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As sea ice in the Arctic Ocean dwindles with each successive year of rising global temperatures, it has become easier and more common for companies to venture into the region for fishing, shipping, and oil and gas exploration. Though the boats, rigs and other trappings of human activity have already quickly moved into this fragile environment, scientists are only just beginning to understand how the light, sound and chemical pollution they bring with them is impacting the Arctic’s marine ecosystem....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Much of the push toward self-driving cars has been underwritten by the hope that they will save lives by getting involved in fewer crashes with fewer injuries and deaths than human-driven cars. But so far, most comparisons between human drivers and automated vehicles have been at best uneven, and at worst, unfair. The statistics measuring how many crashes occur are hard to argue with: More than 90 percent of car crashes in the U....

A simple math problem lies at the heart of a heated debate over whether scientists should be allowed to publish provocative research into the transmissibility of H5N1 flu. Assuming the avian virus could spread easily among people, just how deadly would an H5N1 pandemic be for humans? Flu scientists tend to shy away from that question, suggesting that it is not possible to predict how lethal the virus would still be after undergoing the necessary changes to adapt to human physiology....

SAN DIEGO — The hepatitis A outbreak now roiling this well-heeled, coastal city may have had its roots in a baseball game — when the city cleaned up for the 2016 All-Star Game by pushing its homeless out of the touristy areas downtown and into increasingly congested encampments and narrow freeway onramps just east of downtown. The lines of tents stretched for blocks. At the same time, the city was locking and removing bathrooms to help control the rampant drug and prostitution trade they’d spawned....

WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I study whether birth order affects personality, I usually get blank looks. It sounds like studying whether the sky is blue. Isn’t it common sense? Popular books invoke birth order for self-discovery, relationship tips, business advice and parenting guidance in titles such as The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are (Revell, 2009). Newspapers and morning news shows debate the importance of the latest findings (“Latter-born children engage in more risky behavior; what should parents do?...

Sometimes a whole bunch of different sky events happen over a very short period, giving skywatchers a chance to witness many unusual events in a few days. The next week or two is a case in point, with Uranus, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars are making notable appearances in the night sky. First, the planet Uranus is just past opposition, so it is visible all night long. It’s also in a location where you can spot its dim glow rather easily....

—Charles Q. Choi TURNING POLLUTION INTO DVDs New procedures could turn carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants and other sources into polycarbonate, a type of plastic derived from petroleum and used to make DVDs and eyeglass lenses. Strategies that rely on catalysts have used CO2 to make polymer precursors to polycarbonate. Although the chemical reactions produce only water as a waste product, they require high temperatures and pressure. Hence, the processes would only pay off environmentally if clean-energy sources, such as solar or wind power, were used to fuel them....

Though it’s unlikely to cause a hubbub remotely equivalent to the stir of Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the first worldwide study of sexual behavior appears online this week in the British medical journal The Lancet. Rather than exposing societal taboos occurring everywhere, the report sheds light on the effect of global efforts to curb risky practices. The team of researchers, led by Kaye Wellings, a professor of sexual health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, analyzed nearly 200 studies on demographic sexual behavior in 59 countries published between 1996 and 2006 to obtain their results on the state of international sexual health....

The intense rainstorms sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually unabated for 43 days. The deluges quickly transformed rivers running down from the Sierra Nevada mountains along the state’s eastern border into raging torrents that swept away entire communities and mining settlements. The rivers and rains poured into the state’s vast Central Valley, turning it into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide....

A research group at the University of Illinois has developed technology that may have lasting implications for electric vehicles (EVs) and other electronics. The group, led by Paul Braun, a professor of material sciences and engineering, has come up with technology that creates a much more rapid charging time for lithium-ion batteries, which power electronics like cellphones, laptops and defibrillators. Lithium-ion batteries also power EVs, which can take all night to charge at home and up to an hour to charge at EV stations....

