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ANTARCTICA Only two Adélie penguin chicks out of a population of thousands survived last summer’s breeding season. Researchers blame abnormally large expanses of ice that forced adults to travel farther to find food, while their young starved. KENYA A perfume made from an antelope’s scent protected cattle from tsetse flies, a study of around 1,100 cows found. The flies can transfer the parasite that causes “sleeping sickness” (African trypanosomiasis) in humans to cows as well, causing losses in milk and meat....

They’re also opposites when it comes to balancing climate risk and climate readiness, according to a new University of Notre Dame index ranking 270 U.S. cities on more than 40 climate metrics. About 150 miles south of Dallas and home to the Army’s sprawling Fort Hood, Killeen has the nation’s highest overall risk from climate change, measured by exposure to flood, drought, extreme temperatures and sea-level rise. It also has one of the nation’s lowest overall readiness scores for such events....

Diabetes affects millions of Americans who must monitor their blood sugar closely for life and often undergo frequent insulin injections to avoid undue health complications. So far, cell replacement therapies to reinstate insulin-producing tissue have been limited by the availability of donor cells and the need for lifelong immunosuppression. But the results of a recent study offer new hope for novel treatment options. Scientists have successfully modified liver cells to produce insulin that, when transplanted into mice, brought the disease under control....

When the world-girdling ice came at the end of the Ordovician period roughly 440 million years ago, only a few species of graptolite survived the mass extinction. Graptolites, whose name means written in rock, were tiny animals that lived in colonies of little cuplike structures known as theca. The graptolites built many theca together to form a branching structure that then drifted in ancient seas and therefore can be found in sedimentary rocks of a certain vintage all around the world....

Hiral Tipirneni spent nearly a decade working in emergency medicine in Arizona. She started out 23 years ago at Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Phoenix, treating patients with broken bones, failing hearts and a lot of other problems. Then some health tragedies hit home. “Our family suffered a great loss to cancer: my mom and nephew,” she says. Tipirneni felt she should do something to combat the illness that took her loved ones....

Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference. Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each....

In late March 1988 three economists from the University of Iowa were nursing beers at a local hangout in Iowa City, when conversation turned to the news of the day. Jesse Jackson had captured 55 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, an outcome that the polls had failed to intimate. The ensuing grumbling about the unreliability of polls sparked the germ of an idea. At the time, experimental economics—in which economic theory is tested by observing the behavior of groups, usually in a classroom setting—had just come into vogue, which prompted the three drinking partners to deliberate about whether a market might do better than the polls....

Robots have proved to be valuable tools for soldiers, surgeons and homeowners hoping to keep the carpet clean. But in each case, they are designed and built specifically for the job. Now there is a movement under way to build multipurpose machines—robots that can navigate changing environments such as offices or living rooms and work with their hands. All-purpose robots are not, of course, a new vision. “It’s been five or 10 years from happening for about 50 years,” says Eric Berger, co-director of the Personal Robotics Program at Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley start-up....

French civil engineer Charles-Joseph Minard became famous in the 19th century for the “flow map,” which represents the movement and quantity of something over space or time. His most recognized map was among his last: the charting of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign into Russia, in which hundreds of thousands of troops were lost. A forefather of modern information visualization, as writer and editor Rendgen calls him, Minard created more than 60 statistical graphics that capture the economic and social changes of the industrial revolution in Europe and around the globe....

There is something funky going on in the clouds of Venus. Telescopes have detected unusually high concentrations of the molecule phosphine—a stinky, flammable chemical typically associated with feces, farts and rotting microbial activity—in an atmospheric layer far above the planet’s scorching surface. The finding is curious because here on Earth, phosphine is essentially always associated with living creatures, either as a by-product of metabolic processes or of human technology such as industrial fumigants and methamphetamine labs....

There is perhaps nothing more universal than the drive to move our bodies in sync with music. Studies show that dancing at parties and in groups encourages social bonding, whether it is a traditional stomp, a tango or even the hokeypokey. Many researchers have argued that people experience a blurring of the self into their groups thanks to the synchronization that occurs while dancing. Yet it is also possible that the exertion inherent to dancing releases hormones—like any other form of physical exercise—and these molecules are behind the bonding effect....

Sloths are the quintessential couch potatoes of the rainforest, and these sluggish tree-dwellers also serve as a hotel for moths and algae. Three-toed sloths descend from the trees once a week to defecate, providing a breeding ground for moths that live in the animals’ fur and nourishing gardens of algae that supplement the sloths’ diet, new research finds. Leaving the trees burns energy and makes sloths easy prey for predators, but the benefits of a richer diet appear to be worth the perils....

Joe Ciresi used to drive about 30 miles into Philadelphia for work every day. “It took anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours, depending on traffic,” he recounts. “I said, ‘This is insanity.’” Now a Pennsylvania state representative, Ciresi has been thinking about how to reduce the number of cars on the road. Recently he and his staff were looking at public transport options and encountered a video about trackless trams created by Peter Newman, a researcher at the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute in Perth, Australia....

Tucked away in back rooms above the dinosaur skeletons and gawking school groups at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia a series of file cabinets and drawers houses a whole lot of something you can’t see. This is the second-largest diatom herbarium in the world (behind only London’s Natural History Museum). Although a file cabinet or a hundred doesn’t sound all that sexy, the collection could help provide a way to sniff out some very controversial water quality problems....

Consumers in the United States bought automobiles in the four months from May through August at the fastest clip in more than a decade, propelled by strong appetite for trucks, sport utility vehicles and crossover models and by low gas prices. Light-vehicle sales for August surpassed 17 million units for the fourth month in a row, measured at an annualized, seasonally adjusted rate, according to automotive data company WardsAuto. The last time that happened was 2000, the firm said....

China pledged yesterday to stop releasing carbon emissions before 2060 in a surprise move that catapults it ahead of U.S. ambitions on climate change and instantly raised questions about whether it can radically alter its status as the world’s top emitter within 40 years. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s announcement at the U.N. General Assembly won accolades from European leaders who have pressed China for stronger climate action, and from climate advocates who are hopeful it will lead developing countries to follow suit....

The Muscle Moving Company has a bunch of heavy sculptures it wants to put in ascending order, from west to east, based on weight. However, it is not necessary to put them in precise order provided each sculpture is close to where it should be. Consider an ordering to be “k-away” if every sculpture is either in the place it should occupy according to its weight or at most in k places away from that position....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Nearly 80 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and a growing proportion of them use smartphones for internet access, not just when they’re on the go. This leads to people storing considerable amounts of personal and private data on their mobile devices. Often, there is just one layer of security protecting all that data—emails and text messages, social media profiles, bank accounts and credit cards, even other passwords to online services....

Researchers may have finally found a drug candidate for reducing the mental retardation caused by Down syndrome, which afflicts more than 350,000 people in the U.S. Researchers gave low doses of a human drug to mice bred to mimic the learning and memory problems in people with Down syndrome. After as little as two weeks, the impaired mice performed as well as normal ones in learning tests, and the improvement lasted for up to two months after treatment ended....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Europe’s migrant crisis is forcing the advancement of new psychological therapies that go beyond existing treatments to help victims not of one traumatic event, but of multiple traumas such as rape, war and torture. Among the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and other war-torn areas, significant numbers are likely to have severe psychiatric illnesses, including complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals....