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Tired of your laptop’s battery dying during presentations or bursting into flames? Take heart: scientists are perfecting a new method for transmitting electrical energy from a base station using a technique that resembles a wireless Internet connection. Researchers say that a specially designed device should be able to draw power from a strong magnetic field permeating a room. The effect, which has not yet been demonstrated, would take advantage of the stationary magnetic field that surrounds a charged loop of metal....

Michelle Boyer got an extra six years of life. Karen Koehler had six nearly symptom-free years, thinking she had beaten her diagnosis. And Doug Olson has officially been declared “cured” more than a decade after he thought he was out of options. These people are three of thousands who, in the past 10 years, have experienced both the promise and the challenges of an approach to treating cancer by manipulating the immune system....

In the film, a team of experts is assembled to investigate, and among the chosen individuals is a linguist, played by actress Amy Adams. Though the story is rooted in science fiction, it does tackle a very real challenge: How do you communicate with someone—or how do you learn that individual’s language—when you have no intermediary language in common? The film is based on “Story of Your Life,” a short story by Ted Chiang....

By Alan Devall SANTA BARBARA, May 21 (Reuters) - Cleanup teams labored on Thursday for a third day to remove patches of crude petroleum that stained a California beach and fouled offshore waters from a pipeline rupture that may rank as the biggest oil spill to hit the Santa Barbara coastline in more than four decades. Working around the clock, about 300 people on the beach were scooping up globs of oil from the sand and raking tar balls....

In the past two decades, the roster of known planets in the galaxy has mushroomed. Astronomers have added to the handful in our own solar system roughly 450 so-called exoplanets orbiting other stars. Most of those planets are more massive than Saturn, which makes them unpromising from a habitability standpoint—such giants tend to be gaseous bodies without a surface to walk on. But the giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus—all have moons, some with planetlike features such as atmospheres, magnetic fields or active volcanoes....

This is probably going to come as a shock, which may strike you as kind of funny in a moment, but “soup had its greatest moment in 1953.” That claim, outrageous to anyone who has recently enjoyed a really great bowl of bean-with-bacon, comes from British science journalist Adam Rutherford in his new book Creation: How Science Is Reinventing Life Itself. A closer read, however, reveals that Rutherford is referring to the so-called prebiotic soup, a phrase coined by another eminent Englishman, evolutionary biologist J....

Five decades after it was revealed as a forgery, the Piltdown man still haunts paleoanthropology. Now, thanks to the disgraced stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang, cell biology has a high-profile scandal of its own to live down. Few recent papers in biology have soared as high in acclaim as Hwang’s 2004 and 2005 announcements of cloning human embryonic stem cells–or plummeted as fast into infamy with the discovery that they were rank fakes [see “Down in Flames,” by Sara Beardsley, News Scan, on page 20]....

Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps edited by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History University of Chicago Press, 2020 ($65) Strata are the ribboned horizontal layers of minerals and sediment that underlie the topography of all the landmasses on the earth and have been revealed by erosion over hundreds of millions of years. Although the practice of mapping geologic layers had begun in the mid-17th century, the science of how strata formed was still nascent....

In 2014, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association studied what some of its members saw as a touchy subject: local electricity powered by the sun. NRECA, based in Arlington, Va., is the trade association for 900 local rural electric co-ops that came to life in 1942, when its members were dependent on coal. Many derived 70 percent or more of their power from coal, while just 1 percent of co-ops had gone beyond experimenting with solar as late as 2013, according to a survey at the time....

A drought worsened by climate change has caused hydropower supplies in California to reach their second-lowest level since 2001, leading electricity prices in the state to soar 150% in three months’ time. Yet some of the biggest beneficiaries of the price surge, according to a credit ratings agency report yesterday, are fossil fuel-fired power producers whose emissions only exacerbate global warming. California’s predicament — in which emissions-free hydropower is replaced by planet-warming power from natural gas plants — underscores the need to rapidly decarbonize the electric grid, according to sustainability experts....

PARIS (Reuters) - India reported two outbreaks of a highly contagious bird flu virus in the southern state of Kerala, the first cases of the disease in the country since February this year, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said on Tuesday. The virus killed about 15,000 infected ducks in Kottayam and another 500 in nearby Alappuzha, the Paris-based OIE reported on its website, citing data submitted by the Indian ministry of agriculture....

