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PASADENA, Calif.—Traditional sperm tests don’t reveal much. They can assess how many sperm a man produces, whether sperm are misshapen, and how well they swim. But that’s about it. Determined to extract more data, several startups are developing next-generation tests that they hope will help men better understand their fertility. The goal: to explain why some men who have normal sperm counts still cannot conceive. One such test, marketed as Seed, will be unveiled Monday in front of thousands of fertility doctors at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Salt Lake City....

Recently, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland started a task force to address derogatory place names on federal lands. This task force will recommend new names for places such as Squaw Canyon and Squaw Flat in Canyonlands National Park and Squaw Creek in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. “Squaw” is an insult used to demean Native American women, but the term is pervasive: there are 660 places on federally managed public lands whose names use this slur....

At a time when police across the U.S. are being watched warily by the citizens they serve, many departments are embracing wearable cameras to document their interactions with the public. Police and rights activists alike had hoped recording incidents on patrol would help discourage violence against officers as well as increase transparency in how police treat citizens. But a report released this week questions how much law enforcement agencies are telling the public about the use of the cameras—and the footage they collect....

Shielded from Earth-bound eyes, the far side of the moon is home to a rare set of dormant volcanoes that changed the face of the lunar surface, a new study finds. Data and photos from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) reveal the presence of now-dead silicate volcanoes, not the more common basaltic volcanoes that litter the moon’s surface, researchers said. “Most of the volcanic activity on the moon was basaltic,” primary author Brad Jolliff of Washington University told SPACE....

SpaceX made history last night as it launched a crew of private citizens on a jaunt around Earth. For an added bonus, the rocket landed on its drone ship, marking the company’s 92nd booster recovery. The mission, called Inspiration4, blasted off from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:02 p.m. EDT (0002 GMT) on September 15—the start of a planned five-hour window. A four-person crew was strapped inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft which sat perched atop a slightly sooty 229-feet-tall (70 meters) Falcon 9 rocket....

Most cases of cancer result from avoidable factors such as toxic chemicals and radiation, contends a study published online in Nature on December 16 (S. Wu et al. Naturehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16166; 2015). The paper attempts to rebut an argument that arose early this year, when a report in Science concluded that differences in inherent cellular processes are the chief reason that some tissues become cancerous more frequently than others (C. Tomasetti and B....

America is confronting three interrelated crises: an economic crisis, a climate crisis and an energy security crisis. The country’s best response to all three is a bold, coor­dinated campaign of investment and incentives to accelerate green innovation. Doing so will ensure that the U.S. becomes the worldwide winner in the next great global industry: green technologies. Let me be blunt: we have not been doing enough. We must act now, with speed and scale....

Created, written & designed by John Pavlus / Screencasts produced by Andrew Cahill / Music by Jeff Alvarez Check out previous episodes of The Monitor. Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes or RSS Background on this week’s stories: #1. Location, location, location If you don’t care to read the whole thing, the PNAS paper that describes how where you vote can influence what you vote for was summarized in their early edition....

When Kathleen Sebelius took the helm of one of the largest civilian departments in the federal government, the first thorny issue on her desk was responding to the H1N1 flu virus, a new pandemic flu strain that seemed to target otherwise healthy young people. After less than a week on the job her first public speech focused on how the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration, was responding to the public health emergency....

Last week marked Arctic Matters Day hosted by the National Academy of Sciences. The free, public program highlighted results from research into the environmental changes happening in the remote region and how those changes will ultimately affect us all. Last month, at a meeting of over 20,000 scientists from the American Geophysical Union, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued an Arctic report card for 2015. Its marks were not good....

When it comes to generating renewable electricity, Hawaii is leading other states in almost every category. It gets 33 percent of its electricity from rooftop solar and has 60 utility-scale renewable energy projects feeding power into its grids. The state Legislature wants to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Just how it does that, while preventing overloads and brownouts, is being closely watched by other states. Hawaii provides a “preview” of what states might do as the United States moves faster toward renewable energy than many experts anticipated, according to a study released this week by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory....

MAY 1957 MACHINE BRAWN–“The word ‘automation,’ a journalistic coinage, has undeservedly become ‘a source of fear,’ according to the Earl of Halsbury, an English authority on industrial technology. In the British journal Impact he attempts to correct the impression created by journalists that automatic processes in industry ‘will cause widespread unemployment.’ Machines require trained men to maintain them. Displacements occur mainly in the ranks of the unskilled, who have a high rate of turnover anyway....

When President Richard Nixon launched the war on cancer in his January 1971 State of the Union, he called for “the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon.” Yet nearly 40 years and $100 billion in federally funded cancer research later, it seems the lunar landing was a much less daunting task. Although much has been learned about the biology of cancer, the overall survival rate among people who have it has improved only slightly, according to a commentary published April 21 in Science Translational Medicine....

A running mantra through the climate debate is that global warming is global indeed. Now, however, a scientist has found that localized “CO2 domes” could increase urban smog and other air pollution problems. In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson estimated that the effect could cause the premature deaths of 50 to 100 people a year in California and 300 to 1,000 for the continental United States....

A British survey published last month found that one in 25 therapists would assist gay and bisexual patients attempting to convert to heterosexuality. That’s despite the fact that many medical groups, including the American Medical Association, have for years condemned such practices, saying they don’t work and can actually cause harm. It may not be surprising that Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson and televangelist pastor Jerry Falwell, among many others, have supported programs designed to convert homosexuals away from “sin” and into the arms of God-fearing heterosexuality....

The coronavirus pandemic has provided the world with a quick study in the intricacies of immunology. “Herd immunity” and “serological tests” have become household terms. Front and center among these concepts are antibodies. These immune proteins typically emerge during the second or third week after an infection, glomming onto invaders and preventing them from sneaking into human cells. If antibodies targeting a particular virus turn up in a blood sample, their appearance provides confirmation of an immune response that may protect against reinfection....

Mars may appear red when viewed from Earth, but NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured an up-close photo of the planet’s mountainous landscape, with purple-colored rocks littered across the foreground. This remarkable new photo was captured near the base of Mars’ Mount Sharp. The image’s three frames were taken by Curiosity’s Mast Camera (Mastcam)on Nov. 10. “Variations in color of the rocks hint at the diversity of their composition on lower Mount Sharp....

Just as the African savannas aren’t all lions and tigers, North America’s late Cretaceous wasn’t all tyrannosaurs and triceratops. Researchers have found remains of the continent’s smallest dinosaur, according to a new study. The Hesperonychus elizabethae, which, according to the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, probably looked a lot more like a bird than a tiny Tyrannosaurus rex, is the first of its subfamily to be discovered outside of Asia and postdates the disappearance of its Asian cousins by about 45 million years....

A blockbuster study published in the journal Nature yesterday (May 16) revealed that for the first time since the 1980s, ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have ticked sharply upward in the atmosphere—suggesting a new source. Here’s the thing though: Not only do scientists have no idea what that new source is, it doesn’t make much sense that someone would decide to pump out CFCs again. That’s because there are numerous, inexpensive alternatives to CFCs that work just as well....

While Google and Tesla are working on self-driving cars, Terrafugia’s TF-X has its sights set much higher, literally. Unlike its current car-plane mash-up, the Transition, the four-seat TF-X flying car looks like a modern sedan with catamaran-like pods hanging off each side. These pods are 600 hp engines with folding propellers, comprised of 16 motors each, which allows the TF-X to take off and land vertically and reach estimated speeds of over 200 mph....