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A new study teasing out the causes of the West Coast’s historic drought finds that anthropogenic climate change may have been more of a culprit than in previous dry spells. The study, published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters, examined the reasons why 81 percent of Western snow-survey sites last year had the lowest recorded snowpack in 40 years of records. That occurred even though precipitation levels were nearly normal in Oregon and Washington and unusually, but not exceptionally, low in California....

Boys with autism have smaller heads, are shorter and weigh less at birth than their typical peers do—but all that changes by age 3, a new study suggests. The new work is among the first to link autism to rapid skeletal growth. “Mapping physical growth as well as growth in head circumference is really important because it implicates a lot of other mechanisms that might be involved, not just the brain,” says Cheryl Dissanayake, professor of developmental psychology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who co-led the work....

Every day, approximately 10,000 Baby Boomers reach retirement age. This means that with every sentence of this article you read, approximately one baby boomer is retiring. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that many Boomers haven’t saved nearly enough to actually retire. The numbers are stark: according to the National Institute on Retirement Security, the median U.S. household near retirement has saved $12,000. If you and your spouse did nothing else except share a Starbucks cappuccino every morning, the money would still not last throughout retirement....

Less than 200 years ago schizophrenia emerged from a tangle of mental disorders known simply as madness. In the upcoming fifth edition of psychiatry’s primary guidebook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, schizophrenia will finally shed the outdated, 19th-century descriptions that have characterized it to this day. Yet the disorder remains poorly understood. “There is substantial dissatisfaction with schizophrenia treated as a disease entity; its symptoms are like a fever—something is wrong, but we don’t know what,” says William Carpenter, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland and chair of the manual’s Psychotic Disorders Work Group....

But is suddenly changing your mind really a mark of insight? Major revelations make for memorable stories, but our research shows they rarely represent how the best analytic minds revise their beliefs. Rather than doing a 180, those who excel at making accurate predictions tend to change their beliefs gradually. They revise their predictions to reflect new information, but they do so slowly, comparing it with the information they had before....

Mammals are not big on monogamy. In fewer than 10 percent of species is it common for two individuals to mate exclusively. The primate wing of the group is only slightly more prone to pairing off. Although 15 to 29 percent of primate species favor living together as couples, far fewer commit to monogamy as humans know it—an exclusive sexual partnership between two individuals. Humans obviously have an imperfect track record....

Dear EarthTalk: I was appalled by the pollution haze I saw on a recent visit to Acadia National Park in Maine, and was told by a ranger that it was from smokestacks and tailpipes hundreds of miles away. Is anything being done to clear the air in Acadia and other natural areas where people go to breathe fresh air and enjoy distant unobstructed views?—Betty Estason, via e-mail This pollution haze, which emanates from urban and industrial centers to the south and west, has been a problem at Acadia National Park and elsewhere (e....

Those hoping to trace their ancestry to a particular African tribe are unlikely to find a perfect match, according to a new genetic study. Researchers report that mitochondrial DNA isolated from African-Americans matched up to distinct African ethnic groups in fewer than 10 percent of cases, based on a partial database of African DNA samples. Broader or more probabilistic ancestries are still possible, however. An individual’s genes are a link to the past that stretches across any break in family name or birthplace through the generations....

Radiation levels within and around the United States’ only deep-underground nuclear waste facility continue to drop, nearly two weeks after a mysterious leak triggered alarms and shut down the facility, according to data released this week by the US Department of Energy and an independent air-monitoring group. The sharp spike and subsequent decline in radiation are suggestive of a single release of contamination on 14 February at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico....

A group of prominent Republicans released a “conservative” plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions today, arguing that replacing Obama-era policies with a carbon-tax-and-dividend system would be a politically feasible way to fight off the worst effects of climate change. The plan, released by the Climate Leadership Council in a report titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” would tax carbon beginning at $40 per ton. The price would then rise each year to help push emissions down....

