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DENVER — Forget fancy electronics. Plain old bubbles are enough to direct the flow of liquid through networks of microscopic tubes, called microfluidics. Researchers recently demonstrated that bubbles could act as computer bits by sending liquid this way or that. Now they report constructing a simple type of memory. Such advances may help turn microfluidics into a more practical tool for detecting disease and discovering new drugs. Microfluidics systems are designed to mix cells, proteins or other molecules with one another, potentially allowing researchers to, say, rapidly detect traces of bacteria or viruses among many small samples of fluid....

For years, scientists worried that Republican politicians ignored science and were even downright antagonistic to it. Now that the Democrats have regained some power, we will see if they do any better. The first tests may not come on the most prominent issues, such as climate change and embryonic stem cells, but on other highly important yet less glamorous matters. Energy. The last attempt at a comprehensive energy policy was the notorious “No Lobbyist Left Behind” act, an expensive wish list of sub?...

Although 2014 has not been kind to rockets, it has been a banner year for robots of all stripes. NASA’s Curiosity rover sniffed out signs of methane on Mars; the European Space Agency dropped a washing-machine-sized lander onto a comet. And in July, researchers used a robotic diver to probe one of the most inaccessible parts of the planet—the seas under polar ice. The results from those tests of the Nereid Under Ice (NUI) vehicle were released on December 16 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California....

Derived from the Greek myth of Narcissus, the caricature of a classic “narcissist” is someone who is manipulative, entitled, lacking in empathy, obsessed with grandiose fantasies about power and admiration, and abuses relationships for personal gain. Not surprisingly, then, narcissism is a purported attribute of many powerful leaders, including both destructive leaders, like Saddam Hussein and Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers infamy, but also victors against tyranny like Winston Churchill and visionaries like Steve Jobs....

In the late 1960s the renowned University of Oxford physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose came up with a radically new way to develop a unified theory of physics. Instead of seeking to explain how particles move and interact within space and time, he proposed that space and time themselves are secondary constructs that emerge out of a deeper level of reality. But his so-called twistor theory never caught on, and conceptual problems stymied its few proponents....

Depression is like salad. Hear me out on this one. Salads come in a staggering variety. A leafy green house salad, a creamy macaroni salad, even a Jell-O salad—they’re all salads. How do you group together such disparate examples? Two things: first, a salad is a variety of foods (you can’t have one ingredient and call it a salad). And second, a salad is bound together with a common dressing. So it is with depression....

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the first at-home collection kits for novel coronavirus testing this week. The kits, made by the Burlington, N. C.–based company LabCorp, allow patients to swab their own nasal passages and mail the samples back to one of the company’s laboratories for analysis—without setting foot in a hospital or clinic. The method’s risk of false negative results, as well as its cost and limited availability, may hinder its widespread use....

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) fell 4.9 percent in 2012 as declining deforestation rates and a drought-induced drop in cattle herds outweighed increased emissions from the energy sector, an independent study showed on Thursday.The nation’s output of heat-trapping gases, which are blamed for climate change, hit 1.484 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) last year, according to Climate Observatory, a network of nongovernmental organizations that includes World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and Greenpeace....

Adam Savage and Michael Stevens, two big names in science entertainment, symbolize successive paradigm shifts in the genre: Savage pioneered the personality-driven, blow-it-up TV spectacle that made cultural phenomena of science shows like MythBusters in the early 2000s; Stevens has fueled YouTube’s rise as a science communication hub for digital-age audiences via Vsauce, his popular thought-experiment channel, and his new YouTube Red program, Mind Field. As the year gets underway—and as science communication increasingly confronts a world of “alternative facts”—Savage and Stevens are setting off on a 40-city science presentation called Brain Candy Live, which launches this month....

On February 16, the Kyoto Treaty will take effect, following Russia’s ratification last November. For the next seven years, the 132 signatory nations will strive to curb their emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping gases in an effort to put the brakes on climate change. But how best to achieve this goal in the long term is unclear. Several emissions heavyweights–including the U.S., which produces nearly a quarter of the world’s CO2–have refused to abide by Kyoto, and international representatives meeting in Buenos Aires in December failed to agree on a successor to the agreement, which will expire in 2012....

