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If you are healthy, living at home, and take calcium and vitamin D supplements to prevent broken bones or cancer, you may want to reconsider, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). The group’s new draft recommendations, published online on June 12, add more fervor to the ongoing debate about the benefits and risks associated with these popular supplements. The USPSTF based its recommendations on a meta-analysis of 136 clinical trials, observational studies and a systematic review evaluating the effects of supplementation on fracture and cancer risk....

“Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.” —Steve Jobs Every year, cancer kills approximately 10 million people worldwide. Of those who die, two thirds do so because they were diagnosed with advanced disease. A new paradigm in the approach to cancer is overdue. COVID-19 has already altered conversations and expectations within the medical community and is forcing a rethinking of many public health issues....

As the world continues to fight COVID-19, the menace of infectious disease has never been more apparent. The next devastating pandemic could strike plants. Agricultural pathogens are evolving and spreading at a troubling rate—and the COVID pandemic offers important lessons for how we should prepare for them. Plant diseases can be catastrophic. One of the worst was Panama disease, which destroyed banana plantations in Central and South America in the 1950s, devastating a critical food source and industry....

Hans Robinson, assistant professor of physics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, explains. It is easy to think of computation as something abstract that takes place in the realm of ideas, rather than in the physical world. After all, a computer program makes reference to the laws of mathematics, not to the laws of physics. But in the final analysis, any actual computation must be done by a physical system, exploiting the laws of physics to manipulate information that is represented by the state of some device, such as the directions of magnetization at some particular spots on a hard drive or the conductivity of a specific set of transistors inside a computer’s memory chip....

By Jatindra Dash BHUBANESWAR India (Reuters) - Ten women died and 14 were in a serious condition after botched operations at a government mass sterilization “camp” in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, officials said on Tuesday. The women fell ill on Monday, two days after surgery at a so-called family planning camp at a village. Such camps are held regularly in Chhattisgarh and other Indian states as part of a long-running effort to control India’s booming population....

THESE DAYS MOST SWISS CHEESE consumed in the U.S. is made in Ohio, but our palettes—and ham sandwiches—ultimately have that tiny European country to thank. More specifically, the cheese, which only Americans refer to by its generic name, owes much of its success to the Alpine climate and terrain. Swiss cheese is so easy to slice and keeps for such long periods because Swiss farmers of yore had so much trouble selling the product during the brutal winter months....

I have been a sports lover for as long as I can remember. As a young kid, I played soccer, baseball and basketball. When I was three years old, my dad started taking me to the Philadelphia Eagles home games, and I fell in love with the competitiveness of football. Wrapped up as I was in other sports, I started playing football only in the seventh grade, when I decided to join my middle school team....

Graphic and research by Paul Chodas, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Researchers have identified more than 2,300 asteroids and comets that are big enough to cause considerable damage on Earth and could possibly hit us. These “potentially hazardous objects” look ominous on the flat plot here, but because they travel in three-dimensional orbits, the perfect timing needed to intersect Earth makes the likelihood of collision remote. The symbol sizes shown also deceive; each object is many thousands of times as small as Earth....

STOCKTON, N.J.— A huge meteorite strike may have helped the dinosaurs rise as well as fall. That’s what a small crew of mud-spattered researchers who drilled down hundreds of feet in New Jersey this summer wanted to discover. Roughly 200 million years ago, at least half the species on Earth died off over the course of about 100,000 years, both on land and in sea. This mass extinction, at the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods and one of five known such events in Earth’s geologic history, set the stage for dinosaurs to rise to prominence and dominate the planet’s terrestrial life for the next 135 million years....

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Investigations into foodborne illness are being radically transformed by whole genome sequencing, which federal officials say is enabling them to identify the source of an outbreak far more quickly and prevent additional cases. Previously, samples from sick patients were sent to state and federal labs, where disease detectives ran tests to see if the infections were caused by the same bug. When enough matches emerged, typically a dozen or so, epidemiologists interviewed sick people, looking for a common food that was causing the outbreak....

The first meteor shower of 2013 will kick off the year’s night sky events this week, giving stargazers a chance to ring in the New Year with a celestial fireworks display. The Quadrantid meteor shower is an annual meteor shower every January. While this year’s “shooting star” show is not expected to outshine some of the more spectacular meteor showers of 2012, it may give stargazers with clear, dark skies a great start to the New Year....

A supermassive black hole heftier than 1 billion suns has been ejected from the core of its galaxy by gravitational waves, a new study suggests. The monster black hole has already zoomed 35,000 light-years away from its galaxy’s center, farther than Earth and its sun are from the core of our own Milky Way. And the behemoth is currently traveling outward at 4.7 million mph (7.6 million km/h)—fast enough for the black hole to escape its galaxy completely in 20 million years, researchers said....

NEW YORK — The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum—the home of the retired space shuttle orbiter Enterprise—reopened December 21 for the first time since Hurricane Sandy left the converted aircraft carrier here in disrepair. After a brief ribbon cutting ceremony with a group of school children from the Bronx, the museum and flight deck, housing the Enterprise, opened to the public after a six-week hiatus. The space shuttle and museum on Manhattan’s west side sustained damage during the late October hurricane, and while the museum isn’t fully operational quite yet, the damage to the space shuttle was minimal, however dramatic looking, officials said....

For a year now, as the world tried to figure out how to stop the COVID pandemic, many people have been consumed by a different question: How did it start? In an interview with CNN that aired on March 28, a prominent scientist speculated, without evidence, that the origin was when the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak was first noticed. Virologist Robert Redfield, a former director of the U....

Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Now a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred. Black Lives Matter (BLM) began when Oakland, Calif.–based activist Alicia Garza posted a message of protest on Facebook after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer who followed and fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla....

On blind dates, we search for others that resemble us, at least at some level. This is true in our personal life but even more so on the galactic dating scene, where we have been seeking a companion civilization for a while without success. While developing our own radio and laser communication over the past seven decades, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) focused on radio or laser signals from outer space—two kinds of electromagnetic “messenger” that astronomers use to study the cosmos....

Key Concepts Chemistry Chemical reactions States of matter Combustion Introduction There are many occasions to light candles. Have you ever looked closely at the flame? Which part of the candle is actually burning? Can you tell? Is it the wick, the solid wax, the liquid wax or something else? In this activity you will light some candles to find out—no special occasion required! Background Whether they are on a birthday cake or dinner table or menorah, most candles we use today are wax-dipped candles....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In September 2014, Christa Schleper embarked on an unusual hunting expedition in Slovenia. Instead of seeking the standard quarry of deer or wild boar, Schleper was in search of Lokiarchaeota, or Loki, a newly discovered group of organisms first identified near deep-sea vents off the coast of Norway. The simple, single-celled creatures have captured scientists’ interest because they are unlike any other organism known to science....

A sleepy driver on a dark road hears a loud “thump!” and later finds a speck of blood on the front bumper. Or police spot a tiny but suspicious bloodstain at a crime scene. Quickly determining whether such traces come from humans or animals is crucial, but the necessary tests can be time-consuming—and may destroy valuable evidence. Researchers say a new technique could help. To develop a rapid, nondestructive way to identify human blood, State University of New York at Albany forensic chemists Igor Lednev and Ewelina Mistek-Morabito combined spectroscopy and statistics....

If you have a stomachache, you can take magnesium oxide to feel better. But if you have a headache because your barge full of MgO got wet at a terminal in Arkansas, better to call Damon Carson, owner of Repurposed Materials, and see if he’ll take it off your hands. Carson collects bulk materials that are obsolete, off-spec, out of date, surplus, or once-used. He also collects information about how those products can be used in a different industry....