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Tuesday 1 October should have been an exciting day for David Johnson. The biotech chief executive planned to withdraw some of the cash from a US$1.2-million small business grant that his firm, GigaGen in San Francisco, California, had been awarded just days before by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). But Johnson was not able to access the money, nor may he be able to until the deeply divided US Congress agrees on a plan to fund government operations for the fiscal year that began on 1 October....

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the link between politics and health became glaringly obvious. Democrat-leaning “blue” states were more likely to enact mask requirements and vaccine and social distancing mandates. Republican-leaning “red” states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones. That divergence continued through 2021, when vaccines became widely available....

On March 20 a National Park Service biologist named Jeffrey Goldstein and I descended a rocky incline into the mouth of Devils Hole, a collapsed cave in the Nevada desert 40 miles south of the visitor’s center in Death Valley. Thirty feet down, an arm of water extends out from a deep pool to cover a rock shelf the size of a Ping-Pong table with up to two and a half feet of hot water....

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a difficult task. It must convince U.S. taxpayers that space science is worth $16.25 billion a year. To achieve this goal, the agency conducts an extensive public-relations effort that is similar to the marketing campaigns of America’s biggest corporations. NASA has learned a valuable lesson about marketing in the 21st century: to promote its programs, it must provide entertaining visuals and stories with compelling human characters....

Each summer, amateur astronomers from all over the world look forward to observing the famous Perseid meteor shower, but often overlook six lesser celestial fireworks displays that reach their peak between July 28 and Aug. 20. This year, a bright nearly-full moon will seriously interfere with Perseid meteor observing, so why not take this opportunity to try and view the other six, all but one of which will enjoy dark skies....

“How Many Psychologists Does It Take … to Explain a Joke?” Many, it turns out. As psychologist Christian Jarrett noted in a 2013 article featuring that riddle as its title, scientists still struggle to explain exactly what makes people laugh. Indeed, the concept of humor is itself elusive. Although everyone understands intuitively what humor is, and dictionaries may define it simply as “the quality of being amusing,” it is difficult to define in a way that encompasses all its aspects....

Nearly a year ago, toxicologist Linda Birnbaum was named director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. She sat down with Environmental Health News journalist Jane Kay in San Francisco on Wednesday to answer questions about the environmental health risks we face today. As head of the federal institute examining environmental health, Birnbaum and her staff are taking on many controversial topics, including Bisphenol A and new flame retardants in consumer products....

Monterey, Calif.—As Earth’s atmosphere heats up due to global warming, the world’s oceans will warm, too. All kinds of creatures, from the smallest plankton to the largest fishes, will be forced to adjust. Some of them may be able to adapt by altering their body chemistries, but the most likely response—for those that are free to travel (unlike oysters, say)—is simply to move. Indeed, certain species of fish are migrating away from mid-latitude oceans toward cooler waters such as the Arctic Ocean, according to recent studies....

The Borg have landed—or, at least, researchers have discovered their counterparts here on Earth. Scientists analysing samples from muddy sites in the western United States have found novel DNA structures that seem to scavenge and ‘assimilate’ genes from microorganisms in their environment, much like the fictional Star Trek ‘Borg’ aliens who assimilate the knowledge and technology of other species. These extra-long DNA strands, which the scientists named in honour of the aliens, join a diverse collection of genetic structures—circular plasmids, for example—known as extrachromosomal elements (ECEs)....

The soccer world is abuzz with the allegations that officials at FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) engaged in racketeering, money laundering and other criminal activities. Officials at FIFA engaged in a “24-year scheme to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer,” according to a statement released by the United States Department of Justice on May 27. But while it’s tempting to blame such activities on weak morals, research shows that corruption—or abuse of power for private gain—is far more complicated, said Marina Zaloznaya, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa....

Many view the scientific process as a tool to preclude human emotions from influencing the search for truth. But those emotions are essential when it comes time to help people connect to the science, or so suggests award-winning illustrator and visual artist Fatinha Ramos. The Portuguese artist has won awards from the Society of Illustrators NY, 3x3, Global Illustration Award and World Illustration Awards, to name a few. Her most recent win, the overall professional award from the World Illustration Awards, came for her illustration “Another Tragic Epidemic: Suicide,” which was published in Scientific American....

