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Approximately 40,000 people will die on U.S. roads this year, and thousands more will be injured. A disproportionate number of those traffic injuries will befall people from lower-income communities. According to new research, pedestrians in the poorest neighborhoods of Montreal were six times more likely to suffer traffic injuries than pedestrians in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Bicyclists and motorists in poorer neighborhoods were also at greater risk; they were four times more likely to be injured on the road....

Scientists have documented for the first time that banned flame retardants have declined in people in the United States, where levels of the chemicals had been growing exponentially. The small study, published today, reported that levels in pregnant California women were 65 percent lower than in a similar group of women tested three years earlier. The two flame retardants have been banned in the United States since 2004. But many experts have been concerned about their persistence because they break down slowly in human tissues and were widely used in products, such as sofas, that people keep for many years....

An estimated 35,000 Americans die of antibiotic-resistant infections each year—one every 15 minutes—according to a stark new report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention that reveals that the problem is substantially greater than previously estimated. The new report, the first update of a landmark 2013 publication that estimated the scope of drug resistance in the United States, used better data sources to recalculate the estimates in the earlier version....

As the globe continues to warm, the rainiest parts of the world are very likely to get wetter, according to a new study in Science. Desert dwellers, however, are likely to see what little rain they receive dry up, as the rain becomes even more concentrated in high-precipitation areas. Atmospheric scientists Richard Allan of the University of Reading in England and Brian Soden of the University of Miami looked at satellite records of daily rainfall stretching back to 1987 to see how warmer temperatures had affected precipitation....

NEW YORK—The great global cola war has spilled into a new theater of operations: the environment. Hardly a week passes without the two soft-drink behemoths, the Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo, announcing new environmental initiatives. Both have launched ambitious water-conservation and recycling drives, and the two are now working feverishly to improve their energy efficiency. Most of what they do saves them money and bolsters their bottom lines. But a recent barrage of press releases from both touting small-scale efforts in single bottling plants and massive global initiatives suggests Coke and Pepsi are engaged in combat over which will wear the “greenest beverage company” crown....

Lawmakers agreed last night to phase down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the most significant congressional action on climate change in years and a head start for President-elect Joe Biden’s plans to slash greenhouse gas emissions across the economy. The emission phase-down bill was tucked into the 5,593-page year-end omnibus, which also included a long-anticipated $35 billion energy innovation authorization bill, extensions of key tax credits for renewable energy and bipartisan legislation to boost carbon capture....

As diabetes treatment goes high-tech, diabetics are exposed to ever growing amounts of information about the state of their bodies—and many of those people are starting to wonder what they’re going to do with it all. Devices such as continuous glucose-monitoring systems offer one way of analyzing this growing stream of data, but other options exist as well. InterMed Health Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., for example, offers the Patient Data Handler (PDH), a device that wirelessly interacts with a regular glucose meter, automatically recording the readings after each blood test....

Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication. In recent months, three international teams have published papers comparing the genomes of dogs and wolves. On some matters — such as the types of genetic changes that make the two differ — the researchers are more or less in agreement. Yet the teams have all arrived at wildly different conclusions about the timing, location and basis for the reinvention of ferocious wolves as placid pooches....

Does Social Psychology need more political diversity? Here’s one thing on which everyone can agree: social psychology is overwhelmingly composed of liberals (around 85%). The question of why this is the case, and whether it presents a problem for the field, is more controversial. The topic has exploded out of our conference halls and into major news outlets over the past several years, with claims of both overt hostility and subtle bias against conservative students, colleagues, and their publications, being met with reactions ranging from knee-jerk dismissal to sincere self-reflection and measured methodological critique....

Two weeks after the spring equinox, farmers in China’s Hebei province pay a visit to deceased loved ones in tiny graveyards among the vast wheat fields to mark Qingming Jie, an annual festival for remembering ancestors. After burnt offerings turn to ash and the incense smoke clears, these private family graveyards are left largely undisturbed until next year, quietly allowing nature to take its course. It turns out that such graveyards in crop fields are more than peaceful places for people to pay their respects; they also function as miniature botanical preserves, a new study finds....

