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Sea-level rise has cost homeowners on the East and Gulf coasts nearly $16 billion in property value as floods and the threat of flooding drive some buyers away, according to a study released this week. Analysts at the nonprofit First Street Foundation in Brooklyn studied millions of residential home sales in 17 states from Maine to Alabama and found that coastal property values were rising at a slower rate in flood-prone areas than in areas that did not flood....

Part of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation speech Thursday sounded like something from a 1960s James Bond film. Putin announced his country has developed and recently tested a cruise missile and an underwater drone that are nuclear-powered as well as hypersonic missiles capable of flying at up to 20 times the speed of sound. Putin’s words were punctuated by video and computer graphics the Russian leader used to drive home the point that the weapons would render NATO’s U....

For the first time, scientists have imaged the brain activity of a fish watching its prey. Observing neural signals in real time offers an important glimpse into how brains perceive the outside world. In the new study, researchers developed a way to follow these signals in the brain of a zebrafish larva, using a sensitive fluorescent marker. “It’s a breakthrough,” molecular and cell biologist Florian Engert of Harvard University, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience....

Tennessee soon will have a law granting public school teachers the right to challenge climate science in their classrooms. Gov. Bill Haslam (R) of Tennessee declined to act on a measure yesterday that would formally allow teachers to challenge “the teaching of some scientific subjects,” including global warming, evolution and human cloning. Without the governor’s signature, the bill becomes law by default later this month. “The bill received strong bipartisan support, passing the House and Senate by a three-to-one margin, but good legislation should bring clarity and not confusion,” Haslam said in a statement....

The prevalence of autism in the United States remained relatively stable from 2014 to 2016, according to a new analysis. The results were published January 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers report the frequency of autism in the U.S. as 2.24 percent in 2014, 2.41 percent in 2015 and 2.76 percent in 2016, respectively. The new data come from the National Health Interview Survey—a yearly interview in which trained census workers ask tens of thousands of parents about the health of their children....

Since at least the 1920s, scientists have been puzzled by the turbulence that arises when a liquid hits a wall. For instance, what happens when water violently sloshes against the side of a pool or when crude oil hits the inside of a pipeline? At long last, researchers have discovered equations that describe the intricacies of the behavior seen within the layers of turbulent fluids as they encounter such boundaries. Boundary layer turbulence is very common in nature, notes Björn Birnir, a mathematician at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and leader of the team behind the new findings....

Given her background and curiosity, Helen Mayberg seems to have been destined from girlhood to do what she is doing now–even though her current work was inconceivable then. Her father practiced family medicine in Los Angeles County. Her uncle used x-rays and nuclear medicine machines to research biochemistry. Today Mayberg peers into brains to examine mood networks–and with one startling experiment has transformed the treatment of depression. At the same time, by combining her father’s bedside dedication with her uncle’s technical sophistication, she is changing the leading theories of how thought and mood interact....

Can science tell us how much ethical responsibility different countries bear for combating climate change? It’s going to try. According to a draft of a forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, ethics takes a front-and-center role in a forum traditionally reserved for exploring scientific consensus. The real-world implications of those ethical questions of responsibility will play out over the next several months of U.N. climate treaty talks, making ethics—along with a chapter on the costs of mitigating emissions—among the report’s most controversial topics, sources said....

According to the prominent psychologist Jesse Bering of the University of Otago in New Zealand, in his authoritative book Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2018), “the specific issues leading any given person to become suicidal are as different, of course, as their DNA—involving chains of events that one expert calls ‘dizzying in their variety.’” Indeed, my short list above includes people with a diversity of ages, professions, personality and gender....

Climate change is causing seas to rise and we hear frequent warnings about how future flooding will inundate cities. Visualizing the flooding may be more powerful than words when it comes to understanding what this really means. So, Andrew David Thaler, a deep-sea ecologist and population geneticist in San Francisco, devised a creative application for Google Earth maps that shows what cities around the world would look like under various levels of flooding, from one meter up to 80 meters....

The ocean tides mirror life itself. Their ebb and flow pay homage to the cyclic nature of the cosmos along even the most secluded seashores. But is life itself also ultimately a fluke of the tides? If so, life may ultimately owe its origins to our serendipitously large moon. The sun and wind also drive the ocean’s oscillations, but it is the moon’s gravitational tug that is responsible for the lion’s share of this predictable tidal flux....

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazineModern mammals often live in groups, but most marsupials are solitary. With no fossil evidence to suggest that the animals have ever behaved otherwise, paleontologists have long assumed that marsupials have been loners throughout their evolutionary history. This notion is now being overturned by the analysis of a fossil site containing many marsupials that seem to have been living together.The site, in the Tiupampa locality of Bolivia, contains 35 specimens of Pucadelphys andinus, a primitive opossum from the early Palaeocene Epoch (64 million years ago)....

Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider by Michael Riordan , Lillian Hoddeson , Adrienne W. Kolb University of Chicago Press, 2015 (($40)) Most good science stories are tales of discovery and success, but failure can be just as riveting. Here two historians and an archivist describe the greatest particle physics experiment that never was. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), a planned 87-kilometer ring in Texas, would have crashed protons together at higher energies than any accelerator before or since, dwarfing even the current Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where the Higgs boson was discovered....

Sometimes scientists get it wrong and have to revise the conventional wisdom they helped create. A bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis produces a toxic crystal that has been identified as a killer of garden pests since at least 1911. Researched extensively, the so-called Bt toxin was turned into a commercial product starting in the 1950s, and more recently, plants have been engineered to produce it on their own. Yet, through all these years of research, the mechanism by which it kills bugs has simply been assumed: the toxin eats holes in the insect’s gut and they either starve or experience septicemia–a deadly bacterial infection in the blood–from the Bt itself....

A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns. Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations....

Lack of shut-eye contributes to the risk of obesity, according to many recent studies. In exploring childhood obesity, Johns Hopkins University researchers recently completed a meta-analysis of 11 studies that looked at children’s sleep duration and their body mass. Not getting enough sack time, the scientists confirmed, disrupts hormone levels, which may lead to excessive weight gain. Minimum sleep recommended for children: Younger than 5 years: 11 hours 5–10 Years: 10 hours...

Young Earth’s molten lava ocean was layered like a pudding cake, according to a study published today (Nov. 6) in the journal Nature. Researchers think the Earth’s first millennia were spent covered in magma, following a giant impact that formed the moon. Now, thanks to an experiment that brought basalt rock to the highest pressures ever tested, scientists think this lava sea was stratified, separated into lighter and denser layers....

Exxon Mobil Corp. insisted yesterday that it has not lied to its shareholders about the risks of climate change as it reacted to news that New York’s attorney general is investigating the company’s climate statements to investors. “Exxon Mobil recognizes that climate risks are real and responsible actions are warranted,” said Ken Cohen, the company’s vice president of public and government affairs, during a press call (E&ENews PM, Nov. 5). New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) has issued a “broad” subpoena dealing with “our assessment of climate change,” Cohen said....

There is no charity walk to raise awareness about the 700 to 800 women that die each year during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth in the U.S. There are no dedicated colored-plastic wristbands. But statistics in recent years have revealed a worrisome trend: the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past few decades. Whereas 7.2 women died per 100,000 births in 1987, that number swelled to 17....

It took 1,603 pages of legalese to keep the U.S. government running for another year. That is the length of the 2015 Fiscal Year Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which was approved by the Senate on Saturday to appropriate $1.01 trillion dollars for most federal agencies and departments through September 2015. The bill is on Pres. Obama’s desk waiting for his signature. It is not all about dollars. Congress also loaded the bill with special instructions, called policy riders, which dictate how government funds must be spent....