To reach the pro level, football players must compete aggressively. But to keep charging ahead at full steam, they also need to be vigilant about their health, which means eating and drinking right. In this extreme sport, just how much water can these pro athletes sweat through? The body loses moisture through perspiration as well as through respiration (think of your breath fogging a window). Both of these processes speed up during exercise as the body works to cool itself down with sweat, which evaporates from the skin, taking heat with it, and by breathing harder to get extra oxygen to the muscles....

World Bank President Jim Kim yesterday put climate change at the center of the fight against extreme poverty, part of an effort since he began his tenure to link the two looming global problems. Speaking at the opening of the bank’s spring meetings, he noted that fewer than 100 people control as much of the world’s wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion combined. Meanwhile, about 1 billion people earn less than $1....

Buried a mile into the South Pole ice, more than 5,000 sensors spread over a square kilometer lie in wait. Part of the IceCube experiment, they are a telescope of sorts that looks not for light, but for neutrinos coming in from the far-off cosmos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles with no electric charge and almost negligible mass. Because of these properties, they are immune to the electromagnetic force and feel gravity only very minutely, and so they rarely interact with other matter....

The Army Corps of Engineers’ road map for protecting coastal Louisiana from a Category 5 hurricane is substantially flawed because it fails to recommend a clear plan that can be adopted quickly, according to a National Research Council review released today. The corps’ long-overdue Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Program report, congressionally mandated after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and finalized this month, instead lays out 27 alternatives, highlighting none as preferred. “The LACPR has not proposed, and apparently does not intend to propose, a single plan or a preferred initial course of action,” said the NRC report, which evaluated the Army Corps’ March draft plan....

CANADA Archaeologists have now confirmed that a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton found in the 1990s at a fossil site in Saskatchewan is the biggest and heaviest on record. At nearly 42 feet long and almost 20,000 pounds, “Scotty” surpassed the record set by “Sue,” which was found in South Dakota in 1990. ARGENTINA Archaeologists identified a site where ancient humans killed and butchered giant ground sloths (Megatherium americanum) in the Pampas region in eastern Argentina....

GREENLAND Rising ocean temperatures are melting Greenland’s ice caps at three times what the rate was before 1997, according to a recent data analysis of meltwater runoff and ice-cap mass. The island’s melting ice caps account for a third of global sea-level rise. CHINA Ozone pollution is damaging rice at an important stage of its growth, a new study has shown. China loses more than 1 percent of its rice crop yield for every day that high concentrations of surface ozone occur....

Suddenly the tree canopy below the twin-engine plane turns a mottled gray-brown, a sign of drought damage that he estimates may affect as many as half the trees. Faced with warmer, drier conditions, trees have three options: “Individuals can acclimate, species can adapt or migrate, or they go extinct,” says Kenneth Feeley, a biologist at Florida International University. A floral species can expand its range into a cooler region, but only as fast as seed dispersal allows....

A creative director obsessed with design and space exploration has launched a campaign to bring a “galactic greeting card” from billions of miles out into space back to Earth — by producing and offering exact replicas. Forty-five years ago, NASA launched Pioneer 10, the first probe to encounter Jupiter and to achieve escape velocity from our solar system. Mounted to its antenna support was a gold anodized aluminum plaque that was engraved with “a little bit of where we are, when we are and who we are,” according to the late Carl Sagan, who helped to create the plaque on the off chance that another space-faring society were to someday come across the derelict probe....

A “Gravity blanket” on Kickstarter that claimed to use cozy pressure to treat anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions has been taking the internet by storm, raising more than $3 million. But on Thursday, the company quietly deleted the boldest medical claims on its crowdfunding site — language which violated Kickstarter policy and went against FDA recommendations — after STAT inquired about about its promotional statements. The creators of Gravity call their product a “premium-grade, therapeutic weighted blanket” intended to treat psychiatric illnesses....