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When Ryan Darby was a neurology resident, he was familiar with something called alien limb syndrome, but that did not make his patients’ behavior any less puzzling. Individuals with this condition report that one of their extremities—often a hand—seems to act of its own volition. It might touch and grab things or even unbutton a shirt the other hand is buttoning up. Patients are unable to control the rebellious hand short of grabbing or even sitting on it....

It’s a nightmare scenario: You’re supposed to sleep through the 120-year journey to another star but you wake up way, way too soon. That’s what happens to Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and Aurora Dunn (Jennifer Lawrence) onboard the starship Avalon, which is en route to establish a colony on the distant planet “Homestead” in the new movie Passengers. The film, which opens December 21, grapples with the technological and personal challenges of such an interminable journey, especially when—as they often do in the movies—things go wrong....

Mathematicians classify objects by their symmetries. If you turn a five-armed starfish a fifth of a revolution, it looks unchanged, so it has a five-fold rotational symmetry axis. Objects like a soccer ball, which has five-fold rotation axes (through the black pentagons) and three-fold rotation axes (through the white hexagons), are said to have “icosahedral symmetry.” The arrangement of rotations which leave the objects looking unchanged is the same as that of a regular icosahedron....

The 2019 Mississippi River flood fight is going to slog deep into the summer — and maybe much longer. While communities north of St. Louis are beginning the expensive path to recovery after record-breaking winter and spring precipitation and runoff, people below the Missouri River are shoveling mud from their houses and praying for a dry spell. The Lower Mississippi Valley remains in a flood crisis as high water continues to swamp streets, homes, businesses, sewage and water treatment plants, and farm fields, including across some of the poorest counties in the United States....

After 195 nations agreed to commit nearly all of the world’s countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, heads of state praised the accord and the people who made it happen. President Obama said the deal “sends a powerful signal,” deeming it a possible “turning point for the world.” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called the final version balanced and long-lasting, and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said “the nations of the world have shown what unity, ambition and perseverance can do....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Brrr… it’s cold out there! Children are flocking to the television in hopes of hearing there will be a snow day; the bread and milk aisles at grocery stores are empty because of an impending snow storm; and utility trucks are out spraying salt or salt water on the roads. We all know why the first two happen—kids are excited for a day off of school filled with hot chocolate and snowmen....

A single giant ragweed plant can reduce the yield in an area holding 30 soybean plants by as much as half. That is one of the reasons that farmers are worried by a new generation of superweeds that has developed resistance to the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup. In the past decade, weed resistance to Roundup has extended from a few scattered occurrences to an estimated 11 million acres....

Savvy Psychologist: Today, we’re lucky to have with us Dr. Gail Saltz, who brings us a really interesting idea, which can be summed up in the title of her new book: The Power of Different: The Link Between Disorder and Genius. In the book, she looks at the flip side of disorder and shows how many diagnoses—from depression to anxiety to ADHD-—can link to a hardwired strength. Dr. Saltz, welcome to the show Dr....

The patient was part of a new study that links problems of the inner ear with eerie “out-of-body” experiences. These experiences arecurious, usually brief sensations in which a person’s consciousness seems to exitthe body and then view the body from the outside. The study analyzed 210 patients who had visited their doctors with so-called vestibular disorders. The vestibular system, which is made up of several structures in the inner ear, provides the body with a sense of balance and spatial orientation....

Sooner or later everything seems to go online. Newspapers. TV. Radio. Shopping. Banking. Dating. But it’s much harder to drag voting out of the paper era. In the 2012 presidential election, more than half of Americans who voted cast paper ballots—0 percent voted with their smartphones. Why isn’t Internet voting here yet? Imagine the advantages! There’d be no ambiguity, no hanging chads or errant marks. We’d get the totals instantly. And think how online voting would boost participation!...

