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Sandy Allen—the world’s tallest woman, according to Guinness World Records—died on Wednesday (August 13) in the Indiana nursing home where she lived, the Associated Press reports. Allen was 53 years old and stood seven feet, seven inches (2.3 meters) tall—a full inch taller than Chinese basketball star Yao Ming. As a child, Allen developed a tumor in her pituitary gland—a pea-size structure at the base of the brain that secretes several hormones that are key to the body’s function, including human growth hormone....

Claude T. Moorman III, director of sports medicine at Duke University Medical Center, explains. The simple answer to this question is that “shin splints” is a laymans wastebasket term to describe pain felt between the knee and the ankle after athletic activity. Although there are different reasons why pain is felt in this area, shin splints are considered a cumulative stress disorder as opposed to an acute injury. They occur when the constant pounding and stresses placed on the bones, muscles and joints overwhelm the bodys natural ability to repair the damage and restore itself....

The long days of summer have returned to the Northern Hemisphere. They promise music festivals, sporting events, camps and travel. But for many people, the scars of a global pandemic have made these activities feel fraught with worry. Though the success of COVID vaccinations has enabled many countries to think about going “back to normal,” concerns filter through all levels of society, from the very small details of private lives to the very big manifestations of sociality and togetherness....

Buried deep in the recent government spending bill is a minor victory for international climate change efforts. The fiscal 2018 omnibus provided $3 million for the State Department to pay some dues to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and its scientific cousin, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s not much. The United States generally provides a combined $10 million for the two agencies. Even President Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget blueprint was more generous—offering a combined $6....

How does your body know where your limbs are when you are not looking at them? How does it sense when it is time to go to the bathroom or whether a touch is soothing or painful? All these abilities rely on a mechanism for sensing touch or pressure. And this week Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for contributing to the discovery of such mechanisms, which detect these sensory inputs and convert them into neural impulses the brain can perceive....

Residents of Second Life—an online computer game in which players can do almost everything they can do in real life, such as buy and sell property, take classes and date—tout their world’s realistic settings and social opportunities. Now a growing number of scientists are beginning to take notice and are bringing their human behavior research into the virtual world. Second Life allows researchers to study scenarios that they cannot in real life, such as placing a person in someone else’s body, changing the laws of physics or even performing experiments that are otherwise ethically taboo....

The mounting cost of maintaining U.S. research operations in Antarctica is putting the squeeze on polar science, according to a new review by an independent panel commissioned by the White House. And solving the problem may require cutting science spending, at least temporarily. The U.S. Antarctic Program, managed by the National Science Foundation, maintains three year-round stations on the southern continent and supports more than 50 field camps that spring up each summer, during the main Antarctic field season....

You’ve met the cluck-cluckers—the people who automatically decry every new technology. “All this newfangled gadgetry is rotting our brains,” they say, “and ruining our kids.” Every older generation disapproves of the next; that’s predictable and human. Apparently digital devices are ruining our youth, just the way that rock music ruined their parents, and television ruined their parents and motorcars ruined theirs. So I guess we’ve been ruined for generations. But I got to wondering: What does science say about the ruinous effects of the latest technology?...

Last time you told someone “I’ll call you,” did you mean it? We all make promises in our daily interactions with others. On the one hand, promises such as “I’ll return your book next week” or “I won’t tell anyone” are not heavily binding, except maybe in a moral sense. On the other hand, some of the promises we make bind us legally and financially. By saying “I do”, newlyweds promise to love and cherish each other no matter what happens for the rest of their lives; hardly anybody makes this promise intending to break it....

Over just a few weeks, I received e-mail messages from several banks warning me that my online banking services were in danger of being deactivated, from eBay telling me that I needed to change my password, from Apple complaining that I had unpaid bills for music downloads, from an airline offering me the opportunity to earn a quick $50 for filling out a survey and from the Red Cross asking me to contribute money to help earthquake victims in China....

