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How do we decide what we like to eat? Although tasty foods typically top the list, a number of studies suggest preferences about consumption go beyond palatability. Scientists have found both humans and animals can form choices about what to consume based on the caloric content of food, independent of taste. Research spanning many decades has shown nutrients in the gastrointestinal tract can shape animals’ flavor preferences. One of the earliest findings of this effect dates back to the 1960s, when Garvin Holman of the University of Washington reported hungry rats preferred consuming a liquid paired with food injected into the stomach rather than a solution coupled with a gastric infusion of water....

Geneticists have traced the history of beer’s most important ingredient: yeast. By sequencing the genomes of nearly 200 modern strains of brewer’s yeast, the research reveals how, over hundreds of years, humans transformed the wild fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a variety of strains tuned for particular tipples. Yeast gives beer its booze and bubbles by fermenting sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, but it also makes hundreds of chemicals that impart flavours such as bananas and cloves to a drink....

Health products powered by artificial intelligence, or AI, are streaming into our lives, from virtual doctor apps to wearable sensors and drugstore chatbots. IBM boasted that its AI could “outthink cancer.” Others say computer systems that read X-rays will make radiologists obsolete. “There’s nothing that I’ve seen in my 30-plus years studying medicine that could be as impactful and transformative” as AI, said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and executive vice president of Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif....

Given a choice, most humans would probably rather spend time with nice people than with jerks. But the opposite seems to be true of bonobos, a recent study suggests. “Of our two closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, [bonobos] are the ones known to show less extreme aggression,” says the study’s lead author Christopher Krupenye, an evolutionary anthropologist now at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “So we thought, if either of them are likely to share with humans this motivation to prefer helpers, it may be bonobos....

RALEIGH, Miss.—Kevin Macumber wanted to be a forester. Today he manages about 4,000 acres of longleaf pine in Mississippi—not for the timber, but for what lies far beneath the woods. It’s black gold: oil, deep underground. And the key to getting it out is the same molecule that lets all those trees grow: carbon dioxide. “Another day in paradise,” says Macumber as we meet at a Chevron gas station in southeastern Mississippi, about the closest thing to a landmark around here....

Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas, which helps drive global warming, haven’t been this high in somewhere between 800,000 and 15 million years. And while the 400 ppm mark is somewhat symbolic (as the increase in warming between 399 ppm and 400 ppm is small), it serves to show how much carbon dioxide has been put into the atmosphere since preindustrial times, when concentrations were around 280 ppm. The increase in this and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has warmed Earth’s average temperature by 1....

The world’s coral reefs, which have been hit hard by an unprecedented bleaching event that began in mid-2014, may see a bit of reprieve this year, according to an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Mark Eakin, head of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, said the “longest, most widespread bleaching event ever” has continued into 2017. However, climate models show the absence of a global atmospheric circulation pattern or ENSO — those include El Niños and La Niñas — which would bolster high ocean temperatures key to coral bleaching....

Con artists rarely inspire admiration. Frank Abagnale Jr., however, was hardly a typical con artist. Cunning and charismatic, Abagnale forged checks, diplomas, and transcripts en route to assuming at least eight identities and posing as a pilot, a lawyer, and a doctor—all before his nineteenth birthday. Although he eventually was caught and sentenced to 12 years in a federal prison for his cons, he served less than five years before the U....

Elyn Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California, a Marshall scholar, and a graduate of Yale Law School. She also suffers from schizophrenia – an illness that many would assume makes her impressive resume an impossibility. In 2007, she published an acclaimed memoir of her struggle with the disease, “The Center Cannot Hold.” Her book is a frank and moving portrait of the experience of schizophrenia, but also a call for higher expectations – a plea that we allow people with schizophrenia to find their own limits....

About 2,500 years ago something changed the way humans think. Within the span of two centuries, in three separate regions of Eurasia, spiritual movements emerged that would give rise to the world’s major moral religions, those preaching some combination of compassion, humility and asceticism. Scholars often attribute the rise of these moral religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity included—to population growth, seeing morality as a necessary social stabilizer in increasingly large and volatile human communities....

