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By Niu Shuping and Naveen ThukralWU LIU, China/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - China’s wheat crop has suffered more severely than previously thought from frost in the growing period and rain during the harvest, and import demand to compensate for the damage could see the country eclipse Egypt as the world’s top buyer.Interviews with farmers and new estimates from analysts have revealed weather damage in China’s northern grain belt could have made as much as 20 million metric tons (22....

As climate change continues to grip the Arctic—causing the oceans to rise, permafrost to thaw and sea ice to melt—scientists believe they’ve discovered an unexpected consequence of the shifting landscape. Changes along the coastline are altering the composition of the Arctic Ocean, in ways that could fundamentally transform the local food chain. A new study published yesterday in the journal Science Advances suggests that there’s been an increase in the amount of soils or sediments flowing from the Arctic shore into the ocean over the last decade....

Events like record-setting heat, extreme rainfall and drought will happen more frequently around the world even if global climate targets are met, new research suggests. And missing those targets could make the risk even worse. If global temperatures rise by up to 3 degrees Celsius above their preindustrial levels, the risk of extreme events could grow by as much as fivefold in certain parts of the world. Overall, up to 60 percent of locations across North America, Europe, East Asia and parts of southern South America would likely see at least a threefold increase in various extreme events, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Science Advances....

The latest skirmish in the battle between human and microbe played out on 29 November in a hotel conference room in Silver Spring, Maryland. There, an assembly of scientists and clinicians debated the merits of an experimental antibiotic. For some, the coveted prize was not just an endorsement of the drug itself, but a sign that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is finally ready to rethink its clinical-trial requirements for antibiotics — requirements that the drug industry says are unrealistic....

Matt is a history teacher. his twin brother, greg, is a drug addict. (Their names have been changed to protect their anonymity.) Growing up in the Boston area, both boys did well in high school: they were strong students in the classroom and decent athletes on the field, and they got along with their peers. Like many young people, the brothers snuck the occasional beer or cigarette and experimented with marijuana....

In March a collaboration of scientists operating a microwave telescope at the South Pole made an announcement that stunned the scientific world. They claimed to have observed a signal emanating from almost the beginning of time. The putative signal came embedded in radiation left over from the action of gravitational waves that originated in the very early universe—just a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the big bang....

Deep inside a giant but little known NASA facility, crews have for years been staging elaborately faked space missions. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the sad tale of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, the sprawling New Orleans complex where the space agency had for decades built its biggest rockets. After the space shuttle’s last flight in 2011, Michoud’s massive hangarlike facilities were rented out to Hollywood studios, housing some of the production for Ender’s Game and other science-fiction movies....

The Anatomy of Addiction: What Science and Research Tell Us about the True Causes, Best Preventive Techniques, and Most Successful Treatments by Akikur Mohammad. Tarcher Perigee, 2016 ($27; 272 pages) Addiction is rampant. Millions of Americans use illegal drugs, and in 2014, 88,000 people died from excess alcohol consumption, says addiction expert Mohammad. In his new book, he reviews the developing science of addiction, how different addictive substances work and how such drugs impair brain function....

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore speaking in 2007 at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.(Credit:Stephen Shankland/CNET)Year in, year out, Intel executive Mike Mayberry hears the same doomsday prediction: Moore’s Law is going to run out of steam. Sometimes he even hears it from his own co-workers.But Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who 47 years ago predicted a steady, two-year cadence of chip improvements, keeps defying the pessimists because a brigade of materials scientists like Mayberry continue to find ways of stretching today’s silicon transistor technology even as they dig into alternatives....

100-watt bulb set to be dimmed permanently Congress this week passed legislation designed to boost energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The measure raises fuel-efficiency for passenger vehicles to 35 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2020, up from 25 miles mpg now (the first such increase since 1975) and phases out 100-watt incandescent light bulbs by 2012. It also mandates that companies manufacture more energy efficient appliances, slap labels on TVs and computers specifying their energy consumption, and requires gasoline producers to quintuple the amount of ethanol and other biofuels in the fuel supply to 36 billion gallons by 2022....

Researchers have produced a photoswitch comprising just one photosensitive molecule whose electrical conductivity can be turned on and off by light. The device may, with further development, have potential in solar energy harvesting and light-sensing applications. It may also be useful in biomedical electronics and optical logic, in which light replaces electrical signals to transmit information. In the ongoing quest to miniaturise electronics, one ambitious frontier – molecular electronics – involves constructing electronic circuits and devices from individual molecules....

As coronavirus cases rebounded to devastating levels in much of Europe and the U.S. late last year, one country got its outbreak under control with the aid of widespread testing. In October and November—after a brief lockdown—Slovakia tested a large percentage of its population in several rounds of mass rapid antigen testing. Unlike the gold standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, this approach does not require specialized lab analysis and can often return results in about 15 to 30 minutes, as opposed to days....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named a scientific ombudsman on Monday to fight back against accusations by Republican lawmakers of being opaque in its scientific findings and not allowing outside parties to review them.The agency tapped Francesca Grifo to be its first “scientific integrity official.“Grifo is formerly the director of the scientific integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a director of the Center for Environmental Research at Columbia University....

A research team studying brain signals in mice accidentally stumbled upon what could be an important discovery that could lead to understanding and successfully treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The finding identifies a new potential target for treating the psychological syndrome, which affects some 2.2 million Americans and is characterized by symptoms including anxiety and excessive behavior such as repeated hand washing and pulling out one’s own hair. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center made the discovery after deleting a gene in mice while studying neuronal communication in the striatum, a structure in the midbrain that plays a role in information processing, decision making and movement....

The annual spikes in sore throats, fevers, coughs and chills from seasonal influenza can change depending on the seasons preceding them, according to recent findings. Scientists looking at influenza patterns across the United States going back more than a decade found that warmer-than-average winters give way to earlier and more severe outbreaks. As the climate heats up and warmer winters become more frequent, researchers said, earlier influenza seasons may become more common....

Norman N. Holland, author of Literature and the Brain, replies: Although we know a fair amount about the brain activity linked with reading, no one has isolated the mechanisms tied specifically to suspension of disbelief. Yet we can extrapolate how the brain behaves on a more general level. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief” in 1817, but almost two centuries would lapse before we could infer how the brain might support this puzzling phenomenon....

Karen Oberhauser was scrambling up a mountain about 100 kilometers northwest of Mexico City when she began to fear for the future of the monarch butterfly. It was the winter of 1996–1997, and Oberhauser, an ecologist then working at the University of Minnesota and more accustomed to the flat, low-lying U.S. Midwest, huffed and puffed during the steep, high-altitude hike. Her head ached in the thin air. But when she stopped to look around, she saw millions of monarchs draped like living jewels on fir trees that hugged the slopes....

When water is safe, there is nothing better to drink. It’s good for teeth, skin, weight control and even the ability to think straight. But drinking water contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, heavy metals or other harmful substances can cause diarrhea, brain damage, infertility and cancer. Bottled water is no guarantee of water safety. Not only is it not always safe; bottled water is thousands of times more expensive than tap water, and the plastic packaging and transport carries heavy environmental costs....

Federal agencies are competing with one another over radio waves used to help predict changes in the climate as the sky is increasingly cluttered with noise from billions of smartphones. On one side are NOAA and NASA. They have developed space satellites that passively capture and decode the faint energy signals given off by changes in water vapor, temperatures, rain and wind that determine future weather patterns. They are supported by weather and earth scientists who say the signals are threatened by 5G, the emerging “fifth generation” of wireless communication devices that could create enough electronic noise on radio spectrums to reduce forecasting skills and distort computer models needed to predict the progress of climate change....

KISSIMMEE, Fla.—Frustrated astronomers gathered at the discipline’s largest meeting of the year on Tuesday to discuss the problem of sexual harassment in the field—an issue that came to stark prominence in October when University of California, Berkeley, planet hunter Geoff Marcy was found to have violated the university’s sexual harassment policies in interactions with several women. Scientists and leaders in the community spoke here at the 227th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) about the prevalence of harassment and discrimination and the need to support women and minorities in astronomy....