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Win-win solutions that bring tangible benefits in the present generation while safeguarding the planet for future generations can broaden public support for policies to fight climate change. This is the political intuition behind the Green New Deal, which reframes climate policy as an opportunity to reboot the economy and create millions of jobs. The same logic applies to carbon dividends, a strategy that puts a price on carbon emissions and returns the money straight to the people....

Chimpanzees that engage in unusual hand-holding behavior during grooming may be showing off a little culture, new research suggests. These chimp handshakes, which are seen only among some of the primates, seem to differ from group to group in ways that aren’t dependent on genetics or environment. That leaves cultural differences between groups as a possible explanation for why and how the hand-holding occurs. “We think that this at least indicates that chimpanzees do not only respond to their environment instinctively or based on genetic predisposition,” said study researcher Edwin van Leeuwen, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands....

With millions of lives on the line, researchers have been working at an unprecedented pace to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. But that speed—and some widely touted breakthroughs—belie the enormous complexity and potential risks involved. Researchers have an incomplete understanding of the coronavirus and are using technology that’s largely unproven. Among many worries: A handful of studies on COVID-19 survivors suggest that antibodies—key immune system proteins that fight infection—begin to disappear within months....

Thirty minutes and an index card. That’s what clinical psychologist Craig Bryan needs to conduct what he calls crisis response planning with a soldier who is suicidal. “Tell me the story about the day you tried to kill yourself,” Bryan asks. Then he listens and follows up with the type of question intended to build trust and uncover warning signs. “How would you know that you’re getting stressed out?” Planning mode comes next, identifying self-management strategies such as exercise....

Archer fish are the sharpshooters of the animal world, capable of hitting prey from metres away with pinpoint accuracy. The fish, Toxotes jaculatrix, which live in mangroves in southern and southeast Asia, achieve this by compressing their gill covers, and forcing water through a ‘gun barrel’ made by their tongue and the roof of their mouth. To determine how the fish aim these water cannons, animal physiologists Peggy Gerullis and Stefan Schuster, who are both at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, trained the fish to fire at specific targets....

A group of budding engineers will be diving, splashing and swimming in the pool next week for the first time this summer. The difference between them and a lot of other high school and college students is the pool: an in-ground, freshwater basin that is about 3,000 feet (914.4 meters) long, 51 feet (15.5 meters) wide, and 22 feet (6.7 meters) deep at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Md....

Chestnut Trees Return The imposing 100-foot American chestnut tree that once dominated forests in the eastern U.S. may soon return, fortified by a new resistance to an Asian fungus. That blight essentially wiped out the tree during the past century, altering entire forest ecosystems. Scientists are releasing a sixth-generation hybrid this year for planting in several locations, confident that it will show the resistance of its hardy Chinese cousin. The hybridization began decades ago, when breeders crossed the American and Chinese chestnuts to obtain the resistance genes....

Jaguars, the third-largest cats after lions and tigers and the biggest in the Western Hemisphere, used to live here. In the 1700s and 1800s people spotted them in Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas. Sometimes the cats roamed as far east as North Carolina and as far north as Colorado. As humans have encroached on their territory, the endangered cats’ range has shifted south. Today it stretches from northern Argentina into Mexico’s Sonoran Desert....

For more than 40 years, a subatomic mystery has puzzled scientists: Why do the fragments of splitting atomic nuclei emerge spinning from the wreckage? Now researchers find these perplexing gyrations might be explained by an effect akin to what happens when you snap a rubber band. To get an idea why this whirling is baffling, imagine you have a tall stack of coins. It would be unsurprising if this unstable tower fell....

Legions of science-fiction authors have imagined a future that includes mind-reading technology. Although the ability to play back memories like a movie remains a distant dream, a new study has taken a provocative step in that direction by decoding neural signals for images. Neuroscientist Kendrick Kay and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, were able to successfully determine which of a large group of never-before-seen photographs a subject was viewing based purely on functional MRI data....