The amount of ice being sloughed off the massive land-bound ice sheets that blanket Antarctica has ratcheted up significantly in the last four decades; the continent is now losing six times more ice than it was in the 1980s. With climate change likely to continue accelerating this melt, the implications for global sea level rise are considerable. These conclusions come from a new study that marshals improved data sets and was published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The leaders of the U.S. and China committed their nations to the fight against global warming on Saturday when they handed arcane but momentous documents to the United Nation’s top official. The documents stated that the U.S. and China are ready to join a new global warming pact, putting it on course to potentially become international law before the end of 2016. Largely because of global warming, this year is expected to be the hottest year on record, beating a heat record set last year, which beat the record set the year prior....

We went among some islands which we thought uninhabited, but after we got to be in among them, so numerous were the settlements which came into sight … that we grieved … and, when they saw us, there came out to meet us on the river over two hundred pirogues [canoes], that each one carries twenty or thirty Indians and some forty … they were colorfully decorated with various emblems, and they had with them many trumpets and drums … and on land a marvelous thing to see were the squadron formations that were in the villages, all playing instruments and dancing about, manifesting great joy upon seeing that we were passing beyond their villages....

Women have long surpassed men in the arena of environmental action; across age groups and countries, females tend to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Compared to men, women litter less, recycle more, and leave a smaller carbon footprint. Some researchers have suggested that personality differences, such as women’s prioritization of altruism, may help to explain this gender gap in green behavior. Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity....

National discussions of crucial importance to ordinary citizens—such as funding for scientific and medical research, bailouts of financial institutions and the current Republican tax proposals—inevitably involve dollar figures in the millions, billions and trillions. Unfortunately, math anxiety is widespread even among intelligent, highly educated people. Complicating the issue further, citizens emotionally undeterred by billions and trillions are nonetheless likely to be ill-equipped for meaningful analysis because most people don’t correctly intuit large numbers....

As smoke from the large wildfires in Idaho and Wyoming spread out across America yesterday, two NASA aircraft flew up to investigate parts of that smoky plume. The two planes, a DC-8, which is a converted passenger plane, and an ER-2, a purpose-built, high-altitude aircraft that can operate between 45,000 feet and 70,000 feet, are part of a multiweek NASA campaign to better understand how pollution affects climate. The aircraft are currently based in Houston, and on Monday, researcher Robert Yokelson, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Montana, flew on the DC-8 as it sampled the smoke....

The sincerest expression of love is to learn the characteristics of the object of our affection as they are, without reservations or prejudice. By this definition, the pursuit of scientific knowledge is the ultimate act of loving nature in its full splendor. Scientific inquiry can only enhance the awe we feel when witnessing reality in all of its quantitative detail. The beauty of nature comes for free. The fact that all phenomena in the physical world obey a small set of strict laws is remarkable, given how difficult it is to enforce societal laws in the human world....

For most, putting on deodorant is a necessary ritual on par with brushing teeth or washing hands. But for people who produce no armpit stench, it is totally unnecessary. Despite that, nearly three-quarters of those people still use deodorant daily, a new study finds. The findings, published January 17 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, show just how much a person’s daily life is dictated by what’s considered normal. “They’re spending their money, exposing their skin to what may in a few instances not be good for their skin....

A decade ago layers of shale lying deep underground supplied only 1 percent of America’s natural gas. Today they provide 30 percent. Drillers are rushing to hydraulically fracture, or “frack,” shales in a growing list of U.S. states. That is good news for national energy security, as well as for the global climate, because burning gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal. The benefits come with risks, however, that state and federal governments have yet to grapple with....

When tropical cyclone Haiyan slammed into the Philippines late last week, residents of the city of Tacloban, which was devastated by the storm, said they were prepared for the winds but not the wall of water that swept through the city. That deadly swell was Haiyan’s storm surge. While high hurricane wind speeds are one cause of death and destruction, storm surges and flooding kill the most people during tropical cyclones....