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A leaked memo has revealed that the Supreme Court plans to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. If this does occur, so-called trigger laws already passed in 13 states—along with other laws on the way—would immediately prohibit abortions in a large portion of the country. And one of the ways courts could find people to prosecute is to use the data that our phones produce every day. A smartphone can be a massive storehouse of personal information....

A total of 54 million people worldwide faced weather-related disasters this year while dealing with effects of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released yesterday by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The report by one of the world’s largest relief organizations highlights the “double threat” of climate change and the pandemic, particularly on impoverished nations such as Bangladesh and India. “Our analysis points to the strong overlaps between various risks the world is facing,” the federation wrote in its 21-page report....

For years biologists were so focused on the internal workings of cells that they pretty much ignored the “glue” that holds those cells together in a body, human or otherwise. And yet once researchers started looking deeper into the stuff between cells, known as the extracellular matrix, they began to realize just how dynamic the whole arrangement is. Not only does the overlooked matrix provide the biological scaffolding necessary to keep animal tissues and organs from dissolving into a gooey mess, but it also releases molecular signals that, among other things, help the body heal itself....

From their giant fruits to compact plant size, today’s tomatoes have been sculpted by thousands of years of breeding. But mutations linked to prized traits—including one that made them easier to harvest—yield an undesirable plant when combined, geneticists have found. It is a rare example of a gene harnessed during domestication that later hampered crop improvement efforts, says geneticist Zachary Lippman of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. After identifying the mutations, he and his colleagues used CRISPR gene editing to engineer more productive plants—a strategy that plant breeders are eager to adopt....

Fully autonomous weapons systems (AWSs) may be operating in war theaters even as you read this article, however. Turkey has announced plans to deploy a fleet of autonomous Kargu quadcopters against Syrian forces in early 2020, and Russia is also developing aerial swarms for that region. Once launched, an AWS finds, tracks, selects and attacks targets with violent force, all without human supervision. Autonomous weapons are not self-aware, humanoid “Terminator” robots conspiring to take over; they are computer-controlled tanks, planes, ships and submarines....

CHD8, a gene that regulates the structure of DNA, is the closest thing so far to an ‘autism gene,’ suggests a study published today in Cell. People with mutations in this gene all have the same cluster of symptoms, including a large head, constipation and characteristic facial features; nearly all also have autism. Autism is notoriously heterogeneous, perhaps involving mutations in any of hundreds of genes. Typically, researchers begin by studying people with similar symptoms and working backward to identify what causes those symptoms....

People have worried about the effects of fungi and other microorganisms on cultural objects almost as long as there have been cultural objects to worry about. In fact, the entire science of microbiology began with a fungus damaging a cultural object. In his 1665 book Micrographia the British polymath Robert Hooke included his sketch of what looked like a flower garden on spindly stalks. It was the first known depiction of a microbe, showing the reproductive structures of a fungus from “a small spot of a hairy mould” found on the leather cover of a book....

When 25-year-old Caitlin Seida dressed up as Lara Croft from the movie Tomb Raider one Halloween, she posted a picture of herself enjoying the night’s festivities on Facebook. At most, she figured a few friends might see the photograph and comment. The picture remained in Seida’s social circle for more than three years. Then one day in 2013 a friend sent Seida a link with a cryptic note: “You’re Internet famous....

Days after police killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, last May, physicist Philip Phillips was in his garden in Champaign, Illinois, incensed and racking his brain over how his scientific community could respond. Scientific institutions had not done enough to acknowledge previous deaths of Black people in police encounters, and this time should be different, he thought. “The outrage should have been there a long time ago,” he says. The idea that dawned on him would eventually steer a major physics society to take a stand against police brutality....

The clinical trial for a herpes vaccine flouted just about every norm in the book: American patients were flown in to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts for experimental injections. Local authorities didn’t give permission. Nor did the Food and Drug Administration. Nor did a safety panel. That’s why the trial — run by a startup that has since received funding from billionaire investor Peter Thiel — prompted widespread alarm and censure when it was reported last week by Kaiser Health News....

