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Poorer people in the U.S. tend to have less access to nutritious foods than the wealthy. Measuring the dimensions of the problem can be tricky because diet research often depends on inaccurate surveys and requires contacting hundreds, if not thousands, of people A study published on August 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA reports on an unorthodox approach to more easily assess how meat and plant consumption varies among communities of differing socioeconomic status—and, potentially, how dietary patterns change over time....

The energy storage industry is shattering records for battery deployments, underscoring its growing role in decarbonizing the economy. In the last three months of 2020, nearly 2.2 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy storage systems were put into operation, according to the energy data firm Wood Mackenzie. That’s an increase of 182% from the previous record-setting quarter. The blockbuster fourth quarter capped a year that saw a total of 3.5 GWh installed—more than the 3....

By Jonathan Kaminsky OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) - Washington state authorities have euthanized scores of steroid-filled roosters after raiding a farm and arresting a man on suspicion of raising the birds for cockfighting, prosecutors said on Tuesday. Victor Hugo Gallegos Chavez, 35, the lone defendant in the case, was arrested at his home in Rochester, about 70 miles southwest of Seattle by authorities acting on a search warrant on Monday. Court documents filed by prosecutors cite Chavez and others as saying he sold the roosters to fight in Mexico, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere....

We may be a big step closer to cracking one of the universe’s biggest and most fundamental mysteries. Scientists think that, when the universe was born nearly 14 billion years ago, it contained equal amounts of matter and its bizarro counterpart, antimatter. Antimatter particles have the same mass as their “normal” cousins but opposite electrical charges. Perhaps the most famous such duo is the electron (normal, negatively charged) and the positron (antimatter, positively charged)....

When will all the ice in the Arctic be gone? This is a question often asked of sea-ice researchers by the media, the general public and policy makers—and no wonder. Several recent reports have detailed the accelerated loss of summer sea-ice cover in the Arctic. In addition, the observed ice loss is generally happening faster than climate models have forecasted. The question gets even more complicated because we see a large spread in climate model simulations, with ice-free September conditions already happening in 2020 in some simulations but not until well beyond 2100 in others....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The Pacific Northwest is known for many things—its beer, its music, its mythical large-footed creatures. Most people don’t associate it with earthquakes, but they should. It’s home to the Cascadia megathrust fault that runs 600 miles from Northern California up to Vancouver Island in Canada, spanning several major metropolitan areas including Seattle and Portland, Oregon....

In 1993, the year I began my career in video games, the public face of the industry was Mortal Kombat. In this martial-arts fighting game, two players would pummel each other until one opponent was sufficiently stunned—and then deliver a “Fatality” move. One character could grab his opponent’s head and then rip his spinal cord out of his still standing body. Not surprisingly, parents, teachers and politicians were horrified. Congress held hearings about the game and its influence on youth....

John James Audubon knew birds. As part of what he called his “frenzy” for avians, the French-American naturalist attempted to survey and document in drawings all the native bird species of North America. And it is Audubon who in 1833 identified the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, as the most numerous bird on the continent, highlighting the point by describing a mile-wide flock of migrating pigeons that passed over his head and blocked the sun for three straight days....

Steven Pinker irks many of his fellow intellectuals. I’ve knocked him myself for his views on postmodernism and the origins of war, and he’s knocked me back. I am nonetheless a longtime admirer of the psychology professor turned megapundit, who packages big ideas and voluminous research in lucid, lively prose. Moreover, although he can be combative on the page, in person he’s a nice guy, and that matters to me. And so, on a gloomy day just before Christmas, when I was casting about for someone to give my school a pep talk, Pinker immediately came to mind....

The buzzing. The whirring. The high-pitched ringing. Refrigerators could drive a person a bit mad, and they do: more than half of people who have a fridge are annoyed by its racket, according to a study by Korean engineers presented in 2006. One particularly irksome noise is unique to no-frost fridges: a popping sound that bursts into the room in spats when the home appliance’s compressor revs up. Researchers were uncertain as to the cause of these sounds, so mechanical engineers from MEF University and Istanbul Technical University, both in Turkey, launched a study to zero in on the audibles’ origins....

