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Along the rivers and streams of the Southeast, an invasion of tamarisk plants has been spreading, largely unchecked, for the last 200 years. Native to Kazakhstan and adjoining regions of northwestern China, the plant has in many places outcompeted other species like willow and cottonwood, sucking up water in a region where it is in short supply and constant demand. To curb that invasion, scientists have engineered another. A decade ago, they began introducing populations of the tamarisk’s natural predator, the leaf beetle Diorhabda carinulata, to prey on the plants and bring their numbers into check....

A flurry of recent papers highlights growing interest in approaches that employ nanomaterials as antiviral countermeasures. Compared with traditional small molecules or antibodies that inhibit viral replication or cellular entry, nanotechnology offers drug developers a suite of measures that may complement antiviral measures. They include virus binders, cell-membrane decoys or viral-envelope inhibitors. With the help of an influx of funding spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, some researchers hope that these materials could soon move towards clinical translation....

The Food and Drug Administration is weighing whether to follow British regulators in resuming a coronavirus vaccine trial that was halted when a participant suffered spinal cord damage, even as the National Institutes of Health has launched an investigation of the case. “The highest levels of NIH are very concerned,” said Dr. Avindra Nath, intramural clinical director and a leader of viral research at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, an NIH division....

In a State of the Union speech largely devoid of any lofty legislative goals President Barack Obama did introduce one aspirational target: curing cancer. The charge will be led by Vice President Joe Biden, the president said, laying out a singular specific policy goal in a speech that he acknowledged went “easy on the traditional list of proposals for the year ahead.” In his State of the Union remarks, the last such address of his presidency, delivered before a deeply divided Congress, the president mostly stuck to outlining his administration’s accomplishments during his two terms ahead of a year that seems poised to have few legislative actions to add to the list....

For more than two decades, scientists have wondered whether extraterrestrial life may be flourishing deep below the icy coatings boasted by moons in our outer solar system. Spacecraft like the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn have stumbled on evidence that some of their moons hide global oceans, warmed by the pull of the giant planet they orbit. And oceanic explorers much closer to home have discovered dynamic communities living in darkness around geologic features on the ocean floor....

ANOTHER REASON TO HAVE KIDS “Mortal Thoughts,” by Michael W. Wiederman, raises an interesting question: Why did humans evolve such a strong fear of mortality in the first place? According to an article in the fall 2010 issue of Biological Theory, our awareness of mortality is a by-product of the evolution of consciousness (which has obvious fitness benefits). Yet natural selection was not finished: it then favored a fear of mortality, together with the amelioration of that fear through offspring production....

Astronomers are on the hunt for the remnants of the neutron-star collision that gave Earth its precious metals. When neutron stars merge, they spew a wealth of short-lived elements into their surroundings, and these materials become part of later-forming solar systems. Now scientists are trying to close in on the merger that seeded our solar system by tracing the elements produced by the original decaying material. From that work, they believe the responsible merger occurred 100 million years before and 1,000 light-years away from the birth of our solar system....

Editor’s Note (11/28/2019): This article was originally published on November 23, 2016 following one of the most polarizing presidential races in modern American history. It is being resurfaced to address the political divide that remains in the country since the election. This holiday season, I’m reminded of a scene from 30 Rock in which Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon, alone on Valentine’s Day and high on post-dental-surgery painkillers, says to the camera, “Happy Valentine’s Day, no one!...

Nearly 80 years on, impacts from the violent bombings of World War II are still felt around the globe. Christopher Scott would know—two of his aunts were killed at just 9 and 11 years of age during the London Blitz, Nazi Germany’s eight-month onslaught against the British. Those aerial raids didn’t just have rippling effects through generations of families. Scott, who is a space and atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading in the U....

Kirsten Timmons was navigating a frozen overpass one night when a passing car skidded out of control and slammed into her vehicle. As her car came to a stop, Timmons’s head probably snapped around its own axis, decelerating sharply when it struck the seat-belt holder next to her. The impact produced a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), knocking Timmons out and setting the stage for lasting brain damage. Luckily for her, emergency services rushed her to the hospital within an hour of the crash, greatly boosting her chances of survival....

