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Fifteen years ago, the U.S. National Library of Medicine launched Toxmap, a free, interactive online application that combines pollution data from at least a dozen U.S. government sources. A Toxmap user could pan and zoom across a map of the United States sprinkled with thousands of blue and red dots, with each blue dot representing a factory, coal-fired power plant, or other facility that has released certain toxic chemicals into the environment, and each red dot marking a Superfund program site — “some of the nation’s most contaminated land,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency....

Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-shaped lattice, exhibits a range of superlative properties. Since it was discovered in 2003, it has been found to have exceptional strength, thermal conductivity and electric conductivity. The last property makes the material ideal for the tiny contacts in electronic circuits, but ideally it would also make up the components—particularly transistors—themselves. To do so, graphene would need to behave not just as a conductor but as a semiconductor, which is the key to the on–off switching operations performed by electronic components....

Online identity is quickly becoming more crucial to personal and professional success than in-person communications. Yet most of people don’t understand this new digital frontier and the dangers that lurk around every corner. Many are unaware of the digital bread crumbs that people leave behind with every social media post, and how easy it is for a person with malicious intent to do harm. Tyler Cohen Wood, a senior officer and a cyber branch chief for the Defense Intelligence Agency within the Department of Defense, writes that the “digital puzzle pieces” left behind in the form of online information—such as exchangeable image file (EXIF) data, cookies and information shared in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks—can put one’s personal security at risk....

Sluggish hurricanes have become increasingly common over the past 70 years, according to a new study. Storms that linger over a given area for longer periods, such as Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over eastern Texas for almost a week in August 2017, bring more rain and have greater potential to cause damage than ones that pass quickly. Scientists aren’t sure why this is happening, but if the trend continues, future hurricanes could be even more disastrous....

From Nature magazine The storm of scientific criticism over claims that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes severe disease in rats shows no signs of abating. Gilles-Eric Sralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, is under intense pressure to report the full data behind his team’s finding that rats fed for two years with Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize (corn) developed many more tumours and died earlier than controls (see Nature 489, 484; 2012)....

Supercomputers can store more information than the human brain and can calculate a single equation faster, but even the biggest, fastest supercomputers in the world cannot match the overall processing power of the brain. And they are nowhere near as compact or energy efficient. Nevertheless, IBM is trying to simulate the human brain with its own cutting-edge supercomputer, called Blue Gene. For the simulation, it used 147,456 processors working in parallel with one another....

The “earth” part of the title of this special issue from Scientific American is no doubt self-explanatory, but why “3.0”? Because this planet is no longer simply the home of our species: it is also our creation. And as with any product, sometimes it is prudent to upgrade its quality. If you will indulge the analogy further, Earth 1.0 was the world that persisted and evolved for billions of years, up until very recently....

JUNE 1957 MOON DUST–“The possibility of actually bringing back some of the moon’s material is a scientific bonanza so alluring that ingenious schemes have been proposed to accomplish it, even without landing on the moon. We might, for example, send a pair of rockets, one trailing the other closely by means of a homing device. The first rocket would drop a small atomic bomb on the moon. Since the moon has no atmosphere and comparatively little gravity, the bomb cloud would rise very high....

Opioids relieve pain very effectively by activating particular receptors—proteins that are found on cells and respond to specific substances. But these drugs also cause serious side effects, including respiratory depression, which can be lethal. New research could inspire next-generation opioids that provide pain relief with fewer such risks. Scientists in Australia have discovered peptides, tiny strands of amino acids, that act like opioids in some ways and come from an unlikely source: a Penicillium fungus....

Stephen Wolfram blames himself for not changing the face of physics sooner. “I do fault myself for not having done this 20 years ago,” the physicist turned software entrepreneur says. “To be fair, I also fault some people in the physics community for trying to prevent it happening 20 years ago. They were successful.” Back in 2002, after years of labor, Wolfram self-published A New Kind of Science, a 1,200-page magnum opus detailing the general idea that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules....

FIREARMS FACTS In discussing gun control in “Gun Science” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer first cites a 1998 paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery concluding that guns in the home are much more likely to be used in criminal assaults or homicides than for self-defense. Oddly, that study accounted only for cases where criminals were killed or wounded and not the more typical scenario in which an attacker is scared away....

While still a graduate student in 1974, I had a chance to see malignant tumors from a most unusual perspective. I was working at the National Cancer Institute in the laboratory of the late Pietro M. Gullino, who had developed an innovative experimental setup for studying cancer biology—a tumor mass that was connected to the circulatory system of a rat by just a single artery and a single vein. As a chemical engineer, I decided to use this opportunity to measure how much of a drug injected into the animal would flow to the tumor and back out again....

Kyle Orwig has been itching to do an experiment that would, in his words, “piss people off.” Orwig, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is an expert on the intricate biology of sperm cells—in particular, how specialized “stem” cells located in the male testes produce sperm. Every so often, however, a genetic flaw prevents these stem cells from completing this process, thus rendering the male infertile. The experiment Orwig has in mind is to use gene-editing technology to fix this flaw in the sperm-forming stem cells and then transplant them back into infertile mice, thereby demonstrating a potential treatment for male infertility....

Last year memory researchers John Wixted and Laura Mickes wrote on ScientificAmerican.com that while eyewitness testimony is widely considered unreliable evidence (eyewitness misidentifications have been shown to be involved in a whopping 70 percent of 349 wrongful convictions), we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Eyewitness testimony collected under certain circumstances could still be invaluable. The trick about memory is that sometimes it’s reliable and other times it’s not....

Underrepresentation of nonwhite ethnic groups in scientific research and clinical trials has been a disturbing trend. One particularly troubling aspect is that human genomic databases are heavily skewed toward people of European descent. If left unaddressed, this inherent bias will continue to contribute to uneven success rates in so-called precision medicine. The problem stems from the underlying structure of science. In the early days of genomics, funding for sequencing projects was often highest among mostly white countries, so those populations are better represented in public databases....

This is the story of COVID pandemic—but it could equally well be the story of a catastrophic strike by a large asteroid. As we emerge from the worst of COVID-19, we should heed this lesson: low-probability, high-impact events do occur; but they can be mitigated if we prepare and act early enough. Asteroids are like viruses in a sense: they number in the tens of millions but only a few types pose a threat to humans....

By Jonathan Kaminsky NEW ORLEANS, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Two monkeys belonging to a species that is critically endangered died at a Louisiana zoo after they were left out overnight in the cold by a caretaker, officials said on Wednesday. The cotton-top Tamarins, weighing less than a pound and distinguishable by their shock of white hair, were among three that were kept outside overnight last week in temperatures that dipped into the 30s Fahrenheit at the Alexandria Zoo in central Louisiana....

A General Motors scientist who conducted pioneering research on climate change in the 1960s says she faced sexism that made it difficult to do her job. Ruth Reck’s allegations raise questions about whether GM executives dismissed or downplayed her findings on global warming because of her gender. Reck joined GM Research Laboratories in Warren, Mich., in 1965 and soon began studying the effects of car emissions on the climate, E&E News reported as part of a monthslong investigation (Climatewire, Oct....

Sunday will come to a close with a spectacular solar eclipse across much of the United States with the Southwest enjoying the best view and weather. The moon will reduce the sun to what resembles a thin ring late Sunday along a path from Medford, Ore., to Redding, Calif., to Reno, Nev., to Cedar City, Utah, to Albuquerque, N.M., to Lubbock, Texas. While officially deemed a partial eclipse elsewhere across the West, the astronomical show will still be amazing for Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise with more than 80 percent of the sun being covered....

The raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan was planned and conducted in secret. Only a handful of U.S. officials knew about it in advance, and the international community was kept in the dark. This stealth contributed to the operation’s success, but it may also have sowed suspicion in some quarters—particularly in places like Islamabad, about 50 kilometers from the Abbottabad compound in which bin Laden was killed, where some people are already prone to accept conspiracy theories....