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Thomas J. Palmeri, Randolph B. Blake and Ren Marois of the psychology department and the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University study synesthesia. They provide the following explanation: When you eat chicken, does it feel pointy or round? Is a week shaped like a tipped-over D with the days arranged counterclockwise? Does the note B taste like horseradish? Do you get confused about appointments because Tuesday and Thursday have the same color?...

Red cabbage? Nick Sireau couldn’t understand why the doctor was asking about red cabbage. It was late one night in October 2000, and Nick and his wife Sonya had just made an alarming discovery. Urine from their two-week-old baby son Julien had suddenly turned dark red, almost black. The physician who came to their cramped London flat assured them that it wasn’t blood. Perhaps, he suggested, the pigment from some red cabbage that Sonya had eaten for lunch had made it into her breast milk and was coloring the boy’s urine....

Credit: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01450-9 The pathologies of heart conditions are complex and interwoven, but they often start with ischaemia. Credit: Mohamed Ashour. Sources: 1. British Heart Foundation Heart & Circulatory Disease Statistics 2020 available at http://go.nature.com/2sjhs7q (2020); 2. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Morbidity & Mortality: 2012 Chart Book on Cardiovascular, Lung and Blood Diseases (NIH, 2012); 3. Bottle, A. et al. Heart 104, 600–605 (2018); 4. British Heart Foundation...

Treating depression could change significantly given the results of a small Canadian clinical trial that culminated in 2005. Pacemakerlike electrodes stimulating a deep-brain region called the subgenual cingulate freed several patients from heavy depression that had resisted medication, talk therapy and even electroconvulsive (shock) treatment. Study co-author Helen S. Mayberg, who began the work at the University of Toronto before moving to Emory University, cautions that any trial so small —just six patients —must be considered provisional....

Bats and rodents are considered high-risk viral reservoirs—a source for diseases that can hop over to humans, and sometimes lead to epidemics. Some scientists have even argued that the animals have certain traits that increase the likelihood of spillover events from animal to people, and that they should be monitored more closely as a result. But a new analysis suggests that bats and rodents are “unexceptional” in their propensity to host viruses that infect humans....

When Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th U.S. president on January 20, he inherited major crises, including a raging pandemic, a planet gripped by escalating climate change, a ravaged economy and a nation riven by hyperpartisanship, worsened by what amounted to an attempted coup inspired by his predecessor. But it is an older existential threat, the fearsome power of nuclear weapons, that should still be the most terrifying. Immediately after his inauguration, the new president gained official control over the “nuclear football,” a 20-kilogram satchel containing launch codes and strike options for unleashing the nation’s vast atomic arsenal on his sole authority, at a moment’s notice....

The brain is a hotbed of electrical activity. Scientists have long known that brain cells communicate via electrical missives, created by charged atoms and molecules called ions as they travel across the membranes of those cells. But a new study suggests that in the days and weeks that lead up to a brain forming in an embryo or fetus, altering the electrical properties of these cells can dramatically change how the ensuing brain develops....

▪ The bee’s knees: In the first demonstration that insects can learn by watching, bumblebees seeing fellow buzzing foragers on certain flowers were twice as likely to forage on those flowers. Biology Letters of the Royal Society online, August 19 ▪ The earth’s core appears to be rotating faster than the rest of the planet by up to 0.5 degree a year. The possible cause: the liquid outer core’s magnetic field that tugs on the solid iron inner core....

The global nuclear weapons scene is changing, yet the U.S. is promoting a costly program to replace its warheads according to an outdated cold war policy. More thinking should precede more spending. In July the secretaries of defense, state and energy issued a simple three-page document saying that the country’s strategy is to deter aggression and that nuclear weapons play the essential role. The statement calls for replacing thousands of aging warheads with new Reliable Replacement Warheads (RRWs), with the insistence that the swap does not violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because it does not provide any new military capability—a position some nations dispute (see “A Need for New Warheads?...

