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During next month’s Great American Total Solar Eclipse, you may be tempted to take in the historic event by gazing directly at the sun, but you absolutely should not do this without the proper eye protection, experts say. That’s because, even though the sun is some 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, it can still cause serious, and sometimes irreversible, eye damage. “Even very short direct observation of the sun has the potential to cause damage,” said Dr....

Although neurologist Amie Hsia was hundreds of miles away from the emergency room team caring for her ailing aunt last February, she knew her symptoms and imaging pointed to a severe stroke. Hsia’s aunt needed treatment fast with a clot-busting medicine and a procedure known as an endovascular thrombectomy, which removes the clot and restores blood flow to oxygen-starved patches of the brain. The hospital caring for her wasn’t equipped to perform the surgery, however, so Hsia insisted she be transferred to a nearby hospital, where the clot was removed from her brain....

There is great opportunity where rivers and oceans meet: the salinity gradient that forms at these freshwater-saltwater boundaries holds a substantial amount of potential energy. Estuaries, for instance, could cover an estimated 40 percent of global electricity generation. Scientists have been working for decades to turn this potential into a usable power source and have developed a number of techniques. One of the latest comes from Pennsylvania State University, where Chris Gorski, an assistant professor of civil engineering, and his colleagues say they have come up with a way to generate electricity from freshwater-saltwater ecosystems that is potentially more efficient and cheaper than previous attempts....

With budgets getting tighter and health care needs growing, it makes sense to funnel shrinking resources to the most effective care. But, as Sharon Begley explains in “The Best Medicine” in the July 2011 issue of Scientific American, finding the best bang for our medical buck would be easier if we used the increasingly important analytical tool of comparative-effectiveness research. More efficient health care means dispelling some common myths about what “good” care is....

On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rode a space shuttle into low Earth orbit to become the most productive observatory in history. A quarter-century on, the universe may be the same but our understanding of it is not, forever transformed by the pristine ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared vistas revealed by the Hubble’s 2.4-meter mirror high above Earth’s atmosphere. Peering across the cosmos, Hubble mapped dark matter and helped discover dark energy, the mysterious force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion....

An incredibly luminous outburst that astronomers had previously classified as possibly the brightest supernova ever actually might have been caused by the explosive death of a star torn apart by a giant black hole, a new study finds. Supernovas are explosions that can happen when stars die, either after running out of fuel or gaining a sudden influx of new material. These outbursts can briefly outshine all of the other stars in their galaxies....

Chemists at times look to plants, sea life and other natural sources for the basic ingredients needed to develop the next breakthrough medicine. Unfortunately, nature is not always willing to easily part with its secrets, forcing scientists to rely on sophisticated imaging technology—nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy or mass spectrometry, for example—to decipher the molecular formula of newly discovered organic compounds so they can be replicated in the lab. Sometimes these new compounds defy even the most powerful lab equipment....

By Reuters Staff DAKAR (Reuters) - The three West African countries at the heart of an Ebola epidemic recorded their first week with no new cases since the outbreak was declared in March 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. The U.N. agency said that more than 11,000 people have died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the world’s worst known occurrence of Ebola, but there were no new cases in the week to Oct....

By most accounts, deforestation in tropical rainforests adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads. According to the World Carfree Network (WCN), cars and trucks account for about 14 percent of global carbon emissions, while most analysts attribute upwards of 15 percent to deforestation. The reason that logging is so bad for the climate is that when trees are felled they release the carbon they are storing into the atmosphere, where it mingles with greenhouse gases from other sources and contributes to global warming accordingly....

The Department of Energy is planning to invest $100 million over the next five years into research for hydrogen-powered heavy-duty trucks. The outcome could be the development of larger, more efficient and cost-effective electrolyzers that will use a variety of technologies to split hydrogen from water. The idea is to form two large partnerships that include DOE national laboratories, universities and private companies to help jump-start what has been a very slow-moving American approach to the “hydrogen economy....

