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1971 Fish in Death Valley “Small springs and streams dot the Death Valley region, one of the most arid deserts. These small aquatic ‘islands,’ some not much larger than a bathtub, are populated by four species of a tiny fish, known as desert pupfish. More than 20 distinct populations have been identified. Each population is confined to a single, isolated oasis. Some have evidently survived for thousands of years in small habitats where their numbers have never exceeded a few hundred individuals....

Thanks to Skype, Apple FaceTime and at least a half dozen other mobile video apps, the old-fashioned phone call is becoming passé. Why just speak to someone when you can engage them in video chat or use your handset to transmit what is happening around you in real time? The problem, though, is that owners of the handsets must share the same software to communicate: Both users need to have Skype client software, say, or an iPhone 4 with FaceTime....

Hours after he won the 2020 presidential race, then-President-elect Joe Biden delivered his victory speech to a crowd of masked supporters in Wilmington, Del. “What is the will of the people?” he asked. “To marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.” Today, as we near Biden’s 100th day in office, the Union of Concerned Scientists reflects on his administration’s progress toward “[marshaling] the forces of science....

Wristbands are the accessory of choice for people promoting a cause. And the next wave of wrist wear might act as a fashionable archive of your chemical exposure. Researchers at Oregon State University outfitted volunteers with slightly modified silicone bracelets and then tested them for 1,200 substances. They detected several dozen compounds – everything from caffeine and cigarette smoke to flame retardants and pesticides. “We were surprised at the breadth of chemicals,” said Kim Anderson, a professor and chemist who was senior author of the study published in Environmental Science & Technology....

The research, published today in Nature, found that video calls, as opposed to in-person meetings, reduce creative collaboration and the generation of novel ideas. The results indicate that while the mental cogs keep running more or less smoothly when working remotely, group innovation might be hindered. The findings could stiffen employers’ resolve to urge or require their employees to trek back to the office. In the new study, the authors first recruited 602 participants, who were randomly paired and asked to come up with creative uses for a product....

Pound for pound, fat contains more energy than any other nutrient. So it’s perhaps not surprising that certain cancer cells show a clear preference for growth in fatty tissues. According to a new study by researchers at the Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI) at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), melanomas prefer to grow near adipose (fat) tissue. The team, led by Richard White, a physician-scientist in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at SKI, showed that melanomas actively take in lipids if given the chance, and they tend to migrate toward tissues rich in fat cells....

Scientists have just packed 18 qubits—the most basic units of quantum computing—into just six weirdly connected photons. That’s an unprecedented three qubits per photon, and a record for the number of qubits linked to one another via quantum entanglement. So why is this exciting? All the work that goes on in a conventional computer, including whatever device you’re using to read this article, relies on calculations using bits, which switch back and forth between two states (usually called “1” and “0”)....

In the late 1990s, the Hydraulics Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography nearly closed. The lab, founded in 1964, had lost its permanent funding. Grant Deane, a physical oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, stepped up to head the lab and rescue it from a possible shutdown. “I was a user of the facility at that time, but I had a broader vision for what could be done beyond my own work,” Deane said....

Fuel cells powered by hydrogen are delicate systems. Too little water in the system and the special membranes that allow electricity to be generated dry up, shutting the chemical reaction down. Too much water and the droplets can block the hydrogen gas from interacting with the electrodes, shutting the chemical reaction down. But researchers at Princeton University have discovered ways to make such fuel cells hardier by making them both self-draining and self-regulating, according to a paper in the February Chemical Engineering Science....

On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield in the back. On September 19, 1881, Garfield died, with a bullet still lodged in fatty tissue behind his pancreas. At his trial, Guiteau denied killing the president. “Garfield died from malpractice,” the gunman said. His point was made incredibly moot when he was executed by hanging. But he’d made a decent argument. Historian David Oshinsky discusses Garfield’s medical care in his fascinating new book Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital: “Had the responding physicians … done nothing more than make Garfield comfortable,” Oshinsky writes, “he almost certainly would have survived....

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team took humanity to the heart of darkness when it unveiled the world’s first direct image of a black hole in April. That feat has now earned the team one of this year’s six US$3-million Breakthrough prizes—the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. The image shows the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87, which lies around 17 parsecs (55 million light years) from Earth....

When Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas in 2017, the neighborhood that suffered the worst flood damage was a section of southwest Houston where 49% of the residents are nonwhite. When Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana in 2005, the damage was the most extensive in the region’s African American neighborhoods. Of the seven ZIP codes that suffered the costliest flood damage from Katrina, four of them had populations that were at least 75% Black, government records show....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It should not be a surprise that East Africa was a hotbed of evolution, because over the last five million years everything about the landscape has changed. The extraordinary forces of plate tectonics and a changing climate have transformed East Africa from a relatively flat, forested region to a mountainous fragmented landscape dominated by the rapid appearance and disappearance of huge, deep-water lakes....

People sure do love to share nutrition information on social media. Unfortunately, a lot of what I see going by in my newsfeed is completely inaccurate. I do what I can to set the record straight. No, margarine was not originally invented as a way to fatten up turkeys and no, it didn’t kill them. No, you can’t tell the gender of a green pepper by counting its lobes. No, a clear parasite was not found in a bottle of Dasani filtered water....

Reports from Italy detail the grim reality of a nation on lockdown. All businesses but pharmacies and food stores have shut their doors. Airlines are canceling flights, and roadblocks prevent people from leaving or entering some towns. It presents a glimpse of how dramatically American life could change if COVID-19 spreads rapidly in the United States. Many U.S. cities are already encouraging “social distancing” practices. Schools and universities are temporarily closing or switching to remote learning platforms....

Hani Goodarzi is sticking close to home these days. The cancer biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, cancelled a talk at the University of Calgary in late January and has put international travel on hold indefinitely. That’s because Goodarzi, an Iranian citizen who holds a US green card, is afraid that if he leaves the United States he might not be let back in. He is not alone. Many foreign-born scientists say they are reconsidering plans to work or study in the United States, even though federal courts have indefinitely blocked US President Donald Trump’s travel ban....

A strangely flaring object at the center of a distant galaxy may be the key to unlocking the mystery of how the universe’s most monstrous black holes merge. Weighing in at millions to billions of times the mass of our sun, supermassive black holes are the ultimate heavyweights—and they lurk at the centers of almost every large galaxy. Although they emit no light, these objects can nonetheless create spectacular celestial fireworks as they feed on gas and dust, creating jets of high-energy particles and whirling disks of debris that can be seen clear across the cosmos as active galactic nuclei (AGNs)....

By Marice Richter DALLAS (Reuters) - When the going got tough due one of with worst droughts in a century, the parched Texas city of Wichita Falls got going with its program to recycle sewage water for drinking. The city this month opened the spigots on a $13 million system that mixes 5 million gallons a day of treated waste water with area lake water to keep drinking water flowing for its 105,000 residents....

Urinating is easy. Holding it in, however, is tough. While some animals, such as wolves, control their bladders to selectively mark their territories, cattle roam blithely around pastures peeing with abandon. “You get the impression that these animals have no control over their urination,” says Jan Langbein, an animal psychologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “But you can train dogs, and you can train horses. So we thought, why not cattle?...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Protesters from 12 South Pacific nations plan to block ships entering and leaving Australia’s Port of Newcastle, the world’s largest coal export terminal, this month to highlight effects they say climate change is having on their islands. Some experts say climate change will cause higher tides that will swamp lower-lying Pacific islands and present other challenges such as coral bleaching and an increase in storms and cyclones. A spokesman for the environmental activist group 350....