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Recent research suggested that marine birds such as albatrosses and petrels are attracted to the smell of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a compound produced by phytoplankton but also by plastic debris. Matthew Savoca and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis claimed that there was evidence that certain seabirds use DMS as an olfactory cue to identify sources of food, resulting in them eating plastic waste.1 But this finding has now been challenged by another team....

As a psychologist, I have always found the concept of speed dating fascinating. In fact, some years ago, I decided to try it myself. At the time, I had just moved to Boston and didn’t know that many people yet, so I figured I would give the speed-dating scene a go. As it turns out, I like to talk – so much, in fact, that I have a tendency to talk people’s ears off....

WHY IS THE STUDY of perception so appealing? One reason is that you can gain deep insights into the inner workings of your own brain by doing relatively simple experiments that any schoolchild could have done 100 years ago. More on those in a moment. Your sensory experience of the world does not involve faithfully transmitting the retinal image to a screen in the brain so that it can be “seen” by some inner eye....

Key concepts Physics Heat transfer Insulation Material science Introduction What do you do when it gets very cold in winter? You probably turn your heater on, put on an extra layer of clothes or cuddle under a warm blanket. But have you ever thought about why a jacket helps you stay warm? Why are our clothes made from fabrics and not foils? Find out the answers in this activity; your results might even help you find the best way to stay warm in the cold!...

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on Black and Indigenous communities and other people of color, and U.S. medical institutions should be doing everything they can to root out and eliminate entrenched racial inequities. Yet many of the screening assessments used in health care are exacerbating racism in medicine, automatically and erroneously changing the scores given to people of color in ways that can deny them needed treatment. These race-based scoring adjustments to evaluations are all too common in modern medicine, particularly in the U....

The science of sleep is woefully incomplete, not least because research on the topic has long ignored half of the population. For decades, sleep studies mostly enrolled men. Now, as sleep researchers are making a more concerted effort to study women, they are uncovering important differences between the sexes. Hormones are a major factor. Estrogen, progesterone and testosterone can influence the chemical systems in the brain that regulate sleep and arousal....

A recent research trend has targeted the goal of having one’s stem cells and preserving embryos, too—a nod to powerful critics such as President George W. Bush. Even if an embryo remains intact—the objective of these studies—it is unclear whether these methods will ever satisfy Bush and others who rail against what they perceive as immoral tinkering with the stuff of life. Kevin Eggan and his colleagues at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute brought together embryonic stem cells with skin cells, or fibroblasts, creating fusion cells that reprogrammed themselves to resemble embryonic stem cells genetically matched to the donor of the skin cell....

By Brendan Borrell In her 25 years of research, Gail Prins, a reproductive physiologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, had got used to doing science her way. But when her experiments started to question the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in thousands of consumer products from food-can linings to baby bottles, she found her work under a new level of scrutiny. The experience was unnerving, she says....

A new radioactive tracer may one day be used to predict whether a person might develop Alzheimer’s disease. The brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers are usually shot through with plaques of the protein beta amyloid and so-called tangles of a protein known as tau. Radioactive tracers for beta amyloid plaques exist, but they do not fully distinguish healthy from diseased tissue, says Gary Small, a geriatric psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles....

On February 12, US President Donald Trump released his budget proposal for the 2019 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October 2018. Nature’s US news team will update this story throughout the day with information on what Trump’s budget would mean for US government science agencies. National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) $34.8 billion budget would be roughly equal to the 2017 level, but about $2 billion below the 2018 level approved by Congress on 8 February....

CLIMATEWIRE | In 2010, the Dutch government launched a program to sharply cut carbon dioxide emissions from one of the world’s largest and most problematic sources: homes. It put up $40 million and called it “Energiesprong,” or “Energy Jump” in English. The idea was to convert drafty old row houses into solar and electric heat-pump-powered, well-insulated homes that reduced their CO2 emissions to near zero. The first phase ended with the refurbishment of around 6,000 homes in the Netherlands, but it has since spread across northern Europe, where — retranslated as the “Mustb0” program — it has spread to apartment buildings....

In spring 2010 Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted beneath an ice cap, mixing hot lava with a flood of meltwater, which blasted a plume of gas and ash over 10 kilometers into the sky. Hundreds of people were evacuated and the turmoil reached well beyond Iceland, with several European nations closing their airspace for days. Thankfully, Eyjafjallajökull killed no one—but it still caused its fair share of chaos. In spite all the harm and havoc volcanic eruptions can wreak—even the nonfatal ones—scientists still cannot reliably forecast them....

In the aftermath of last Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, U.S. government officials have reignited the debate over encryption and government surveillance. They argue that encryption is a huge problem in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and that tech companies should create “backdoor” access to encrypted information for the government—something that big tech companies including Apple, Google and Facebook fiercely oppose. Yet despite speculation, we still do not know whether encryption played any role in the Paris attacks—and even if it did, security analysts say, granting the government access to encrypted data will not make it much easier to track terrorists....

Opera singers and dry air don’t get along. In fact, the best professional singers require humid settings to help them achieve the right pitch. “When your vocal cords are really dry, they’re a little less elastic,” says Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami. As a result, singers experience tiny variations in pitch, called jitter, as well as wavering volume—both of which contribute to rougher refrains. If the amount of moisture in the air influences musical pitch, Everett wondered, has that translated into the development of fewer tonal languages in arid locations?...

The number of sequenced human genomes will soon swell to more than 1,000 as part of a new international research consortium’s effort to trace the potential genetic origins of disease. But first the mother, father and adult child of a European-ancestry family from Utah and a Yoruba-ancestry family from Nigeria will join an anonymous individual as well as famous geneticists Craig Venter and James Watson as part of the handful of humans to have on record a complete readout of their roughly three billion pairs of DNA....

At the smallest scales, everything in the universe can be broken down into fundamental morsels called particles. The Standard Model of particle physics—the reigning theory of these morsels—describes a small collection of known species that combine in myriad ways to build the matter around us and carry the forces of nature. Yet physicists know that these particles cannot be all there is—they do not account for the dark matter or dark energy that seem to contribute much of the universe’s mass, for example....

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context....

Nearly 4,000 years ago, a woman and a man were buried together just east of the Volga River in modern-day Russia, with a secret locked away in the pulp of their teeth. The bodies were uncovered just a few years ago, the teeth pulled and sent westward to the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where Maria Spyrou was working on a Ph.D. in paleogenetics. When she subjected the pulp to a bevy of genetic tests, she found something surprising: an ancestor of the bacteria responsible for the Black Death....

Key concepts Electricity Electronics Insulators Conductors Introduction Have you ever wondered why rubbing a balloon or a blanket—or even a winter hat—on your head makes your hair stand up? The effect is due to static electricity, but how is the static electricity made, and why does it make your hair stand on end? Static electricity is the buildup of electrical charge in an object. Sometimes static electricity can suddenly discharge, such as when a bolt of lightning flashes through the sky....

A group of biodiversity experts called on their colleagues yesterday to figure out how to best use satellite data from space agencies to track changes in the environment like species occurrence, fires and leaf cover. “The potential has been untapped for the moment,” said Nathalie Pettorelli, a conservation biologist with the Zoological Society of London and one of 14 authors from around the world who published a letter in the journal Nature....