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For 20 years neurologists have divided the neurological disorder multiple sclerosis (MS) into four distinct categories—subtypes that are supposed, in part, to help patients get the right treatments. But a new theory erases the distinctions between these groups and suggests that MS is a single disease after all. The idea was developed by Stephen Krieger, a neurologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and presented in late April at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting in Washington, D....

Thirty-one of the largest U.S. science societies—collectively representing millions of scientists—sent a letter to Congress this week urging lawmakers to recognize anthropogenic climate change and take decisive action to combat it and its effects. “The letter continues the decades-long efforts of the scientific community to persuade Congress to act on the climate crisis,” says Sarah Green, a chemistry professor at Michigan Technological University who studies climate change and who is affiliated with of several of the societies that signed the letter....

Communities of color will have fewer ways to protect themselves from pollution and climate change under President Trump’s decision to curtail environmental reviews for infrastructure projects. Citing an economic emergency associated with the coronavirus, Trump yesterday signed an executive order waiving reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act. The law is often used by the public to shape federal decisions related to infrastructure; it requires agencies to analyze alternatives that could minimize harm to the environment and allows the public to comment....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, March 16 (Reuters) - For more than half a century, scientists have scratched their heads over the nature of an outlandishly bizarre creature dubbed the Tully Monster that flourished about 307 million years ago in a coastal estuary in what is now northeastern Illinois. But researchers on Wednesday announced they have finally solved the mystery. They analyzed numerous fossils of the creature, named Tullimonstrum gregarium, and determined it was not a segmented worm or a free-swimming slug, as once hypothesized, but rather a type of jawless fish called a lamprey....

By Ivan Semeniuk of Nature magazineThe most fractious and combative US Congress in recent memory is getting on with approving a 2012 budget–although perhaps only so that it can move more swiftly to the next battlefield. On November 17, legislators passed a spending bill that includes allocations for several key science-related agencies. The bill has since been signed off by President Barack Obama.The budget was a relief for researchers and their advocates, who had feared deeper cuts to science....

A rise in 3D printing technology won’t mean a “Star Trek” replicator in every home to make whatever Americans desire. But the White House has bet big on the idea that 3D printing can revolutionize U.S. manufacturing from within the heart of the Midwest’s “Rust Belt” once known for its shuttered steel mills. President Barack Obama’s proposed $1 billion bet on a manufacturing innovation network hinges upon places such as Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where the whirring sounds of 3D printers and laser cutters filled the engineering department’s invention center on a late Friday afternoon....

Refrigerators are a necessary aspect of modern life, but most of them rely on a cooling mechanism called vapor compression—and the vapors involved tend to be potent greenhouse gases that can contribute to global warming when they escape into the atmosphere. The refrigeration industry has explored ways to improve its environmental impact, such as testing greener gases, but there has been no major shift toward radically new cooling systems. Some scientists, however, are thinking outside the icebox....

The past 18 months were very good ones for hypnotists, yoga teachers and acupuncturists. For many chronic pain sufferers, promises of relief from various forms of alternative medicine seemed like rational options amid the unending stream of negative reports about Vioxx, Celebrex, Aleve and Rush Limbaugh’s addiction to painkillers. Not all was lost for patients who prefer medicine to meditation. With little fanfare, the Food and Drug Administration approved in late December two new drugs intended to treat a form of pain that often proves resistant to anti-inflammatories and opiates–the two predominant classes of pharmaceuticals for analgesia....

We now know of thousands of planets orbiting other stars. In all likelihood, hundreds of billions more call the Milky Way home. Many of the known “exoplanets” are large, gaseous worlds like Jupiter or Neptune—hostile places for life. But like those giants of our solar system, distant exoplanets may also have large moons. And if they do, moons—not planets—may be the most common home for life in the universe. In recent years one frontier of the search for moons of exoplanets—exomoons—has been in the basement of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, inside a gloomy room lined with computers in wire-mesh cages....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the deal nowadays with aerosol spray cans? I thought that the ozone-depleting chemicals used in them were eliminated back in the 1970s. Is this true? If so, what is now used as a propellant? Are aerosols still bad for the ozone layer? – Sheila, Abilene, TX The aerosol spray can has a storied history in the United States. First invented in the 1920s by U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists to pressurize insect spray, American soldiers eventually used the technology to help ward off Malaria in the South Pacific during World War II....