The idea for an eternal clock that would continue to keep time even after the universe ceased to exist has intrigued physicists. However, no one has figured out how one might be built, until now. Researchers have now proposed an experimental design for a “space-time crystal” that would be able to keep time forever. This four-dimensional crystal would be similar to conventional 3D crystals, which are structures, like snowflakes and diamonds, whose atoms are arranged in repeating patterns....

Eugene Parker, the pioneering astrophysicist whose name graces NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission, died Tuesday (March 15) at age 94. Parker’s work focused on understanding the sun. In a key contribution to the field, he proposed that the sun produces a phenomenon called solar wind, a steady stream of charged particles that flows off the sun and across the solar system. The mission named for him seeks to understand the origins of the solar wind within the sun....

In the face of fear, whether it be caused by a grizzly bear or an audience waiting to hear you speak, your body initiates a reaction to stress. The breath quickens, the pupils dilate, the heart begins to pound. These automatic responses occur as part of the so-called fight-or-flight response, the body’s evolved mechanism to deal with threats around us. Scientists have known for decades that this reaction is triggered by hormones released by the adrenal glands, two cone-shaped organs that sit atop the kidneys....

The increasing sums of money spent on health care in the U.S. over the past 40 years have provided good bang for the buck, even if some of the spending was wasteful, researchers report. The strength of that bang seems to be waning over time, however, especially for the elderly. The health care debate typically hinges on the finding that the U.S. spends twice as much on medical care as other industrialized nations and yet its citizens are not as healthy as their global peers....

Nutritionists have long known that ‘you are what you eat’ is not just an expression. Recent studies suggest that what you eat affects you and sometimes even your children and grandchildren. This winter Nestlé convened esteemed experts in human and animal health to talk about the future of nutrition science. One theme to emerge was the epigenetic impact of diet and lifestyle on individual health. Epigenetics is the study of how different biological and environmental signals affect gene expression....

Editor’s Note (10/7/20): This article is being republished because it contains information relevant to the vice presidential debate that will be held tonight in Salt Lake City. Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris of California will debate each other from behind plexiglass screens. But if someone was infected, these barriers would not prevent the potential spread of the virus in tiny droplets called aerosols. President Donald Trump tested positive for the novel coronavirus last week, just days after attending the first presidential debate with former vice president Joe Biden at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic’s Health Education Campus....

When you need a favor, there’s nothing more convenient than shooting off an e-mail or two. It also saves you the awkwardness of in-person pleading. Just don’t expect the same results. Two new studies show that people nonetheless believe e-mail requests are just as effective as asking face-to-face. In the first study, published in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 participants were told they would have to ask 10 strangers, either in person or via e-mail, to complete a survey for no pay....

War is hell. William T. Sherman, the Civil War general, made this statement back in 1880, but it’s just as true today. The current conflict in Iraq, now almost three years old, is confronting American soldiers with horrors that we on the home front can only guess at. Recently, however, I got a high-tech glimpse of what the grunts in Iraq must be going through. During a visit to the U....

A new study by the Environmental Defense Fund and a team of university scientists estimates that the U.S. oil and gas industry emits 13 million metric tons of methane into the atmosphere each year, losing $2 billion annually from over 400 leak-prone drilling and processing facilities. The losses, according to the study published yesterday in the journal Science, are 60 percent more than those estimated by EPA. The studies “have transformed our understanding of methane emissions from natural gas systems in the United States,” said David Allen, a drilling expert at the University of Texas, who was one of 19 co-authors of the paper....

The shells of tiny ocean animals known as foraminifera—specifically Globigerina bulloides—are shrinking as a result of the slowly acidifying waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The reason behind the rising acidity: Higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, making these shells more proof that climate change is making life tougher for the seas’ shell-builders. Marine scientist Andrew Moy at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center (ACE) in Hobart, Tasmania, and his Australian colleagues report in Nature Geoscience this week that they made this finding after comparing G....