By Emma Farge HASTINGS, Sierra Leone (Reuters) - When Dr Sekou Kanneh goes to work at his Sierra Leonean Ebola clinic, he will probably be in the “red zone” for many hours, ignoring by necessity strict limits that govern foreign colleagues fighting the epidemic. Conditions at Kanneh’s treatment center, the only Ebola unit in the country run by local staff, contrast to the purpose-built facilities where foreign volunteers who have flocked to Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia work....

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that environmental non-profits have been hit hard by the economic downturn, and has this had an impact on their effectiveness? —Bridget W., Bainbridge Island, WA Non-profits of every stripe have been suffering from the economic downturn. In a recent survey of 800 U.S.-based non-profits, 75 percent reported feeling the effects of the downturn, with more than half already experiencing significant cuts in funding from both government and private foundation sources....

The existence of this tiny object had first been proposed by physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. For years, the significance of the prediction was lost on most scientists, including Higgs himself. But gradually it became clear that the Higgs boson was not just an exotic sideshow in the particle circus but rather the main event. The particle and its associated Higgs field turned out to be responsible for giving all other particles mass and, in turn, creating the structure of galaxies, stars and planets that define our universe and enable our species....

Editor’s Note: Neurobiologist Larry Young studies a monogamous species of rodent, the prairie vole, to understand the behavior and chemistry behind relationships. In The Chemistry between Us, Young teams up with science journalist Brian Alexander to describe science’s progress in illuminating the neurochemistry behind our experience of love. In this excerpt, the authors describe the work of neurobiologist Oliver Bosch, a specialist in maternal behavior, who worked with Young’s prairie voles to study the bitter price of bonding....

The vast majority of voters do not support the deep cuts to climate science funding now being proposed in Washington, a new poll has found. Three-quarters of voters think it is a bad idea to cut money for climate research, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday. Sixty-five percent say they believe climate change is caused by human activity, which the majority of scientists in the field concluded years ago, but American politicians have been slow to accept....

As the hardest substance known, diamond is ideal for cutting rock and other tough stuff. But diamond is costly, and it degrades when machining steel and other ferrous metals because of reactions that create softer iron carbides. For cutting steel, the first choice is cubic boron nitride, which is almost as hard, resisting 40 to 50 gigapascals (GPa) of pressure compared with diamond’s 70 to 100 GPa. But manufacturing the substance requires high temperatures (1,500 degrees Celsius) and extreme pressures (5 GPa), which make it expensive....

Neil Armstrong thought he had a 50–50 shot at pulling it off. “There are so many unknowns,” the first man to set foot on the moon said in a 2011 interview with an Australian accounting firm. “There was a big chance that there was something in there we didn’t understand properly and we [would have] to abort and come back to Earth without landing.” That he, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins—with the help of thousands of NASA engineers, scientists and mission controllers on Earth—did pull off a moon landing remains one of humanity’s most incredible achievements....

The human body replaces its own cells regularly. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have finally pinned down the speed and extent of this “turnover.” About a third of our body mass is fluid outside of our cells, such as plasma, plus solids, such as the calcium scaffolding of bones. The remaining two thirds is made up of roughly 30 trillion human cells. About 72 percent of those, by mass, are fat and muscle, which last an average of 12 to 50 years, respectively....

In a technical tour-de-force, physicists have made of the first measurements of how antimatter atoms absorb light. Researchers at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, trained an ultraviolet laser on antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen. They measured the frequency of light needed to jolt a positron — an antielectron — from its lowest energy level to the next level up, and found no discrepancy with the corresponding energy transition in ordinary hydrogen....

Biologists studying extracellular RNA (exRNA)—and the tiny spherical structures known as exosomes that shuttle this genetic information from cell to cell—typically focus on mammals. As long ago as the 1960s, however, scientists found that plant cells also generate vesicles that carry cargo out of the cell membrane. But for decades, these botanical observations were largely forgotten. Plant biologist Hailing Jin at the University of California, Riverside, is trying to revive the field to work out how plants send cellular messages....