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Puerto Rico lured pharmaceutical and medical device companies to its shores with its attractive tax regime. Now, its climate vulnerability threatens the world’s medical supplies. The Food and Drug Administration is monitoring about 30 critical pharmaceuticals manufactured either solely or primarily on Puerto Rico — including 14 that cannot be substituted by anything else on the market, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told a congressional panel yesterday. The outlook is also risky for manufacturers of 50 critical medical devices, like insulin pumps and pacemakers....

Dr. Melissa D. Young is a clinical pharmacist and Certified Diabetes Educator at the American Association of Diabetes Educators1 who holds a very personal interest in advocating for annual influenza (flu) vaccination. Twelve years ago, her mother passed away after an influenza infection was complicated by bacterial pneumonia. Young’s mother had a pre-existing chronic lung condition, but “she had refused to get a flu vaccine because she mistakenly thought it would give her the flu,” says Young....

FINALIST YEAR: 1994 HIS PROJECT: Making molecules that can be used to create chemicals out of oil and purify water WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Job Rijssenbeek’s Long Island high school, Ward Melville, took a proactive approach to earning its students finalist nods in the Westinghouse (or Intel) Science Talent Search. Its “West Prep” program recruited students in 10th grade, taught them research techniques, and helped them pick a mentor. Students would enter their results in high-profile science fairs and contests, including Westinghouse....

When Peter Parker’s “spidey sense” starts tingling, it’s warning him about danger nearby. Real spiders are known for their ability to detect close-up threats, but a new study suggests that they can also sense sounds that are much farther away. Tiny jumping spiders, which depend primarily on their vision to catch prey and evade predators, were thought to be capable of sensing only the sounds produced nearby, the study authors wrote....

Although termites have a reputation for being indiscriminate eaters, they can in fact be quite choosy. Indeed, in addition to selecting for wood palatability and hardness, different species are known to favor particular sizes of wood–presumably as a way of avoiding competition with other termites. Exactly how they manage this sizing up has puzzled scientists, however: the creatures are blind, and they do not pace the dimensions of a piece of wood before tucking into it....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Pregnant women now have another reason to quit smoking - a new analysis links it to differences in their babies’ DNA that mirror alterations in adult smokers and suggest how smoking might contribute to certain birth defects. Researchers analyzed data on mothers and their newborn children to see how smoking influences DNA methylation. When women smoked daily during pregnancy, researchers identified 6,073 places where their babies’ DNA was methylated differently from the DNA of nonsmokers’ infants....

Helen’s left foot slipped off the clutch on impact, twisting her ankle against the car’s floorboard. It felt like a minor sprain at the time, she recalls, but the pain never subsided. Instead it intensified. Eventually, the slightest touch, even the gentle brush of bed linen, shot electric flames up her leg. “I was in so much pain I could not speak, yet inside I was screaming,” wrote the young Englishwoman in an online journal of the mysterious condi-tion that would torment her for the next three years....

New national drinking water rules are expected to lead to fewer dangerous pathogens coming out of the tap. The new regulation, which was announced last month and takes effect within three years, switches focus to a type of bacteria that more accurately reflects the presence of pathogens that can make people sick. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that its revised rules will cost U.S. utilities an additional $14 million a year....

Each week, Dr. Kim Puterbaugh sees several pregnant patients at a Cleveland hospital who are experiencing complications involving bleeding or infection. The OB-GYN has to make quick decisions about how to treat them, including whether to remove the dead or dying fetus to protect the health and life of the mother. Leaving in place a fetus that has no chance of survival dramatically increases the chance of maternal infection and permanent injury....

As artificial-intelligence products steadily improve at pretending to be human—an AI-generated voice that books restaurant reservations by phone, for example, or a chat bot that answers consumers’ questions online—people will increasingly be put in the unsettling situation of not knowing whether they are talking to a machine. But the truth may make such products less effective: recent research finds a trade-off between transparency and cooperation in human-computer interactions. The study used a simple but nuanced game in which paired players make a series of simultaneous decisions to cooperate with or betray their partner....

