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Even a small conflict in which two nations unleash nuclear weapons on each other could lead to worldwide famine, new research suggests. Soot from burning cities would encircle the planet and cool it by reflecting sunlight back into space. This in turn would cause global crop failures that — in a worst-case scenario — could put 5 billion people on the brink of death. “A large percent of the people will be starving,” says Lili Xia, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who led the work....

A lopsided atomic nucleus may help to refine nuclear theory. The stubby pear shape, described today in Nature, may also be pointing towards new tests of particle physics that could reveal why matter became more common than antimatter in the early moments of the Universe. Nuclei are held together by the strong nuclear force, which acts against the electrostatic repulsion that pushes protons apart. But calculating the interplay of these forces from first principles is complex, and theorists have instead devised several competing models to describe the structure of nuclei, based on empirical data and simplifying assumptions....

Scientists uncovered something unexpected in the fossilized embryo of a worm-like creature from the Cambrian period: the remains of a tiny, doughnut-shaped brain in the primordial animal’s head. The roughly 500 million-year-old fossil is an example of the marine species Markuelia hunanensis, an ancient cousin of penis worms (priapulids) and mud dragons (Kinorhyncha). To date, scientists haven’t found fossils of the worm-like weirdos in their adult form, but researchers have uncovered hundreds of pristine embryos that capture different stages of the animals’ early development....

Interplanetary travel probably means that astronauts will need to carry ecosystems along to supply food and oxygen. Past studies of potential space food have considered poultry, fish and even snails, newts and sea urchin larvae, but they all have downsides. Chickens, for instance, require a lot of food and space, and aquatic life is sensitive to water conditions that may be hard to maintain. Scientists at Beihang University in Beijing suggest recruiting silkworms, which are already eaten in parts of China....

In 2015 a white supremacist with a handgun walked into a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C., and murdered nine worshippers. In 2019 a gunman went on a rampage in El Paso, Tex., and has been charged with 23 murders, as well as hate crimes for targeting Mexicans and immigrants. In June 2020 a man whom prosecutors described as a Ku Klux Klan leader drove his vehicle into a crowd of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Virginia, injuring several....

Chemistry is perhaps the most sensual of the sciences, writer Ball posits in this absorbing collection of photographs from science artists Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang. Behind every smell, every worldly texture, even every emotional response, there is a chemical reaction. The wonder of those reactions is on display here, from the mesmerizing precipitation of heavy metals such as cobalt and nickel to the thermal heat map of sodium dissolving in plain water....

In the year since a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes and stopped the man’s heart, a record number of protesters have taken to the streets around the world to demand change. Earlier this year a jury took the all too extraordinary step of convicting the officer of murder. But the incessant killing of Black people and “the devaluation of Black lives in all domains of American life,” as sociologist Aldon Morris writes, continue to power the Black Lives Matter movement, which was launched in 2013 after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida....

“It was a Rube Goldberg idea,” says Carl June, recalling the earliest suggestions that the immune system might be retrained to attack tumors. This was the late 1980s, and it seemed unlikely—maybe even crazy—that T cells could be taken from a cancer patient and genetically engineered to become cancer killers. The idea was that the T cells would be reprogrammed to express chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) proteins, tuned to the patient’s unique tumor antigens; the resulting CAR-T cells, when returned to the patient, would thus kill any cells displaying that antigen (see ‘How CAR-T Therapy Works’)....

Lifting the curtain of darkness that surrounds world populations that have no access to energy was never among the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals for eradicating poverty. But Richenda Van Leeuwen, the U.N. Foundation’s new point woman on energy poverty, said leaders widely recognize the impossibility of achieving universal primary school education, reducing child mortality or other development targets without access to electricity. To that end, the United Nations has called for universal access to modern energy services by 2030....

A gaping hole in a dying tectonic plate beneath the ocean along the West Coast of the United States may be wreaking havoc at Earth’s surface, but not in a way most people might expect. This gash is so big it may trigger earthquakes off the coast of Northern California and could explain why central Oregon has volcanoes, a new study found. The researchers in the new study aren’t the first to suggest that the Michigan-size Juan de Fuca (pronounced “wahn de fyoo-kuh”) plate has a tear....

