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A dangerous new form of antibiotic resistance has spread to the United States, according to a report published Thursday. Researchers at the Department of Defense announced that a Pennsylvania woman developed a urinary tract infection (UTI) with bacteria that fought off an antibiotic of last resort called colistin, and had 15 genes for resistance to other antibiotics. Until now, many bacteria have been vulnerable to colistin, even if they have been able to survive other medications....

By David CyranoskiHow should clinics that treat patients with injections of their own stem cells be regulated? That question is about to test the jurisdiction of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a landmark legal battle–and is fuelling a war of words between doctors marketing such therapies and academics who urge caution.The FDA asserted its authority on August 6, when it requested a federal injunction from the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia to prevent stem-cell clinic Regenerative Sciences in Broomfield, Colorado, from preparing its treatments....

By Richard A. Lovett In addition to smashing buildings and killing more than 200,000 people, Haiti’s devastating January 12 earthquake produced two 3-meter tsunamis, scientists announced on February 24 at a meeting in Portland, Ore.The discovery was made by Hermann Fritz, a coastal engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Savannah, who spent six days in Haiti in early February documenting stories from fishermen and aid workers.When the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck, computer models predicted that a tsunami would hit the nation’s south shore–but with a height of just 20 centimeters, said Fritz....

In the past several days a number of news articles have touted the passage of a tidy astronomical milestone—the discovery of the 500th known planet outside the solar system. In the past 15 years, the count of those extrasolar worlds, or exoplanets, has climbed through single digits into the dozens and then into the hundreds. The pace of discovery is now so rapid that the catalogue of identified planets leaped from 400 to 500 entries in just over a year....

Jordan Suchow came to three rapid-fire conclusions as he watched his Macintosh laptop plummet toward the floor. First, in approximately 300 milliseconds he was going to be in a heap of trouble—the machine had been given to him by his thesis adviser, George Alvarez of Harvard University. Second, hoping against all hope, he decided that Harvard could probably afford to buy him a new computer. Third, he realized that the most important observation of his life was unfolding right in front of him as his laptop accelerated toward the parquet: the onscreen doughnut that he had programmed to scintillate appeared to have stopped doing so....

An experimental wind turbine floating about 20 kilometers off the coast of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant marks Japan’s first step toward building the world’s largest offshore wind farm. But the island country still faces huge challenges as it aims to boost renewable power sources in the wake of its greatest nuclear disaster. The turbine is connected to the world’s first floating wind farm substation in an ambitious bid to unlock offshore wind power in deep waters....

Beau Bassin–Rose Hill, Mauritius—Nearly two weeks after the Japanese-owned, Panamanian-flagged ship MV Wakashio ran aground off the coast of Mauritius late last month—immediately destroying more than 600 yards of fragile coral reefs—the bulk carrier began leaking oil into the pristine blue lagoons of the Indian Ocean island. The spill threatened to do much greater damage than the ship itself. Within hours of the leak, more than 5,000 local volunteers and dozens of career conservationists jumped into action to save their remote nation’s vibrant, unique wildlife by controlling the oil and moving some species out of harm’s way....

OBSERVATIONS BLOGS: Laureate Says Big Answers May Lie in Accidental Lab Results Bill Gates Urges Young Scientists to Consider the “Needs of the Poorest” Laureate urges next generation to address population control as central issue Virologist Advocates Vaccinating Only Boys for HPV to Prevent Cervical Cancer Message to Early-Career Scientists: Work to End Third World Diseases PODCASTS: Nobelist Kroto: What’s the Evidence for What You Accept? Nobelist Smithies Shares Thesis on Theses Business and Regulation Models Can Bring Medicines to World’s Poor Nobelist Christian de Duve Compares Good and Better Brains Nobelist Edmond Fischer: Factor and Phenomenon Have Switched Places as Research Starting Points Bill Gates: Lagging Research on Diseases of Poor Is a Market Failure...

The boundary between the Earth’s outermost layer, the crust, and the underlying mantle is speckled with mysterious, blob-like regions. Scientists have long known about these odd pockets, which are called ultralow-velocity zones. They slow down the seismic waves caused by earthquakes and may be the culprit for deep mantle plumes, which can lead to volcanic hotspots like those that created Yellowstone National Park or the Hawai’ian Islands. Researchers have postulated a number of explanations for what these ultralow-velocity zones are made of and how they’re formed....