For example, interstellar travel. However, NASA itself has said the idea is worth pursuit and has teamed with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to sponsor the 100 Year Starship project to spur scientists to look into it. Jack McDevitt, author of the Nebula award-winning “Seeker” and the upcoming “The Cassandra Project” (Ace, Nov. 6), agrees with Robinson that traveling to other stars is farfetched. “Ditto time travel,” he added in an email to SPACE....

In this era of Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone, it is easy to take for granted our ability to connect to the world. Yet communication is most critical precisely at those times when the communications infrastructure is lost. In Haiti, for example, satellite phones provided by aid agencies were the primary method of communication for days following the tragic earthquake earlier this year. But even ordinary events such as a power outage could cripple the cell phone infrastructure, turning our primary emergency contact devices into glowing paperweights....

By sunrise on a warm December morning, Janila Shulu’s team are out in the dirt roads and alleyways of Ungwan Rimi, a poor neighborhood in a predominantly Muslim section of Kaduna city in northern Nigeria. Three female health workers, accompanied by a community leader, dart from house to house, squeezing a few drops of polio vaccine into the mouths of all the young children they can find, even those who pass by on the street....

Monkeypox is spreading: there have been more than 3,000 confirmed cases of this virus in over 40 countries, and the actual number is likely much higher. Although the monkeypox virus is not normally as contagious or transmissible as coronavirus, this peculiar spread of cases worldwide is worrisome, because there are still so many unknowns. I had a déjà vu while listening to the WHO’s monkeypox briefing on the occasion of the 75th World Health Assembly in May 2022....

Although many neuroscientists are trying to figure out how the brain works, Mark Changizi is bent on determining why it works that way. In the past, the assistant professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has demonstrated that the shapes of letters in 100 writing systems reflect common ones seen in nature: Take the letter “A”—it looks like a mountain, he says. And “Y” might remind one of a tree with branches....

Most people on this planet blithely assume, largely without any valid scientific rationale, that humans are special creatures, distinct from other animals. Curiously, the scientists best qualified to evaluate this claim have often appeared reticent to acknowledge the uniqueness of Homo sapiens, perhaps for fear of reinforcing the idea of human exceptionalism put forward in religious doctrines. Yet hard scientific data have been amassed across fields ranging from ecology to cognitive psychology affirming that humans truly are a remarkable species....

For more than 12,000 years, the adolescent girl’s bones lay deep in a Mexican cave. Now analysis of her skeleton is revealing details of her harsh existence in the early Americas—which probably included pregnancy and childbirth before death at a young age. The bones show that the girl, whom researchers nicknamed Naia, is likely to have travelled long distances on foot, but didn’t carry much on her journeys. The skeleton also reveals that Naia experienced severe and repeated nutritional stress that scarred her bones and teeth, according to results presented on March 30 at the meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada....

On the day the devastating tornado hit Moore, Okla., Robert Marshall sat glued to the news, watching images of the deadly twister on CNN while he also monitored it on his computer. Marshall, the energetic CEO of Earth Networks, a company that owns and operates an enormous network of weather sensors, was looking for one thing in particular: lightning. But he didn’t see it. “These tornadoes from a couple weeks ago were probably the most videotaped tornadoes in history....

The ill comes in many insidious forms. One of the malign manifestations of the new technology is for-profit online charter schools, sometimes called virtual academies. These K–12 schools recruit heavily and spend many millions of taxpayer dollars on advertising. They typically collect state tuition for each student, which is removed from the local public schools’ budget. They claim to offer customized, personalized education, but that’s just rhetoric. They have high dropout rates, low test scores and low graduation rates....

Call it the latest Ebola complication. The epidemic that already killed almost 10,000 people in west Africa also upended daily life and scuttled plans to vaccinate thousands of kids against preventable diseases. As a result, an additional 100,000 children may have been left vulnerable to measles, according to new projections. If those inoculation gaps are not addressed, measles could deliver a death toll rivaling the Ebola epidemic itself, warns a new study published today in Science....