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The climate crisis is making people sicker—worsening illnesses ranging from seasonal allergies to heart and lung disease. Children, pregnant people and the elderly are the most at risk from extreme weather and rising heat. But the impact of the climate crisis—for patients, doctors and researchers—is already being felt across every specialty of medicine, with worse feared to come. “There’s research suggesting that our prescription medications may be causing harm because of changing heat patterns,” said Aaron Bernstein, a pediatric hospitalist who is the co-director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University....

Researchers are closing in on ironclad evidence for the black hole believed to lurk at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers used a “virtual” telescope spanning more than 2,800 miles (4,500 km) to home in on Sagittarius A* (“A-star”), the light source believed to mark the location of a black hole four million times as massive as the sun. They were able to resolve Sagittarius A* to within 37 microarcseconds, the width of a baseball on the moon as seen from Earth....

An intense heat wave that sent temperatures in Phoenix to 118 degrees Fahrenheit (47.7 degrees Celsius) this weekend has killed four people—and the heat could be worse today. Those killed so far were all hiking or biking outdoors, but heat waves can kill close to home, too. In 2003, during a major European heat wave, 14,802 people died of hyperthermia in France alone. Most were elderly people living alone in apartment buildings without air conditioning, according to Richard Keller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of medical history and bioethics and author of “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)....

Key concepts Psychology Learning Memory Brain Introduction If someone tells you to remember a phone number or address, it can feel like an easy task at first. You repeat the numbers to yourself, either aloud or in your mind. But after just a few seconds you might find yourself starting to doubt your own memory. Was it 5-7-3 or 3-7-5? Our brain is always seeking new and useful information, and as a result it will try to throw away information that seems old or irrelevant, such as a random string of numbers or an address....

Key Concepts Physics Engineering Gears Mechanics Introduction Did you know that gears are all around you? You can find them in wind-up toys, bicycles, carousels, cars and trucks, cranes, drills, wind turbines, analog watches, and so forth! If you’ve looked closely at a moving bicycle, you have seen gears at work. Are you curious about their purpose? In this activity you will use candy to make gears and explore why they are so versatile....

American drivers are consuming less and less fuel, following a trend of reduced car ownership and distance traveled, according to a new report by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). The findings show that overall fuel consumption among light-duty vehicles fell 11 percent over a recent seven-year period. Light-duty vehicles consumed 123.9 billion gallons of gasoline in 2011, down from a peak of 138.8 billion gallons in 2004....

The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it’s 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long. The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers devoted to finding primes, similar to projects like SETI@Home, which downloads and analyzes radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)....

Roughly 1.2 billion years ago a pair of circling black holes swirled closer and closer, shedding shudders of gravitational energy before they collided. Although the black holes had likely orbited each other for billions of years, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) only caught the event’s final 0.2 second. Witnessing the gravitational waves produced during that parcel of time, however, ushered in a new era of astrophysics, and scientists now want to understand how this duo and others like it end up in their circling embrace in the first place....

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Scribner (Simon & Schuster), 2005 ($25) Temple Grandin has been known to crawl through slaughterhouses to get a sense of what the animals there are experiencing. An autistic woman who as a child was recommended for institutionalization, Grandin has managed not only to enter society’s mainstream but ultimately to become prominent in animal research....

The image of a spy headquarters protected by a series of high-tech gadgets that scan faces, fingers and other body parts to keep out evildoers has been with us since the dawn of the Cold War. Such gadget-heavy security systems have yet to prove themselves outside of Hollywood (think James Bond and Get Smart), but Japan’s Fujitsu Ltd. is hoping to change that with a device that checks identifications based on the unique pattern of veins in a person’s palm....

NUCLEAR MATTERS In “Nuclear War Should Require a Second Opinion” [Science Agenda], the editors argue that the president of the U.S. should not be the only person to decide on whether or not to cause worldwide havoc by ordering a nuclear launch and that “we need to ensure at least some deliberation.” Alone or through informed advice and widespread consent, threatened by enemies or not, an American president (or any other president) should never have the power to destroy the world....

