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Early this evening (Feb. 10), careful observers across parts of North America can watch a Full Snow Moon penumbral lunar eclipse. With a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, skywatchers can also catch a glimpse of a bright-green comet passing by Earth. Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková, which entered the media spotlight in December as the “New Year’s Eve comet” when it first became visible, makes its closest approach to Earth on Saturday (Feb....

BOSTON—To make health care more accessible and higher quality, insurers and providers are experimenting with a number of new approaches—from storing patient information in the cloud to opening clinics inside of grocery stores. Close cousins to many of these tactics, however, were implemented even earlier in the homeless health care system. Homeless patients’ unique characteristics—they frequently have multiple chronic conditions, they move around often—overlap with some of the pressures driving medicine’s evolving care model today....

Your memories of high school biology class may be a bit hazy nowadays, but there are probably a few things you haven’t forgotten. Like the fact that you are a composite of your parents—your mother and father each provided you with half your genes, and each parent’s contribution was equal. Gregor Mendel, often called the father of modern genetics, came up with this concept in the late 19th century, and it has been the basis for our understanding of genetics ever since....

Whether scientists can capitalise on the huge potential that stem cell research and therapeutic cloning promise depends on where in the world they work. There is a disparate and confusing patchwork of legislation, with little agreement between countries on exactly what should be permitted and what should be banned. Attempts to reach consensus have failed in Europe and at the United Nations, and in some countries the debate remains unresolved at the national level....

BALTIMORE—Dark matter pervades the universe, giving shape to the cosmos on the grandest scales. So perhaps it is fitting that physicists are turning to a large-scale physics experiment to uncover what dark matter is made of. Dark matter helps mold galaxy formation and accounts for five times the mass of all the ordinary, visible matter in the universe, but it has eluded direct detection for decades. Astronomers can see its gravitational effects—galaxies and galaxy clusters behave as if they have far more mass than ordinary matter alone can provide—but the particle nature of the stuff remains a mystery....

The huge potential of energy efficiency measures for mitigating the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere attracts little attention when placed alongside the more glamorous alternatives of nuclear, hydrogen or renewable energies. But developing a comprehensive efficiency strategy is the fastest and cheapest thing we can do to reduce carbon emissions. It can also be profitable and astonishingly effective, as two recent examples demonstrate. From 2001 through 2005, Procter & Gamble’s factory in Germany increased production by 45 percent, but the energy needed to run machines and to heat, cool and ventilate buildings rose by only 12 percent, and carbon emissions remained at the 2001 level....

Serious political tensions and fears of COVID-19 have led record-breaking numbers of Americans to vote early this year, either by mail or in person. Now the process of counting these votes—whether in states that did so on a rolling basis as they came in or those that waited until Election Day—relies on machines that vary a great deal from state to state and even from county to county. Although the technology used in voting continues to evolve, it remains vulnerable to both malicious and unintentional errors....

Late on a Friday night in April 2020, Lexi Walls was alone in her laboratory at the University of Washington, waiting nervously for the results of the most important experiment of her life. Walls, a young structural biologist with expertise in coronaviruses, had spent the past three months working day and night to develop a new kind of vaccine against the pathogen ravaging the world. She hoped that her approach, if successful, might not only tame COVID but also revolutionize the field of vaccinology, putting us on a path to defeat infectious diseases from flu to HIV....

By Tom BrownMIAMI (Reuters) - The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season looks set to go down as a big washout, marking the first time in 45 years that the strongest storm to form was just a minor Category 1 hurricane.There could still be a late surprise in the June 1-November 30 season, since the cyclone that mushroomed into Superstorm Sandy was just revving up at this time last year.But so far, at least, it has been one of the weakest seasons since modern record-keeping began about half a century ago, U....

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - At least 600 million people, or 1 in 10 worldwide, fall ill from contaminated food each year and 420,000 die, many of them young children, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. Giving its first global estimates of preventable foodborne diseases, a WHO report called on governments and industry to improve inspections and control of the food chain from the fields and farmyard to the factory and the plate....

The novel coronavirus exposed and exacerbated the fragility and inequity of the global economic system. Many countries, including the U.S., proved unable to manufacture simple products such as face masks, let alone more complicated ones such as ventilators. Multiple supply chains broke. The resulting ordeal will almost surely lead to the creation of more onshore production facilities. An ugly nationalism displayed by countries that have hoarded vaccines and put profits over lives shows no sign of abating, despite its potentially devastating outcomes for the world....

By Zeeya Merali The laws of physics say that you can’t get energy for nothing – worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information. Masaki Sano, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a bead can be coaxed up a ‘spiral staircase’ without any energy being directly transferred to the bead to push it upwards....

Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe as we know it began in the instant of time we call the big bang. At this moment, very hot and dense energy and matter suffused the cosmos, fueling the expansion of space. In the first split second afterward, many physicists posit, the universe went through a phase of extremely rapid expansion: a process called inflation. One of the most marvelous predictions of this theory is that the arrangement of all the galaxies throughout the universe—the placement of all the “stuff” in the cosmos at the largest conceivable scales—was set by events taking place at the smallest possible level of measurement: the quantum realm....

Two Americans won the 2009 economics prize in memory of Alfred Nobel: Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” the prize committee announced today, and Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley, “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.” Ostrom becomes the first woman ever to win this economics prize. Both researchers went beyond traditional economics thinking, which relies on analyses of market prices....

More than 500 brands of psychotherapy exist, with new ones springing up on a nearly monthly basis. Although a handful of these neophyte treatments have been tested in scientific studies, it is anybody’s guess whether the others actually work. Over the past 15 years or so, one of these new kids on the therapy block has stood out from the pack for the remarkable attention it has received from the media, practitioners and mental health consumers....

Blockbuster flooding events such as Hurricane Harvey grab headlines, but urban flooding is a routine—and growing—problem: in a 2018 report, 83 percent of municipal stormwater and flood managers surveyed in the U.S. reported such inundation in their areas. Though heavier downpours fueled by climate change are a factor, the expansion of pavement and other impervious surfaces is making the situation worse because it prevents the land from absorbing these torrents of water....

In integrative medicine, healthcare practitioners often combine conventional treatments with holistic ones, such nutritional supplements, acupuncture and phytotherapy, which is the use of plant-derived medicines. The principle is that synergistic combinations can deliver better results than any single therapy alone. “In my field, that of human nutrition, one compound might reduce absorption of cholesterol in the intestine, for instance, and another the de novo synthesis of cholesterol in the liver,” says Jan Frank of the Institute of Biological Chemistry and Nutrition at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany....

About 300 million years ago, volcanic ash buried a tropical forest located in what is now Inner Mongolia, much like it did the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. This preserved forest has given researchers the unusual opportunity to examine an ecosystem essentially frozen in place by a natural disaster, giving them a detailed look at ancient plant communities and a glimpse at the ancient climate. This ancient, tropical forest created peat, or moist, acidic, decaying plant matter....

For as long as he could remember, Razel Colón had known pain. It ripped down his neck and back, shot through his legs and traveled on to his feet, often leaving him writhing and incapacitated. He suffered occasional attacks of “acute chest,” in which breathing suddenly becomes difficult. “It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest, with tight, tight pain,” Colón tells me. Trips to the emergency department and the hospital were commonplace....

A Chinese riddle invites on to guess the identity of runners without a leg, swimmers without a flipper, gliders without a wing. The answer, of course, is snakes. Today more than 3,000 species share a long, limbless body that can negotiate land, water and even the air between trees. Their ancient ancestors, however, had limbs of various shapes. How, scientists have wondered, did snakes lose their legs? Special forms of appendages are often tied to certain habitats....