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Each of us starts life with a particular set of genes, 20,000 to 25,000 of them. Now scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence that pollutants and chemicals might be altering those genes—not by mutating them, but by sending subtle signals that silence them or switch them on at the wrong times. Last week, several dozen researchers and experts convened by the National Academies tackled this complicated topic, called epigenetics, at a two-day workshop in Washington, D....

Each year, the US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars stockpiling countermeasures for potential biological, chemical and radiological warfare agents. For ethical reasons, many of these treatments have never been tested in humans. Now, the US military and civilian science agencies are supporting the development of the next best thing for tests: miniature human organs on plastic chips. “It’s unethical to expose humans to the kind of radiation that you’d see in a disaster like Fukushima, but you need to be prepared,” says Donald Ingber, a bioengineer at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute in Boston, Massachusetts....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When police in London recently trialled a new facial recognition system, they made a worrying and embarrassing mistake. At the Notting Hill Carnival, the technology made roughly 35 false matches between known suspects and members of the crowd, with one person “erroneously” arrested. Camera-based visual surveillance systems were supposed to deliver a safer and more secure society....

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it will not comply with a request from President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department transition team for the names of people who have worked on climate change and the professional society memberships of lab workers. The response from the Energy Department could signal a rocky transition for the president-elect’s energy team and potential friction between the new leadership and the staffers who remain in place....

That’s the main finding of a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, which looked at the rate of temperature change over 40-year periods. The new research also shows that the Arctic, North America and Europe will be the first regions to transition to a new climate, underscoring the urgent need for adaptation planning. “Essentially the world is entering a new regime where what is normal is going to continue to change and it’s changing at a rate than natural processes might not be able to keep up with,” Steven Smith, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said....

US lawmakers have taken a significant step towards averting a global crisis in helium supply, thanks to a bill passed by the House of Representatives on 26 April. If it passes the Senate and becomes law, the bill would delay the imminent closure of the world’s only strategic helium reserve. It would also increase the price of the gas from the reserve, so helium-dependent researchers and industry could still face ballooning costs....

Every winter the allure of skiing on deep, untracked mountain snow attracts skiers to backcountry areas. Yet the thrill of skiing in an off-the-beaten-path bowl with waist-deep powder comes with a risk of being caught in a dangerous, potentially life-threatening avalanche. Most experienced skiers pay close attention to avalanche safety and carry specialized equipment such as avalanche beacons, shovels and probes that can help in location and rescue. This season a new device has been added to the tool kit: an “avalanche air bag” equipped with inflatable bladders that fill instantly in the event of a snowpack slide....

Dozens of nearly complete skeletons of prehistoric marine reptiles have been uncovered near a melting glacier in southern Chile. Scientists found 46 specimens from four different species of extinct ichthyosaurs. These creatures, whose Greek name means “fish lizards,” were a group of large, fast-swimming marine reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era, about 245 million to 90 million years ago. The newly discovered skeletons are from both embryos and adults. The creatures, likely killed during a series of catastrophic mudslides, were preserved in deep-sea sediments that were later exposed by the melting glacier, the researchers said in the study, published May 22 in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin....

Numerous Readers responded to “Mindful of Symbols,” by Judy S. DeLoache, in the August issue, which described the difficulties children encounter as they learn to think symbolically. Geoff Baldwin of Portola Valley, Calif., recalled his own childhood experience: “I saw drawings of airplanes and thought I could cut them out to get small model planes. I remember being baffled and frustrated when they did not pop into three dimensions.” Even curiouser is when adults respond to symbols rather than what they represent: an illustration of an orchestra in “Is the Universe Out of Tune?...

Astronomers have captured the strongest evidence yet that the growth of high-mass stars occurs by the rapid absorption of hot gas and not by the collision of several smaller stars. Researchers observed a young high-mass star that seems to be pulling in a rotating disk of gas and spraying some of that gas outward in jets, as modeling predicts. Researchers believe that low-mass stars such as the sun start to grow by dragging gas from their surroundings around them in a ball, which later flattens into a disk....

