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By David Bailey (Reuters) - Arthur weakened from hurricane force on Saturday and pelted parts of southeast Canada with heavy rain and strong winds, leaving 250,000 homes and businesses without power, as the storm swept away from New England. Arthur weakened to a tropical storm on Saturday morning after having reached landfall on North Carolina’s Outer Banks late on Thursday as a Category 2 hurricane, snarling plans for tourists at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend....

One scientist was called Climate Barbie. Another was described as an “ugly fake scientist.” A third had an erect penis drawn on her car window while she was in the field researching sea-level rise. Such is the life of many female climate scientists in 2018. All researchers face the risk of being criticized when speaking publicly about their findings. But women in the field describe being attacked based on their gender....

From Nature magazine Scrounging chemicals and equipment in their spare time, a team of chemistry bloggers is trying to replicate published protocols for making molecules. The researchers want to check how easy it is to repeat the recipes that scientists report in papers — and are inviting fellow chemists to join them. “We’re just a bunch of people who want to make the reactions work,” explains blogger See Arr Oh, who is based in the United States and prefers not to reveal his real name....

People who are slightly overweight but not obese—as defined by their body mass index (BMI)— tend to live longer than their normal-weight counterparts, according to a new Danish study. But that has not always been the case. In the 1970s, the Danish data show, study subjects with the best chance of living longer tended to have a BMI in the normal range, defined as being between 18.5 and 25. Someone who is 1....

One decision that came out of last year’s climate negotiations gained more attention than others for the pressure it puts on nations to cut planet-warming pollution faster. Rather than wait until 2025 to submit new plans for reducing emissions, each country would need to update their targets this year, according to the final pact sealed in Glasgow, Scotland. That’s necessary because the world is lagging so far behind scientific assessments that warn of irreversible impacts from rising temperatures....

Reducing cholesterol intake by 20 percent and getting total cholesterol levels below 180 will improve a person’s risk of heart disease by 20 to 30 percent, Feltheimer notes. Healthy diets should include at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, Franke declares. “This ensures that you get more vitamins and minerals, which most people don’t do, and will likely increase fiber intake as well,” he explains. “It will also be more filling, making you less likely to cheat and ingest more calories by nibbling on snacks....

Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that people would approach or withdraw from objects based on their colors. Bright reds and yellows often mean ripe, delicious fruit, whereas drab yellowish-greens and browns signal … well, less pleasant things. To test whether the objects most commonly associated with particular colors really do determine color preference, psychologists Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss of the University of California, Berkeley, asked a group of volunteers to brainstorm all the common objects they associated with each of 32 colors....

Climate change disproportionately affects the world’s most vulnerable people, particularly poor rural communities that depend on the land for their livelihoods and coastal populations throughout the tropics. We have already seen the stark asymmetry of suffering that results from extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and more. For remedies, advocates and politicians have tended to look toward cuts in fossil-fuel use or technologies to capture carbon before it enters the atmosphere—both of which are crucial....

Autism is primarily a disorder of the brain, but research suggests that as many as nine out of 10 individuals with the condition also suffer from gastrointestinal problems such as inflammatory bowel disease and “leaky gut.” The latter condition occurs when the intestines become excessively permeable and leak their contents into the bloodstream. Scientists have long wondered whether the composition of bacteria in the intestines, known as the gut microbiome, might be abnormal in people with autism and drive some of these symptoms....

All around the world, sewage gushes out of pipes into rivers and the sea, threatening the health of humans and aquatic ecosystems. Though some individual sites have long been known to be major sources of coastal pollution, “we’ve never had a global understanding of how big the problem is,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He and his colleagues took a broad look at the issue by calculating the amounts of fecal pathogens and nitrogen—which can fuel harmful algal blooms and create oxygen-deprived dead zones—flushed into the ocean in human wastewater at nearly 135,000 sites around the world....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Nutrition Diva listener Andrew writes: “We can measure the amount of vitamins and minerals in a food, but how do we know how much of that our bodies actually absorb? If a banana contains 422 mg of potassium, for example, do our bodies take in 100% of that? What factors determine how much (or how little) nutrition we get from our food?...

President Obama announced Friday morning that he has denied TransCanada’s permit application to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the U.S. “The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States,” Obama said. “I agree with that decision.” Obama said America is a global leader on taking action on climate change, and approving Keystone XL would have undercut that leadership....

Think people are the only ones who can plan for the future? You may change your mind when you hear the story of Santino the chimpanzee, whose premeditated attacks on zoo visitors are described today in Current Biology. When Santino was first transferred to Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo in 1983 at the age of five, he was relatively calm and passive, lead study author Mathias Osvath, a postdoctoral student in cognitive sciences at Lund University in Sweden, tells ScientificAmerican....

When I was a teenager, my parents often asked me to come along to the store to help carry groceries. One day, as I was waiting patiently at the check-out, my mother reached for her brand new customer loyalty card. Out of curiosity, I asked the cashier what information they record. He replied that it helps them keep track of what we’re buying so that they can make tailored product recommendations....

The majority of antimatter that pervades the Milky Way may come from clashing remnants of dead stars, a new study finds. The work may solve a 40-year-old astrophysics mystery, the study’s researchers said. For every particle of normal matter, there is an antimatter counterpart with the opposite electrical charge but the same mass. The antiparticle of the negatively charged electron, for instance, is the positively charged positron. [Will Antimatter Power the First Starships?...

People in the path of Hurricane Isaias are shunning emergency shelters as officials from Florida to North Carolina have urged evacuating residents to stay with friends or relatives instead or to rent hotel rooms. Ten shelters were opened in Florida in recent days, yet they received a total of 266 people, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency report. In North Carolina, where mandatory evacuation orders are in place for parts of three coastal counties, 17 shelters have been opened with a combined capacity of 2,300....

Looking for the perfect blue? You’ll have to specify. Cobalt, Prussian, azurite or ultramarine? According to Philip Ball’s book Bright Earth, if you were an artist living in the 14th century, the finest blue could cost you a king’s ransom. We can’t even reproduce it in this magazine —it’s not part of the gamut, or achievable range of colors, that can be rendered by the four “process colors” of ordinary printing....

Robert Schoelkopf spent more than 15 years studying the building blocks of quantum computers until, in 2015, he decided it was time to start constructing one. The physicist and his colleagues at Yale University began pitching their start-up firm Quantum Circuits to investors, hoping to persuade venture capitalists that the time was ripe to pour cash into a quantum-computing company. Within two years the team had secured $18 million. That was enough to build a specialist laboratory—which opened in January 2019—in a science park near the university in New Haven, Conn....

Stephanie Tubbs Jones—the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Ohio—died yesterday evening in a Cleveland hospital, according to several news reports. The Democratic congresswoman was 58 years old. According to her aides, Jones suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm while driving in Cleveland Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. A police officer saw her car swerve on the road and stopped her. She was rushed to Huron Hospital—part of the Cleveland Clinic—where officials said her condition deteriorated due to complications from a brain hemorrhage....

All the vaccines we use to ward off SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, share one crucial feature: they were designed to protect against its ancestral form, which surfaced in Wuhan, China, more than two years ago. Today’s virus, however, is not the same as it once was. SARS-CoV-2 has been evolving, with successive variants of concern eroding immunizations’ ability to ward off infection. The mRNA vaccines, prominent in the U....