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By Richard Lovett of Nature magazineIn the calculus of global warming, natural gas is generally considered to be preferable to coal as a fuel. That’s because, on a per-joule basis, burning methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, produces less carbon dioxide than burning coal.But, earlier this week, the conventional wisdom was shaken by researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who argue in a study to be published in Climate Change that, over a 20-year period, the use of natural gas extracted from ‘gas shales’, porous rocks that hold the gas in minute pockets throughout the rock, could be worse for the climate than coal....

Nearly two centuries separate the two epidemics—one began four years ago this month and the other in the summer of 1832—but they are otherwise strikingly similar, and the parallels offer some lessons for public health officials today. A novel infectious agent, cholera, is introduced into an island population living in crowded and unsanitary conditions, killing thousands. The recent epidemic, of course, occurred on the impoverished island nation of Haiti. The earlier one unfolded 2,400 kilometers north, on the island of Manhattan....

It has been a bleak year for the world’s coral. Ecologists have watched in horror as unusually warm ocean temperatures have prompted corals to ‘bleach’, or expel the symbiotic algae that provide much of their food. The result has been death and damage to reefs from Kiribati in the Pacific to the Indian Ocean’s Maldives. With such episodes projected to occur more often even if climate change is mitigated, researchers are redoubling efforts to identify the factors that can make a reef resilient to harsh conditions....

Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans 10 years ago, a grim anniversary to be marked next week. Huge earthen levees dissolved and concrete floodwalls toppled over. But the real culprit when the tropical cyclone made landfall was outside the city. Thousands of square miles of wetland marshes and swamps that had once provided a buffer between the city’s coastline and the ocean had been badly tattered from decades of human damage. Thick, robust wetlands would have absorbed much of the surge of water that Katrina pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico....

Killer hot peppers? Jalapeños join tomatoes as salmonella suspect Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials are now investigating whether jalapeño peppers (as well as closely related serrano peppers) may be linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak first reported in April. Until now, tomatoes were the prime suspects in the largest U.S. food-borne outbreak in the past decade. More than 1,000 people have been affected in more than 40 states and in Canada....

Impact on people and wildlife Indigenous communities in the region also hunt many of these animals. In Loreto alone there are 500 indigenous territories and five reserves for people in voluntary isolation who have rejected any outside contact. “It is now very likely that they have no fish nor land animals for food, nor fresh water to drink,” Mori says. In official statements PETROPERÚ claimed having sent trained personnel to control the contingency and hired indigenous people to assist in the remediation....

Just in time for a summer holiday, scientists have discovered the solar system’s newest beach destination. Too bad there’s no way to get there—at least not easily. Researchers report in Nature today that they identified a dark liquid lake, surrounded by a lighter shoreline and a “beach,” on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The foot-shaped lake is the first verified extraterrestrial body of liquid, and is likely filled with hydrocarbons, simple compounds also common on Earth....

Back in 2010, in this space, I described my near run-in with he whom I dubbed “Scooter Boy.” This yutz was driving down a busy road in Florida on, you guessed it, a scooter, the handlebars of which were unsullied by human contact. Because both of his hands were busy texting on a smartphone. To add insult to his inevitable injury, earbuds blocked up the auditory appendages on the sides of his helmetless head, to further insulate him from sensory awareness of his dangerous reality....

WASHINGTON—The university that employed a controversial herpes vaccine researcher has told the federal government it learned last summer of the possibility of his illegal experimentation on human subjects. But Southern Illinois University did not publicly disclose the tip or its findings about researcher William Halford’s misconduct for months, according to a memo obtained by Kaiser Health News. Last week, Kaiser Health News reported that Halford conducted an experiment in which he vaccinated patients in U....

In early 2021, Nick Wilson was feeling hopeful. For months, New Zealand had been reporting zero or just a few daily cases of COVID-19. To Wilson, a public-health physician and researcher at the University of Otago in Wellington, eliminating the disease in New Zealand—and possibly across the globe—didn’t feel out of reach. “The success of public-health and social measures without the vaccine gave us confidence that when the vaccine became available—if it had sustained high efficacy and was rolled out everywhere—and was combined with public-health and social measures, we could eradicate COVID-19,” he says....

