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Today anesthetics are considered as routine as a trip to the dentist. They have been around at least since the 18th century when a talented chemist named Humphry Davy discovered the mysterious effect of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Davy, young and ambitious, set out to rigorously test the gas’s effect, inhaling nitrous oxide daily for several months. Under slightly less rigorous conditions, Davy shared the gas with a distinguished group of friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Watt, and Robert Southey—who wrote in a letter that “the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas....

It’s a question on many people’s minds these days: Do I need a booster dose of a COVID vaccine? The answer, like many aspects of this pandemic, is complicated. And in some ways, it depends on what we mean by “need.” The three vaccines approved or authorized in the U.S. generally provide very good protection against severe disease and death from COVID. Yet some people, especially those who are immunocompromised, may not mount a strong response to the initial doses....

CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian woman died on Monday of H5N1 bird flu after coming into contact with infected birds, the second death from the disease this year, a health ministry spokesman told Reuters. Egypt has identified seven cases of the virus in people this year, including the two who died, Hosam Abdel Gaffar said. In the latest case, the woman was 19 and died at a hospital in the southern region of Assiut, he said....

You might think the “best” songs would be the biggest hits. But the fickle tastes of music listeners continue to defy expert predictions–or objective measures of quality. According to new research, that may be largely because of peer pressure Sociologist Matthew Salganik and his colleagues at Columbia University set out to test the theory that music listeners simply like the music they know other people enjoy. They set up a Web site and recruited more than 14,000 participants–mostly American teenagers–by offering free, licensed downloads of 48 songs by different up-and-coming (and therefore unlikely to be known) bands....

The city and Brazil as a whole have become an exemplar of what happens when a country pursues a strategy of denying the pandemic and embracing herd immunity by letting the virus spread unchecked. Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has promoted the idea of letting the pathogen move throughout the population until most people have been infected. He described proposals for a lockdown in Manaus before a crushing second wave of infections hit as “absurd....

Bill Gates will have the final say in who gets the CEO role at Microsoft.(Credit:CBS)The evaluations of Steve Ballmer’s 33 years at Microsoft are winding down, with the focus shifting to who will replace him within the next 12 months. It’s a job that requires a rare combination of talents, experience and intellect. The odds maker Ladbroke has Stephen Elop, former Microsoft Office head and now best friend of the company as CEO of Windows Phone spearhead Nokia, as the leading contender, followed by current COO Kevin Turner....

Yet the disorder was common and growing more so. How could people with such a debilitating gene have survived, Neel wondered, and why was diabetes, which is defined by the presence of abnormally high levels of the sugar glucose in the blood, becoming more prevalent? The thrifty gene hypothesis has drawn criticism, but it has endured in one form or another for half a century. The idea that our body can be genetically programmed to store fat and that our rich modern diet and sedentary ways can send this program into overdrive has prompted a good deal of research into possible thrifty genes at the root of diabetes and other obesity-linked diseases: hypertension (high blood pressure), nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and heart disease....

A honeybee’s brain is hardly bigger than the tip of a dog’s whisker, yet you can train a bee just as Pavlov got his pups to drool on hearing their dinner bell. Using a sugar solution as a reward, you can teach the insect to extend its little mouthparts in response to different scents. Several Pavlovian lab studies of individual worker honeybees, however, found that those fed small amounts of pesticides—especially a class called neonicotinoids—do not learn which scents lead to a sweet reward as quickly as their pesticide-free peers do....

President Biden is set to announce twin policies today aimed at slashing car emissions and accelerating widespread electric vehicle adoption in an effort to tackle climate change and out-compete Chinese manufacturers, according to senior administration officials. The long-awaited moves will usher in one of the nation’s strongest-ever climate regulations and target 50% of all vehicles sold by 2030 to be electric. Administration officials lauded the plan as a “paradigm shift.” Some climate experts, however, said the policies fall short of what is needed to stave off catastrophic warming, and critics described Biden’s efforts as incomparable to the stronger actions of Europe and other countries....

