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Democrats released their strongest climate platform in history, but any celebration from the left was soured by news that party officials had removed a provision that called for an end to subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel companies. The last-minute drama follows months of negotiations between climate activists and party insiders over the Democratic direction on global warming. The talks led to a detente of sorts, but the latest platform fight runs the risk of upsetting that armistice (Climatewire, Aug....

Recent legislative struggles around public restrooms and transgender rights have been so contentious they made Caitlyn Jenner have to pee. She posted a video of herself walking into the women’s restroom at Trump Tower. “Not anymore!” she says as she passes the men’s room. Needing a bathroom break is basic biology—Caitlyn even posted her video with the hashtag #everyonehastopee. But as the science of transgenderism advances, it seems that being transgender is basic biology, too....

By Richard A. Lovett of Nature magazineLast year, it was Pakistan and Russia. This spring, all talk of disasters attributable to freak weather conditions turns eyes to the U.S. First, it was snowfalls that never seemed to end. After that came tornadoes. Now, a massive slug of water is working its way down the Mississippi River, forcing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deliberately flood farmland to spare riverside towns such as Cairo in Illinois, and threatening near-record water levels all the way to New Orleans....

This week eastern Afghanistan was struck by a middle-of-the night earthquake that became the country’s deadliest in two decades. The epicenter was in the province of Paktika, about 30 miles from the city of Khost. Hundreds of homes and buildings collapsed. Entire villages were knocked to the ground. At least 1,150 people were killed, and at least another were injured, according to official reports. And a subsequent aftershock on Friday added to the toll....

Famed science-fiction writer Fredric Brown (1906–1972) delighted in creating the shortest of short stories. “Answer,” published in 1954, encapsulated a prescient meditation on the future of human-machine relations within a single double-spaced, typewritten page. The foreboding of the story echoes current apprehensions of scientists, policy makers and ethicists over the rapid evolution of machine intelligence. “Answer” begins under the watchful eyes of a dozen television cameras that are recording the ceremonial soldering of the final connection to tie together all the “monster” computers in the universe....

Although the Holocaust was propelled by charges that Jews were genetically inferior to Aryans, a new study in the Journal of Biosocial Science published online in June supports the opposite notion: Ashkenazi Jews may be genetically predisposed to higher intelligence. In the past, powerful figures, including Adolf Hitler, manipulated pseudoscientific ideas to fuel prejudice. But legitimate biological techniques now allow researchers to identify the functions of specific genes. Gregory Cochran, the infamous independent evolutionary biologist who in 1992 proposed that homosexuality is caused by an infectious disease, has teamed up with anthropologists Henry Harpending and Jason Hardy of the University of Utah....

Being swallowed alive by a frog is a death sentence for most insects, but one beetle species shrugs off being digested and instead finds freedom by sneaking out through its captor’s anus. When the pond frog Pelophylax nigromaculatus was presented with the aquatic beetle Regimbartia attenuata, it quickly snapped up the beetle, swallowing it whole and alive. But the meals ended with a strange twist, researchers recently discovered. In most of the experiments, the beetles reappeared within six hours, slipping out of a frog’s anus, or vent....

Why is the brain wired up the way it is—why does the right cortex control the left side of the body, and vice versa? —Peter Wilson, London Mark A. W. Andrews, professor of physiology and director of the Independent Study program at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, provides this explanation: FROM ANCIENT TIMES, many have asked your question. Greek physician Hippocrates, for example, wondered why trauma on one side of the head caused deficits on the opposite side of the body....

What is dark matter, and how is it affecting the universe? Robert Caldwell, a cosmologist at Dartmouth College, offers this explanation: Dark matter is a proposed solution to an as yet unresolved phenomenon—the mismatch between measurements of the gravitational mass and the luminous mass (the mass contributed by light-emitting matter) of galaxies and clusters, gravitationally bound groups of galaxies. This disparity suggests the presence of matter in the universe that does not efficiently produce light—hence, it is invisible, or “dark....

At a campaign rally in Roanoke, Va., before the 2012 election, President Barack Obama opined: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life…. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Although Obama was making a larger point about the power of collective action, such as building dams, power grids and the Internet, conservative heads exploded at the final sentiment....

By Julie Steenhuysen Florida officials on Tuesday announced the first case of Zika transmitted by mosquitoes in Pinellas County, located some 265 miles (425 km) from Miami, where the first locally transmitted U.S. cases were reported. Steve Huard, acting spokesman for Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County, said the case involves a woman without a significant travel history, indicating the virus was contracted locally. He did not know the timeline on the case, only that it had been confirmed within the past day....

Could your neighborhood be next? Neighborhoods can be turned upside down by shale oil and shale gas drilling (see hereand here),by pipelines dug through backyards, and by pipeline spills that send crude oil across entire neighborhoods. All of it gives me the willies, but it’s always been theoretical willies as the prospects of something like these happening in my neighborhood have seemed remote. That changed a bit a few weeks ago when I got a call from someone doing a survey for an “oil and gas firm....

An alcohol-busting enzyme may help prevent heart attack damage, according to a new study in Science. Researchers report that aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2), an enzyme important for processing alcohol in the human body, clears harmful toxins produced in cells when blood flow is blocked in the heart—and a new drug can switch it on. Red wine has long been toted as a preventive measure against cardiac disease. In fact, heart cells exposed to ethanol in the laboratory actually recover better when researchers temporarily stop the flow of oxygenated blood to them....

By Elie DolginResearchers who have mapped a species’ genome need to be more explicit about the quality of their sequence, says an international team of genome researchers.“People generating these sequences should discriminate a bit more between the products that they provide to the rest of the scientific community,” says Patrick Chain of the Joint Genome Institute at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who is first author of a policy paper on genomic standards published this week in Science....

To truly understand the essence of something, pelt it with projectiles. That has long been the preferred approach of some physicists, anyway. These scientists routinely study the subtle properties of solids by bombarding them with charged particles and watching for those that bounce off, get stuck or pass through to emerge, somehow changed. The specifics of what happens to such particles while they are inside some materials have remained elusive, however....

Leading tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft are now offering unprecedented amounts of data storage and access to “apps” on huge Internet-connected servers, saving consumers and businesses the hassle of installing and running programs and storing information on their own local computers. This emerging trend, dubbed “cloud computing,” means that these providers have had to scale up their power consumption considerably, as they are increasingly responsible for providing more and more of the computing horsepower required by the world’s two billion Internet users....

It’s officially spring in Washington, as the cherry blossoms are out in full force. But once again, they’re out earlier than expected. The National Park Service announced Sunday that the famous blossoms around the Tidal Basin had hit their peak bloom. Scientifically speaking, that’s the point when at least 70% of all the blossoms have opened. The peak arrived several days earlier than NPS had originally forecast, likely spurred on by above-average temperatures in the last week....

ALL OF US, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience. I see a coffee mug on the table, reach for a sip and, lo and behold, the vessel’s handle is soon in my grasp as I gingerly imbibe the hot liquid. Or I see a chartreuse-yellow tennis ball on the lawn, pick it up and throw it....

Hopefully you weren’t too attached to “2014 MU69,” because the most distant object ever explored has a new name. The 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, a term that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language, mission team members announced today (Nov. 12). “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement....

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry Gary Greenberg Blue Rider Press, 2013 ($27.95) This is a landmark book about a landmark book. Psychotherapist and author Greenberg first took on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in a blistering article in Wired in 2010. The Book of Woe is the nearly 400-page update, whose release coincided with the May 2013 release of the DSM-5, the fifth edition of the bible of mental health, which first appeared in 1952....