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Every year around this time, 120 million Americans roll up their sleeves to get their annual flu shots. Since 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended yearly jabs for every healthy American over the age of six months. The goal is to curb the spread of infection and minimize the risk for potentially dangerous complications such as pneumonia, particularly among the elderly and the very young. But science on the vaccine’s efficacy is scant among those two vulnerable groups....

BALTIMORE—Keyonta Parnell has had asthma most of his young life, but it wasn’t until his family moved to the 140-year-old house here on Lemmon Street two years ago that he became one of the health care system’s frequent customers. “I call 911 so much since I’ve been living here, they know my name,” said the 9-year-old’s mother, Darlene Summerville, who calls the emergency medical system her “best friend.” Summerville and her family live in the worst asthma hot spot in Baltimore: ZIP code 21223, where decrepit houses, rodents and bugs trigger the disease and where few community doctors work to prevent asthma emergencies....

BOSTON – Temperatures have plunged to record lows on the East Coast, and once again Peter Gwynne is being heralded as a journalist ahead of his time. By some. Gwynne was the science editor of Newsweek 39 years ago when he pulled together some interviews from scientists and wrote a nine-paragraph story about how the planet was getting cooler. Ever since, Gwynne’s “global cooling” story – and a similar Time Magazine piece – have been brandished gleefully by those who say it shows global warming is not happening, or at least that scientists – and often journalists – don’t know what they are talking about....

In 2013 John Tanacredi, an environmental sciences professor at Molloy College on Long Island, N.Y., received a call from a friend who worked at nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport. “You’ve got to see this,” he told Tanacredi, and sent him a photo of a cargo container filled with 600 dead horseshoe crabs. It was mid-July, and airport officials had opened the container because of a rotting stench. It turns out the crabs were sent by a Vietnamese exporter to some fishermen in the U....

GitHub—a website that has become popular with scientists collaborating on research data and software—is to be acquired by Microsoft for US$7.5 billion. In the wake of the takeover announcement on 4 June, some scientists and programmers voiced concerns about the deal on social media. They fear that the site will become less open, or less useful for sharing and tracking scientific data, after the buyout. But others are hopeful that Microsoft’s stewardship will make the platform even more valuable....

We’ve all heard that people favor their own kind and discriminate against out-groups—but that’s a simplistic view of prejudice, says Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies how we judge others. In recent years she and psychologists Susan Fiske of Princeton University and Peter Glick of Lawrence University have developed a powerful new model. All over the world, it turns out, people judge others on two main qualities: warmth (whether they are friendly and well intentioned) and competence (whether they have the ability to deliver on those intentions)....

The Obama administration wants to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. Of course, such a mission requires a lot of advance engineering, and as a first step, nasa plans to send astronauts to a small asteroid that would be brought into a stable orbit around the moon. To achieve that mechanical feat, a solar-powered robotic probe is being designed to capture a space rock and slowly push it into place....

Instead of reaching for a cup of coffee during a graveyard shift, workers might one day hold an electric-razor-sized device to their necks. After a couple of minutes they would emerge refreshed and awake from this experience, which could come to be known as a “vagus nerve break.” The device, called gammaCore, sends a series of vibrating bursts of low-voltage electricity, each lasting a millisecond, to the side of the neck....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It may not have quite have the same wow factor as a skull, but the discovery of a pinkie bone that is more than 1.8 million years old may help us solve the puzzle of stone-tool use among our early ancestors. The bone, which is the earliest modern human-like finger bone ever found, could come from a number of species that were around at the time, including Homo erectus....

Errors in how scientists account for water loss from leaves may be skewing estimates of how much energy plants make through photosynthesis, according to the latest research. This in turn could jeopardize models of how individual leaves function and even of the global climate. The errors are particularly pronounced when a plant’s water supply is limited — a condition of increasing interest as plant breeders and climate scientists grapple with the effects of global warming....

We usually think of cyborgs as part human, part machine, but roboticists don’t limit themselves that way. Researchers have developed a hybrid robot built with body parts from a novel source: sea slugs. The new robot combines a Y-shaped muscle from the mouth of a California sea hare (Aplysia californica) with a 3D-printed skeleton. Researchers surgically removed the so-called “I2” muscle from the mouths of sea slugs and glued them to flexible, 3D-printed plastic frames....

By Frank McGurty More than 40 percent of retired NFL players tested with advanced scanning technology showed signs of traumatic brain injury, a much higher rate than in the general population, according to a new study of the long-term risks of playing American football. The research, presented at an American Academy of Neurology meeting that began in Vancouver on Monday, is one of the first to provide “objective evidence” of traumatic brain injury in a large sample of National Football League veterans while they are living, said Dr....

When we walk into a voting booth and cast our vote, we like to think that we are making a considered decision, based on the issues. After all, a properly functioning democratic system, which gives its citizens the power to choose their leaders and shape critical policies, requires that voters are, for the most part, rational and that society can trust them to make sound judgments. Perhaps partly for this reason, choosing competent leaders is considered too important to be left to minors, which is why most democracies only allow their adult citizens to vote....

Relativity, a lithograph print by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, portrays a world with three orthogonal sources of gravity, in which people climb and descend stairwells that seem to go uphill both ways. The disconcerting artwork is based on Schröder’s Stairs, a two-dimensional ambiguous image named after its eponymous creator. Though Escher popularized and expanded on Schröder’s concept, he kept it on a bidimensional plane. But can Schröder’s Stairs exist in 3D space?...

Carrie asks: “Is it true that aloe vera juice helps with intestinal health? And if so, what should I look for in a quality juice?” What Is Aloe Good For? The juice of the aloe vera plant has been used throughout the ages, in particular as a skin soother. The viscous gel that oozes out of the leaves of this succulent plant can moisturize your skin and cool minor burns or irritation....

This month, my Scientific American column described the evolution of documentation for our tech products. You no longer get a printed user guide in the box; meanwhile, the computer-book industry itself has shrunken dramatically, as more and more help information has moved online. In researching these trends, I emailed Tim O’Reilly to ask him his thoughts. He’s the publisher of my own Missing Manual series of computer books—the ultimate tech-industry thought leader, founder of O’Reilly Media, and an old friend....

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions held steady for the second year in a row while the economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency. In a simple, two-column spreadsheet released yesterday, IEA showed that the world’s energy sector produced 32.14 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2015, up slightly from 32.13 metric gigatons in 2014. Meanwhile, the global economy grew more than 3 percent. Analysts credited the rise of renewables—clean energy made up more than 90 percent of new energy production in 2015—for keeping greenhouse gas emissions flat....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). For more than 20 years, Ivan Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer. He has not been alone. The quest to harness the computational might of quantum weirdness continues to occupy thousands of researchers around the world. Why hasn’t there been more to show for their work? As physicists have known since quantum computing’s beginnings, the same characteristics that make quantum computing exponentially powerful also make it devilishly difficult to control....

By 2050, the world will host nine billion people—and that’s if population growth slows in much of the developing world. Today, at least one billion people are chronically malnourished or starving. Simply to maintain that sad state of affairs would require the clearing (read: deforestation) of 900 million additional hectares of land, according to Pedro Sanchez, director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program at The Earth Institute at Columbia University....

After 340 days in orbit, astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are coming home. The mission began March 27, 2015, and will end at about 11:27 P.M. Eastern time, March 1, when the pair lands on the steppes of Kazakhstan onboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. For just under a year Kelly and Kornienko lived in the close quarters of the International Space Station with four other rotating crew members, who worked standard six-month missions....