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A new case of Ebola has been found in Liberia, a country declared free of the disease on Sept. 3, a senior United Nations official said on Friday. The patient is a 10-year-old boy who lived in the Paynesville, a suburb east of the capital Monrovia, said the official, who declined to be named. The case represents a setback for Liberia, which has seen more than 10,600 cases and 4,808 Ebola deaths since it was first announced in March, 2014, according to U....

In their rush to avoid a repeat of the controversy that plagued the 2000 presidential election, and to meet the requirements of Congress’s hastily mandated 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states and counties flocked to electronic voting systems they hoped would eliminate hanging chads and other flaws inherent in paper-based systems. Six years later, with another presidential election less than three months away, many e-voting systems are fraught with security glitches, and the technology has yet to prove itself as the solution voters were looking for....

What many hope will be the final chapter in an unfortunate saga in multiple sclerosis research appears to have been written by the scientist who started the affair in the first place. Italian physician Paolo Zamboni has publicly acknowledged that a therapy he developed and dubbed “the liberation treatment” does not cure or mitigate the symptoms of MS. A randomized controlled trial—the gold standard of medical research—he and other Italian researchers conducted concluded the procedure is a “largely ineffective technique” that should not be recommended for MS patients....

Nations involved in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)—a project to build the world’s largest radio telescope—have signed a convention to establish an intergovernmental organization to oversee the project and formally approve its construction. The body, called the SKA Observatory, will be similar to organizations such as CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and will replace the SKA Organization, which has managed the telescope’s design and pre-construction activities since its establishment in 2011....

Scientific American presents The Dog Trainer by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Today, a little Dog Trainer mind game. Take a minute to think about your ideal pet dog, and picture her. Him. Or her. Whatever. What does she look like? What kind of personality does he have? And now let’s say that I, The Dog Trainer, have superpowers, which I’m using to develop pet dogs....

Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news from social media, according to a 2016 poll by Pew Research Center. That stat helps explain the ubiquity of fake news: When information travels via social networks, regular editorial filters have no chance to separate the quality tweet from the chaff. Developing tools to help stop the spread of lies and false rumors will require the collaboration of computer scientists, linguists, psychologists and sociologists....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Wild bison from Yellowstone National Park that are deemed free of cattle disease could be safely used to establish new herds elsewhere across the American West without posing a risk to livestock, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study concluded. The findings raise hopes of park managers, Native American tribes and wildlife advocates that efforts to restore bison populations derived from the nation’s last pure-bred band of wild bison will face less resistance from the cattle industry....

By Jessica Dye New York state’s top prosecutor said on Wednesday his office has sent cease-and-desist letters to seven companies accused of deceptively marketing ineffective Zika-protection products as concern grows over the mosquito-borne virus. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman also issued an alert warning consumers against the companies’ advertisements, which mainly promote ultrasonic and botanical oil-based mosquito repellants. Those products, mostly sold online with some at discount and local stores, “simply don’t work,” Schneiderman told a news conference....

New research suggests it is possible to slow or even reverse aging, at least in mice, by undoing changes in gene activity—the same kinds of changes that are caused by decades of life in humans. By tweaking genes that turn adult cells back into embryoniclike ones, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reversed the aging of mouse and human cells in vitro, extended the life of a mouse with an accelerated-aging condition and successfully promoted recovery from an injury in a middle-aged mouse, according to a study published Thursday in Cell....

Much about the immune system has long been mysterious to scientists. Its activity is incredibly complicated and varies greatly between individuals; a deeper understanding of how the system works could lead to more and better vaccines, and even to a clearer distinction between health and disease. Now three studies report finding new patterns amid the apparent chaos—including in the crucial days just after birth, when the immune system faces many threats from the outside world for the first time....

Understanding how brains work is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our times, but despite the impression sometimes given in the popular press, researchers are still a long way from some basic levels of understanding. A project recently funded by the Obama administration’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative is one of several approaches promising to deliver novel insights by developing new tools that involves a marriage of nanotechnology and optics....

The analysts’ response was enthusiastic, except for one crucial caveat. “It came down to whether they could explain the model to a decision maker—like the secretary of Defense,” says Matheny, who is now IARPA’s director. What if the artificial intelligence (AI) model told defense analysts that North Korea was getting ready to bomb Alaska? “They don’t want to be in the position of thinking the system could be wrong but not being sure why or how,” he adds....

By Dipika Jain The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it would update guidelines for nutritional labels on packaged food and beverages to include information on added sugar and to prominently display calorie count and servings. The move comes at a time the United States is staring at increasing childhood and adult obesity and lifestyle diseases such as heart problems. The FDA said on Friday that the modified guidelines, which companies would have to adopt within two years, would help consumers “make informed decisions about the foods they eat and feed their families....

Edward Maa did not plan to become a marijuana researcher. But a few years ago, when the neurologist and epilepsy specialist surveyed his patients about their use of alternative medicines, he discovered that more than a third had turned to marijuana to try to control their seizures. “I had no idea,” says Maa, who is chief of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program at Denver Health. Now he is trying to impose some scientific rigor on what has become a very big and unscientific ad hoc experiment in his state, where medical marijuana use is legal....

One evening this past fall a patient stumbled into the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “I don’t feel so…” she muttered, before losing consciousness. Her breathing was shallow and her pupils were pinpoints, typical symptoms of an opioid overdose. Her care team sprang into action. They injected her with 0.4 milligram of naloxone, an overdose antidote—but she remained unresponsive. They next tried one milligram, then two, then four....

God moves the player, he in turn the piece. But what god beyond God begins the round Of dust and time and sleep and agony? —Jorge Luis Borges As I write this column, a computer program called AlphaGo is beating the professional go player Lee Sedol at a highly publicized tournament in Seoul. Sedol is among the top three players in the world, having attained the highest rank of nine dan....

What could be cooler for an aspiring scientist or engineer than a hands-on project working with and learning about electronics and optics? How about one where each student ends up with his or her own digital camera. Such is the vision of Shree Nayar’s BigShot, which the chair of Columbia University’s computer science department has been carefully cultivating since 2006. Nayar, with help from some of his graduate students, has already developed a dozen prototypes of the build-it-yourself BigShot camera, an associated educational and social-networking Web site, and several successful pilot tests with children around the world....

Seven million people died prematurely in 2012 from air pollution caused by fossil fuel combustion, according to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization. So President Trump’s decision to halt U.S. compliance with the 2015 Paris climate agreement is a blow not just to climate science and international diplomacy — it’s also a looming disaster for public health. “It’s a huge mistake for the United States to pull out of the Paris agreement for lots of reasons,” says Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison....

By Joseph Milton The molecular changes that trigger the uterus to start contracting at the beginning of childbirth have been worked out in detail. The research could eventually help the design of therapies to prevent premature birth, a significant cause of infant mortality and disability in developed countries.There are few effective treatments to block early labor, perhaps in part because the molecular mechanism that underlies the onset of contractions has remained elusive–until now....

Energy and climate change are intertwined, a fact that the Obama administration recently acknowledged with plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from generators. Experts note, however, that shifting rainfall, heat waves and storms have severe consequences for the energy sector, as well. The Department of Energy issued a report yesterday definitively linking certain energy infrastructure disruptions like power plant shutdowns, blackouts and transmission interruptions to the changing climate, projecting that these threats may get worse and create cascading impacts (Greenwire, July 11)....