Physicians have recommended vitamin D supplements to their patients for a decade, with good reason: dozens of studies have shown a correlation between high intake of vitamin D—far higher than most people would get in a typical diet and from exposure to the sun—and lower rates of chronic diseases, such as cancer and type 1 diabetes. So when the Institute of Medicine, which advises the government on health policy, concluded in November that vitamin D supplements were unnecessary for most Americans and potentially harmful, patients were understandably confused....

Humans are an energy-hungry species, and our current sources of power are not cutting it. Nuclear fusion, the process that fuels the sun, might offer the kind of clean, abundant energy we need—if only scientists can figure it out. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the biggest and most ambitious attempt yet to harness the energy produced by forcing two atoms to become one. The $25-billion experiment in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France, is a joint project of the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the U....

For decades industrial manufacturing has meant long assembly lines. This is how scores of workers—human or robot—have built really big things, such as automobiles and aircraft, or have brought to life smaller, more complex items, such as pharmaceuticals, computers and smartphones. Now envision a future in which the assembly of digital processors and memory, energy generators, artificial tissue and medical devices takes place on a scale too small to be seen by the naked eye and under a new set of rules....

[Editor’s note: This story was updated on Sept. 22, 2017, to state that geneticist Cliff Tabin’s remarks were made as part of his scientific talk.] For months fish that live in dark caves in Mexico go without food. They have gone far longer—millennia—without light, evolving to lose their eyes and skin pigments. Now researchers have discovered these strange creatures have another oddity. To survive their food-scarce environment, the fish have evolved extreme ways of turning nutrients into energy....

Can training to become ambidextrous improve brain function? —Rachel Fallon, via e-mail Michael Corballis, professor of cognitive neuroscience and psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, responds: Although teaching people to become ambidextrous has been popular for centuries, this practice does not appear to improve brain function, and it may even harm our neural development. Calls for ambidexterity were especially prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries....

We have been hearing for years that high-density lipoprotein (HDL)—the “good cholesterol”—may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Now a new study shows that a certain subclass of HDL may actually be “bad,” increasing the risk of coronary heart disease. A small protein may be to blame. HDL with a small proinflammatory protein called apolipoprotein C-III (apoC-III) on its surface may nearly double the risk of heart disease in healthy men and women, according to Frank Sacks, professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard School of Public Health and senior author on a paper in the April Journal of the American Heart Association....

Estuaries, where freshwater mixes with saltwater, are dynamic environments of great complexity and a critical habitat for economically important species. Together with coastal waters, which are affected by much the same environmental pressures, they have long suffered degradation. Indeed, last year the United Nations declared the estuaries of China’s two greatest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow, “dead zones.” The damage affects not only the immediate estuarine and coastal environment but also the oceans....

The claim: Living in a city makes people develop schizophrenia. Tell me more: The claim is not quite that stark, but it’s close. For a study published last week, researchers interviewed 2,063 British twins (some identical, some not) at age 18 about “psychotic experiences” they’d had since age 12—such as feeling paranoid, hearing voices, worrying their food might be poisoned, and having “unusual or frightening” thoughts. Among those who lived in the most densely populated large cities, 34 percent reported such experiences; 24 percent of adolescents in rural areas did....

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission delivered a formal warning to the Philippines and Papua New Guinea on Tuesday over illegal fishing, a step that could lead to a ban on exporting to the European Union, the world’s biggest fish importer. The warning, which was welcomed by environmental groups, puts the two countries on the EU’s “yellow list”, which requires them to improve monitoring and control of fishing practices. Failure to do so will put them onto the “red list” of nations which are not allowed to sell fish to the 28-nation EU....

SKEGNESS, England - Humans have left many landmarks across central England’s Lincolnshire county over the past two thousand years: Roman roads, medieval castles, World War II airfields. The newest stand three miles offshore from this beach resort town: Fifty-four massive wind turbine towers, each rising 440 feet above the North Sea - about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza. The adjoining wind farms, Lynn and Inner Dowsing, boast 194 megawatts of capacity, enough to power 130,000 homes....