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) strikes without warning. The condition, which strips nerve cells of their ability to interact with the body’s muscles, starts painlessly, with subtle initial symptoms—such as stumbling, increased clumsiness and slurred speech—that are often overlooked. The disease itself attracted little public attention until legendary New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig began dropping balls and collapsing on the field for no apparent reason. Known as the Iron Horse for playing in 2,130 consecutive games over 14 years, Gehrig was diagnosed with ALS in June 1939 and delivered a poignant farewell at Yankee Stadium the next month....

Life is going to present special challenges to any creature named for a deadly sin. Sloths really deserved better. They could have been called deliberates or contemplatives. How sloths conceive of themselves remains a secret—three-toed sloths (Bradypus variegatus) seem to smile a lot, but they’re not talking. They didn’t say anything to me, anyway, at the Aviarios Sloth Rescue Center just north of Cahuita, along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, which I visited on March 6....

The elevator that lowers them 4,850 feet down a mine shaft to a subterranean physics lab isn’t called an elevator, the physicists tell me. It’s called The Cage. It descends at precisely 7:30 A.M.—the same time it leaves the surface every day—and doesn’t wait around for stragglers. I show up on time, and prepare to board with a group of scientists. We look identical: in coveralls blinged out with reflective tape, steel-toed boots, an emergency breathing mask and a lamp that clips to the belt and loops over the shoulder....

As “Star Trek” marks its 45th anniversary, space exploration is less about the voyages of the starship Enterprise and more about robots that boldly go where no man has gone before. But surely even Lieutenant Commander Data would approve the slate of robotic missions looking out beyond Earth orbit toward extraterrestrial destinations both familiar and mysterious. Possible candidates for robotic planetary exploration missions include Venus, Mars, asteroids, comets and even Saturn’s moon Titan....

New Yorkers who look up today can catch a glimpse of history. The Enterprise space shuttle will be flown along the Hudson River and around the metropolitan area on its way to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, a stopover on its final journey to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan. A modified Boeing 747 is ferrying the shuttle from its former home in Washington, D.C....

Every so often in the vast cosmos, something exciting happens in one of the few places that humans happen to watch closely. So it was with a recent supernova in the Whirlpool galaxy, a photogenic swirl some 30 million light-years away. Shortly after the light from an exploding star there reached Earth at the end of May 2011, amateur reports and images of the cataclysm began pouring in from around the globe....

Colleges across the country are failing to keep up with a troubling spike in demand for mental health care — leaving students stuck on waiting lists for weeks, unable to get help. STAT surveyed dozens of universities about their mental health services. From major public institutions to small elite colleges, a striking pattern emerged: Students often have to wait weeks just for an initial intake exam to review their symptoms. The wait to see a psychiatrist who can prescribe or adjust medication — often a part-time employee — may be longer still....

Even as companies rush to develop and test vaccines against the new coronavirus, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are betting that scientists can do even better than what’s now in the pipeline. If, as seems quite possible, the Covid-19 virus becomes a permanent part of the world’s microbial menagerie rather than being eradicated like the earlier SARS coronavirus, next-gen approaches will be needed to address shortcomings of even the most cutting-edge vaccines: They take years to develop and manufacture, they become obsolete if the virus evolves, and the immune response they produce is often weak....

Some people are getting a breakfast that’s not par for the course: golf balls in their breakfast scrambles. Manufacturer McCain Foods USA has recalled bags of frozen hash browns that might be contaminated with “extraneous golf ball materials.” The hash browns were sold under the Roundy’s and Harris Teeter brands. It’s not clear whether, perhaps, there was a driving range next door to the potato field. But, somehow, golf balls were harvested alongside potatoes....

“Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!” (“Can only have been painted by a madman!”) appears on Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most famous painting The Scream. Infrared images at Norway’s National Museum in Oslo recently confirmed that Munch himself wrote this note. The inscription has always been visible to the naked eye, but the infrared images helped to more clearly distinguish the writing from its background. Comparing it with the artist’s handwriting then clearly proved Munch’s authorship....