Image: Ethereal views of Titanic’s bow (modeled) offer a comprehensiveness of detail never seen before. CREDIT: COPYRIGHT © 2012 RMS Titanic, Inc.; Modeling by Stefan Fichtel, ixtract GmbH based on photomosaics produced by the Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Just in time for the 100th anniversary of the most storied maritime disaster in history, National Geographic magazine and a team of researchers have unveiled new images of the Titanic, revealing unrestricted views of the wreck for the first time ever....

President Trump’s nominee to lead the premier science office at the Interior Department sidestepped a question yesterday about whether climate change is a core mission of the U.S. Geological Survey. Speaking with reporters after a Senate hearing, James Reilly II said he “couldn’t address” whether the office’s climate research fits into its traditional mandate. Reilly told senators that one of his priorities if confirmed would be identifying the core mission of USGS and whether it’s working on issues outside those boundaries....

The future of an effort to monitor earthquakes from within the infamous San Andreas fault is on shaky ground. On April 14, the National Science Foundation (NSF) said that it will stop soliciting proposals for new experiments at the partially completed San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD), and may move to “mothball” the facility, located in Parkfield, Calif., within the year. The $25-million project aimed to achieve two firsts: to sample rocks from deep inside an active fault, and to install pressure sensors, thermometers and seismometers within a roughly 3-kilometre-deep borehole to catch a small earthquake in action....

DISCOVERING US Allen L. Edwards Psychology Lecture Series University of Washington Free podcasts available at www.uwtv.org The question of what makes us us—what determines the choices we make, the world we see and the way we speak—is arguably one of psychology’s greatest and most compelling mysteries. It is also a topic rife with groundbreaking research. And every year the University of Washington invites a handful of the world’s leading psychologists to deliver lectures on the newest advances in behavioral research....

Artificial tides oscillate downstream where the canyon gorge is steep and narrow for more than 200 miles, sloughing the sandstone banks and sluicing fish out of eddies. These flows are calculated and controlled at all times by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, sometimes doubling in volume as the water moves downstream. Raft guides who lead trips down the Colorado know to stake their boats high and leave lots of rope for them to float, so that they do not get stranded in the morning as the levels go down overnight....

The house-sized rock that exploded spectacularly in the skies near Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February may have been a member of a gang of asteroids that still poses a threat to Earth, a new study says. The evidence is circumstantial, but future observations could help to settle the question. On 15 February, an 11,000-ton space rock slammed into the atmosphere above Russia, producing the most powerful impact since the Tunguska explosion in 1908 — which may also have been caused by an asteroid — and generating a shock wave that damaged buildings and injured more than 1,000 people....

Sight begins with light. Look around and everything you perceive is the result of particles of light bouncing off surfaces and traveling to your eyes. For millennia visual artists have played tricks with light and shadow to mimic, capture and occasionally subvert the same rules that let you take in the world. Perceptual scientists V.S. Ramachandran and Chaipat Chunharas at the University of California, San Diego, have developed dozens of demonstrations to identify and explore these rules....

Dear EarthTalk: Are there any health hazards associated with the use of the new silicone bake ware and cooking utensils? I have found information associated with the hazards/benefits of Teflon and other cookware but nothing on the use of silicone. —Jean McCarthy, Sebastian, Fla. With all the negative press about Teflon and about metals leaching out of pots and pans, consumers are on the lookout for cookware that’s easy-to-clean and doesn’t pose health concerns....

As Diet Coke and its sweetener aspartame wrap up 40 years or so on American store shelves, the decades-long controversy around the safety of sugar substitutes continues. Ever since diet drinks hit the stores in the 1950s, rumors have swirled that such sweeteners—which today also include saccharin, sucralose and stevia—do more than satisfy a sweet tooth without the calories of sugar. But whether that “more” exists hasn’t been easy to establish....

“The division of labor, though it may bring to perfection the production of a country up to a certain point, is most deleterious in its effects upon the producers. To make pins to the best advantage, it may answer for a time to divide the operation into 20 parts. Let each man concentrate the whole of his attention on the one simple work, for instance, of learning to make pin heads, and on this ever let his time be consumed....