurricane Sally blew through coastal Alabama last month, the owners of about 16,000 homes there had a reason to breathe a little easier. Their roofs were probably going to be OK. Alabama’s two Gulf Coast counties—Mobile and Baldwin—are the nation’s leading adopters of a nationally recognized building standard meant to keep storms from ripping rooftops from houses, far outpacing other states, including others in Hurricane Alley. The design standard, called “Fortified,” was developed by the Insurance Institute for Building & Home Safety in 2012 and has been adopted by homeowners form the Carolinas to Texas....

Editor’s Note (12/1/20): This story has been updated to include the two additional storms that formed during hurricane season, which officially ended yesterday. The 2020 season set a record of 30 named storms. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season has truly been one for the record books. With 30 named storms, it has set the record for the most named storms in a single season. (Named storms are those that reach at least tropical storm strength, meaning they have wind speeds of 39 miles per hour or higher....

The Australian government unleashed a strain of a hemorrhagic disease virus into the wild earlier this year, hoping to curb the growth of the continent’s rabbit population. This move might sound barbaric, but the government estimates that the animals—brought by British colonizers in the late 18th century—gnaw through about $1150 million in crops every year. And the rabbits are not the only problem. For more than a century Australians have battled waves of intrusive species with many desperate measures—including introducing nonnative predators—to limited avail....