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The U.S. currently has the most confirmed COVID-19 infections of any country, with more than 203,000 cases as of Wednesday. New York City has emerged as the outbreak’s newest focal point, with more than 44,900 people testing positive as of that time. And major outbreaks are underway in cities such as Seattle and New Orleans. But state-level data may be hiding hotspots in less populous areas. Now a team from the University of Chicago has mapped confirmed COVID-19 infections per county—and has adjusted for population sizes....

Deborah Reed lived in a tall historic house on a tree-lined street in tony northwest Portland, Ore. In 2003 the author and mother of two boys developed deep muscle pain and profound fatigue, seemingly out of nowhere. “I remember climbing the wood stairs to my bedroom on the third floor,” Reed recalls. “It was agonizing.” Reed would spend entire days in her bed, getting up only for trips to the bathroom....

ENTOMOLOGICAL ETHICS My emotional response to “The Wipeout Gene,” in which Bijal P. Trivedi describes the use of genetic modification to destroy the mosquito species Aedes aegypti, was trepidation. We see A. aegypti as the vector of human diseases, but the global ecological significance of the species is unknown. Also disturbing is the implication that assent obtained during a town hall or village meeting of lay individuals was mean­ingful when substantive understanding of arthropod gene manipulation and its ecological impact is limited among scientists....

Last March, as Texas and Mississippi lifted their coronavirus pandemic mask mandates against the advice of health officials, President Joe Biden accused the governors of those states of “Neandertal thinking.” Biden was right to be concerned about rolling back coronavirus restrictions too soon, but he was wrong to use our evolutionary cousins as the basis for his reprimand. Biden is hardly alone in wielding “Neandertal” as a pejorative term. In popular culture, it is common to make fun of Neandertals, pointing to their primitive physical features, their backward ways, their overall stupidity....

In late January a Brobdingnagian battle erupted over a Lilliputian water dweller. Okay, the battle wasn’t really all that huge. And we’re not talking about the Benihana shrimp toss case, a lawsuit that started in January. That ballyhoo was big and concerned a chef who flung sizzling shrimp into the mouths of his patrons. Hey, it’s not just dinner, it’s a show. Anyway, one guy dodged the shrimp, hurt his neck, went into a general health decline and eventually died....

Former alcoholics have a tough time resisting the urge to drink in two particularly trying situations. Analysis of what is happening in their heads under these circumstances is greatly improving neurobiologists understanding of how chronic alcohol use changes the brain. And their findings suggest measures that could help people abstain. The following case illustrates one of the most tempting situations. Hank had been dry for several weeks thanks to a radical withdrawal program, but a simple walk past Petes Tavern on any given night almost erased his will to abstain....

Alfred Wegener’s idea of continental drift wandered in the wilderness for the first few decades after he wrote about it in his 1915 book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Although some geologists marshaled further evidence for the theory, most remained skeptical because no plausible mechanism seemed capable of sending huge landmasses plowing through the ocean crust on long journeys across the surface of the earth. The modern concept of moving tectonic plates emerged in 1962, proposed by Harry H....

The notion of “the aesthetic” is a concept from the philosophy of art of the 18th century according to which the perception of beauty occurs by means of a special process distinct from the appraisal of ordinary objects. Hence, our appreciation of a sublime painting is presumed to be cognitively distinct from our appreciation of, say, an apple. The field of “neuroaesthetics” has adopted this distinction between art and non-art objects by seeking to identify brain areas that specifically mediate the aesthetic appreciation of artworks....

Though the coronavirus pandemic has been a defining story of 2020, the year has been a notable one on the climate front as well. Developments have ranged from an agonizing array of warming-fueled disasters that impacted the lives and livelihoods of millions around the world, to signs that some countries (including China and members of the European Union) are making efforts to move forward on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving this warming....

Don’t look down! Checking your phone may take just a few seconds, but that’s enough to ruin your train of thought, according to new research showing that a three-second distraction can double the number of mistakes people make. Given how commonly such distractions occur in modern life, the findings, published Jan. 7 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, could have broad implications for how people work. Multitasking myth Past studies have shown that switching between many different tasks makes people worse at all of them....

It was a winter of record snowfall two years ago when Donald Trump’s reported running mate made a daring comment about climate change. “We haven’t seen a lot of warming lately,” Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) said during a February interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC. It turns out that same year, 2014, would go down as the warmest since records began in 1880. The status was short-lived. The following year would supplant it as having the highest average temperature in the instrumental record, according to NASA....

States have tried with limited success to get covid vaccines to people of color, who have been disproportionately killed and hospitalized by the virus. Starting Thursday, Vermont explicitly gave Black adults and people from other minority communities priority status for vaccinations. It follows Montana, which in January announced that Native Americans and other people of color, because they are at higher risk of complications from covid-19, would be allowed to receive the vaccine....

A powerful blast of cosmic rays—carrying the energy of 167 megatons of TNT—entered Earth from a star 1,200 years ago and filled the remote reaches of the Earth with beryllium, carbon isotopes and other elements. The cosmic event left its imprint in tree rings and ice cores, which are natural history books for times before the human era. And using it, scientists have resolved a long-standing argument on how the planet responds to volcanic eruptions....

September 1966 Artificial Intelligence “In order for a program to improve itself substantially it would have to have at least a rudimentary understanding of its own problem-solving process and some ability to recognize an improvement when it found one. There is no inherent reason why this should be impossible for a machine. Given a model of its own workings, it could use its problem-solving power to work on the problem of self-improvement....

This story is a supplement to the feature “No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving the Soil by Parking Their Plows” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. The roots of both no-till and tillage-based farming methods run deep, but eventually the latter approach predominated, thanks to the evolution of the plow. Over the past few decades, however, advances in herbicides and machinery have made no-till practical on a commercial scale....

For years cities have encouraged residents to install green roofs—gardens that turn barren tar and asphalt roofs into verdant oases. The added foliage helps to keep buildings cool in the summertime and warm in the winter; it can also ease sewers by absorbing rainfall. But not just the hardscape benefits from these lush areas—so do some urban dwellers: bats. “The general population of New York City, they see birds; they see insects....

Humanity just planted its flag on the far side of the moon. China’s robotic Chang’e 4 mission touched down on the floor of the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Kármán Crater Wednesday night (Jan. 2), pulling off the first-ever soft landing on the mysterious lunar far side. Chang’e 4 will perform a variety of science work over the coming months, potentially helping scientists better understand the structure, formation and evolution of Earth’s natural satellite....

East often meets West and vice versa, but did North frequently meet South when it comes to the history of people and technological innovations migrating across the continents? New genetic analysis suggests the way that continents are oriented may indeed have played a key role in our cultural interactions over time. For decades scientists have suggested that the east-west orientation of Eurasia helped spread ancient culture and technological innovations such as agriculture and writing more rapidly than occurred in the oppositely oriented Americas, with biologist and ecologist Jared Diamond perhaps most famously making this case in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Gun, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W....

The only factor separating someone from an eating disorder may be a healthy dollop of self-delusion. Psychologists have tried to identify whether individuals with eating problems have distorted perceptions or feelings about their bodies, but the findings have been unconvincing. Researchers from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands recently tried a different approach. First they asked individuals from two groups to rate their own attractiveness. One group had symptoms of eating disorders....

Future sea levels depend on how much and how quickly the massive ice sheet covering Greenland melts. Satellite-based measurements have revealed that Greenland’s glaciers are melting and on the move—and the ice sheet has lost some 36 billion metric tons of ice each year in recent years from its northwestern flank. Thanks to weird weather, nearly the entire ice-covered surface of the world’s largest island melted for a period this year....