It was the headlines that most upset Amy Orben. In 2017, when she was a graduate student in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford researching how social media influences communication, alarming articles began to appear. Giving a child a smartphone was like giving a kid cocaine, claimed one. Smartphones might have destroyed a generation, said another. Orben didn’t think such extreme statements were warranted. At one point, she stayed up all night reanalyzing data from a paper linking increases in depression and suicide to screen time....

Today Earth orbit is a busy place. Almost 2,000 active satellites whiz around our planet, along with nearly 3,000 dead satellites and 34,000 pieces of “space junk” larger than 10 centimeters in size. Whenever debris or a defunct spacecraft gets too close for comfort to an active satellite—typically when a collision risk rises to one part in several thousand—the satellite’s operator must perform a collision-avoidance maneuver. The International Space Station, for example, is moved when the chance of a collision is greater than one in 10,000....

Almost 110 years ago Alfred Nobel left a will outlining how to award what would become the most recognized academic prize in the world. This December 10, once again, the Royal Swedish Academy will impart the diplomas and medals that accompany the prizes, intended for scientists whose work has contributed to the benefit of humanity. For more details, visit www.sciam.com/ontheweb and nobelprize.org —Sarah Todd Davidson PHYSICS: Roy J. Glauber, for his 1963 research on how coherent light (light waves traveling at the same frequency and phase) behaves at the quantum scale; and John L....

When Heidi Fearn, a theoretical physicist at California State University, Fullerton, returned from sabbatical in 2012, she found a surprise in the laboratory adjoining her office: a man, an old man named James F. Woodward. Fearn knew him from around—he was a professor of science history and an adjunct professor of physics. With white hair and eyes perpetually peering over the top of his glasses, he fit the part. Still, she thought, “What the heck is this guy doing in my back room?...

According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity arises from the geometry of space and time, which combine to form spacetime. Any massive body leaves an imprint on the shape of spacetime, governed by an equation Einstein formulated in 1915. The earth’s mass, for example, makes time pass slightly more rapidly for an apple near the top of a tree than for a physicist working in its shade. When the apple falls, it is actually responding to this warping of time....

The shadows lengthen in a guesthouse cafeteria on the sprawling campus of christian Medical College, Vellore, in India. Wrapped up as he is in an issue that has possessed him for years, T. Jacob John notices neither the dying light nor the gathering mosquitoes. He is talking about the oral polio vaccine. A slight man who speaks and moves with a speed that belies his 76 years, John is one of India’s leading polio experts....

In 1813, President James Madison occupied the White House, Americans occupied Fort George in Canada (a result of the War of 1812) and a rockfish was born somewhere in the North Pacific. Two hundred years later, that same rockfish was caught off the coast of Alaska by Seattle resident Henry Liebman — possibly setting a record for the oldest rockfish ever landed. Troy Tydingco of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told the Daily Sitka Sentinel that the longevity record for the shortraker rockfish (Sebastes borealis) is 175 years, but that fish “was quite a bit smaller than the one Henry caught....

Both quantum theory, which governs the subatomic realm, and Einstein’s general relativity, which describes reality at cosmic scales, are often viewed as the most important developments in 20th-century physics. But there is another finding on par with these breakthroughs: the discovery the universe is expanding and must have originated at a finite time in the past, a moment now called the big bang. General relativity and quantum theory both became vital tools for exploring how the universe evolves....

It’s one thing to spot stuff from orbit above an alien world and quite another to get in close. Earlier Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery of Gale Crater, now home to NASA’s Curiosity rover, had shown signs of what appeared to be something akin to an “alluvial fan”—a sign that at some previous time there had been a flow of liquid water washing into and across a section of the crater floor....

By Noah Browning and Tom Brown A Saudi-led coalition air strike hit a hospital operated by Medecins Sans Frontieres in northern Yemen on Monday, killing at least 11 people and wounding 19, the aid group said. A Reuters witness at the scene of the attack in the Abs district of Hajja province said medics could not immediately evacuate the wounded because war planes continued to fly over the area and emergency workers feared more bombings....