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WASHINGTON—President Trump has vilified the pharmaceutical industry and made bold promises to lower prescription drug prices. But when it comes to staffing the health care agencies empowered to oversee those efforts, he has turned regularly to the pharmaceutical industry. His Food and Drug Administration chief, Scott Gottlieb, was a longtime industry investor and adviser to major players like GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb. A senior adviser at the Health and Human Services Department, Keagan Lenihan, joined the administration after running the lobby shop for the drug and distribution giant McKesson....

Why do so many of us get so fat? the answer appears obvious. “The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight,” the World Health Organization says, “is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended.” Put simply, we either eat too much or are too sedentary, or both. By this logic, any excess of calories—whether from protein, carbohydrate or fat (the three main components, or “macronutrients,” in food)—will inevitably pack on the pounds....

In 1918, as the First World War was ending, “something fierce” was spreading. Troops in the battlefield camps and in their home countries, along with civilians, were falling sick with flu. The pandemic killed up to 100 million people within a year. A century later emergency room doctor Brown traces the complex history of misguided flu remedies such as bloodletting, inhalation of toxic gases, use of mercury chloride, misuse of aspirin and not very effective vaccines....

Research into why women continue to drop out of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields despite high aptitude in these areas at early ages increasingly points to factors that include the stereotypical treatment and unequal representation of females in popular culture. It is becoming clear that toys, visual media and written media, from books to references such as Wikipedia, could do wonders to encourage girls and young women by adding more and better representations of females in STEM....

We do it automatically. As soon as we observe another person, we try to read his or her face for signs of happiness, sorrow, anxiety, anger. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong, and errors can create some sticky personal situations. Yet Paul Ekman is almost always right. The psychology professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has spent 40 years studying human facial expressions. He has catalogued more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial muscle movements that reveal what a person is feeling inside....

Extraordinary discoveries inspire extraordinary claims. Thus James Watson reported that, immediately after they had uncovered the structure of DNA, Francis Crick “winged into the Eagle (pub) to tell everyone within hearing that we had discovered the secret of life.” Their structure–an elegant double helix–almost merited such enthusiasm. Its proportions permitted information storage in a language in which four chemicals, called bases, played the same role as twenty six letters do in the English language....

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has bounced back from the glitch that prevented it from gathering any data during its flyby of Jupiter last week, agency officials said. Juno went into a protective “safe mode” on Oct. 19, the same day the probe made its second-ever close flyby of the giant planet. (The first close encounter occurred July 4, when Juno arrived at Jupiter; the spacecraft is in a 53-day orbit, so the next flyby will take place Dec....

For the first time, astronomers have directly detected light coming from planets outside our solar system. Two separate research teams announced their findings yesterday. So far, astronomers have discovered some 130 stars outside our solar system that have planets orbiting them. All of these were initially detected using indirect methods, such as analyzing the effect they have on their star’s position. Now a team led by Drake Deming at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has measured light from the planet known as HD 209458b, which orbits a star 153 light-years away from our planet....

While Christian Cooper was bird-watching in Central Park last month, he asked a pet owner to put a leash on her dog, as required by park rules. When she declined, Cooper began filming. The video, which went viral, shows the owner, Amy Cooper, who is white, calling 911 and saying, “There’s an man, African-American… threatening me and my dog.” The scene captured was all too familiar to other black birders, outdoor enthusiasts and researchers who do fieldwork....

One of the biggest scientific findings in recent years is the discovery that the universe is not only expanding, but it is also accelerating in its expansion. Under the influence of a mysterious dark energy, the universe will eventually thin out to nothingness and die a cold death. For the Insights story, “Dark Forces at Work,” appearing in the May 2008 Scientific American, David Appell talked with Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the leaders of the group that came to the astonishing conclusion....

Most seafood lovers have never heard of domoic acid, but it might be time for them to start paying attention — the material, occasionally found in shellfish, is a serious health risk, and researchers have recently linked its presence with climatic phenomena. Domoic acid is a neurotoxin produced by certain kinds of algae. Because algae are the base of the marine food chain, the acid gets transferred to other animals, including shellfish....

A new study provides the first neuroscientific evidence that people have self-control or the ability to reverse gears mid-action, and pinpoints the part of the brain responsible for helping us get a grip. Researchers report in The Journal of Neuroscience that a sort of emergency brake activates in our brains when we plan to ignore traffic signals or abort other planned activities. The finding may help scientists better understand the underlying mechanisms of attention deficit disorder (ADD), addiction and other personality disorders that stem from an inability to control impulses....

Researchers have grown vaginas in a lab, and the organs are working normally in four teenage patients who were among the first people to receive such an implant, scientists reported today. All of the patients in the study underwent surgery five to eight years ago because they were born with a rare genetic condition in which the vagina and uterus are underdeveloped or absent. Scientists grew each vagina from the patient’s own cells, and then implanted it in her body....

The United States filled a crucial gap in its weather-forecasting arsenal when it launched its latest geostationary satellite on March 1. The craft will enable meteorologists to track hurricanes, snow storms and other threats as they develop. It will also beam down data that researchers can use to measure air temperature and humidity—if they can work out how to incorporate them into their models. Scientists currently can’t use much of the information collected by geostationary satellites, which sit above a particular location on Earth, and polar-orbiting satellites, which swing around the planet’s poles....

Conventional wisdom has long held that attitudes toward the role of women in agricultural societies are much more conservative than those in economically advanced societies, such as western Europe and the U.S. Political scientists Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Pippa Norris of Harvard University have now put this assumption to the test. They analyzed data from the World Values Survey, an ongoing study of attitudes that gauges reactions to various statements such as whether a university education is more important for a boy than a girl and whether women must have children to be fulfilled in life....

By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists for the first time have mapped out the molecular “switches” that can turn on or silence individual genes in the DNA in more than 100 types of human cells, an accomplishment that reveals the complexity of genetic information and the challenges of interpreting it. Researchers unveiled the map of the “epigenome” in the journal Nature on Wednesday, alongside nearly two dozen related papers....

For more than a year, a 3.5-tonne spacecraft has been circling Mars in a series of erratic loops. Now, after 1,000 circuits, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has reached the ideal position to study the planet’s atmosphere, and has made its first scientific observations. It is poised to solve one of the most controversial mysteries in Martian science: why methane, a possible signature of life, is being released on the red planet....

By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazineBy tacking drugs onto molecules targeting rogue brain cells, researchers have alleviated symptoms in newborn rabbits that are similar to those of cerebral palsy in children. Cerebral palsy refers to a group of incurable disorders characterized by impairments in movement, posture and sensory abilities.In general, medicines tend to act broadly rather than influence certain sets of cells in the brain. “You don’t expect molecules to enter the brain, and if they do, you don’t expect them to target specific cells, and immediately act therapeutically – but all of this happened,” says study co-author Rangaramanujam Kannan, a chemical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland....

We take it for granted that Homo sapiens is the only human species in existence, but it didn’t use to be this way. From the origin of our species a few hundred thousand years ago until a few tens of thousands of years ago, multiple human species shared the planet with our own. What distinguished H. sapiens from other members of the human family, and why did our lineage alone survive to the present day?...

Each year doctors diagnose approximately 60,000 Americans with Parkinson’s disease, an incurable neurodegenerative condition for which the number-one risk factor is age. Worldwide an estimated seven to 10 million people currently live with the malady. As U.S. and global populations grow older, it is becoming increasingly urgent to understand its causes. So far, researchers know that Parkinson’s involves cell death in a few restricted areas of the brain including the substantia nigra (SNc), one of two big cell clusters in the midbrain that house a large population of dopamine neurons....