Not all planets orbit stars. Some are instead “free-floating” rogues adrift in interstellar space after being ejected from their home systems. For decades astronomers have sought to study such elusive outcasts, hoping to find patterns in their size and number that could reveal otherwise hidden details of how planetary systems emerge and evolve. Of the handful known so far, most free floaters have been massive gas giants, but now researchers may have found one small enough to be rocky—smaller even than Earth....

A certain French rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but fragrance aside, its scientific name is Rosa gallica—and that’s the name it should bear in botanical collections. Yet more than half of plant specimens tucked away in herbaria may be mislabeled, and the problem could extend to other types of collections, too, according to a study published in Current Biology. To examine how pervasive mislabeling can be, researchers at the University of Oxford and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh analyzed the tags on 4,500 specimens of African ginger and more than 49,000 specimens of morning glories as case studies....

It was one of those seemingly mundane moments, but I was thunderstruck when I realized the implications. Tossing on a cardigan, I happened to notice my toddler intently staring at me to figure out how to push a button through a hole in her sweater. Suddenly, I realized how much we learn how to do things and how to behave around others just by watching and copying. At the time, nearly a decade ago, I had little idea about how extensively my child was mentally rehearsing my actions as she studied me....

In virtually all machinery, from your vacuum cleaner to factory assembly lines, oil or grease lubricates the moving parts to reduce friction. Friction wears out parts quickly and raises the energy expended in moving them. Anything that can cut such resistance should lengthen the life of machines and save energy. U.S. government estimates indicate, for example, that even a modest improvement in the efficiency of the common hydraulic pump could save American industry hundreds of millions of dollars in annual energy costs....

So natural is our capacity for rhythm that most of us take it for granted: when we hear music, we tap our feet to the beat or rock and sway, often unaware that we are even moving. But this instinct is, for all intents and purposes, an evolutionary novelty among humans. Nothing comparable occurs in other mammals nor probably elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Our talent for unconscious entrainment lies at the core of dance, a confluence of movement, rhythm and gestural representation....

After two cable failures in the span of four months, Puerto Rico’s most venerable astronomy facility, the Arecibo radio telescope, has collapsed in an uncontrolled structural failure. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the site, decided in November to proceed with decommissioning the telescope in response to the damage, which engineers deemed too severe to stabilize without risking lives. But the NSF needed time to come up with a plan for how to safely demolish the telescope in a controlled manner....

Because 99 percent of our evolutionary history was spent as hunter-gatherers living in small bands of a few dozen to a few hundred people, we evolved a psychology not always well equipped to reason our way around the modern world. What may seem like irrational behavior today may have actually been rational 100,000 years ago. Without an evolutionary perspective, the assumptions of Homo economicus—that “Economic Man” is rational, self-maximizing and efficient in making choices—make no sense....

You would be forgiven for assuming that we understand the proton. It is, after all, the main constituent of matter in the observable universe, the fuel of stellar furnaces. Studies of the proton—its positive charge suitably bound up with a negatively charged electron to make a hydrogen atom—initiated the quantum-mechanical revolution a century ago. Today researchers trigger torrents of ultrahigh-energy proton collisions to conjure particle exotica such as the Higgs boson....

Right now our solar system is barreling into a region of space that we know next to nothing about. For about 60,000 years, our sun has been traversing the local interstellar cloud (LIC), a region of gas and dust within a mostly empty bubble that was carved out of the Milky Way by supernovae millions of years ago. In as little as 2,000 years, however, our star’s sphere of influence will move on to uncharted space....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A new virus, Langya henipavirus, is suspected to have caused infections in 35 people in China’s Shandong and Henan provinces over roughly a two-year period to 2021. It’s related to Hendra and Nipah viruses, which cause disease in humans. However, there’s much we don’t know about the new virus – known as LayV for short – including whether it spreads from human to human....

To Dr. William Cornatzer, it was an unforgettable image, one that troubled him deeply. An avid hunter, Cornatzer was listening to a presentation on the lead poisoning of California condors when an x-ray of a mule deer flashed on an overhead screen. The deer had been shot in the chest with a high-powered rifle. Cornatzer was shocked that the deer’s entire carcass was riddled with dozens of tiny lead-shot fragments....