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If the United States lost its shield of natural coastal defenses, about twice as many Americans would be exposed to dangerous storm surges and other hurricane threats, according to new research. Protective buffers like mangroves, wetlands and oyster beds currently buffer about 67 percent of the nation’s seashores from ocean forces like wind and waves. If they disappear, more than a million additional people and billions of dollars in property value will be vulnerable to damage, says a paper published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change....

In 1949, at the height of his career, Rustin McIntosh, director of pediatrics at Columbia University’s Babies Hospital, submitted his letter of resignation. Scott Baird, who wrote a biography on pathologist Dorothy Andersen, takes us back to this pivotal moment, which occurred at the dawn of pediatric pathology in the U.S. Through archival resources, Baird explores the institutional tensions that led to this abrupt resignation. At the eye of the storm is a character we’ve come to know well, perhaps the most important person working in pediatric pathology at the time: Andersen....

New satellite imagery shows the monster winter storm now battering the northeastern United States with snow as it gathered strength for what may be an epic snowfall. The huge storm’s claws are definitely out in the photos, which were captured from Saturday through Monday (Jan. 24 to Jan. 26) by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration’s (NOAA) GOES-East spacecraft and combined into a new movie that shows the storm’s development and movement....

By flattening a droplet of water between two sheets of graphene, researchers have created a new form of ice. Just a few molecules thick, its atoms are locked in a square grid pattern. The discovery of ‘square ice’ highlights another remarkable property of graphene, which consists of flat, atom-thick sheets of carbon. Not only are graphene sheets remarkably stiff, strong and conductive, but they can also exert immense pressure on molecules trapped between them....

By Ronnie Cohen (Reuters Health) - Physicians wrote significantly fewer prescriptions for painkillers and other medications for elderly and disabled patients who had legal access to medical marijuana, a new study finds. In fact, Medicare saved more than $165 million in 2013 on prescription drugs in the District of Columbia and 17 states that allowed cannabis to be used as medicine, researchers calculated. If every state in the nation legalized medical marijuana, the study forecast that the federal program would save more than $468 million a year on pharmaceuticals for disabled Americans and those 65 and older....

The United States and the Soviet Union pushed each other to new heights during the Cold War space race, and now something similar appears to be unfolding across Asia. In the past two months, both North Korea and South Korea successfully launched satellites to orbit for the first time, and Iran claimed it sent a monkey to suborbital space and retrieved the animal unharmed. Such activities are not isolated incidents, but rather highlight a growing trend, experts say....

1531 DIVING BELL DEBUTS Treasure hunters don crude diving bells to scour the bottom of a lake near Rome for two bejeweled ships built for Roman emperor Caligula. The barrel-shaped bell is worn over the neck and shoulders, trapping enough air for divers to search for up to an hour. 1620 FIRST SUBMARINE BUILT A dozen men power the world’s first submarine with oars protruding through holes in the sides of the vessel that are sealed with leather....

The popular perception of creative thinkers and artists is that they often also have mental disorders—the likes of Vincent van Gogh or Sylvia Plath suggest that creativity and madness go hand in hand. Past research has tentatively confirmed a correlation; scientific surveys have found that highly creative people are more likely to have mental illness in their family, indicating a genetic link. Now a study from Sweden is the first to suggest a biological mechanism: highly creative healthy people and people with schizophrenia have certain brain chemistry features in common....

It’s hard to keep oxygen molecules around, despite the fact that it’s the third-most abundant element in the universe, forged in the superhot, superdense core of stars. That’s because oxygen wants to react; it can form compounds with nearly every other element on the periodic table. So how did Earth end up with an atmosphere made up of roughly 21 percent of the stuff? The answer is tiny organisms known as cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae....

By Steve Holland and Valerie Volcovici Advisers to President Donald Trump will meet on Tuesday to discuss whether to recommend that he withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a White House official said on Monday. The accord, agreed on by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015, aims to limit planetary warming in part by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Under the pact, the United States committed to reducing its emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025....