Some contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln described the 16th U.S. president as exhibiting awkward mannerisms and a clumsy gait. About a year ago, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced the discovery of a gene for a rare neurodegenerative disorder called spinocerebellar ataxia type 5 (SCA5)—which can strike between early childhood and old age, affecting speech, writing and/or movement—in a family descended from Lincoln. Scientists say the president himself had a one-in-four chance of suffering from the disease, which affects about 0....

ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS has been researching how our memories work since the early 1970s. The professor of psychology and law now teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Quick to come from her lips is contempt for the analogy that human memory works like a computer hard disk, on which data are cleanly written and from which data are accurately read back. Loftus says our memories are routinely wrong. Indeed, we all have forgotten where we placed our keys or blanked on a name....

President Biden launched one of the strongest climate policy platforms in U.S. history with a series of executive orders yesterday. The moves made addressing climate change a national priority on par with battling the pandemic and revitalizing the economy. “It’s about workers building our economy back better than before,” Biden said before signing the order. “It’s a whole-of-government approach to put climate change at the center of our domestic, national security and foreign policy....

Embryonic stem cells differ from other cells in the body. They can divide seemingly endlessly; they do not perform a specialized function; and, ultimately, they can become any other type of cell. How they do this remains a mystery, but new research has uncovered some of the genes that allow these cells to renew themselves. Molecular biologist Ihor Lemischka of Princeton University and his colleagues used a bent sequence of RNA–so-called short hairpin RNA (shRNA)–to sequentially turn on and off various genes within embryonic stem cells from a mouse....

After more than a week of record-breaking temperatures across much of the country, public health experts are cautioning that children are more susceptible to heat illness than adults are — even more so when they’re on the athletic field, living without air conditioning, or waiting in a parked car. Cases of heat-related illness are rising with average air temperatures, and experts say almost half of those getting sick are children. The reason is twofold: Children’s bodies have more trouble regulating temperature than those of adults, and they rely on adults to help protect them from overheating....

The second in a series of stories on Bangladesh and climate migration. GABURA, Bangladesh – The dam burst before dawn. The men of the village knew it could happen. All day and all night they trudged by the hundreds, shirtless and shoeless, up a slippery hill, hauling baskets of mud on their heads. It was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of daylong fasts. But the men had a only few hours to try to strengthen the mushy barrier that protected their homes from the dangerously rising tide....

On Earth, methane is something of a villain—a powerful greenhouse gas that is far more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. But it is also a marker of life that emerges by and large from biological processes, such as the digestive systems of cows and termites. So when methane was identified on Mars in 2003 and 2004, efforts were rekindled to seek out life there, either historical or extant....

The moon has not superseded Mars as a human-spaceflight target, despite NASA’s current focus on getting astronauts to Earth’s nearest neighbor, agency officials stressed. The Red Planet remains the ultimate destination, and the moon will serve as a stepping stone along the way, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, and Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said during congressional hearings yesterday (Sept. 26). “The moon is the proving ground, and Mars is the goal,” Bridenstine said during testimony before the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, part of the U....

Bacteria that make us sick are bad enough, but many of them also continually evolve in ways that help them develop resistance to common antibiotic drugs, making our medications less effective or even moot. Doctors try to reduce the evolution by cycling through various drugs over time, hoping that as resistance develops to one, the increased use of a new drug or the widespread reuse of an old drug will catch some of the bugs off guard....

The reason for a mysterious excess of genelike molecules in human cells is finally becoming clear, but in the process is further blurring the notion of what a gene is. Researchers know that the cells of species such as yeast, flies and humans make far more RNA molecules—copied from DNA—than they seem to need. Now a team has identified three new classes of RNA, along with evidence that genes become more active as these strange RNA molecules become shorter....