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ITALY Europe’s most restless volcano, Mount Etna, is slowly sliding into the sea under its own weight. If part of it collapses suddenly, researchers say it could trigger megatsunamis in the Mediterranean Sea. INDONESIA The construction of a hydro electric dam and power plant in North Sumatra’s Batang Toru forest caused orangutans from an endangered, newly described species to flee the project site. The government has sent guards to monitor the apes, which have built their nests on local plantations....

The changes spaceflight induces in astronauts are much more than skin deep. Space travel strongly affects the way genes are expressed, or turned on and off, preliminary results from NASA’s “Twins Study” have revealed. “Some of the most exciting things that we’ve seen from looking at gene expression in space is that we really see an explosion, like fireworks taking off, as soon as the human body gets into space,” Twins Study principal investigator Chris Mason said in a statement....

It is plausible that a piece of aircraft debris found on the shores of the French island of Réunion, in the western Indian Ocean, could be from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, oceanographers say. The Boeing 777 plane disappeared—along with its 239 passengers and crew—en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014. The 3-by-1-metre piece of wreckage, which beachgoers discovered on 29 July, is now being shipped to Toulouse, France, for examination by specialists from the French aviation-safety bureau and a Malaysian investigation team....

On a cool morning in August, Stephen Payton stood at the edge of a dock in Seldovia, Alaska, dragging a fine, conical net at the end of a pole through the rippling ocean water. Screaming crows and gulls wheeled above us in the damp air, as the long-limbed 30-year-old watched his ghostly net wend its way underneath the surface. A small plastic bottle at the net’s narrow end captured and concentrated particles from the water....

The International Space Station likely won’t have to be evacuated despite the recent failure of a Russian rocket launched toward the orbiting lab, a panel told U.S. lawmakers today (Oct. 12) on Capitol Hill. On Aug. 24, Russia’s Progress 44 cargo vessel crashed in Siberia after the third stage of its Soyuz rocket failed. That rocket is similar to the one NASA and other space agencies depend on to loft astronauts, raising doubts about whether the issue could be fixed in time for a new crew to get to the station before its three remaining residents depart for Earth on Nov....

Wind and solar power are wallflowers in oil- and gas-rich Russia. Not so in neighbouring Ukraine. With fears about Russian hegemony at a peak, the former Soviet republic is ready to join the renewables revolution. “Energy independence has become a matter of national security for Ukraine,” says Sergiy Savchuk, head of the state agency on energy efficiency and energy saving in Kiev. “That’s why renewable-energy development is now a priority issue for the Ukrainian government....

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to turn human adult cells into stem cells in 2007 came the frustration of actually trying to make that transformation efficient. In creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human fibroblast (skin) cells to change. A group led by Duanqing Pei of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China has found that a simple chemical can boost the efficiency by 100-fold—namely, vitamin C....

In thinking about the state of the world, it is easy to see the signs of backsliding, and to feel at least a little despair. And this, argues Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, is a profound error. In Enlightenment Now, he makes a powerful case that the main line of history has been, since the Enlightenment, one of improvement. We, the people of Earth, are better off now than we have ever been....

U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy to ban travelers from five Muslim-majority countries is lawful, the U.S. Supreme Court said on 26 June. The 5-4 ruling comes after several lower courts had acted to limit or suspend the policy, which Trump introduced in January 2017. The original ban had immediate repercussions for researchers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—stranding several in transit and preventing others from coming to the United States to work, study or attend scientific meetings....

BEIJING (Reuters) - An earthquake in China on the weekend triggered landslides that have blocked rivers and created rapidly growing bodies of water that could unleash more destruction on survivors of the disaster that killed 410 people, state media reported on Thursday. More than 2,300 people were injured and 12 are missing after the magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the southwestern province of Yunnan on Saturday. It was the region’s strongest quake in 14 years and destroyed thousands of buildings....

