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On 11 March, U.S. President Donald Trump released his budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October 2019. Nature’s news team reports on what Trump’s budget would mean for U.S. government science agencies. National Institutes of Health The White House plan would give the National Institutes of Health (NIH) U.S.$34.4 billion, roughly $5 billion below the current level. The plan would move the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, to the NIH....

Borna disease virus 1 (BoDV-1) causes a bizarre and deadly neurological infection in horses, sheep and other domesticated mammals in parts of Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria. Borna disease was named after a city in eastern Germany where it once killed numerous horses in the late 19th century. Infected animals have been known to engage in strange behaviors, such as smashing their heads into things, as well as “pipe smoking”—an informal term for when animals are eating hay and suddenly stop chewing mid-mouthful, with the uneaten portion protruding like a pipe....

Nothing is nonsensical. It is impossible to conceptualize nothing—not only no space, time, matter, energy, light, darkness or conscious beings to perceive the nothingness but not even nothingness. In this sense, the question is literally inconceivable. Nothing is something. It is a logical fallacy to talk about “nothing” as if it were a “something” that ceases to exist. Here we bump up against the problem of defining what we mean by “nothing” and the restrictions that language imposes on the problem....

Aerial spraying of the insecticide naled, followed by a product that targets mosquitoes when they are in the larval stage, may be responsible for a sharp drop in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in a part of Miami where local transmission of the Zika virus was first found, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday. CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said the apparent success of the combination in the Miami neighborhood of Wynwood may represent a new standard for control of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes....

At her first birthday, Emma Larson was not walking or standing, but neither are plenty of other kids at that age. She loved the bouncer her parents set up in their Long Island, N.Y., home, and she crawled with gusto. Then, at 13 months, Emma’s legs stopped working. Her mother, Dianne Larson, snaps her fingers and says, “It was like that.” Emma stopped bouncing. Her legs buckled when she pulled herself up to stand....

The Apollo missions are most celebrated for putting human footprints on the moon, but their biggest contribution to science was the collection of rocks the astronauts brought home with them. To call these 382 kilograms of stone and regolith (the thick layer of crushed rock and dust that covers the surface of the moon and other planetary bodies) a treasure trove does not do them justice. Studying these samples in laboratories on Earth helped to establish the modern field of planetary science and gave us crucial insights into geologic processes that operate on all planetary bodies....

A new 2,100-square-meter building outside Frankfurt, Germany, houses a series of chambers that can simulate a hot, humid day or temperatures so frigid that metals crack, and every punishing weather scenario in between. It’s all for testing one product—solar photovoltaic panels—and it’s the third such facility opened since 2008. Underwriters Laboratories, perhaps most recognizable for the ubiquitous “UL” in a circle that is printed on many gadgets, was founded back in the late 19th century by insurance companies looking to forestall the fires endemic to the new era of electrification by safety certifying electrical products....

The Department of Energy has awarded around a half-million dollars to New York, Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts state organizations to cooperate on scaling up the offshore wind industry in the region. Under the leadership of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the group will lay out a collaborative road map by the end of the year on how to build up the new industry. The project largely aims to reduce the cost of offshore wind projects, which has been a barrier to development, and establish a regional supply chain....

In the Greek myth of Icarus, wings that melt in the sun are a tragedy. For the U.S. military, however, flying vehicles that vaporize in sunlight could be a potent weapon: picture a drone that vanishes without a trace after covertly delivering supplies to a remote location. Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new type of plastic that can form flexible sheets and tough mechanical parts—then disappear in minutes to hours when hit by ultraviolet light or temperatures above 176 degrees Fahrenheit....

Negotiators at the global climate talks in Scotland tentatively agreed to accelerate the timeline by which countries need to strengthen their promises for carbon reductions, according to a draft of the working text released this morning. The text reflects growing alarm among nations that global goals to slow the pace of climate change are falling short. It urges the countries to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 climate targets by next year, a move that would dramatically speed up the five-year timeline for new pledges....

