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By Luc Cohen Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney scored a victory that had eluded more than 40 U.S. public officials who took on the powerful U.S. soda industry when the city council voted on Thursday to slap a tax on sweetened drinks. After a bitter, months-long battle, the city council voted 13-4 to approve a 1.5 cent-per-ounce tax on sugary and diet drinks beginning in January. The council already approved the plan in a preliminary vote last week, and the outcome had not been expected to change....

Cities have seen various forms of protest against President Trump’s executive order barring immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. But not all protesters marched or carried signs. Scientists are using social media to coalesce around various forms of protest, including boycotting US conferences and journals. Such acts of academic “civil disobedience” could, in the short term, slow the progress of science. But none promise to do as much damage to science as the ban itself....

Nikolay Zheludev’s voice in the U.K. traverses the Atlantic Ocean on wires, fiber-optic cables and microwaves and reaches me in New York City. The delay and noise make a conversation difficult. Speaking from the University of Southampton, he is describing man-made structures called metamaterials and how they will make almost any conceivable device or application faster, cheaper and more efficient. Our transoceanic conversation is a case in point, he notes: over a metamaterial-augmented all-optical network, the static, the awkward pauses and the cross-talk at the ends of our sentences would be eliminated....

The promise of driverless cars and software that teaches itself new skills has sparked a revival of artificial intelligence—and, with it, fears that our machines may one day turn against us. Read More Springtime for AI: The Rise of Deep Learning After decades of disappointment, artificial intelligence is finally catching up to its early promise, thanks to a powerful technique called deep learning What “Self-Driving” Cars Will Really Look Like They are coming, but not the way you may have been led to think Should We Fear Supersmart Robots?...

Eleven inches of rain chucked down on Beijing on July 21, 2012, flooding roads and filling underpasses. Landscape architect Yu Kongjian barely made it home from work. “I was lucky,” he says. “I saw many people abandon their cars.” As the deluge continued, the city descended into chaos. Beijing’s largest storm in more than 60 years killed 79 people; most of them drowned in their vehicles or were sucked into underground drains....

Stepping out of a capsule no bigger than a modest home kitchen, the four-person crew of NASA’s latest Human Exploration Research Analog study “returned” to Earth last month after a 45-day mission to fictional asteroid Geographos. Although the capsule never actually left NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, the mission’s results could shape how the space agency’s astronauts someday handle the isolation, confinement and sleep deprivation likely to occur during interplanetary travel....

As a physician in Verona, Girolamo Fracastoro observed the mortifying effects of the disease firsthand. More virulent and contagious than syphilis today, the disease would be responsible for an estimated five million deaths throughout the continent. Its symptoms were particularly visual and included widespread bodily lesions. Born in Verona in the Republic of Venice in 1478 to a family of high standing, Fracastoro was by 1502 appointed professor at the University of Padua, where his contemporaries included a certain Nicolaus Copernicus....

Many readers may remember Danica McKellar as Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years. Some may know her as the author of the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem in mathematical physics. Nowadays, she’s hoping that young girls will see her as a cool ambassador of math. In her newly released book, “Girls Get Curves,” McKellar explains why geometry is worth knowing: it promotes logical thinking and reveals why diamonds are shiny! Hmmm. Some call this patronizing....

The story of the birth of our solar system has been worn smooth through years of retelling. It starts billions of years ago with a black, slowly spinning cloud of gas and dust. The cloud collapses, forming our sun at its heart. In time, the eight planets, along with lesser worlds such as Pluto, emerge from leftover gas and debris swirling about our star. This system of sun and planets has been whirling through space ever since, its motions as accurate and predictable as clockwork....

Donald Trump has selected one of the best-known climate skeptics to lead his U.S. EPA transition team, according to two sources close to the campaign. Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading Trump’s transition plans for EPA, the sources said. The Trump team has also lined up leaders for its Energy Department and Interior Department teams. Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKenna is heading the DOE team; former Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt is leading the effort for that agency, according to sources close to the campaign....