This past November, a heated conversation about mentorship in science was sparked by a Nature Communications study that alleged that female scientific trainees are less prolific in their subsequent careers if their research adviser is a woman. After serious backlash, the journal took a step back and retracted the paper. The response highlights the positive impact of female scientists on female trainees, with many banding together to formally speak out against the journal and creating a database of mentoring pairs numbering more than 1,500....

Linguistic anthropologists have observed that people all over the world perceive languages, and speakers of those different languages, as fundamentally different from one another. When people listen to others’ speech, they hear discrete categorical boundaries even when differences in speech exist along a continuum. Our minds, and not just our ears, perceive these differences: we think of language X as being fundamentally different from language Y. From there, it is not a big leap to think of groups of speakers as being essentially different from one another: speakers of X are fundamentally different from speakers of Y....

Doug’s amateur soccer team had just lost its playoff game, and Doug needed a pick-me-up. He decided to stop by the local animal shelter on his way home because puppies always put a smile on his face. He was by no means looking to adopt an animal, but Delia, a five-month-old mutt, changed his mind. “I had her for 17 years,” Doug said, wiping away tears in our psychotherapy session. “I knew it would be rough when she died, but I had no idea… I was a total wreck....

Serious question: How much water does the average adult need to drink every day? You’ve probably heard the usual answer: eight 8-ounce glasses, sometimes stated as 8 × 8. But there’s not much science behind this ubiquitous recommendation. A 2002 research review found essentially no reliable studies. Any truly serious answer to the how-much question will begin with some version of “it depends.” Are you in a hot location? Are you exerting yourself?...

Mitchell Gorby came into this world around 3 P.M. on August 9, 2019, at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. The baby seemed healthy, and his parents, Tiffany and Rylan, were thrilled. But a few hours later a nurse noticed that Mitchell seemed lethargic and never cried, and monitors indicated that his body was not getting enough oxygen. Mitchell was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit at nearby Rady Children’s Hospital, where tests revealed that oxygen wasn’t bonding to the molecule that carries it through the blood, hemoglobin, and his red blood cells were dying off....

Oceanographers are carving up the world’s seas like the last of the holiday turkey. A new 3D map sorts global water masses—from deep, frigid circumpolar waters to the oxygen-starved Black Sea—into 37 categories. The map groups together marine regions of similar temperature, salinity, oxygen and nutrient levels. It has been available for only a few months, and researchers are still working through how they might use it. But its international team of developers hopes that the map will help conservationists, government officials and others to better understand the biogeography of the oceans and make decisions about which areas to preserve....

February 1961 Protein Structure “Only when the structures of large numbers of proteins have been worked out will biochemists be in a position to answer many of the fundamental questions they have long been asking. It is well to point out that the chemical approach does not provide a complete solution to the problem of protein structure. The order of links in the chain is not the whole story. Each chain is coiled and folded in a three-dimensional pattern, no less important than the atom-by-atom sequence in determining its biological activity....

Retreating glaciers, stronger hurricanes, hotter summers, thinner polar bears: the ominous harbingers of global warming are driving companies and governments to work toward an unprecedented change in the historical pattern of fossil-fuel use. Faster and faster, year after year for two centuries, human beings have been transferring carbon to the atmosphere from below the surface of the earth. Today the world’s coal, oil and natural gas industries dig up and pump out about seven billion tons of carbon a year, and society burns nearly all of it, releasing carbon dioxide (CO2)....

Blood doping to heighten performance is forbidden in professional sports. Athletes can use this technique to fuel their muscles with more oxygen-carrying red blood cells—for example, by receiving a transfusion. But many animals dope naturally: sheep, marine fishes and horses can boost their blood’s capacity to carry oxygen by 16 to 74 percent in physically demanding situations. Now a study shows that an Antarctic fish called the bald notothen can ramp up its carrying capacity by more than 200 percent to pursue an active life in frigid waters....

How, then, can we explain the attitude of the disease’s namesake, baseball great Lou Gehrig? He told a sellout crowd at Yankee Stadium: “For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.” The Iron Horse then recounted his many blessings and fortunes, a list twice punctuated with “I’m lucky” and “That’s something....