For the second time ever, humanity has brought asteroid samples down to Earth. A small capsule bearing pristine pieces of the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu touched down early this afternoon (Dec. 5) within the remote and rugged Woomera Prohibited Area, about 310 miles (500 kilometers) northwest of the South Australian capital of Adelaide. The samples were snagged millions of miles from Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, which studied the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) Ryugu up close from June 2018 to November 2019....

Oceanographers can learn a lot about marine food webs and chemical vents at the bottom of the ocean by analyzing the larvae of tiny plankton that live along the seafloor. But moving a robot vehicle to precise spots along the pitch-black, irregular surface is difficult. So is sifting through large volumes of water to snag the fragile critters, barely visible in size, without tearing them apart. In July the Sentry autonomous underwater vehicle took a new sampler, called SyPRID, to six methane seeps in the Atlantic Ocean between North Carolina and Nantucket, in some cases more than 2,000 meters down....

Finding traces of pollution in a supposedly pristine mountain brook is sadly no longer surprising. But when the contaminants are genes for antibiotic resistance, the implications should still raise concern. With resistance to antibiotics growing at an alarming pace among pathogenic bacteria, humans must become more aggressive. In keeping with the “ounce of prevention” principle, early intervention in the processes that foster resistance would be a very good start. A news story beginning on page 22 describes work by Colorado scientists who make a case for monitoring and mitigating the dangerous DNA as one would any other environmental pollutant....

One day as a child Billy Smith (not his real name), a resident of Newfoundland, could not take off his shoe. No amount of twisting or tugging would loosen its grip on his foot. The reason for his struggle eventually surfaced: a nail had pierced the sole and entered Smith’s flesh, tightly binding the two. Removing the nail freed the foot, but solving that problem only underscored a bigger one: Smith had not noticed....

After a nice long bout of aerobic exercise, some people experience what’s known as a “runner’s high”: a feeling of euphoria coupled with reduced anxiety and a lessened ability to feel pain. For decades, scientists have associated this phenomenon with an increased level in the blood of β-endorphins, opioid peptides thought to elevate mood. Now, German researchers have shown the brain’s endocannabinoid system—the same one affected by marijuana’s Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—may also play a role in producing runner’s high, at least in mice (Proc....

A Massachusetts company announced today that it has grown large numbers of a rare type of human embryonic stem cell that can transform into blood and blood vessels. When injected into mice, the cells congregated around damaged blood vessels in the eye, heart and limbs, where they seemed to help rebuild injured tissue, according to a report published online today. The company says it plans to request approval by the end of next year to conduct human trials of the cells, called hemangioblasts....

Explaining the Aperture Illusion Looking through a peephole can change the direction an object appears to move—a tilted rod going left to right seems to move downward at an angle when viewed through a hole (see video clip below). Dale Purves and his colleagues at Duke University think they know why. They asked volunteers to describe how they perceived the motion of moving lines seen through apertures. They also developed computer simulations of a virtual rod moving in three-dimensional space in which information regarding its direction was stripped out (via projection onto a two-dimensional surface)....

Web-based therapy for insomnia is an effective option that could reach “previously unimaginable numbers of people,” researchers suggest. Although cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is the first-line treatment for adults with chronic insomnia, there aren’t enough trained clinicians to deliver the treatment, according to Dr. Lee Ritterband of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville and colleagues. To investigate whether web-based CBT-I is effective over the long term and might enable more people to benefit, the team randomly assigned 303 adults with chronic insomnia to a six-week automated, interactive and tailored web-based program (Sleep Healthy Using the Internet, or SHUTi, at www....

In the Tripa forest in Indonesia’s Aceh province, the rare Sumatran orangutans were dying. Flames devoured the trees, smoke filled the air and the red apes had nowhere to go. The fires had been set intentionally, to clear the land for planting oil palms—trees whose fruit yields palm oil, a widely used component of biofuels, cosmetics and food. Although the land was supposed to be protected, the Aceh governor issued a permit in August 2011 for Indonesian palm oil firm PT Kallista Alam to develop some 1,600 hectares in Tripa....