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In yet another collision of nature versus nurture, a team of scientists at the University of Arizona says the genetic research community must control for the environment when conducting experiments, because it may well affect the results. The Study: The group specifically targets studies that utilize knockout mice, a technique developed in the late 1980s in which strains of mice are bred with specific genes turned off. The methodology is used to try to determine whether disorders ranging from sickle cell anemia to alcoholism have a genetic component....

Inspired by the large-scale sky surveys with which astronomers explore the cosmos, neuroscientists in Seattle, Washington, have spent four years systematically surveying the neural activity of the mouse visual cortex. The Allen Brain Observatory’s first data release, on July 13, provides a publicly accessible data set of unprecedented size and scope, designed to help scientists to model and understand the human brain. The project is part of an ambitious ten-year brain-research plan announced in 2012 by the Allen Institute for Brain Science....

The battle over car rules is a math problem, and it might have life-or-death consequences. At issue is how the Trump administration will estimate potential fatalities in new cars that meet stringent standards on fuel efficiency established under former President Obama. The White House is making a central argument: More fuel-efficient cars and trucks will cost more money, so drivers could purchase fewer of these safer new models. The result? Older cars stay on the road longer, increasing the risk of injury to motorists and failing to reduce air pollution....

By Malia Mattoch McManus HONOLULU (Reuters) - The center of Tropical Storm Iselle made landfall on Hawaii’s Big Island on Friday with strong winds and heavy rain, knocking down trees and causing power outages ahead of a more powerful storm gathering steam behind it. While Iselle has weakened to a tropical storm, according to the U.S. Central Pacific Hurricane Center, it is being closely followed by Julio, a Category 3 hurricane set to reach Hawaii on Monday....

Earlier this year ominous headlines blared that Cape Town, South Africa, was headed for Day Zero—the date when the city’s taps would go dry because its reservoirs would become dangerously low on water. That day—originally expected in mid-April—has been postponed until at least 2019 as of this writing, thanks to water rationing and a welcome rainy season. But the conditions that led to this desperate situation will inevitably occur again, hitting cities all over the planet....

On a recent spring day William Cohn, a surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute, waited for a call he hoped would not come. In an operating room near his office doctors worked to extract wires that had been threaded through a 55-year-old female patient’s blood vessels from her pacemaker to her heart. The wires had broken, as happens all too often with pacemaker leads, and now they had to be removed without damaging the patient’s blood vessels....

New research released yesterday links human-caused climate change to six of 12 extreme weather events from 2012, including summer heat waves in the United States and storm surges from Superstorm Sandy. Teams of scientists from around the world examined the causes behind extreme weather events on five continents and in the Arctic. Their results were published as a special report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. One of the stronger linkages between global warming and severe weather was found in an analysis of last year’s high July temperatures in the northeastern and north-central United States....

Scientists are finding clues about how climate change could affect marine life by looking deep into the global ocean’s past experiences with warming. Through analysis of ocean sediment data, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that the last time the planet underwent a major temperature change at the end of the last ice age, ocean oxygen levels fell sharply along the continental margins in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The findings raise concerns about whether warming conditions will make certain parts of the ocean uninhabitable for a wide range of marine life that needs oxygen to survive....

OLDER AND MORE STRESSED The article “Splintered by Stress,” by Mathias V. Schmidt and Lars Schwabe, was very interesting. Have any studies been done on stress as it relates to a person’s age? Being an older male (I’m 64) in the workforce, I have definitely noticed that my ability to handle stress in general has declined over the years. George Stewart Maitland, Fla. SCHMIDT AND SCHWABE REPLY: There is indeed some evidence that the way we handle stress and the way we are affected by it change with age....

On a moonless night, a team of researchers boarded a rigid inflatable boat in the coastal city of Plymouth, England. As they left the illuminated city about three kilometers behind them and entered the darkness of the River Lynher, the notion that light pollution could reach deep below the water’s surface seemed dubious at first. But the scientists soon realized the sky was not so dark after all. “We could see the light from the city being reflected across all the clouds all the way up, right above us, right over [the] top of us and off into the distance,” says Thomas Davies, a marine conservationist at the University of Plymouth....

Roughly 650 million years ago vast sheets of glaciers stretched from the poles to the tropics, entombing Earth within a frozen skin that lingered for millions of years. And this had happened before: Our “pale blue dot” has transformed into a pearly-white “snowball Earth” at least three times in our planet’s history. But these deep freezes present a conundrum: They should have been deadly and yet life clearly survived. There is both geologic evidence our earliest microscopic ancestors did not freeze to death and genetic indications the lineages of a range of single-celled organisms extend beyond snowball Earth....

As of this month, there have been more than 750 cases of measles in the U.S. this year across 23 states—the most since 1994, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Measles was considered “eliminated” in the U.S. in 2000, although there have been small, sporadic outbreaks since then. A new study looks at how countries have pulled themselves out of past outbreaks of the disease—strategies that may need to be adapted in light of current vaccine hesitancy....

Jealousy can be devastating to a relationship—and it is well known that the genders experience the green-eyed monster in different ways. Men are more likely to be jealous of sexual peccadilloes and women of emotional infidelity, according to past research. The oft-quoted evolutionary explanation is that men care more about sex because an unfaithful partner could mean raising someone else’s kids, whereas women are protective of emotional attachments because the biggest danger for them is being left alone with the burden of single parenthood....

It has been said that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” but new research suggests that they may be a window to the brain as well. Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even used by the FBI to detect deception. Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence....

Physicists often describe the fabric of the universe we inhabit as four-dimensional spacetime, comprising three dimensions of space and one of time. Yet whereas we spend our days passing freely through space in any direction we wish (gravity and solid obstacles permitting), time pushes us along, willingly or not, in a single, predetermined direction: toward the future. This is the arrow of time—life carries us from the past, through the present, and into the future....

OSLO (Reuters) - Forty Roman Catholic groups said on Tuesday they were shunning investments in fossil fuels and urged others to follow suit. The coalition was the largest number of Catholic institutions, in countries including Australia, South Africa, Britain and the United States, to team up for a shift to greener energies, the Global Catholic Climate Movement said. Among those taking part was Assisi’s Sacro Convento and other Catholic institutions in the Italian town, birthplace of Saint Francis, who inspired Pope Francis....

Stem cells are vital throughout life because they can develop into specialized tissue. Recently, however, scientists have discovered that damaged or altered stem cells may be the driving force behind some kinds of cancer when their specialization takes a malignant turn for the worse. Stem cells were first identified in leukemia in 1997. Since then, they have been found in breast cancer and certain brain tumors, including glioblastoma multiforme, the most aggressive brain malignancy in adults....

Soon electronic chauffeurs will take us wherever we want to go, whenever we want, in complete safety—as long as we do not need to make any left turns across traffic. Changing road surfaces are a problem, too. So are snow and ice. It will be crucial to avoid traffic cops, crossing guards and emergency vehicles. And in an urban environment where pedestrians are likely to run out in front of the car, we should probably just walk or take the subway....

Month by month, these companies try to clasp the velvet handcuffs tighter, offering more and more goodies to entice us to stay within their ecosystems. Apple generally keeps its offerings to itself. You can’t shop the iTunes movie or music store on Android machines, for example, nor consult your iCloud calendar on an Android phone (at least not without a shareware utility). But other companies—the ones that don’t derive most of their income from selling hardware—make their software and services available to their rivals’ecosystems....

By Sharon WeinbergerIn August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he’d watched a recent game.Inside George’s bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words–he was studying Arabic at Pomona–and a book they considered to be critical of U....