A record-breaking storm that swept through California in recent days was made worse by climate change, experts say. And not just because of additional rainfall that’s a symptom of a warmer climate. Adding to the misery was what preceded the deluge: months of dry conditions and devastating wildfires. That seesaw in weather conditions—from bone dry to sopping wet—is a taste of what’s to come as the Earth heats up, scientists say....

Last October in London the DeepMind team invited the European Go champion, Fan Hui, to play against their program, AlphaGo. The match was private, witnessed by just a few spectators. Hui and AlphaGo played a full-size game on a 19 by 19 grid board. AlphaGo had already been tested against state-of-the-art Go programs, like Crazy Stone and Zen, and had won all but one of 495 contests. But playing against a human expert is a much greater challenge than playing other computers because, well, the pros are still so much better—they have years of experience with the game and a certain intuition about how to play it....

Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today’s life-forms. Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun’s harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the first cells come to be nearly four billion years ago? Conventional scientific wisdom holds that life arose in the sea....

The colder months have arrived, and COVID-19 infections and deaths are rising once again—but Americans are breathing a sigh of relief nonetheless, as the first authorized vaccine is finally rolling out. Perhaps surprisingly, though, that will actually make it increasingly difficult for public health officials to judge whether any of the vaccines will work well enough to tame the pandemic. That’s because the emergency use authorization (EUA) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted to Pfizer will begin to undermine the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths....

PLURIPOTENT CELLS MOTOR ON Researchers have used genes to make adult cells pluripotent, that is, capable of giving rise to any cell type. But whether the reprogrammed cells could then generate specific cells needed to treat a disease was uncertain. Scientists at Harvard University and their colleagues have succeeded in making pluripotent the skin cells from an elderly patient with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Exposed to the right molecules, the induced pluripotent stem cells turned into motor neurons, which the ailment normally destroys....

Ensconced in a former warehouse in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, an energy start-up has equipment not typically associated with battery manufacture—restaurant-grade mixers, pasta-makers and even rolling pins. This kitchen equipment makes ingredients that the company hopes will turn the familiar alkaline battery into a cheap way to store the electricity from massive wind farms. Like many other battery start-ups, Urban Electric Power has survived so far on city and state business development grants for its Harlem location as well as research funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E)....

Tucked in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, next to fossils of long-gone gigantic sloths and knee-high horses, stands a newcomer to the extinction parade: Lonesome George, the last of his subspecies and a native of the Galápagos’s Pinta Island. Until his death in 2012, the giant tortoise had stood as a global conservation icon for four decades. Now, preserved by a team of taxidermists and put on display at the museum until his January 4 return to his South American homeland, George still shares his message amid other vanished species—lonesome no more....

LITTLETON, Colo.—After expensive delays, NASA’s next mission to Mars is on track to embark next year. As spacecraft names go, this one is a mouthful: Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. At NASA, and here at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, which built the craft, it’s just called InSight. Designed to probe the planet’s deep interior and to eavesdrop on rumbling “Marsquakes,” the InSight lander will effectively take the planet’s temperature and measure its pulse....

The most common form of malignant brain cancer—called a glioblastoma—is notoriously wily and considered the deadliest human cancer. Glioblastomas charge their way into normal brain tissue diffusely and erratically, making them surgical nightmares. And they mutate at such a rapid rate that most currently available cancer treatments can’t keep up with them. Even neighboring tumor cells can be genetically distinct, and therefore hard to target with a single therapy. Survival rates from glioblastomas enjoyed a modest bump in the 1980s when radiation became a standard part of the treatment protocol....

During spring in the Pacific Northwest, meltwater from thawing snow rushes down rivers and the wind often blows hard. These forces spin the region’s many power turbines and generate a bounty of electricity at a time of mild temperatures and relatively low energy demand. But much of this seasonal surplus electricity—which could power air conditioners come summer—is lost because batteries cannot store it long enough. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy national laboratory in Richland, Wash....