For the first time, researchers have sequenced the full genome of the bacterium that caused a plague that killed millions of people in the 6th century A.D., and discovered to their surprise that the outbreak was caused by a different strain of the same germ that was to blame for the more famous Black Death 800 years later. Their findings offer insight into the genetic factors that influence the virulence of the plague bacterium as well as other pathogens....

By Rory Carroll and Nichola Groom IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif./LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - One of the world’s largest solar projects, which uses heat from the sun to generate power in California, opened on Thursday but may be the last of its kind in The Golden State. Sprawling across 3,500 acres in the Mojave desert near the California-Nevada border, the $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar thermal power plant has more than 300,000 mirrors that reflect sunlight onto boilers housed in the top of three towers, each of which is 150 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty....

The bomb that shattered Travis Adams’s peace of mind never actually exploded. Its timer went off, but the bomb malfunctioned. Still, the 25-year-old U.S. marine remained haunted by the memory of an explosive device diabolically concealed beneath a tempting array of cookies and candies. Whoever had set it that day in Iraq must have planned to blow up children. “People are evil if they’re willing to do that,” he recalls thinking....

Your favorite radio station transmits on a specific frequency. When you set your receiver to so many cycles per second, you tune the antenna circuit to pluck that station’s frequency out of the ether. If other transmitters interfere with your reception, your only real option is to wait out the problem. In the best of all worlds, though, your receiver would respond by switching immediately to an open backup frequency that carries your station’s broadcast....

Amid rumors that precision gene-editing techniques have been used to modify the DNA of human embryos, researchers have called for a moratorium on the use of the technology in reproductive cells. In a Comment published on March 12 in Nature, Edward Lanphier, chairman of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine in Washington DC, and four co-authors call on scientists to agree not to modify human embryos — even for research. “Such research could be exploited for non-therapeutic modifications....

Just down the road from the world’s tallest tower, in the shadow of monster sand dunes, marine biologists from around the world clamored onboard a boat for a visit to some of the Persian Gulf’s coral reefs. The waters off the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) coast can be murky and only have 10 percent of the coral reef diversity found in the Indian Ocean or on the Great Barrier Reef. But the researchers came looking for something even more precious: clues that could one day help coral reefs around the world survive the onslaught of global warming....

If not for the orange power cords trailing from their sides, the 15 Mini Coopers lined up in the northwest corner of the University of Delaware’s science and technology campus might have been a scene from a BMW dealership. No other outward clues hinted that in their stationary form, these cars were driving a new business. The electric-powered versions of the Mini Coopers are part of an effort, undertaken by the university and a consortium of partners from the private sector, to develop and deploy vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology....

The classroom gently rocked as the speaker approached the lectern. I sat quietly, holding one talisman in my left hand—an iPhone—while balancing another sign of fealty in my lap—a MacBook. The computer was brand-new, purchased for this very purpose. Otherwise, the assembled might have scoped me out for what I truly was—a ­quarter-of-a-century adherent to PCs that ran DOS and ­Windows—and thrown me overboard. For I was attending a weeklong gathering at sea of the faithful, called MacMania 10....

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has abandoned an effort to reconstruct a detailed picture of hour-by-hour changes in the atmosphere stretching back to the 19th century. Known as the 20th Century Reanalysis, the project has already helped scientists better understand the causes of historic weather events like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and unusual Arctic warmth during the 1920s and 1930s. Those discoveries and others could eventually improve the predictions of climate models that look decades into the future....

Humans produce more than 300 million metric tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills, and up to 12 million metric tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no sustainable way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms. Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the larvae of the greater wax moth can efficiently degrade polyethylene, which accounts for 40 percent of plastics....

Key concepts Electricity Materials Conductivity Electrons Introduction Have you ever noticed that some types of clothes are more susceptible to static cling than others? For example, a wooly sweater can have a lot of static cling, but clothing made out of cotton doesn’t cling nearly as much. How well do other materials around the house produce static electricity? In this science activity you’ll explore this by making a simple, homemade electroscope (an instrument that detects electric charges) and testing it out....