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We would all appreciate a healthy work-life balance, but even those of us who try to unwind outside the office are frustrated by the gentle chime of email at all hours. To our delight and horror, smartphones and tablets have given us the flexibility to respond to work from anywhere, practically becoming one of the family. Entrepreneurs and executives are known for a round-the-clock devotion to work, in contrast to the four-day-week gurus, but what toll does availability take for those whose jobs require it?...

It’s been more than 30 years—during the Blizzard of 1978 to be exact—since Neil Stuart saw “thundersnow,” a weather phenomenon featuring the unusual combination of thunder, lightning and snow. The National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist was 10 years old, living near Boston. The storm—which he says “is famous in meteorological circles” and influenced his career path—dumped 27 inches (67 centimeters) of snow on the ground over two days. The heaviest snow, however, came during a six-hour thundersnow storm that delivered one foot of snow over a six hour period....

Brazilian folk tradition holds that if your asthma is acting up, you might consider sharing dinner with a bird. Feeding leftovers to a white-naped jay in particular is thought by some healers to transfer the illness to unsuspecting avians. If that doesn’t work, the roasted, powdered liver of the black vulture also apparently helps open restricted airways. Birds and certain bird bits — their beaks, their feathers, their livers — are involved in traditional remedies throughout the world, practices that trace back to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt and early China....

As rising seas encroach on coastal communities, governments and property owners often try to block the water by setting up barriers such as seawalls or levees. But a new study has found this conventional fix can seriously backfire in bays and estuaries, potentially causing worse flooding and massive economic damage in nearby unprotected communities. The research, published in July in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, focused on San Francisco Bay, the largest estuary on the West Coast—and the findings could also apply to other major cities, from London to Hong Kong....

Pudgy, ungainly tardigrades are among the smallest legged animals on Earth, and these microscopic water bears lumber around like chubby-thighed toddlers. But most creatures as small as tardigrades don’t even have legs, so scientists recently analyzed tardigrades in motion to better understand how they use their limbs. Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets, have segmented bodies and four pairs of legs. They scoot through deep sea sediments and sandy river bottoms, and scurry over lichens and moss on land, scampering toward prospective mates and food or away from predators....

President-elect Joe Biden demonstrated his intent to give the Federal Emergency Management Agency a major role in his administration by quickly nominating an agency leader and selecting a widely praised emergency manager who has dealt with hurricanes, wildfires and pandemics. Biden’s nomination Friday of New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell marks the first time a woman has been selected to lead FEMA since its creation in 1979. Criswell has spoken openly about the threat of climate change and its role in exacerbating disasters, telling an interviewer last year that “sea rise is definitely a concern” in New York City....

A preventive treatment for Alzheimer’s disease is one of medicine’s holy grails. Until recently, however, testing such a regimen would have been impossible—people do not have symptoms of dementia until it is too late. Now the Dominantly Inherited Alzhei­mer Network project, a large international study of those whose families suffer from a heritable form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, has found that those who develop the disease have chemical changes in their brain decades before symptoms appear....

Key concepts Buoyancy Gravity Acceleration Inertia Density Introduction Have you ever noticed that loose objects tend to move around in a car as it accelerates or decelerates? Now imagine a helium-filled balloon floating in a car. All of the windows are rolled up and the vents are turned off. When the car accelerates, what, if anything, do you think happens to the position of the balloon? The answer may surprise you!...

Apparently, humans aren’t the only species whose relationships can suffer from stress. According to new research, birds living in unpredictable climates are more likely to “cheat” on their feathered partners. “Mating with multiple partners improves the chances that at least one chick will have the genes to cope with the variable conditions to come,” explained Carlos Botero, an evolutionary ecologist and the lead researcher of the study, published yesterday in the journal PLoS ONE....

Bob and Alice send shipments of raw diamonds to one another in envelopes. Each shipment passes through the hands of exactly three of five possible middlemen, known by their numerical pseudonyms M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5. For secrecy, each actor (Bob, Alice, and each middleman) has a mailbox-like strongbox. To transfer goods to X, one puts an envelope in the mail slot of X’s strongbox. X will come in when he or she is sure not to be watched and will remove the envelope from the strongbox....