One dedicated deep-sea octopus is now the world record holder for the most outlandishly long egg development. A female Graneledone boreopacifica off the California coast was observed guarding her eggs continuously for nearly four and a half years. This eclipses the previous record holder for prenatal guardianship, the alpine salamander, which keeps its offspring internally for up to four years. Most animals that lay eggs watch them for a much shorter period of time....

“My heart starts to race, I can’t breathe, I get all sweaty, and I feel very scared - like I am about to die.” This is how one of my patients recently described her panic attacks. Her diagnosis is panic disorder. The cause of this condition is still not understood, but we have long known that the vulnerability to panic disorder is strongly genetic. Now, a recent study from the laboratory of John Wemmie at the University of Iowa may have revealed an important new clue to the underlying cause of recurring panic attacks: It may, in effect, be a problem of pH – of acidity at key junctures in the brain....

A University of Texas at Austin law student has demonstrated to the world that any ambitious tinkerer can make a handgun almost entirely out of 3-D printed parts. Cody Wilson’s revelation is not likely to lead to an arsenal of plastic zip guns anytime soon, but it does raise a number of hairy questions about a technology that, until now, has been highly touted as central to the future of manufacturing in the U....

A severely brain-injured man showed marked improvements after treatment with deep brain stimulation, a technique in which surgically implanted electrodes deliver electrical impulses to the brain. For six years the patient, who sustained head trauma during a violent assault, had been in a minimally conscious state—he could not communicate verbally, and he only sporadically seemed to be aware of himself and his surroundings. After the procedure, the 38-year-old man’s attention, verbal and motor skills improved during intervals of brain stimulation, report researchers led by Nicholas D....

As COVID-19 death tolls mount rapidly, palliative care experts have urged Americans to have difficult conversations with loved ones about our end-of-life wishes. With death all around us, they have argued, it is now more urgent than ever that we plan for our deaths. But in addition to having “the conversation” about end-of-life wishes, we should also grapple with deeper societal questions about who gets the privilege to plan. It may sound perverse to suggest that a cancer diagnosis could be a fortunate event, but cancer compels people to anticipate death in a way that many never will....

More than million years ago, around the same time some primates on Earth began to master fire, a comet drifting at the outer edge of our solar system felt the gentle gravitational tug of a dwarf planet or a passing star and began to fall toward the sun. It has been falling ever since, falling as the primates developed language, domesticated plants, built cities and launched rockets and robots into outer space....

Tourism authorities call Mexico Beach, Fla., “the Unforgettable Coast.” That’s even more true now after haunting images show the seaside town turned to splinters by Hurricane Michael. From his home nearly 600 miles away in North Miami Beach, architect and engineering consultant Ricardo Alvarez spent much of last Thursday and Friday comparing storm photos and Google satellite images of the destroyed town of 1,200 residents, which some have speculated will never be rebuilt....

On Valentine’s Day, everywhere you look there are heart-shaped balloons, pink greeting cards and candy boxes filled with chocolate. But what is true love? Does it exist? Or is it simply a cognitive illusion, a trick of the mind? Contrary to the anatomy referenced in all our favorite love songs, love (as with every other emotion we feel) is not rooted in the heart but in the brain. (Unfortunately, Hallmark has no plans to mass-produce arrow-pierced chocolate brains in the near future....

A new study by researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and the Shanghai Institute of Brain Functional Genomics shows that an enzyme called alpha calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (αCaMKII) [this is a type of CaM Kinase] is essential for the formation and retrieval of memories. By briefly altering levels of αCaMKII activity at different stages of the memory process, they were able to prevent the transfer of new memories from short-term to long-term storage and to selectively erase specific memories as they were being recalled....

The sun’s pockmarked surface is always shifting. Sunspots and solar flares rise and fall every 11 years, a cycle associated with regular reversal of the star’s magnetic field. Huge quantities of plasma—known as coronal mass ejections—fly into space, which can disrupt satellites and other electronic signals if they reach Earth. More solar activity during the cycle also amplifies auroras and warms Earth’s temperatures slightly. Yet careful study has shown that longer periodicities exist, too....