Hurricanes are expected to grow stronger as the climate warms, with more of them spinning up into major storms. But it’s not just the biggest cyclones that are worsening. New research finds that weak tropical cyclones, including tropical storms and low-category hurricanes, are intensifying over time. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, uses data collected by thousands of scientific instruments scattered across the world’s oceans. Tropical cyclones leave telltale signs in the water, speeding up ocean currents as they churn through....

Watson is the IBM computer built by David Ferrucci and his team of 25 research scientists tasked with designing an artificial-intelligence (AI) system that can rival human champions at the game of Jeopardy. After beating the greatest Jeopardy champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in February 2011, the computer is now being employed in more practical tasks such as answering diagnostic medical questions. I have a question: Does Watson know that it won Jeopardy?...

Over the past five decades mosquito populations in parts of the U.S. have skyrocketed by a factor of 10—a situation with worrying implications for the spread of diseases such as West Nile virus, dengue and chikungunya. And some places are apparently more vulnerable than others. A new study published last October in the Journal of Medical Entomology found that in Baltimore, low-income neighborhoods bear the biggest burden: they have not only more mosquitoes but also larger ones, which often survive longer....

For the first time, researchers have obtained images of individual carbon dioxide molecules trapped in a series of molecular “cages”—and they borrowed an imaging technique from biologists to do it. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are exceptionally porous polymers designed to capture particular gas molecules, letting scientists separate or purify various vapors. Even small amounts can slurp up a lot of gas: a single gram can have a gas-grabbing surface area nearly the size of two football fields....

The Turing test, the quintessential evaluation designed to determine if something is a computer or a human, may have a fatal flaw, new research suggests. The test currently can’t determine if a person is talking to another human being or a robot if the person being interrogated simply chooses to stay silent, new research shows. While it’s not news that the Turing test has flaws, the new study highlights just how limited the test is for answering deeper questions about artificial intelligence, said study co-author Kevin Warwick, a computer scientist at Coventry University in England....

If we must find some good news about the global novel coronavirus pandemic, we perhaps could point to the improved survival rates recorded in the latest tallies—about 1.5 percent of diagnosed cases ending in death as of the beginning of November, compared with about 7 percent fatality during the spring’s devastating first wave. Researchers have also assembled a clearer picture of what preexisting conditions dispose an individual to higher risk of death from COVID-19, which helps identify society’s most virus-vulnerable populations....

What better day to step back and take stock of the planet than Earth Day? Started in 1970 to raise awareness in the U.S. about the environmental state of the planet, Earth Day is now celebrated in more than 190 countries and has led to the creation of legislation in the U.S. aimed at protecting the environment. But one global trend has continued to alter the world—the rise of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, which have led to an ever-rising average global temperature....

In nationwide demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd in police custody, protesters have been frequently pepper-sprayed or enveloped in clouds of tear gas. These crowd-control weapons are rarely lethal, but in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, there are strong calls for police to stop using these chemical irritants because they can damage the body in ways that can spread the coronavirus and increase the severity of COVID-19. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, some experts said additional research was needed on the risks of tear gas—an umbrella term for several chemical “riot-control agents” used by law enforcement....

In China, people remember the period from roughly 1849 to 1949 as the “century of humiliation.” The time was turbulent, from the First Opium War (a defeat by the British) through many other defeats and unfavorable treaties in which Chinese people were dominated by the Japanese, French and English. Although the century was declared over in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was established, the Chinese remember the sting of those times and still interpret modern events through them....

Today (March 8) the moon will pass in front of the sun, causing the first and only total solar eclipse of 2016. For skywatchers around the world, here’s how to see the eclipse and what to expect. The eclipse will be visible across Indonesia, from the islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and Halmahera. A partial eclipse will be visible over southern and eastern Asia, northern and western Australia, and Hawaii. Skywatchers in the rest of the world can watch the eclipse live in a webcast hosted by the Slooh Community Observatory....