From Nature magazine Women’s gut microbe populations change as pregnancy advances, becoming more like those of people who might develop diabetes. These changes, which do not seem to damage maternal health, correspond with increases in blood glucose and fat deposition thought to help a mother nourish her child. Although scientists have profiled microbial communities around the world and throughout the human body, this is the first time they have tracked the gut microbiome during pregnancy, says Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the work1....

Scientists have detected molecules of oxygen in the hazy halo of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko—an unexpected discovery that may challenge theories about the formation of the Solar System. The detection, made by an instrument on board the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, was reported today ( October 28) in Nature. “As soon as we got close enough to the comet, we actually found it right away,” says André Bieler, a physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and lead author of the paper....

A small air leak was detected on the International Space Station Wednesday night (Aug. 29) but does not pose an immediate danger to the astronauts currently living aboard the orbiting laboratory. Flight controllers on Earth began to notice signs of a slight pressure drop in the orbiting laboratory around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT), while the six crewmembers of Expedition 56 were sleeping, NASA officials said in a statement today (Aug....

A pioneering research institute that introduced the computer world to the mouse, hypertext and networks is now setting its sights a bit lower. A team of engineers at SRI International, a nonprofit contract research and development lab in Menlo Park, Calif., has harnessed simple, magnetically levitated microbots to build structures and perform other sophisticated tasks at small size scales. Many such floating microbots could be made to work in concert, something like mechanical ant colonies, to construct objects and carry out many other useful applications, says Ron Pelrine, chief scientist at SRI’s Robotics, Engineering Research and Development Division....

Physicists are making the universe more complicated than it needs to be, says eminent theorist Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario. Scientists are faced with huge mysteries, such as the makeup of the invisible dark matter that seems to populate space and the explanation behind the dark energy that could be accelerating the expansion of the cosmos. To answer these questions, physicists have come up with increasingly convoluted theories over the past few decades, including myriad versions of string theory and supersymmetry....

Ecologists have long predicted that climate change will send plants and animals uphill and towards the poles in search of familiar temperatures. Such movements have increasingly been documented around the world. But a study now shows that changing rainfall patterns may be driving some tree species in the eastern United States west, not north. Songlin Fei, a forest ecologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues tracked the shifting distributions of 86 types of trees using data collected by the US Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program during two periods: from 1980 to 1995 and between 2013 and 2015 for all states....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineAn epic victory over daunting challenges, or a costly project that should never have flown? After nearly half a century of work and US$750 million spent, Gravity Probe B, one of NASA’s longest-running mission programs, has finally achieved some scientific closure. But it has yet to quiet its critics.On 4 May, researchers released the results of a tortuous five-year data analysis that relied on the largesse of a Saudi funding agency to complete....

Whether it’s natural gas drilling unleashing a mud volcano that has engulfed 12 Indonesian villages or the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 blanketing the world in enough particles to block out the sunshine and lower temperatures by more than a 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), volcanoes are among Earth’s most destructive natural phenomena. These openings, or vents, in Earth’s crust allow hot ash, steam or even magma to erupt. Lava flows can then build new land in the ocean—as in the case of Hawaii—or entomb whole cities, as in the case of Pompeii in A....

There’s nothing like a nasty cold to make you appreciate good health. The same goes for the state of the universe: Tweaking just one of the fundamental physical laws or constants, normally perfectly “fine-tuned” at the right values to allow stars, planets, atoms and life as we know it to flourish, could turn things very different — quite unpleasantly so. Imagining such a “bizarro” universe may heighten your appreciation for the norm....

In 2010 I worked on a Dateline NBC television special replicating classic psychology experiments, one of which was Stanley Milgram’s famous shock experiments from the 1960s. We followed Milgram’s protocols precisely: subjects read a list of paired words to a “learner” (an actor named Tyler), then presented the first word of each pair again. Each time Tyler gave an incorrect matched word, our subjects were instructed by an authority figure (an actor named Jeremy) to deliver an electric shock from a box with toggle switches that ranged in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts (no shocks were actually delivered)....