MAY 10 What does your brain do when you memorize something? Find out at the monthly Brains and Behavior Distinguished Lecture Series hosted by Georgia State University, when biologist Mary Kennedy discusses the complex brain pathways that allow us to create memories. In her lab at the California Institute of Technology, Kennedy has identified and sequenced the structure of individual proteins critical for this pathway, and she is modeling how these molecules help form memories....

On December 18, 2020, Ian Sample of the Guardian published a report about a tantalizing radio signal at 982.002MHz that was detected within the Breakthrough Listen project by the Parkes telescope in Australia from the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri. This infrared star hosts an Earth-size planet, Proxima b, in its habitable zone, where liquid water could allow the chemistry of life on the planet’s surface. There was no scientific paper accompanying the report, and therefore it’s too early to draw any inferences....

A lot of what we think of as thinking happens at the brain’s outer limits. A blanket of cells, marked with deep creases, swaddles the core of the brain in every animal with a spine. This blanket integrates all kinds of information, makes decisions, interprets emotions, solves problems and creates complex behavior. It is called the cerebral cortex, and neurons in it—humans have about 16 billion—act a bit like tiny information processors to form thoughts....

Black Sci-Fi Short Stories edited by Tia Ross Flame Tree Gothic series. Flame Tree, 2021 ($30) In a 1970s essay with the provocative title of “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction,” the late African-American writer Charles R. Saunders reflected bitterly on the prevalence of anti-Blackness in the genre. Although white American science-fiction writers “were capable of stretching their imaginations to the point of conceptualizing aliens with sympathetic qualities,” he mused, “a black man or woman in a spacesuit was an image beyond the limits of [their] imaginations…....

Given record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes and other weather disasters that cost lives and billions of dollars amid a pandemic that brought death to every corner of the country, the events of 2020 stretched U.S. emergency management institutions. Local governments have been unable to cope with the disasters, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been strained. This litany of destruction has brought into stark relief problems of capacity and inequity—people of color and low-income communities have been hit disproportionately hard—that have been festering for decades in the nation’s approach to disaster preparedness....

The hunt for habitable planets beyond the Solar System just became more difficult. A study posted today on the arXiv server suggests that the same factors that make planets near M-dwarf stars easy to probe for potential life also diminish the chances that life could actually exist on those planets. Researchers have often cited the environs of M-dwarfs, a type of red dwarf star, as a relatively easy place to look for planets that might be habitable....

Five thousand known worlds. That is the next, most ballyhooed milestone in the ongoing hunt for exoplanets, the confirmed total of which presently tallies just a few hundred shy in our catalogues. More remarkable than these sheer numbers, however, is the diversity they reveal. A fraction of the worlds overflowing astronomers’ coffers resemble those orbiting our own sun, but most are far more alien: scorched gas giants that circle their star every few days, Neptune-sized puffballs with the density of cotton candy, and hordes of small planets packed like sardines around tiny, cool stars....

Dear EarthTalk: I run a sorting machine at the post office, and am worried about all the paper dust swirling around the building. I asked both management and our union if this was a health or safety problem and both said no, but I’m not sure they really know. Can you set the record straight? – J.G. Eddins, Phoenix, AZ One of the drawbacks to the increasing mechanization of postal facilities is the increase in paper dust....

Pluto’s famous heart-shaped feature is on the road to getting an official name, nearly two years after its discovery. “Tombaugh Regio” — nicknamed after the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh — is among dozens of informal names that will likely be submitted to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) under new naming themes for the dwarf planet and its moons. Pluto and its moons Charon, Nix, Styx, Kerberos and Hydra got a close-up from the New Horizons spacecraft flyby in 2015, revealing many surprises, such as mountain ranges on Pluto....

Cosmologists have found signs that a second type of dark energy — the ubiquitous but enigmatic substance that is pushing the current Universe’s expansion to accelerate — might have existed in the first 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Two separate studies — both posted on the arXiv preprint server in the past week — have detected a tentative first trace of this ‘early dark energy’ in data collected between 2013 and 2016 by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile....