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Kimpese, a mid-sized town in southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo, rings with a cheerful melody as the thumping bass of café sound systems mixes with the chatter from vendors selling bright fruits and soft fabrics. Against the background of this everyday chorus, it’s almost impossible to hear the tall man with grey-tinged stubble, standing beneath the overhang of a single-story, freshly painted building, talking to the bats overhead. He speaks in a hybrid language of chirps and the local Kikongo dialect, cooing toward the outdoor rafters as mothers steer their children around the eccentric visitor and into the facility—the local health center—stealing curious but wary glances....

Laser weapons small enough to fit aboard fighter jets could begin ground-based firing tests aimed at shooting down threats to U.S. military warplanes in 2014. The 150-kilowatt lasers would represent a new class of weapons 10 times smaller and lighter than current lasers of similar power, according to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Pentagon agency issued a special notice on Jan. 17 for General Atomics - Aeronautical Systems Incorporated to build a second laser weapon so that both the U....

Many forms of childhood cancers have gone from being a death sentence to a curable disease. Thanks to advances in treatments, the overall survival rate for childhood cancers has increased from 10% a few decades ago to nearly 90% today. This means that by the year 2020, an estimated half a million survivors of childhood cancer will be living in the U.S. With more children surviving, though, it has become increasingly clear that cancer and the subsequent treatments, such as chemo or radiation therapy, can have long-term negative effects that extend beyond physical problems such as hair loss, pain, and physical disability....

Since the coronavirus pandemic started spreading across the U.S. and state governments issued stay-at-home orders, millions of Americans have isolated themselves for months to avoid exposure. One result is that parents across the country have canceled pediatric checkups—and immunization levels for vaccine-preventable diseases have plummeted, a Scientific American investigation has found. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May that routine orders of pediatric vaccines had dropped because of the pandemic....

She was born in the usual way. A disorganized blob of clouds emerged over the Atlantic Ocean off Africa’s bulging western coast, just north of the equator. Atmospheric pressure there was low, typical for late summer. Natural variability in the earth’s climate spawns tropical disturbances every year in this area—sometimes more, sometimes fewer, and sometimes they become hurricanes. Weather forecast models unanimously predicted that the clouds would coalesce into a storm that curved harmlessly northwest into the mid-Atlantic, far from land....

Childhood vaccines have transformed medicine. Smallpox has been globally eradicated, polio has been eliminated from the U.S., and diphtheria and congenital rubella have been almost wiped out in North America. Yet some preventable diseases—most notably measles—are managing to make a comeback in certain pockets of the U.S. after a small number of parents have refused to give their children routine immunizations. In the article leading this section, a pediatrician and an epidemiologist detail how intentionally unvaccinated children are helping drive epidemics....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog Posted on behalf of Gene Russo. The 2014 Kavli Prizes, announced today, were shared among nine scientists for their work on the theory of cosmic inflation, for contributions to the field of nano-optics and for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition. The Kavli Foundation, has awarded prizes every two years since 2008 in the three disciplines of astrophysics, nanotechnology and neuroscience....

Tumor immunologists have known for decades that the immune system can be an important ally in the fight against cancer. Most early attempts to recruit its potential proved disappointing, however. It turns out that investigators had not done enough to stimulate a key component of the immune system, a kind of master sergeant called the T cell. Without enhancing the ability of T cells both to identify and to attack cancer cells, researchers were, in effect, asking the immune system to go into battle with the biological equivalent of paper airplanes and pellet guns....

The almond industry contributes an estimated $21 billion annually to California’s economy and it is completely dependent on honeybees for its existence. For eight years the Wonderful Company, the world’s largest almond grower, had been funding a large research project to breed another commercial pollinator—Osmia lignaria, aka the blue orchard bee, or BOB—to help the beleaguered honeybee in their vast orchards. Researchers and growers worldwide were keeping a close eye on the program’s progress....

A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving. The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness....

A wave of nausea washed over Sheri J. Storm when she opened the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on a February morning a decade ago and saw the headline: “Malpractice lawsuit: Plaintiff tells horror of memories. Woman emotionally testifies that psychiatrist planted false recollections.” The woman in the article shared a lot with Storm–the same psychiatrist, the same memories, the same diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. At that moment, Storm suddenly realized that her own illness and 200-plus personalities, though painfully real to her, were nothing more than a figment of her imagination–created by her trusted therapist, Kenneth Olson....

Paleontologists discovered in western Patagonia what may be one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs ever. The new species, Mapusaurus roseae, is bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex, slightly more immense than its cousin, Gigantosaurus, and appears to have hunted in packs.Announcement by Museo Carmen Funes, Plaza Huincul, Argentina, and University of Alberta, April 17 Pass the hummus: Americans who consumed a Mediterranean diet—meals with vegetables, fruits, legumes, some fish and alcohol, along with low amounts of dairy and meat products—experienced a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease as they grew older....

In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity. These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain. Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neandertal genes, launched them into orbit onboard the International Space Station and used them as models to develop more humanlike artificial-intelligence systems....

Consider the following experiences: You’re headed toward a storm that’s a couple of miles away, and you’ve got to get across a hill. You ask yourself: “How am I going to get over that, through that?” You see little white dots on a black background, as if looking up at the stars at night. You look down at yourself lying in bed from above but see only your legs and lower trunk....

Perfluorinated compounds, such as perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), help firefighting foams rapidly flow over flaming liquids such as gasoline and jet fuel, cooling and quenching fires. But despite environmental scientists’ concerns about these possibly toxic compounds accumulating in wildlife and lurking in firefighters’ blood, researchers don’t know the identity of many of the chemicals in the mixtures on the market. For the first time, a new study borrows a medical research tool to pinpoint fluorochemicals in the blood of firefighters, identifying novel compounds that have never before been publicly reported (Environ....

Bush fire season is underway again in Australia, where summer has just kicked off. Yet the country is still recovering from record-breaking wildfires two years ago that killed at least 33 people, destroyed thousands of homes and burned more than 65,000 square miles of land. How quickly the natural landscape recovers depends on the climate over the coming years. It might take a couple of decades under average conditions. But if the weather stays hot and dry—and if more extreme wildfires occur in the meantime—the ecosystem might never get back to normal....

Humanity has yet to reach the point of no return when it comes to catastrophic climate change, according to new calculations. If we content ourselves with the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure we can hold greenhouse gas concentrations below 450 parts per million in the atmosphere and limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—both common benchmarks for international efforts to avoid the worst impacts of ongoing climate change—according to a new analysis in the September 10 issue of Science....

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Even that wasn’t enough. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students....

One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (num­bers that cannot be evenly divided by any other num­ber except themselves or 1). For example: 35 = 19 + 13 + 3 or 77 = 53 + 13 + 11 Mathematician Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now inched toward a proof....

After a six-months-long search, Microsoft has handed responsibility for its future to Satya Nadella, who replaces Steve Ballmer and becomes only the third chief executive in the company’s nearly four-decade-long history. Founder Bill Gates, meanwhile, will move over as a “technology advisor,” suggesting a more active role in the development of Microsoft product. John Thompson will take over as chairman. “Satya is a proven leader with hard-core engineering skills, business vision, and the ability to bring people together,” Gates said in a prepared statement....