Two California counties and a city yesterday sued 37 oil, natural gas and coal companies and trade groups, saying their actions intensified climate change and exacerbated costly sea-level rise. San Mateo County and Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area and Imperial Beach in San Diego County in separate court filings sued companies that included Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Citgo Petroleum Corp., ConocoPhillips Co....

The first computers were biological: they had two arms, two legs and 10 fingers. “Computer” was a job title, not the name of a machine. The occupation vanished after programmable, electric calculating machines emerged in the late 1940s. We have thought of computers as electronic devices ever since. Over the past 15 years or so, however, biology has been making a comeback of sorts in computing. Scientists in universities and biotech start-ups believe they are close to advancing the first biocomputers from mere research objects to useful, real-world tools....

With California now on track to have the rainiest year in its history—on the heels of its worst drought in 500 years—the state has become a daily reminder that extreme weather events are on the rise. And the recent near-collapse of the spillway at California’s massive Oroville Dam put an exclamation point on the potentially catastrophic risks. More than 4,000 dams in the U.S. are now rated unsafe because of structural or other deficiencies....

Skyler was counting down the days. In just a few months, the 14-year-old would attend a life-changing medical appointment. It would be the first step toward resolving body and identity issues that the teenager had been struggling with for years. Skyler’s sex at birth (or, to use trans terminology, his “assigned” gender) was female, yet he did not readily identify as a girl. From the age of four, Skyler hated wearing dresses, which he would rip apart with scissors....

(Adds railway comments on number of cars involved in derailment) By Jeffrey Hodgson TORONTO, March 8 (Reuters) - A Canadian National Railway Co train carrying crude oil that derailed near the northern Ontario community of Gogama early on Saturday is still on fire, the company said late on Sunday. The derailment is CN’s second in the region in just three days and the third in less than a month. It was the latest in a series of North American derailments involving trains hauling crude oil, raising concerns about rail safety....

The Brazilian Ministry of Health estimates that there were nearly 150,000 new cases of Zika virus infection in Brazil in the first half of 2016. Those numbers have made athletes, fans and many others nervous about traveling to Rio de Janeiro for this month’s Summer Olympics. Although the virus is relatively harmless to most people—three out of four of those infected are asymptomatic—it can cause severe birth defects if it strikes a pregnant woman....

If you were dropped into virtually any region of North America 56 million years ago, you probably would not recognize where you had landed. Back then, at the dawn of the Eocene epoch, the earth was warmer and wetter than it is today. A sea had just closed up in the middle of the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains had not yet attained their full height. The continent’s plant and animal communities were dramatically different....

The popular club drug ketamine—or ‘Special K’—is also a fast-acting antidepressant, but how it works has eluded scientists. Now a team reports in Nature that the mood-lifting effect may not be caused by the drug itself, but by one of the products formed when the body breaks the drug down into smaller molecules. If the findings, from a study in mice, hold true in humans, they could suggest a way to provide quick relief for people with depression—without patients having to experience ketamine’s ‘high’....

Perhaps it is because we Homo sapiens are today the only remaining members of the various human species whose feet have trod this world, we believe ourselves to be completely unique in multiple ways. Of course, we think, we survived where others failed because we must have been the most collaborative, the most intelligent, the most creative of all human species. Of course. Yet for every time we have come to feel so sure of ourselves about anything, it seems to me, science patiently provides the evidence and the rejoinder: “It’s never that simple....

Novartis’ groundbreaking CAR-T cancer therapy is one big step closer to reaching patients. A panel of outside experts convened by the FDA voted 10-0 Wednesday to recommend the approval of Novartis’ CAR-T therapy, called CTL019, for the treatment of children and young adults with advanced leukemia. The vote marks a pivotal milestone for this class of experimental treatment. The FDA is expected to make a final decision on approval by Oct....

Parents in the United States tend to rate their children’s autism features as more severe than do parents in four other countries, according to a new survey1. The work is one of the first attempts to zero in on how parents from different cultures perceive the condition. One culture’s autism ‘hallmarks’ may be seen as nothing unusual in another, says Rosa Hoekstra, lecturer in psychology at King’s College London, who was not involved in the study....