First impressions are powerful and are formed in all sorts of social settings, from job interviews and first dates to court rooms and classrooms. We regularly make snap judgments about others, deciding whether people are trustworthy, confident, extraverted, likable, and more. Although we have all heard the old adage, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” we do just that. And at the same time that we are judging others, we in turn communicate a great deal of information about ourselves – often unwittingly – that others use to size us up....

Why does exercise make us feel good? –David Graybill, Wilton, Conn. Jeannine Stamatakis, instructor at several colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, responds: THERE IS NO DENYING the high you feel after a run in the park or a swim at the beach. Exercise not only boosts your physical health–as one can easily see by watching a marathon or a boxing match–but it also improves mental health. According to a recent study, every little bit helps....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. For my fourth-grade science fair project, I tested different soaps to see which ones were the most effective at keeping my hands clean. Now, nearly 20 years later as a microbiology doctoral candidate, I can’t help but think, “Ugh, the fourth-grade me was such an amateur scientist!” My experiment lacked obvious control groups and ultimately asked the wrong question....

An artificial “leaf” that collects energy in much the same way as a natural one could provide a day’s worth of power for homes without access to an electricity grid. The leaf, a silicon-based square the size of a playing card, closely mimics the way plants use the process of photosynthesis to create energy. The device is dropped into a bucket of water, or even a muddy puddle, and placed in direct sunlight....

The fortification of salt with iodine is a global success story: with two out of three households in the developing world now consuming iodized salt, an estimated 82 million children are protected from thyroid disease and resultant learning disabilities every year. Still, people suffer from a lack of other micronutrients. For years, food scientists have looked for a way to fortify iodized salt to combat iron-deficiency anemia, which affects some two billion people, as well as vitamin A deficiency, which afflicts at least 100 million children in poor countries and is the leading cause of blindness among them....

In the summer of 2009 I tried to cure homemade sausages in my kitchen. One of the hazards of such a practice is preventing the growth of undesirable molds and diseases such as botulism. My wife was not on board with this plan, skeptical of my ability to safely execute the procedure. And so began many weeks of being peppered with warnings, relevant articles and concerned looks. When the time came for my first bite, nerves were high....

A melting Antarctica alone could raise oceans by more than 3 feet by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continued unabated, roughly doubling previous total sea-level rise estimates, according to new research. Scientists previously thought glacial melt in Antarctica would raise sea levels only by a little or only in the far future. But that’s changing as researchers learn more about the different ways the continent’s ice sheets could dump water into the oceans....

Targeted beams of high-intensity radiation can shrink early-stage tumors with limited collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue. The addition of robotics and image guidance systems in recent years has made these stereotactic, or directed beam, radiosurgery systems an even more versatile weapon against cancer, attacking not only brain tumors (for which they were originally designed) but also other diseases virtually anywhere in the body. Researchers have begun pushing the technology to the next step by increasing beam accuracy so that physicians can safely administer higher doses of radiation to cancerous cells, making radiosurgery a viable alternative to conventional surgery in more cases....

Biotech Behind the Revolution in Cancer Therapy Immunologist James Allison has spent over thirty years studying T cells and developing strategies for cancer immunotherapy. Now, he’s looking at new ways to unleash the immune system to eradicate cancer… September 12, 2018 Public Health Preparing for the Next Pandemic Even after 100 years, an influenza outbreak remains the scariest scenario in public health January 29, 2018 — Sharon Guynup Mental Health...

Originally posted on the Nature news blog The $1.4-billion European Space Agency spacecraft woke up in January this year after almost three years in hibernation. By August it hopes to catch up with the comet before setting down its lander, Philae, on the surface in November. This will be the first time a soft-landing has been attempted on a comet. The images from Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera, released by ESA today, show 67P-Churyumov–Gerasimenko increasingly releasing gas and dust over six weeks, from March 27 to May 4....