Jered Chinnock’s mantra was “lift the leg, kick the foot out.” The paired actions were all part of a tough, years-long rehabilitation routine the Wisconsin man took on after a snowmobile accident left his lower limbs paralyzed when he was 26 years old. Coupled with the arduous rehab, Chinnock had a device implanted in his lower spine, relaying electrical signals from brain to muscles under battery power. The study team working with him hoped that one day the repetitive, targeted motions together with signals from the device would eventually make him able to walk again....

The powerful earthquake that rocked Chile in April ruptured the earth in a way that suggests major quakes may still hit the region in the future, researchers say. On April 1, a magnitude-8.2 earthquake struck about 58 miles (94 kilometers) northwest of Iquique in northern Chile, a major port city and hub for Chile’s copper mining industry. It killed six people, damaged or destroyed at least 13,000 homes, caused power failures and triggered a tsunami wave nearly 7 feet (2....

By Elie DolginThe GenBank sequence database, the central repository of all publicly available DNA sequences, counted its thousandth complete microbial genome this month. But a thousand genomes is only a small fraction of the diversity that exists in the microscopic world. Now, scientists want to fill in the gaps.“The broad brush strokes of microbial diversity are not adequately represented in that first thousand,” says Stephen Giovannoni, a microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis....

Scientists predicted climate change would fuel the kind of devastating wildfires that California has seen this year. Except it wasn’t expected to happen for decades. A major analysis by state researchers projected that the amount of area burned by wildfire could jump 77% by the end of the century. Another study by UCLA warned that by 2050 fire on average would scorch twice as much land in Southern California. A doubling happened this year, instead of three decades from now....

Washington Post headline, September 4, 2015: “Chimp That Attacked a Drone with a Stick Planned Ahead, Researchers Say” Classified report, September 20, 2015: Venue: Secure location, the Netherlands; translation of interview with damaged drone aircraft, performed by unidentified security official: Security Official: It’s been five months. In your own words, describe what happened. Damaged Drone: In my own words? Okay, in my own words, one of the chimps picked up a big stick and whacked me like I was a piñata and he was in candy withdrawal....

China yesterday approved the construction of two new nuclear reactors, giving a long-awaited go-ahead to Chinese nuclear developers. The country halted its rapid nuclear power expansion in 2011, when Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex experienced meltdowns after a deadly tsunami. While Chinese officials allowed several already approved nuclear projects to complete their construction after passing safety reviews, they did not approve starting new projects—until yesterday. State-owned China General Nuclear Power Group, formerly known as China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group, gained the first approval....

The natural world seems intent on synchronizing. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, herds of wildebeest, and swarms of fireflies all effortlessly coordinate their actions with one another. A recent study published by Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath of Stanford University in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that humans are no different. In fact, our ability to synchronize might be one of the most important developments in our evolution as a social species, a skill we need to successfully choreograph our dance moves at parties—and also, perhaps, to live together in stable, cooperative societies....

John Milnor, an American mathematician best known for the discovery of exotic hyperspheres, was awarded the 2011 Abel Prize, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced March 23. Milnor, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York State, got a call at his Long Island home at 6 A.M. informing him he was receiving the $1-million prize—an honor first awarded in 2003 as mathematics’ answer to the Nobel Prizes....

Most autistic children are not diagnosed as such until they are three years old, and by then valuable time has already been lost. But Patricia K. Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, and her colleagues have discovered that certain neural and behavioral differences can be spotted in autistic children as young as two. The researchers plan to test whether they can similarly distinguish babies at six months of age....

Scientists are scrambling to learn how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, causes disease, as well as racing to develop treatments and, critically, a vaccine. The work relies heavily on a rarely acknowledged player: research animals. One of the most unusual things about SARS-CoV-2 is the wide range of disease severity it has in humans—from mild or asymptomatic infections to deadly ones. Creating animal models that reflect such clinical diversity will be important, albeit difficult....