About 15 million years after the big bang, the entire universe had cooled to the point where the electromagnetic radiation left over from its hot beginning was at about room temperature. In a 2013 paper, I labeled this phase as the “habitable epoch of the early universe.” If we had lived at that time, we wouldn’t have needed the sun to keep us warm; that cosmic radiation background would have sufficed....

DECEMBER 1959 THE FAR SIDE—“Man’s first blurred view of the other side of the moon suggests that current theories of the origin and history of our natural satellite may require revision. The Soviet vehicle, launched on October 3, crossed the moon’s orbit some three days later. Shortly thereafter, in response to radio signals from earth, it pointed its two cameras at the moon and made the photographs. They were developed in the vehicle and were radioed back to the earth....

Poring over 12 years of detailed data, atmospheric scientists Joel Thornton at the University of Washington, postdoc Katrina Virts of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and their colleagues found lightning flashes occur nearly twice as often directly above heavily trafficked shipping lanes as they do elsewhere over the ocean. The increased frequency of lightning follows the exhaust from ships and cannot be explained by meteorological factors such as winds or the atmosphere’s temperature structure, according to a study, published in Geophysical Research Letters in September....

Dashing for a train in a busy station at rush hour, I picked out a face in the crowd—the familiar configuration of features, the laugh lines and the mole above the right eye. I immediately knew the distinctive visage belonged to my former classmate, Robert. Most of us are highly skilled at recognizing faces, even though they all have similar features arranged in roughly the same configuration: two eyes separated by a standard-issue nose, along with a mouth, chin and cheeks....

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria—arguably the most widespread, abundant and ancient organisms on earth—can produce a toxin called BMAA, which is linked with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and an illness in Guam similar to Lou Gehrig’s and Parkinson’s diseases. An international team examined cyanobacteria living in marine, brackish and freshwater environments throughout the world along with those living symbiotically with plants and lichens. Ninety percent of the 41 strains studied generated BMAA, and at the right times or growth conditions all cyanobacteria might produce the toxin, the investigators report in the April 5 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA....

The Energy Department is launching a new contest to lure U.S. companies into the business of designing and building floating wind turbines for offshore areas. The contest offers a combination of $5.75 million in prizes plus up to $1.1 million worth of assistance from Energy Department laboratories. The goal is to encourage businesses and inventors to design mass-produced platforms called “floaters.” In doing so, the Biden administration is looking to address a major hurdle in offshore wind energy....

IRVINE, Calif. — Even in a test tube, snake venom is terrifying. Mix a few beads of venom from a deadly Indian krait with blood cells and, within an instant, the clear liquid will turn bright red as toxins blast through the cells, rupturing their membranes. One look tells you more than you want to know about the excruciating pain of a snakebite. That’s why synthetic chemist Jeffrey O’Brien was so startled, and so excited, when he tried lacing a test tube full of blood cells with a compound he had created to neutralize snake venom....

Blood cancer treatments may one day include special dietary restrictions: researchers have found that an essential amino acid plays a crucial role in the creation of blood stem cells—a discovery the scientists say could lead to a potential alternative to chemotherapy and radiation. Valine is one of 10 essential amino acids—protein building blocks that are crucial to life but cannot be made by the human body. It must therefore be obtained through diet and is found in protein-rich foods such as meat, dairy and legumes....

The best actors, directors and screenwriters receive Oscars; the top scientists, Nobel Prizes. Society doles out a multitude of awards every year to celebrate the creative achievements of individuals. Such events feed a popular conception that creativity is a gift only certain people possess and constitutes the apotheosis of individuality. Albert Einstein once observed, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom....

A powerful new planet hunter has begun searching the heavens for rocky, potentially habitable worlds. The ESPRESSO instrument, which is installed on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile, made its first observations last month, project team members announced today (Dec. 6). ESPRESSO is designed to find alien planets via the “radial velocity” method—that is, by detecting the tiny wobbles in a star’s movement caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets....