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When we think of infrastructure, we tend to think of the facilities and systems required for a country to function and thrive—roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways, as President Donald Trump specified in his February 28 speech to Congress. Potholes and crumbling edifices clearly indicate that something needs fixing. But knowledge is infrastructure, too, and right now it needs urgent attention. Science and technology are the basis of the modern economy and key to solving many serious environmental, social and security challenges....

On a chilly, late March day I was happily sipping a Starbucks half-caf when I caught a glimpse of a friend’s cup and narrowly avoided performing a Danny Thomas-style spit take. On the side of the paper cup was printed: The Way I See It #224 “Darwinism’s impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism’s connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record....

SAN FRANCISCO — The huge geysers on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa have gone underground. Late last year, scientists announced that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope had detected plumes of water vapor spewing about 120 miles (200 kilometers) into space from Europa’s south pole in December 2012. The news was met with a great deal of excitement, as it suggested that a robotic probe may be able to sample Europa’s possibly life-supporting subsurface ocean without touching down....

When she went before the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time in 1971, the 26-year-old Sarah Weddington became the youngest attorney to successfully argue a case before the nine justices—a distinction she still holds today. Weddington was the attorney for Norma McCorvey, the pseudonymous “Jane Roe” of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion—one of the most notable decisions ever handed down by the justices....

MIRROR THERAPY I read with great pleasure “Reflections on the Mind,” by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran [Illusions]. These experiments involving the senses are indeed fascinating. Similar experiments were first done by a well-known behavioral optometrist, Robert A. Kraskin, more than 40 years ago in Washington, D.C. He used the techniques in diagnosis and for vision rehabilitation—including for Luci Baines Johnson while her father was in office. He called his regimen of eye exercises “squinchel” and taught it to many optometrists and vision therapists nationwide at various professional meetings and workshops....

Mink dive deep into the depths of New York’s Hudson River to hunt frogs and fish. Scurrying along the river shore, they nose around in the dirt, building dens. But their food and shelter are giving them heavy doses of industrial chemicals, which could be killing their babies and jeopardizing their populations. In a new study, farm-raised mink were fed fish caught in the upper Hudson River, which is highly contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)....

How does a memory form? To demonstrate how this process occurs at the most basic level, biophysicists at Tel Aviv University replicated that event with neurons attached to a computer chip. Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob placed neurons from rat embryos on a chip surface and connected 64 electrodes to record activity. The researchers witnessed an identical pattern of nerve firings when chemical stimulants were dropped repeatedly at the same location on the chip....

Calls to modernise the 40-year-old law regulating chemicals in the US have become louder and louder, amid recognition that it has failed to police the country’s chemicals. However, political bickering has prevented any revamp of the law during several years of contentious negotiations. Meanwhile, about 85,000 chemicals are on the market in the US, with hundreds of new ones introduced every year. How are chemicals regulated in the US at the moment?...

Documentaries Flow: For Love of Water (The Water Project LLC Irena Salina, 2008) Now being picked up by theaters and growing in popularity. Case studies show how the privatization of water supplies aggravates pollution and compromises human health. www.flowthefilm.com The 11th Hour (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007) Presents practical solutions to ward off environmental decay. Produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour A Crude Awakening The Oil Crash (Lava Pictures, 2006) Chronicles civilization’s dependency on oil supplies....

Editor’s Note (3/21/22): This article was originally published on March 27, 2019, when Russia’s hypersonic nuclear weapons were still in development. It is being republished because of Russia’s claim, reported this past weekend, that it has used hypersonic missiles for the first time, striking targets in Ukraine with its Kinzhal missiles. Both the United States and Russia last month pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a Cold War–era pact that prohibited land-based ballistic or cruise missiles with ranges between 311 and 3,420 miles....

Salamanders in the Appalachian Mountains are shrinking, and researchers suspect that climate change is the culprit, according to a study published this week in Global Change Biology. Six species of the genus Plethodon are now 2–18% smaller than they were in the 1950s, according to body measurements of adult salamanders that exclude the amphibians’ tails. “This is the first evidence of shrinking salamanders,” says study co-author Karen Lips, an amphibian ecologist at the University of Maryland in College Park....

JULY 9 On this day in 1934, Canadian scientist Herbert Jasper of Brown Uni­versity made the first electrical tracing from a human brain. Jasper, considered to be one of the founders of modern neurosci­ence, pioneered the use of the electroencephalogram (EEG) to study electrical activity associated with fundamental brain functions such as consciousness and learning. He and his collaborator, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, also elucidated the mechanism underlying epilepsy and invented a highly successful procedure to treat seizures....

Ultrasound scanners, which image the inside of the human body, are a life-saving medical tool. Now researchers have shrunk the handheld ultrasound probe—which typically requires a highly trained technician to move over the skin—down to a flat chip that is the size of a postage stamp and sticks to the skin with a special bioadhesive. The new device can record high-resolution videos for two days at a stretch, capturing blood vessels and hearts laboring during exercise or stomachs expanding and shrinking as test subjects gulp juice and then digest it....

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s campaign was a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a legislative milestone of Pres. Barack Obama’s administration. Indeed, on his Web site Trump declared, “On day one of the Trump administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare.” In his “Contract with the American voter” the president-elect vowed again to repeal the ACA within the first 100 days of his administration....

Yesterday morning, I was riding my bike up a pretty significant hill. To get up that hill, I was pedaling as hard as I could. I had nearly reached the top when I felt that familiar trickle of moisture run down my forehead. Even though it was only 6ºC (42ºF), I was sweating. Our human meat-sack bodies work optimally when their internal temperature hovers around 98.6ºF (37ºC). When the body gets warmer than that, the brain doesn’t like it, so the hypothalamus (the part that controls temperature) sends a message to your body saying “Let’s cool down!...

The experience of seeing a lightning bolt before hearing its associated thunder some seconds later provides a fairly obvious example of the differential speeds of light and sound. But most intervals between linked visual and auditory stimuli are so brief as to be imperceptible. A new study has found that we can glean distance information from these minimally discrepant arrival times nonetheless. In a pair of experiments at the University of Rochester, 12 subjects were shown projected clusters of dots....

Many of the 10,000 or so bird species on the planet are pretty, melodic or tasty. But birds are much more than that. Over the centuries, humankind has come up with some distinctive and surprising ways to take advantage of the unique abilities of our feathered friends. At various points in the history of civilizations, birds have served as hunters, guides and messengers. And we haven’t run out of new things for them to do....

In a physician chat group recently, a doctor who treats hospitalized patients made a recommendation to our group of 38,000 members that left me startled and alarmed. She shared her protocol for all COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital: every one of them gets not only a chest x-ray but an entire battery of special tests, including a coagulation test, a leg ultrasound and a CT scan. This was offered as her blanket standard of care....

A demonstration floating offshore wind project in Oregon breezed over another hurdle yesterday, raising hopes that West Coast’s first offshore turbines will begin spinning before the end of the decade. However, the project’s developers indicated that this new and potentially transformative technology will likely find a more welcoming market in Europe before it is realized at utility scale in the United States. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management yesterday released a determination of no competitive interest for a 15-square-mile offshore area in Oregon that Seattle-based renewable energy developer Principle Power aims to use as a test bed for its floating offshore wind technology....

The most complete extinct-ape skull ever found reveals what the last common ancestor of all living apes and humans might have looked like, according to a new study. The 13-million-year-old infant skull, which its discoverers nicknamed “Alesi,” was unearthed in Kenya in 2014. It likely belonged to a fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon, the researchers said. Among the living primates, humans are most closely related to the apes, which include the lesser apes (gibbons) and the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans)....