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HONG KONG—A powerful typhoon hit China this weekend, killing over a dozen and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate. Typhoon Soudelor—named after a legendary Pohnpeian chief—made landfall late Saturday in Putian of Fujian province along China’s east coast, with maximum sustained wind of 86 mph, according to the China Meteorological Administration. The Chinese weather agency said that the typhoon, which is the western Pacific’s version of a hurricane, weakened as it moved inland and degraded to a tropical storm....

It is one of the most evocative traces of humanity’s ancestors ever found, a trail of footprints pressed into new fallen volcanic ash some 3.6 million years ago in what is now Laetoli, Tanzania. Discovered in 1978 by a team headed by Mary Leakey, the Laetoli footprints led to the stunning revelation that humans walked upright well before they made stone tools or evolved large brains. They also engendered controversy: scientists have debated everything from how many individuals made the prints to how best to protect them for posterity....

Tatsuhiko Kodama began his 27 July testimony to Japan’s parliament with what he knew. In a firm, clear voice, he said that the Radioisotope Center of the University of Tokyo, which he heads, had detected elevated radiation levels in the days following the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. But when it came to what wasn’t known, he became angry. “There is no definite report from the Tokyo Electric Power Company or the government as to exactly how much radioactive material has been released from Fukushima!...

Dear EarthTalk: A friend with many minor health problems recently switched to a diet of only raw plant foods and reports feeling much better. She also insists her new eating habits are better for the environment. Does this make sense or is the strange diet making her crazy? —Phil C., Reno, Nev. A raw foods diet typically consists of unprocessed foods that are not heated above 115 degrees Fahrenheit so as to preserve nutrients otherwise lost during cooking....

Hundreds of thousands of native fish in Australia’s Darling River have died following a major outbreak of blue–green algae and some severe weather. Two mass die-offs have been reported near Menindee in western New South Wales—the first was late last year, and the second last week. Outbreaks of blue–green algae (cyanobacteria), which thrive in warm water, are not uncommon during droughts. The algae did not directly cause the mass die-off; rapid cooling and intense rainfall might have disrupted the bloom and depleted the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, killing the fish, said Anthony Townsend, a senior fisheries manager at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, in a statement....

Militaries around the world could be overstretched as they respond to more intense and frequent climate-driven crises and threats to their own installations. That means faster action is needed to address climate risks in security practices, according to a report by the International Military Council on Climate and Security, a group of officers and experts. It envisions a world rippling with new threats as conflicts erupt over waning water supplies and disappearing farmland....

When we perform an action and get an unexpected reward, we learn to repeat that action. And in the presence of others competing for resources—food, money, and so on—our competitors’ actions offer opportunities to guide our behavior. According to new work from researchers at the University of Bristol in England, it is not our peers’ successes that stick with us, but their failures. Volunteers played a simple game, modeled after foraging in the wild, against a computer-controlled com­petitor....

A group of researchers think they’ve found a simpler, more accurate way to track historical ocean temperatures: studying nacre, or mother-of-pearl, under a microscope. Mother-of-pearl is an iridescent material that’s found in mollusk shells. It forms in layers, which allows it to reflect light and shimmer. But these layers could be useful in another way, according to Pupa Gilbert, a professor with the University of Wisconsin, Madison: They provide a good estimation of the temperatures they grow in....

DRUG-RESISTANT TUBERCULOSIS IS ROARING through Europe, according to the World Health Organization. Treatment options are few—antibiotics do not work on these highly evolved strains—and about 50 percent of people who contract the disease will die from it. The grim situation mirrors the fight against other drug-resistant diseases such as MRSA, a staph infection that claims 19,000 lives in the U.S. every year. Hope comes in the form of a nanotech knife....

Scientists once thought bigger brains made smarter animals. But birds fly in the face of that logic: with a brain smaller than a walnut, they can develop sophisticated tools and remember where they hid food. Now research published in Current Biology suggests birds can pull this off because their brain neurons use less energy than those of mammals, letting their bodies support a higher proportion of these cells. A 2016 study showed that avian brains are denser than those of many other animals....