Exposure to colleagues from many nations made both my parents better scientists, and now as I begin my own research career, I’m starting to see why. My mother and father traveled the world for their work. They grew up in Argentina during the military dictatorship, got their Ph.D.s, then moved to the U.S. Later, their jobs took them to Scotland, Wales and England before returning to the U.S. Every time we moved, my parents’ new colleagues quickly became friends, and from an early age I was exposed to many different cultural perspectives (not to mention delicious food at potlucks)....

The gold standard for certifying “green” buildings fails to place enough emphasis on human health and needs to be upgraded, according to a new report from an environmental health group. The standard - Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED - is weighted more heavily toward energy conservation and not enough toward health protection, skewing green-design criteria, concluded Environmental and Human Health, Inc., a Connecticut-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting human health from environmental harms....

If your life sometimes seems directionless, you might legitimately blame the universe. According to the key tenets of modern physics, the cosmos is “isotropic” at multi-billion-light-year scales—meaning it should have the same look and behavior in every direction. Ever since the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe ought to have expanded identically everywhere. And that expectation matches what astronomers see when they observe the smooth uniformity of the big bang’s all-sky afterglow: the cosmic microwave background (CMB)....

“If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.” —Richard Feynman Four years ago in these pages, writer Shawn Otto warned our readers of the danger of a growing antiscience current in American politics. “By turning public opinion away from the antiauthoritarian principles of the nation’s founders,” Otto wrote, “the new science denialism is creating an existential crisis like few the country has faced before.” Otto wrote those words in the heat of a presidential election race that now seems quaint by comparison to the one the nation now finds itself in....

Key Concepts Physics Machines Engineering Mechanics Geometry Introduction Have you ever wished you could copy a drawing but make it larger or smaller? If you’ve ever tried to create a larger or smaller copy of your work, you’ve probably realized that it is very hard to get the details right. A machine called a pantograph, however, could help. It makes copies that can be scaled up or down or made the same size....

Editor’s Note (8/9/17): The story below about a federal report, written by one of our partners, Climatewire, was based on a New York Times article that has since been corrected. Climatewire has issued a correction as well. Several scientists who were report authors have said the report was not “leaked” as the Times claimed, but had been available during a public comment period, and was still available on at least one Web site....

An emerging technology could offer a more efficient way of reducing air pollution from power plants. A Seattle-based company called ClearSign Combustion has demonstrated how to manipulate flames using high-voltage electric fields to prevent pollution from forming in the first place. Much of the air pollution produced by today’s fossil-fuel power plants is the result of imperfect combustion. Hot spots in a flame increase the reactions between fuel and air molecules and lead to formation of common air pollutants like nitrogen oxides (or NOx, a precursor to smog), carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter....

Hawaii saw record temperatures over the weekend. Not for heat. For cold. Nighttime lows on the island of Oahu plunged to 56 degrees Fahrenheit — breaking a nearly 60-year record for what passes in Hawaii as extreme cold. Saturday’s daytime high was 70 degrees, the lowest on record, beating 76 degrees in 1965. And temperature was not the worst of it. Driving rain and relentless winds slammed Hawaii, as well — gusting to 40 mph in Honolulu and twice that speed atop Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, twin dormant volcanoes on the Big Island whose peaks reach more than 13,500 feet....

When babies are five months old, they can distinguish among faces of all races equally well. Past studies show they can, for instance, match a happy sound with many kinds of happy faces with equal ease. Yet by nine months, babies react more swiftly to their own race than others: they differentiate more readily between faces and match emotional sounds with facial expressions faster. A study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, published in May in Developmental Science, showed that the younger infants use only the frontal part of the brain for the task....

This holiday season all kinds of products are coming equipped with GPS receivers to tell consumers exactly where on earth they are. The choices include dashboard navigators for cars, pocket navigators for humans, “golf buddies” that reveal the distance between a golfer and greens and sand traps, and, most prominently, cell phones. GPS transponders also now track paroled criminals, errant pets, migrating elephants and retreating glaciers. Positioning satellites have been beaming signals for decades, but three converging factors are broadening the marketplace, according to Per K....