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A huge amount of money, skill and organizational complexity goes into testing a single new therapy in a randomized controlled trial—the “gold standard” type of study that forms the bedrock of modern medicine. Among the steps: devising a valid statistical design, determining dosages and measures of efficacy, passing ethical reviews, training collaborators in the study’s protocol, and recruiting the required number and type of patients for both the novel treatment and a control group....

Every once in a long while, we see gesture raised to a high art. Amanda Gorman, our first National Youth Poet Laureate, presented her poem The Hill We Climb at the Biden-Harris inauguration on January 20—and, on February 7, was the very first poet to speak at the Super Bowl. Her words were inspirational. But so were her gestures. Gorman is an original who moves her hands in ways that bring her thoughts to life....

Less than a month after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a law-enforcement officer in Ferguson, Mo., the municipal police department issued 50 wearable video cameras to its officers so they could record encounters with the public. Since then, at least a dozen other U.S. cities—including Miami Beach, Fla., and Flagstaff, Ariz.—have announced similar plans. The response is commendable, but police chiefs should proceed cautiously. Proponents argue that the small, tamper-proof cameras will lead to fewer violent encounters between police officers and citizens because everyone knows that their speech and actions can be retrieved later....

Fancy a day’s outing skimming above the moon’s surface in a private two-person spaceship? If you’re staying at a future space hotel planned by Virgin Galactic, that may be an option. In a speech to Virgin Galactic customers on September 27, the company’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, outlined these plans and more for the future of his commercial space fleet. “Using small, purpose-built, two-man spaceships based at space hotels our guests will be able to take breathtaking day trips programmed to fly a couple of hundred feet above of the moon’s surface,” Branson said....

When David Liu first heard about a strain of mouse from his colleague Zheng-Yi Chen, he got excited. The mice carry a gene, TMC1, with a mutation that leads to deafness over time, giving them the name Beethoven mice. Their mutation matches one in humans that produces the same effect. The mutation is dominant; if it is present, hearing loss is certain. Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute, works with the noted CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which targets and changes precise stretches of DNA....

CLIMATEWIRE | The world’s first carbon border fee was always expected to roil nations that export their emissions through polluting goods. Now it could go further than originally proposed. The European Union brought carbon border adjustments into the spotlight last year. Since then, the proposal has gained momentum among legislators who want to expand its scope and ambition and raised discussion among other countries considering similar measures. Across the Atlantic, U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the early 20th century, the leading cause of death was infectious disease. Epidemics erupted with little warning, seemingly out of the blue. When the “Great Influenza” struck in 1918, it killed thousands of people a week in American cities and spread like wildfire around the globe. My great aunt, still a teenager, and living in the San Francisco area, was one of its estimated 50 to 100 million victims worldwide....

The lumbering marine mammals normally spend their summers resting on the ice as it floats north, making periodic dives to the ocean floor to forage for food. But this year, as in 2007 and 2009, a lack of ice in the eastern Chukchi Sea has driven thousands of walruses to congregate on land instead. “Our biggest concern right now is stampeding,” said Bruce Woods, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Alaska regional office....

Where is the dark matter? Scientists who have hunted for decades for the stuff that comprises most of the cosmos’ mass are starting to worry that they are looking in the wrong places. After the latest null results came out this summer from the most sensitive search yet for the particles thought to make up dark matter, a limited theoretical range of masses and other characteristics remains viable for the particles....

Pres. Barack Obama, medical error and gravitational waves all sat atop Digital Science’s third annual Altmetric Top 100 list, which highlights 2016’s most shared scientific publications. Obama’s paper on the progress and next steps for health care reform in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association came in first place, and received the highest Altmetric Attention Score ever. Altmetric analyzes how articles percolate across the Web—you may have seen the little rainbow doughnut and number accompanying scientific publications....

Mining interests are racing to extract minerals from the ocean bottom that would be used in batteries for electric vehicles. Deep seabed mining could begin by 2025 or earlier, depending on the pace of international negotiations that resume this week in Kingston, Jamaica. Environmentalists, who want to slow down the race to the seafloor, will be present in force at the 25th round of the U.N. International Seabed Authority (ISA), pressing for firm protections for the international seabed....

Most of us could use more sleep. We feel it in our urge for an extra cup of coffee and in a slipping cognitive grasp as a busy day grinds on. And sleep has been strongly tied to our thinking, sharpening it when we get enough and blunting it when we get too little. What produces these effects are familiar to neuroscientists: external light and dark signals that help set our daily, or circadian, rhythms, “clock” genes that act as internal timekeepers, and neurons that signal to one another through connections called synapses....

MIAMI—In very rough terms, the sun’s activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle’s evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that—the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out around late 2008 or so....

It’s springtime, and the city feels especially glorious; it felt like a winter on top of a winter this year. But, if we reflect on what brought joy during this challenging time, birds enjoyed a top spot on the happy list for many. Especially those we saw out our windows—or, in New York City, on the street. Three species in particular dominate the sidewalks, asphalt, tops of buildings, fire escapes, window ledges and air conditioners: house sparrows (the small brown and gray birds, males with a black beak and bib underneath), pigeons (which need no introduction) and starlings (the medium-sized dark iridescent birds that are quick, crafty and ubiquitous)....

Starting at dawn in eastern Brazil, then sweeping across northern Africa and central Asia before ending at sunset in Mongolia, the moon will block the light of the sun for several minutes today in a narrow band of territories. Observers in Africa, Europe and Asia who are outside that path will be treated to a partial eclipse. Such a total eclipse is relatively rare–the next one for observers in the U....

On Sunday, November 8, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris released the Biden-Harris plan to beat COVID-19—and on Monday they announced the names of the doctors and public health officials who will head up their coronavirus task force. The plan and the board members who will implement it are mostly to be celebrated. Still, both create cause for concern, particularly in regard to how incarceration, health care access and the persuasive (and bipartisan) ideology of ableism have plagued so much of the coronavirus response in the United States....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every fall and winter, viral respiratory illnesses like the common cold and seasonal flu keep kids out of school and social activities. But this year, more children than usual are ending up at emergency departments and hospitals. In California, the Orange County health department declared a state of emergency in early November 2022 due to record numbers of pediatric hospitalizations for respiratory infections....

The virulence of Ebola virus strains appears to be innately linked to the degree of disorder in proteins that form their nucleocapsids. Computational analysis has revealed that strains responsible for the most lethal outbreaks of Ebola show significantly higher levels of intrinsic protein disorder than less virulent strains, in a discovery that could constitute a major breakthrough in understanding the pathogen’s behaviour. With over 27,000 confirmed, probable and suspected cases and more than 11,000 fatalities worldwide, the ongoing Ebola outbreak has resulted in considerably more casualties since late 2013 than all other outbreaks combined....

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent LONDON - French scientists say they have proved a link between the Zika virus and a nerve syndrome called Guillain-Barré, suggesting countries hit by the Zika epidemic will see a rise in cases of the serious neurological condition. Guillain-Barré is a rare syndrome in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the nervous system. It usually occurs a few days after exposure to a virus, bacteria or parasite....

Despite what the overcrowded, overpriced shelves of your pharmacy might suggest, pharmaceutical companies struggle to find new drugs these days. The low-hanging fruit is long gone, and the main discovery method that served so well in past decades is generating far fewer hits today. But a fresh strategy, focused on a property called allosterism, is now invigorating many investigators. Some predict it will revolutionize drug discovery and could deliver treatments for diseases that so far remain intractable....