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The movie Fantastic Voyage, the story of a miniaturized team of doctors traveling through blood vessels to make lifesaving repairs in a patient’s brain, was pure science fiction when it came out in 1966. By the time Hollywood remade the film in 1987 as Innerspace, a comedy, real-world engineers had already begun building prototypes of pill-size robots that could voyage through a patient’s gastrointestinal tract on a doctor’s behalf. Patients began swallowing the first commercially built pill cameras in 2000, and since then doctors have used the capsules to get unprecedented views of places, such as the inner folds of the small intestine, that are otherwise difficult to reach without surgery....

Scientists have known about the stage of sleep called rapid eye movement, or REM—which is associated with dreaming as well as improved learning and memory—since the 1950s. Many of its mechanisms remain mysterious, however. Now a study has identified two genes that play a key role in REM. Mice that lack the genes Chrm1 and Chrm3 sleep fewer hours than typical mice and have almost undetectable REM levels, the researchers find....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 captured what has become one of the most iconic images of the Earth: the Blue Marble. Biochemist Gregory Petsko described the image as “perfectly representing the human condition of living on an island in the universe.” Many researchers now credit the image as marking the beginning of environmental activism in the U....

Squid can save energy by flying rather than swimming, according to calculations based on high-speed photography. Squid of many species have been seen to ‘fly’ using the same jet-propulsion mechanisms that they use to swim: squirting water out of their mantles so that they rocket out of the sea and glide through the air. Until now, most researchers have thought that such flight was a way to avoid predators1, but Ronald O’Dor, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, has calculated that propelling themselves through the air may actually be an efficient way for squid to travel long distances....

At Ernest Hemingway’s old home in Key West, Fla., you’ll find bromeliads and date palms, a hand-crafted wooden yacht and an in-ground pool—the only one within 100 miles at the time of its construction. You’ll also find roughly 50 cats, most of which have six toes on their front feet instead of five. As legend has it, after a booze-soaked evening at a local bar, Hemingway was given their six-toed ancestor, “Snow White,” by a waylaid ship captain....

To slow down the rapid spread of tick-borne illnesses, the ideal public health strategy would be to predict where the pests are likely to be concentrated—and immediately getting this information to medical professionals and the public. That’s why researchers are trying to develop an accurate way of forecasting where dangerous ticks might be. Such a program could ideally be used like a weather map to anticipate danger areas. When it comes to tick-borne illness, forewarned is forearmed....

I love to be outdoors during solar eclipses, enjoying the universe appearing to darken around me while my research observations get under way. Long ago I used to suggest that people make a pinhole projector or even use cheese graters from their kitchens to watch these events. But in recent years the availability of partial-eclipse filters for only a dollar or so has made such advice obsolete. Now anyone can glance up at the sun through such a filter starting more than an hour prior to totality and see an apparent bite being taken out of the solar disk....

DAY IN, DAY OUT, people believe they can win their headlong race against time by maintaining an excessively hectic pace. As soon as they wake each morning, the same questions plague their minds: “What do I have to accomplish today? How do I get it all done as quickly as possible?” The term “relaxation” is practically a dirty word. At some point, such driven people are likely to hit the wall....

World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has now officially declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). The decision comes after the global health body’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on the disease failed to reach a consensus on the declaration at the end of its second meeting in less than a month. Between the meetings, the number of confirmed cases worldwide rose from 3,040 across 47 countries to more than 16,000 in 75 countries and territories, and the number of deaths rose from one to five, according to the WHO....

The National Rifle Association asserts firearms are safe in the hands of people who know how to use them. It promotes firearm-training courses that it says are taken by one million Americans each year. And opponents of new gun regulation contend injuries occur only among inexperienced users. But where is the evidence? Funding on the public-health impact of guns is scarce, in part because of a long-standing congressional provision that prohibits the U....

Padme wrote this week to tell me about a new diet she’s been on and is very excited about. According to the creator, this eight-week meal plan will shrink your waist, melt your fat, and give you the body of your dreams. All the recipes, which Padme reports are both delicious and filling, incorporate lots of spices like cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cayenne, and black pepper. The idea is that all these spices speed weight loss by flushing impurities from your body and super-charging your metabolism....

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt—Countries meeting in Egypt clinched a deal early Sunday that could send billions of dollars from wealthy countries to help developing nations treat the symptoms of climate change. But the agreement’s final text also offered its tacit blessing to natural gas, a fossil fuel that’s worsening the underlying disease. That surprise last-minute addition dulled the sense of triumph for activists who had hailed the major achievement of this two-week U....

For the first time, researchers have found evidence of a split in the migration pattern of a species of bird, a behavior that some theorize could lead to a new species. Bands of the European blackcap, which typically breed in Austria and Germany, have begun flying to two separate locations for the winter: one group to Portugal, Spain and North Africa, the other to Britain and Ireland. Scientists studying the two groups found that the birds that wintered together in the north tended to mate with each other once they arrived back in Austria and Germany....

By Jonathan Stempel and Braden Reddall(Reuters) - Halliburton Co has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Thursday.The government said Halliburton’s guilty plea is the third by a company over the spill and requires the world’s second-largest oilfield services company to pay a maximum $200,000 statutory fine.Halliburton also agreed to three years of probation and to continue cooperating with the criminal probe into the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig....

The world is at war. Some might quibble with the characterization of malicious hacking as warfare, preferring phrases such as “cyberespionage” or “cyberconflict.” But when governments, industry and individuals are under constant attack by antagonists from all corners of the globe—marauders who use the Internet to steal vital information, sabotage critical operations and recruit terrorists—this means war. It is high time for an internationally coordinated response. The first skirmish arguably took place in 2007, when online attacks against the Baltic state of Estonia took down critical government, banking and media Web sites....

The scientific consensus that human actions first began to have a warming effect on the earth’s climate within the past century has become part of the public perception as well. With the advent of coal-burning factories and power plants, industrial societies began releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the air. Later, motor vehicles added to such emissions. In this scenario, those of us who have lived during the industrial era are responsible not only for the gas buildup in the atmosphere but also for at least part of the accompanying global warming trend....

Using mobile phones to navigate has become second nature. Whether you’re heading to a new park, meeting friends at a restaurant, or going to run errands, you just tap the location on your phone and go. Prior to GPS, exploring and wayfinding in new places required preparation. We had to think, consult paper maps, and plan and memorize parts of our route. But in today’s technological world, there is no need to think....

It’s hard to imagine a world without antibiotics, but because of widespread overuse of the drugs, that’s where we’re headed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in the U.S. alone, more than 23,000 people now die every year from infections that antibiotics can no longer cure. A study commissioned by the U.K. government estimated that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cause 10 million deaths worldwide annually. Scientists have struggled to develop new drugs that can kill these superbugs....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineWoolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances. This conclusion–the result of a huge analysis of fossils, climate records and DNA–hints that it could be more difficult than thought to identify the species at greatest risk of disappearing today.Researchers who studied the fate of six species of ‘megafauna’ over the past 50,000 years found that climate change and habitat loss were involved in many of the extinctions, with humans playing a part in some cases but not others....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is making major changes to the way in which it evaluates chemicals for environmental and public-health effects. The latest push includes changes to chemical-safety guidelines that place greater weight on industry-sponsored research, among other things, and is a part of efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to reshape how the agency uses science to make decisions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its chemical-assessment guidance in May, and is soliciting public comments until 16 August....