New evidence suggests that frozen water lurks in the dusty, pitted surface of our solar system’s second most-massive asteroid. The discovery at Vesta is helping researchers understand how a once-molten protoplanet—a category that includes Earth’s embryo—could gather water early in its history as it cooled and spun through space. Vesta’s regolith, or rocky soil, is estimated to hold only 5 percent water by weight, however; hardly enough to get future astronauts wet or even offer them much of a drink....

At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement. Male-biased evolutionary scenarios–Man the Hunter, Man the Toolmaker and so on–are being challenged by the discovery that females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of one of our nearest relatives. In the past two decades many strands of knowledge have come together concerning a relatively unknown ape with an unorthodox repertoire of behavior: the bonobo....

Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years. Such floods are likely caused by atmospheric rivers: narrow bands of water vapor about a mile above the ocean that extend for thousands of kilometers. The atmospheric river storms featured in a January 2013 article in Scientific American that I co-wrote with Michael Dettinger, The Coming Megafloods, are responsible for most of the largest historical floods in many western states....

On a rainy morning in April, Curtis Rogers woke up and scrolled through e-mails on his phone—pausing on one from a user of his free ancestry-searching Web site, GEDmatch. The message stunned him. It said law enforcement officials had used his site to help find the Golden State Killer. Rogers immediately told his wife, then started sifting through the e-mail deluge that soon followed. “I had seen news reports the day before saying that this guy had been caught using genealogy DNA,” Rogers says....

Several years ago biochemists studying marine ecosystems noticed something unusual: a sponge thriving in the middle of a coral reef that was dying from a bacterial infection. The researchers identified a substance made by the sponge that defended it from harmful microbes and realized it was a natural antibacterial molecule called ageliferin. Ageliferin can break down the formation of a protective biofilm coating that bacteria use to shield themselves from threats, including antibiotic drugs....

About four months ago, in December 2019, the interstellar comet known as 2I/Borisov made its closest approach to our sun. After its initial discovery by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov in August 2019, astronomers raced to observe the object—only the second known visitor from another star since the asteroidlike ‘Oumuamua in 2017—before it drifted out of view. But aside from merely watching 2I/Borisov, they were hoping for something else: that the warmth of our sun would crack the comet apart, releasing material from its innards that was scarcely, if at all, altered after forming billions of years ago in an alien star system....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The U.S. Senate voted last week to allow internet service providers to sell data about their customers’ online activities to advertisers. The House of Representatives agreed on Tuesday; President Trump is expected to sign the measure into law. As far back as 1927, American lawmakers sought to balance the needs of the public against the desire of big telecommunications companies to make huge profits off delivering information to Americans nationwide....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Carrie Fisher’s ashes are in an urn designed to look like a Prozac pill. It’s fitting that in death she continues to be both brash and wryly funny about a treatment for depression. The public grief over Carrie Fisher’s death was not only for an actress who played one of the most iconic roles in film history....

The first leg of an ambitious, yearlong Arctic science expedition just ended, and scientists say they’ve already gained new insight into the rapidly changing Arctic—the fastest warming region on Earth. An initial team of researchers from the MOSAiC Expedition—short for Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate—arrived in the port city of Tromsø, Norway, on New Year’s Day after more than three months at sea. Billed as the largest Arctic science mission in history, the expedition launched from the same spot on Sept....

MEXICO In now flooded caves, researchers discovered the oldest known ochre mines in the Americas. Around 12,000 years ago inhabitants of the Yucatán Peninsula extracted the red pigment, possibly for use as an antiseptic and sunscreen or for symbolic purposes such as body painting. ITALY A massive bloom of pink algae, triggered by low snowfall and high spring and summer temperatures, could accelerate the melting of the Presena glacier by causing the ice to absorb more sunlight....