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Originally posted on the Nature news blog At the moment of his death, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had a prostate cancer in advanced state, with extended metastasis, according to the first analysis of his remains, carried on by the Chilean Legal Medical Service (SML). The results were delivered yesterday to Mario Carroza, the prosecution judge who is investigating the cause of the Nobel Laureate’s death in 1973. Whether the death was caused by that cancer, or rather by poisoning, as a key witness has claimed, may be cleared by a toxicological analysis that is being carried on in North Carolina....

Rain, mountain snow and colder conditions are in store for search, rescue and recovery operations in the Van, Turkey, area which was hit by a deadly and devastating earthquake this past weekend. A large storm will form and stall over the region this week, bringing progressively chilly and unsettled weather conditions. Reports indicate that from hundreds to thousands of people may remain buried under collapsed buildings and other structures in the Lake Van region of Turkey....

For the Chinese three-keeled pond turtle (Chinemys reevesii), self-determination starts early. A study published today in Biology Letters suggests that, as embryos, the reptiles can move around in their eggs to regulate their body temperatures — and, in turn, their own sex. “Our results suggest that animals may actively select their own destiny even at the very early stage of embryos,” says Wei-Guo Du, an ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the leader of the team who conducted the study....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard of the slow food movement, but what is “slow money” all about? – Phil Nimkoff, New York, NY “Slow Money” is the name for a movement started by socially conscious investing pioneer and author, Woody Tasch, who essentially borrowed the conceptual framework of “Slow Food”—whereby participants eschew convenience-oriented “fast” foods, instead filling up their plates with traditional, unprocessed and, ideally, locally produced foods—and applied it to personal finance and investing....

By Kate Kelland LONDON - The World Health Organization’s cancer agency - which is facing criticism over how it classifies carcinogens - advised academic experts on one of its review panels not to disclose documents they were asked to release under United States freedom of information laws. In a letter and an email seen by Reuters, officials from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cautioned scientists who worked on a review in 2015 of the weedkiller glyphosate against releasing requested material....

Brush your fossils twice a day. Do it for yourself and for future researchers and museum visitors. Because if any part of you is going to get unearthed millions of years from now, it’ll probably be a tooth. “Teeth are stronger than bones, and they are much more likely to survive the ages,” writes University of Arkansas paleoanthropologist Peter S. Ungar in his book Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet and Human Origins....

My family is what you might call politically diverse, with members ranging from real pinko-commie hippies to paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists—and we’re all connected on Facebook. This election year, things among us had gotten pretty acrimonious until my brother, Colin, did something ingenious: he made a pledge to stop talking politics on Facebook. Most of my other family members and I quickly followed suit, and as a result, I not only like my family more, I honestly feel more open to their opinions and ideas....

Life began in the sea and continues to flourish there, undetected by modern science and invisible to the human eye—until now. A new survey of the waters that cover more than 70 percent of our planet has captured an unprecedented look at the teeming life of the global ocean, from 50-nanometer-wide viruses to fish that measure just a few millimeters in length. © A. Deniaud/Tara Expeditions The 36-meter research schooner Tara surveyed the oceans from 2009 to 2013 and stopped at more than 210 stations from the Arctic to the South Atlantic....

We live together on the surface of a smallish rock in the immediate neighborhood of an angry plasma death-ball that gives us the energy we need to survive but could also swallow our entire home with nary a burp. So, you know, sometimes this plasma ball causes problems. Like blowing up a bunch of underwater mines during the Vietnam War, according to a paper published Oct. 25 in the journal Space Weather....

After her kidneys failed from the same illness that took the lives of her mother and brother, Anne Rupp went on dialysis in May 2016, spending three hours a day, three times a week undergoing the blood-cleaning procedure. She hated it. Rupp, who had polycystic kidney disease, joined more than 95,000 other Americans on kidney transplant lists. She knew the wait could stretch out for years. But an experimental—and controversial—source of donated organs provided a far quicker resolution: Expensive medicines to treat hepatitis C have made it possible to use organs donated by victims of opioid overdoses who were infected with the once-deadly virus....

Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) mission to the International Space Station is poised to launch at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT) on Thursday (May 19) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This second uncrewed test mission of the company’s Starliner capsule serves as a critical step in NASA’s certification of the spacecraft for human spaceflight, following the incomplete original OFT mission in December 2019 and valve problems that delayed OFT-2’s liftoff from summer 2021 until now....

When a shop selling cannabidiol (CBD), a compound found in marijuana, opened near the place where I get coffee in my Southern California neighborhood, I was of two minds. Actually, for several weeks I was of one mind, which was to wish for the speedy demise of the business. As a physician, I just know too much about some of the deleterious consequences associated with marijuana use: memory issues, altered judgment, addiction, longer-term cognitive issues, chronic bronchitis symptoms, and so on....

Scientists who combined an on-the-ground look at stream gauge data and an above-the-ground view from satellites have determined that as the Earth warms, the threat of flooding is growing in the northern half of the United States. The research from the University of Iowa, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that shifting rainfall patterns and the amount of water in the ground are likely causes for the changes....

Dear EarthTalk: I understand there is an effort underway to allow all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, motorbikes, motorboats and other motorized vehicles into wilderness areas, which would overturn a long-standing ban. What’s behind this?—Harry Schilling, Tempe, Ariz. A new bill making its way through Congress, the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage and Opportunities Act (H.R. 2834), aims to make federally managed public lands across millions of acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management property more accessible to hunters and anglers....

The disappearance of snakes’ limbs is more than a story of loss—it is a complex history detailed in their DNA. Hoping to understand how and why evolution shaped the snake as it did—and what happened to its genome when it stopped walking—a team of scientists is using the gene-editing CRISPR/Cas9 system to produce the same change in mice. Advances in genetic technology have accelerated the study of evolution via genomics, says Axel Visel, a geneticist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory....

Physicists are growing ever more frustrated in their hunt for dark matter—the massive but hard-to-detect substance that is thought to comprise 85% of the material Universe. Teams working with the world’s most sensitive dark-matter detectors report that they have failed to find the particles, and that the ongoing drought has challenged theorists’ prevailing views. The latest results from an experiment called XENON1T at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, published on October 30, continue a dry spell stretching back 30 years in the quest to nab dark-matter particles....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog. The rover that NASA is sending to Mars in 2020 will carry seven instruments geared to choosing just the right rocks to collect and store for future return to Earth. They include several firsts for Mars, including a zoomable camera, a machine to generate oxygen from carbon dioxide, and radar to explore geology up to half a kilometer deep. The instruments, announced July 31from a pool of 58 competitors, are in some ways a very different collection than what the Curiosity rover is currently trundling around Mars with....

Human activities currently add about nine gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere yearly. Photosynthetic organisms on land and in the ocean absorb about five of those gigatons through the natural uptake of CO2, leaving to humans the task of dealing with the rest. But no matter how much carbon there is, capturing it and preventing it from reentering the atmosphere is an immense engineering challenge; even today’s best technology is orders of magnitude less effective than photosynthesis at trapping atmospheric carbon....

If NASA’s $2.7 billion flagship mobile science laboratory, Perseverance, successfully touches down in Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, the feat will not only open a new chapter in exploration of the Red Planet, but also mark the triumphant culmination of four decades of increasingly challenging landings there. Replete with sedimentary rocks that might contain fossilized creatures from the planet’s warmer, wetter, more habitable past, Perseverance’s destination—the dried-up delta-and-lake system of Jezero Crater—seems so ideal for sniffing out signs of ancient life that one might wonder why it as of yet has remained unvisited....

Engineers are redesigning the uranium fuel used in almost all nuclear reactors worldwide to reduce both the chance of a hydrogen explosion and the release of radiation during an accident—which is what happened in 2011 at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The new fuels, which must still be perfected, are already being tested. In a reactor core, uranium atoms are split, releasing neutrons and heat. Systems in and around the reactor keep the core from getting too hot....