From cuttlefish seduction to hyena cooperation, the earth’s creatures come to life in the pages of this companion volume to the Discovery Channel/BBC series, premiering in the U.S. in March. Here gelada baboons forage and socialize in the Ethiopian highlands. Excerpt The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire by Jack Weatherford. Crown, 2010 Anthropologist Jack Weatherford pieces together the lost history of the ruling women of the Mongol Empire, painting a rich picture of life among the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian Plateau....

The Red Planet has never been a particularly spherical one. Indeed, its shape has changed numerous times over its history and its polar axis has wandered significantly. New findings have revealed the locations of Mars’s ancient poles, a finding that could shed light on the amount of underground water on the planet. Jafar Arkani-Hamed of McGill University discovered that five impact basins–dubbed Argyre, Hellas, Isidis, Thaumasia and Utopia–form an arclike pattern on the Martian surface....

GREAT FALLS, Va. – Tom Lipscomb knows the precise spot on the 18th hole that wilts under summer’s pressure. And it’s not at the tees on the 544-yard par 5. It’s a plateau in the fairway scarcely visible from the clubhouse patio of the newly renovated River Bend Golf and Country Club, where members can sip cocktails as they watch golfers finish in an expanse of brilliant green. In the distance, beyond the cascading stream that trickles past wildflowers, beyond the stonework bridges, there’s a high flat stretch of land that collects all the heavy rain and oppressive sun that August offers in the suburbs just west of Washington, D....

Second of a three-part series. Click here for the first part. FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif.—The contents of your toilet could soon be powering your car and helping to cut down greenhouse gas emissions. In this suburb of Los Angeles, FuelCell Energy Inc. is operating the world’s first “tri-generation” plant that converts sewage into electrical power for an industrial facility and renewable hydrogen for transportation fuel. The system runs on anaerobically digested biogas from the Orange County Sanitation District’s municipal wastewater treatment plant....

Thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface, it’s pitch dark. Researchers sitting in a submersible turn off all the lights and, for a moment, even the whirring scrubber fans. In complete silence the humans stare out of a small fish bowl into a vast and mysterious deep sea—then the light show begins. The majority of deep-sea organisms communicate via bioluminescence in order to attract mates, find food or warn off predators....

Researchers who discovered a molecular “scissors” for snipping genes have now developed a similar approach for targeting and cutting RNA. The new cutting tool should help researchers better understand RNA’s role in cells and diseases, and some believe it could one day be useful in treatments for illnesses from Huntington’s to heart disease. To develop the “blades” for the process, researchers led by Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute used CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)—a system that bacteria evolved to fight off pathogens....

Doctors in Scotland were amazed when a 66-year-old woman underwent what is normally a very painful operation on her hand for severe arthritis and required little to no pain medication afterward. Similarly, two years ago, she was diagnosed with severe osteoarthritis in her hip with significant joint degeneration, yet she complained of no discomfort before, during, or after her hip replacement surgery. In fact, the patient told her doctors, there have been times she had burned herself and withdrew her hand from the flame only when she smelled burning flesh....

The future isn’t what it used to be. A mere half-century ago, it was entirely possible to envision a world—a universe—in which the Soviet Union, not the U.S., would win the cold war–fueled space race and become the dominant nation on Earth and beyond. Spin-off technologies from space exploration would spectacularly enrich socialist economies, a Soviet lunar base would ensure a “Red moon” loomed over our planet, and cosmonauts would create outposts or colonies on Mars....

The reigning queen of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is the “Baroness” Titti Von Tramp, a deeply bronzed, thoroughly waxed and statuesque figure approaching seven feet tall in stiletto heels, wearing tinted couture glasses and crowned with a perfect platinum mane. On any given night, you can find the bosomy Von Tramp at one of the local nightclubs, pursing her strawberry-colored lips in a photo-op for one of her many fans or perhaps making an Ulster businessman turn bright red by deviously running one long, manly finger down the man’s cheek and judging, “That’s a good year....