Razi Nalim has lived in the United States for 30 years. An engineer at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, he often travels around the world to recruit science and engineering students to his university. But last week, on the cusp of a recruitment trip to India, he hesitated when asked whether he would still encourage foreign, Muslim students to work or study in the United States. “I would still say the opportunity for doing cutting-edge science here is unmatched,” said Nalim, who is Muslim....

Between 2008 and 2013, China’s fledgling solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80 percent, a stunning achievement in a fiercely competitive high-tech market. China had leapfrogged from nursing a tiny, rural-oriented solar program in the 1990s to become the globe’s leader in what may soon be the world’s largest renewable energy source. “They fundamentally changed the economics of solar all over the world,” said Amit Ronen, director of the Solar Institute of George Washington University, one of many scholars following the intense competition in the emerging $100 billion industry that supports the world’s growing solar energy demands....

Last fall economist Carl Benedikt Frey and information engineer Michael A. Osborne, both at the University of Oxford, published a study estimating the probability that 702 occupations would soon be computerized out of existence. Their findings were startling. Advances in data mining, machine vision, artificial intelligence and other technologies could, they argued, put 47 percent of American jobs at high risk of being automated in the years ahead. Loan officers, tax preparers, cashiers, locomotive engineers, paralegals, roofers, taxi drivers and even animal breeders are all in danger of going the way of the switchboard operator....

By Nerijus Adomaitis OSLO (Reuters) - Wind power is blowing gas and coal-fired turbines out of business in the Nordic countries, and the effects will be felt across the Baltic region as the renewable glut erodes utility margins for thermal power stations. Fossil power plants in Finland and Denmark act as swing-producers, helping to meet demand when hydropower production in Norway and Sweden falls due to dry weather. The arrival of wind power on a large scale has made this role less relevant and has pushed electricity prices down, eroding profitability of fossil power stations....

“Flesh eating” bacteria that live in the ocean may be spreading to previously unaffected beach waters thanks to climate change, according to a new report. The report authors described five cases of severe flesh-eating bacterial infections in people who were exposed to water or seafood from the Delaware Bay, which sits between Delaware and New Jersey. Such infections have historically been rare in the Delaware Bay, as the bacterium responsible for the disease, called Vibrio vulnificus, prefers warmer waters, such as those in the Gulf of Mexico....

Apple’s Spotify rival is finally here. Dubbed Apple Music, this new streaming service is an all-in-one destination that combines iTunes’ vast library with live radio and dedicated artist hubs. It’s launching on June 30 on iOS, Apple TV and desktop for $9.99 monthly, or $14.99 per month for a family plan. An Android version will be coming later this fall. The new program was introduced at WWDC by industry veteran and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine, who called the music industry a “fragmented mess” that requires fans to jump between apps such as Twitter, Spotify and YouTube to fully keep up with an artist....

The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is—at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted—a viral internet survey that drew two thirds of a million respondents—researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates....

(Reuters) - Gay men will be able to donate blood one year after their last sexual contact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday, under a proposal that will be introduced early next year to end a ban that has been in place since 1983. Scientific evidence shows the move will not create risks for the nation’s blood supply, the FDA said. The policy change is expected to boost the supply of donated blood by hundreds of thousands of pints per year....

Just before midnight at the close of a hot summer day in 1916, a natural gas pocket exploded 120 feet beneath the waves of Lake Erie. It happened during work on Cleveland’s newest waterworks tunnel, a 10-foot-wide underwater artery designed to pull in water from about five miles out, beyond the city’s polluted shoreline. The blast left twisted conduit pipes littering the tunnel floor and tore up railroad tracks inside the corridor, with noxious smoke curling off the rubble....

Key concepts Chemistry Water Fluids Surface tension Introduction Have you ever wondered what makes a bubble form? The secret to making bubbles is surface tension. Adding soap (such as the kind you use to wash dishes in the sink) to water changes the surface tension of that water, and this creates a great solution to make bubbles from. If you try to make bubbles using normal water, you will quickly see that it doesn’t work very well....