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For some SARS-CoV-2 vaccine makers, a vaccine “could meet the companies’ benchmarks for success if it lowered the risk of mild COVID-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe” COVID-19, nor the risk of hospitalization, intensive care admission or death, according to an essay published 9/22/20 in The New York Times. This statement pertains to vaccines being developed by Moderna, by Pfizer, and by AstraZeneca, the essay states. The benchmarks should be higher, the authors contend....

To join the Mega Society, you have to score at the one-in-a-million level on an intelligence test. The group has only 27 members. Even those people, though, rarely claim to be geniuses. So what does it take? As Dean Keith Simonton explains in “The Science of Genius,” IQ is not the only, or even best, measure of genius. Creative output is perhaps a better gauge. Even with an abundance of raw talent, it still takes years of work to achieve greatness....

In 1986, Yiu-Kwok Chan from Agriculture Canada identified a new bacterial species. Following standard protocol, he deposited it in the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a repository where scientists store novel microbial strains. It sat there for decades until 2020 when it was noticed by Roland Wilhelm, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, for bearing a striking resemblance to a different group of bacteria. Wilhelm obtained a vial of Chan’s strain from the ATCC and used newer DNA sequencing technology to confirm that the 1986 strain was actually a species of the Paraburkholderia bacteria he was currently studying....

When the Washington State Department of Health said this week that the recent heat wave in the Northwest had killed 117 people, many people missed an important word in the announcement. Preliminary. The death tallies being released by state and county officials are early estimates based on records that the officials acknowledge typically undercount heat-related deaths. Because it can be difficult to determine the role of extreme heat in mortality, an official death count can be elusive and can take months or more to develop....

Mistrusted Adviser A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine. W. W. Norton, 2006 ($24.95) Many psychological studies show that on average, each of us believes we are above average compared with others–more ethical and capable, better drivers, better judges of character, and more attractive. Our weaknesses are, of course, irrelevant. Such self-distortion protects our egos from harm, even when nothing could be further from the truth....

When Christopher Reeve became quadriplegic, there was little hope for patients with spinal cord injury. Now researchers are combining what they know about the central nervous system’s ability to rewire and regrow with a new understanding of the hidden smarts of the spinal cord to dramatically improve treatments. Even the most devastating spinal cord injuries usually do not completely sever the link between the brain, spine and the rest of the body....

The word has been out for decades: We were born on a damaged planet careening toward environmental collapse. Yet our intellects are poorly equipped to grasp the scale of the Earth’s ecological death spiral. We strain to picture how, in just a few decades, climate change may displace entire populations. We struggle to envision the fate of plastic waste that will outlast us by centuries. We fail to imagine our descendants inhabiting an exhausted Earth worn out from resource extraction and devoid of biodiversity....

Operation Warp Speed has certainly lived up to its name. The arrival of the first coronavirus vaccines less than a year after the pandemic began blew away the previous development record of four years, which was held by the mumps vaccine. Now social scientists and public health communications pros must clear another hurdle: ensuring that enough people actually roll up their sleeves and give the shots a shot—two doses per person for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that won emergency use authorization from the U....

EDITOR’S NOTE: William Tillman was later awarded (grudgingly) $6,000 in salvage compensation from the S. J. Waring’s insurance company. New York, August 3, 1861 RETAKING OF ONE OF THE VESSELS CAPTURED BY THE JEFF. DAVIS. The schooner S. J. Waring, mentioned in our last among the vessels which had been captured by the privateer, Jeff. Davis, arrived in this port on Sunday July 21st, having been retaken by the black steward, with the assistance of one of the seamen....

Who owns stem cells? And more to the point, who should own the life-altering medical treatments that may one day emerge from this futuristic and highly contentious field of research? It may seem premature to worry about ownership rights for technologies that do not yet exist–and may never prove commercially viable. But with more money pouring into embryonic stem cell research–especially after the success of a ballot initiative in California last year, mandating $3bn in state funding for embryonic stem cells–disputes over ownership rights cannot be far behind, legal experts say....

The construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment, is now 60 percent complete. The challenges ahead are huge and the way to go is still long, but an extensive research effort is supporting the technological developments needed to make ITER a reality. Saint-Paul-lès-Durance is a small, quiet village in the south of France, but the road leading there has been widened and reinforced to support large, heavyweight vehicles....

Bisphenol A (BPA) will continue to be a part of the US diet.Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would not ban the chemical from food and beverage containers.BPA is a ubiquitous chemical that has been linked to a range of conditions, including heart disease, reproductive problems, behavioral problems and breast and prostate cancers. Scientists believe that it produces such a wide range of health effects in low doses because it mimics the hormone estrogen, disrupting human development and making it particularly potent for infants....

Experts have long decried U.S. student performance in math and science, but new data suggests cause for cautious optimism. A nationwide report on student achievement in science, released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that fourth- and eighth-graders have improved since 2009, the last time such data was collected for both grades. The gap between racial and ethnic groups has narrowed as well. Twelfth-graders did not see any change in performance, however, and many of the other gains were modest....

Dozens of antibody tests for the novel coronavirus have become available in recent weeks. And early results from studies of such serological assays in the U.S. and around the world have swept headlines. Despite optimism about these tests possibly becoming the key to a return to normal life, experts say the reality is complicated and depends on how results are used. Antibody tests could help scientists understand the extent of COVID-19’s spread in populations....

Add space satellites and supercomputers to the list of birdwatching tools. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology are combining those high-tech tools with a database of bird sightings contributed by birdwatchers to learn how climate change is affecting bird movement in the United States. “The approach we’re taking here is we’re trying to bring together as much environmental data as we can to try to understand what influences the bird migration,” said Bob Cook, a distinguished research scientist at ORNL involved with the effort....

We hope our cover story this month brings you as much joy reading it as we have had producing it. The author, behavioral ecologist Caitlin O’Connell, has what sounds like one of the best jobs on Earth: observing elephants in the wild and making sense of their behaviors. Some of the silliest behaviors turn out to be surprisingly meaningful. Young elephants play in their water holes much like human children play in swimming pools during summer break....

The Atlantic forest of Brazil, which in the past 400 years has been reduced to less than 8 percent of its original size, could contain as many as 13 million unidentified species of bacteria, a new study has found. Not only do the results point to an abundance of life still remaining the forest, but they indicate a potentially untapped resource for drug development. “Besides the importance of these bacteria in ecosystem stability, they can also be sources of biochemical compounds for the pharmaceutical industry and agriculture,” says Marcio Lambais of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, whose team published their results in today’s issue of Science....

By the time she visited her doctor, Anne, a 28-year-old graduate student, had felt listless for months. Plagued by headaches, dizziness, anxiety and visual disturbances, she was struggling in her seminars and failed two exams. She also quit hobbies she enjoyed and stopped socializing. Her doctor diagnosed burnout, a depressive reaction to ongoing stress. He prescribed antidepressants and referred her to me for psychotherapy. Neither helped. A year later I suggested she go for a routine checkup to rule out any underlying physical illness....

The study of exoplanets—worlds orbiting distant stars—is still in its early days. Yet already researchers have found hundreds of worlds with no nearby analogue: giants that could steamroll Jupiter; tiny pebbles broiling under stellar furnaces; puffy oddballs with the density of peat moss. Still other exoplanets might look familiar in broad-brush, only to reveal a topsy-turvy realm where rare substances are ordinary, and vice versa. Take carbon, for instance: the key constituent of organic matter accounts for some of humankind’s most precious materials, from diamonds to oil....

When residents of Santa Rosa flip a wall switch, they can take a little credit for the lights that come on. In this California city, yesterday’s toilet flush is today’s electricity. Santa Rosa and Calpine Corporation, an wenergy company, are partners in the world’s largest geothermal wastewater-to-power project. They are using urban effluent to generate clean energy, improving life not only for humans but also for fish. For the city, the partnership has eliminated fines it was paying for dumping wastewater into the Russian River and the $400-million expense of building new wastewater storage facilities....