In September 2020 Golda Barton’s 13-year-old autistic son became frantic with anxiety the first day she had to return to work after several months at home. His mother called 911 and asked for a crisis intervention team. When Salt Lake City police showed up, the boy ran. One of the officers chasing him shot him 11 times, leaving him in critical condition. According to the family’s GoFundMe page set up to cover the boy’s medical bills, in spring 2021 he had to undergo a complex nerve transplant surgery, one of a line of medical procedures and has endured intractable pain....

Key concepts Physics Engineering Inclined plane Gravity Momentum Introduction Have you ever watched a Slinky “walk” down a flight of stairs and wondered how it works? It’s a fascinating thing to see and a big part of the Slinky’s appeal. These spring toys have been popular for well over half a century; your parents, or even grandparents, may have played with them. Slinkies not only make fun toys, they are also great for doing physics and engineering activities....

Early this month, Jim Valentine found himself faced with a heart-wrenching decision: the 35-year-old, unemployed computer consultant from Lansing, Mich., had to decide whether to shell out thousands of dollars he didn’t have to try to save his beloved dying cat, Silvus. His nine-year-old, silver-furred friend was suffering from kidney failure and he likely needed a pricey kidney transplant. Instead, Silvus was put to death on March 3. “My only option at that point was to be somewhat financially responsible and have him euthanized,” Valentine says sadly, “which was a terrible choice to have to make…....

Since the earliest days of medicine, physicians have needed to make judgements about a patient’s condition. In his Book of Prognostics, Hippocrates (after whom the Hippocratic Oath is named) wrote of a doctor: “He will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.” Foresight is never easy, but thankfully disease diagnosis and prognosis has improved since Hippocrates’ time. As doctors deepened their understanding of diseases, they identified measurable signals, or biomarkers, that indicate normal biological function, pathology or response to treatment....

As it seeks to modernize its nuclear arsenal, the United States faces a big choice, one which Barack Obama failed to mention during his moving Hiroshima speech on May 27. Should we spend a trillion dollars to replace each of our thousands of nuclear warheads with a more sophisticated substitute attached to a more lethal delivery system? Or should we keep only enough nuclear weapons needed for a devastatingly effective deterrence against any nuclear aggressor, investing the money saved into other means of making our nation more secure?...

Theorists and observational astronomers are hot on the trail of dark matter, the invisible material thought to account for puzzling mass disparities in large-scale astronomical structures. For instance, galaxies and galactic clusters behave as if they were far more massive than would be expected if they comprised only atoms and molecules, spinning faster than their observable mass would explain. What is more, the very presence of assemblages such as our Milky Way Galaxy speaks to the influence of more mass than we can see....

By Steve Gorman Aug 29 (Reuters) - Wildlife agents authorized to eradicate a group of 11 wolves for repeated attacks on cattle in Washington state have hunted down and killed six animals from the condemned pack and are searching for the rest, a state game official said on Monday. State biologists fatally shot two members of the so-called Profanity Peak wolf pack from a helicopter on Aug. 5 after confirming five fatal wolf attacks on livestock in that area....

Black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, navy beans and pink beans—varieties of what is called the common bean—provide essential protein and vitamins the world over, especially in Latin America and Africa. But according to a recent climate model, increasing temperatures could take those beans off the table for up to 50 percent of their growing areas by 2050, making temperature rise a greater threat to this staple food than even drought or disease....

A man who once flew all the way to Copenhagen from Washington, D.C., just to tell journalists that climate change wasn’t that big a deal is likely now to return to lead (or at least strongly influence) the environment committee of the U.S. Senate. As Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.) said at that time, in December 2009, he came to Copenhagen to “make sure that nobody is laboring under the misconception that the U....

Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Americans can be forgiven if they’ve lost track of the latest variants circulating nationally and around the world. We’ve heard of the alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and omicron variants, but a new Greek-letter variant hasn’t come onto the scene in almost half a year. Instead, a seemingly endless stream of “subvariants” of omicron, the most recent Greek-letter variant, has emerged in the past few months....