Male, short and stout, with dark skin, brown eyes, ­shovel-shaped teeth, type A+ blood and coarse, dark brown hair giving way to pattern baldness. He would have a high tolerance for alcohol and a higher-than-average risk of nicotine dependence—fortunately, he lived thousands of years before humans discovered smoking. The description of a Stone Age Greenland resident published in February paints an extraordinary portrait of a man who vanished more than 4,000 years ago, drawn almost solely from his DNA remains....

When most of us imagine someone in pain, we feel uncomfortable and want to help. Psychopaths do not: a callousness toward others’ suffering is the central feature of a psychopathic personality. Now an imaging study finds that psychopathic inmates have deficits in a key empathy circuit in the brain, pointing to a potential therapeutic target. Jean Decety, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues used functional MRI to scan the brains of 121 male prison inmates while they looked at photos of a painful moment, such as a foot stepping on a nail or a finger being smashed in a drawer....

The white supremacist who drove 200 miles to a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket and opened fire, killing 10 people, had posted a screed. Most of the people he killed were Black. The document’s 180 pages cited not only racist conspiracy theories, but also scientific research on behavioral genetics. The research focused on finding heritable differences in IQ and propensity to violence between racial groups. There’s no reason to believe, on the basis of his screed, that the Buffalo shooter understood, or even read, the scientific papers....

When Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey in 2012, it washed away miles of beaches that the government paid billions to restore afterward. Few preventative countermeasures were in place. Now, as the Mid-Atlantic waits to see if it’s in Hurricane Joaquin’s path, whether or not its coastal communities are ready for a major storm might be put to the test. Many places along the East Coast, like Norfolk, Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina, know they’re at risk for storm surge flooding....

SpaceX ’s first Crew Dragon spaceship to carry astronauts slid into a dock at the International Space Station Sunday (May 31), concluding a historic 19-hour voyage to for its veteran NASA crew. The arrival marked a major feat: the first docking of a crewed U.S. spacecraft at the station since NASA ’s shuttle fleet retired in 2011. It ’s also the first docking of a commercial spacecraft carrying humans, in this case astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley....

Trees that communicate, care for one another and foster cooperative communities have captured the popular imagination, most notably in Suzanne Simard’s much-praised book Finding the Mother Tree, soon to be a movie, and in other works like James Cameron’s Avatar, Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. But many scientists like myself believe these depictions misrepresent ecosystems and harm the cause of conservation....

Can the growing obesity epidemic be linked to over-prescribed antibiotics? The Epidemic You don’t have to look far to get a sense that many Americans are overweight and even obese. Just drop by a mall on any weekend or for a more personal view, a glance in the bathroom mirror might suffice. If you want more objective data: According to a 2012 report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 69 percent of all adult Americans are overweight or heavier, and almost 36 percent are obese....

It is not unusual for visionaries to be impassioned, if not fanatical, and Willem van Eelen was no exception. Before he died in February at age 91, van Eelen looked back on his extraordinary life. He was born in Indonesia when it was under Dutch control, the son of a doctor who ran a leper colony. As a teenager, he fought the Japanese in World War II and spent several years in prisoner-of-war camps....

But that target, set seven years ago when there was less carbon in the sky, will almost certainly be overshot. Many climate experts believe that outcome is inevitable. Global temperatures will climb higher than 1.5 degrees compared with 150 years ago, they say, though often only in private. Such assertions stand to rupture a pillar of climate planning embraced by countries around the world. Efforts to reduce greenhouse gases are measured against that temperature target, as are estimates for adapting to the dangers of rising seas, wildfires and other perils....

A flexible, flat semiconductor material that can harvest energy from radio signals permeating cities may be just the thing to power a new generation of electronics. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team reports in Nature that a film of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)—a two dimensional material because it is just three atoms thick—can act like an antenna to convert radio signals from wi-fi, cell phones and radio or television broadcasts into power for wireless devices....