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Climate change comes with a hefty bill. The United States stands to experience major economic losses over the 21st century as sea levels rise, heat waves become more frequent and rains fall in heavier bursts, according to the recently released National Climate Assessment (NCA). Sources of the costs range from damaged and abandoned coastal properties, to wages lost when it is too hot to work outdoors, to premature deaths caused by increased air pollution and disease exposure....

In a worsening trend, deaths from heroin overdose in the United States increased even more dramatically in recent years than they did over the previous decade, according to a new report. The results show the rate of death from heroin overdose nearly quadrupled, from 0.7 deaths per 100,000 people in the year 2000, to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 2013. But the steepest rise occurred between 2010 and 2013, when the rate of death from heroin overdose increased 37 percent, compared with rising just 6 percent over the decade before, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)....

Ships without sailors could keep humans out of harm’s way, and that possibility is not their only potential benefit. Without crews, shippers could save money normally spent on salaries, keep boats away from shore for longer and, without wasting room on accommodations, try more efficient designs that would emit less pollution. The autonomous shipping market is projected to grow from $90 billion today to more than $130 billion by 2030. But the technology remains in its early stages—particularly for large vessels designed to face the open ocean—which means testing is still vital....

A living fossil fish is giving researchers a peek into the genetic machinery that would eventually lead to our hands and feet. The fins of the modern paddlefish Polyodon spathula, which evolved perhaps 200 million years ago, share a distinctive pattern of gene activity with the limbs of all four-limbed animals, according to a new report. The finding tells researchers that limbs were a long time in the making, says evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and The Field Museum in Chicago....

While many products commonly found in the grocery aisles are just now receiving the environmentally friendly treatment, some are old-timers in the field. Consider the case of coffee. U.S. distributors saw specialty coffee rise 75 percent in economic value from 2000 to 2008, and in 2012, it represented 37 percent of U.S. coffee sales by volume and a whopping 50 percent of the total economic value, bringing in roughly $32 billion....

Last year a cat named Cinder-Block from Bellingham, Wash., broke the Internet when a video of her weight-loss routine appeared all over social media. In the clip, Cinder-Block paws at the edge of an underwater treadmill, getting accustomed to the moving belt one foot at a time. The compelling video and its adorable star became an instant sensation. But consider, for a moment, the underlying beliefs about weight that led so many viewers to laugh at a cat with obesity who would not exercise....

Scientists have documented for the first time that several phthalates – controversial chemicals used to make vinyl and fragrances – are declining in people while several others are rising. The study, published today, is the first comprehensive, nationwide attempt to document trends in exposure to these widely used chemicals over the past decade. The researchers said the results suggest that manufacturers may be reformulating products in the wake of a federal regulation and environmental groups’ campaigns....

Silicon is all around us: after oxygen, it is the most abundant element in Earth’s crust. So why living beings never incorporate it into their biochemistry has long been a puzzle. Now chemical engineers have discovered that living organisms can be nudged to bind carbon and silicon together. They showed that a natural enzyme from a bacterium that lives in hot springs can form C–Si bonds inside living Escherichia coli cells—when the cells are fed the right silicon-containing compounds....

Lillian Fritz-Laylin is observing a strain of leukemia cell that zips along at about 10 to 20 microns per minute. She’s looking for the motive secret of how these speed demons of the cellular world get around, and she’s doing it by making a high-resolution 3-D micro movie. “People have studied for a long time how slow cells move…and [they] have largely assumed that fast cells use the same mechanism—just faster,” says Fritz-Laylin, a postdoc scholar at the University of California, San Francisco....

The battle to prevent or at least slow global warming has intensified in the past year as scientists have learned more about the magnitude of the problem. One of the leading climate experts, Inez Y. Fung, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Center at the University of California, Berkeley, recently showed that the earth may soon lose its ability to absorb much of the greenhouse gas that is raising temperatures. The oceans and continents currently soak up about half the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels....

It’s a hot and humid afternoon in the suburbs of Washington DC, and Bob Watson is looking worried. The renowned atmospheric chemist sits back on a bench in his yard, hemmed in by piles of paperwork. He speaks with his characteristic rapid-fire delivery as he explains the tensions surrounding the international committee he helms. The panel is supposed to provide scientific advice on one of the world’s most intractable problems—the rapidly accelerating loss of plants and animals....

Loneliness hurts. It is psychologically distressing and so physically unhealthy that being lonely increases the likelihood of an earlier death by 26 percent. But the feeling may serve a purpose. Psychologists theorize that it hurts so much because, like hunger and thirst, loneliness acts as a biological alarm bell. The ache of it drives us to seek out social connection just as hunger pangs urge us to eat. The idea is intuitively satisfying, yet it has long proved difficult to test in humans On March 26, however, just as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posted a preliminary report on bioRxiv....

When Deblina Sarkar wanted to name her lab’s new creation the “Cell Rover,” her students were hesitant. “They were like, ‘it seems too cool for a scientific technology,’” she says. But Sarkar, a nanotechnologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wanted the tiny device’s name to evoke exploration of unknown worlds. This rover, however, will roam the inside of a living cell rather than the surface of a planet. Recent engineering advances have enabled scientists to shrink electronics down to the cellular scale—with hopes of potentially using them to explore and manipulate the innards of individual cells....

Robot explorers have found Mars to be a world of sulfur, acids, magnesium, iron and chlorine compounds, all of which are sunbaked and wrapped in a carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere. But what would this complex and exotic brew smell like? It turns out that everyone—not just Mars explorers—might be able to find out, because there may be ways to recreate whiffs of the Red Planet here on Earth. [The 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars] Headspace tech One relatively recent innovation in the perfume business is “Headspace” technology....

Michael Jackson, the moonwalking pop star whose health problems have often shared the spotlight with him, is reportedly wracked with severe emphysema and potentially deadly internal bleeding. According to Ian Halperin, an investigative journalist who is writing an unauthorized biography of the singer, Jackson, 50, has been fighting the genetically inherited disorder alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency for several years. Last year he was seen in a wheelchair near his home in Las Vegas....

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has escalated: Russian troops have invaded and now control several areas in Ukraine. Heavy fighting is raging in some cities, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has declared martial law. This causes fear and worry to many people in Europe, including children and other young people. But how do you answer their questions, and can war be explained at all? In an interview with Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German-language edition of Scientific American, Torsten Andersohn, a Berlin psychologist and longtime family counselor, argues for an open approach to the topic....

A nurse showed me the newspaper just as I was walking in. I saw the smiling face of the young man I had taken care of since he was a teenager. Several times after hurting himself or threatening suicide he had been admitted to the Connecticut hospital where I work as a child and adolescent psychiatrist. I wished I had seen that smile during our interactions. It looked genuine. But this was an obituary....

FEBRUARY 1960 METEOR DUST— “The recent extension of geophysical investigations into nearby space has given emphasis to the fact that life on earth is shielded by the earth’s atmosphere. Death from ‘meteoritic stroke’ might be a not-uncommon coroner’s verdict if the protective canopy of the atmosphere were not spread above our heads. During the past 13 years I have been engaged in efforts to secure direct measurement of the meteoritic fallout....

November 1967 Moon Texture “When men first set foot on the moon, what will the ground be like? Will it perhaps be soft and powdery, as some have suggested, or hard and crusty, as has been proposed by others? The most specific evidence has come from Surveyor III, which was equipped with a device that could dig into the surface of the moon and place samples of lunar material in front of a television camera for close examination....

Human skin is soft and stretchy and has millions of nerve endings that sense heat and touch. This makes it a superb instrument for detecting and responding to the outside world. Engineers have been working to reproduce these abilities in a synthetic version for the past 40 years, but such attempts have always fallen fall short of the versatility and adaptability of living skin. Now, however, new research is adding more abilities and complexities to bring this field closer to its ultimate goal: an electronic skin, or e-skin, with uses ranging from covering robots to sticking wearable devices onto humans....