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New evidence is confirming that the environment kids live in has a greater impact than factors such as genetics, insufficient physical activity or other elements in efforts to control child obesity. Three new studies, published in the April 8 Pediatrics, land on the import of the ’nurture’ side of the equation and focus on specific circumstances in children’s or teen’s lives that potentially contribute to unhealthy bulk. In three decades child and adolescent obesity has tripled in the U....

Once a memory is lost, is it gone forever? Most research points to yes. Yet a study published in the online journal eLife now suggests that traces of a lost memory might remain in a cell’s nucleus, perhaps enabling future recall or at least the easy formation of a new, related memory. The current theory accepted by neurobiologists is that long-term memories live at synapses, which are the spaces where impulses pass from one nerve cell to another....

It’s a summer Saturday morning and more than 160 people are packed into a windowless classroom beneath a Lower Manhattan street. Organizers had distributed the ad for the three-hour event just three weeks earlier. The goal was to gather people who identify as “Asian” on the U.S. census—and nearly everyone in the overcapacity room fits that label. Attendees, the flyer says, will learn about precision medicine—a health care trend in which treatment and medication are tailored to an individual’s genes, environment and lifestyle....

Billions of years ago the single-celled common ancestor of all life on earth split into bacteria and archaea, according to evolutionary theory. Now scientists have genetically engineered a microbe that combines features of both domains, offering insight into how this pivotal event occurred. Bacteria and archaea are both unicellular organisms that lack nuclei, but they have distinct genetic and chemical makeups. Their cell membranes, for example, are made up of two different kinds of fatty molecules, known as lipids....

This story was co-published with WNYC Radio. When Patrice and Philip Morgan bought a house near the ocean in Brooklyn, they were not particularly worried about the threat of flooding. Federal maps showed their home was outside the area at a high risk of flood damage. For that reason, the government did not require them to buy flood insurance, a cost imposed on neighbors on more vulnerable blocks. Even so, the couple decided to raise their house four feet to protect their basement from the effects of heavy rain storms....

Editor’s Note (12/5/17): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published August 5, 2016, in light of the International Olympic Committee’s announcement on Tuesday that Russia has been suspended from competing in the 2018 Winter Games as penalty for doping. At this month’s summer’s Olympic Games in Rio, the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt—a six-foot-five Jamaican with six gold medals and the sinewy stride of a gazelle—will try to beat his own world record of 9....

Dear EarthTalk: How are heating, cooling and electricity produced by geothermal energy? I don’t understand how it works. —Delano Stewart, Wyandanch, NY The term “geothermal” is derived from the Greek words for Earth (geo) and heat (therme). In essence geothermal energy is power harnessed from the Earth itself. Heat from the Earth’s core, which averages about 6,650 degrees Fahrenheit, emanates out toward the planet’s surface. Heated springs and geysers up to three miles underground can be accessed by special wells that bring the hot water (or steam from it) up to the surface where it can be used directly for heat or indirectly to generate electricity by powering rotating turbines....

This summer the American Postal Workers Union filed a grievance against the U.S. Postal Service over the agency’s plans to decommission 671 mail-sorting machines at facilities across the country. Although a few such machines are normally replaced each year because of wear and tear, this mass removal would involve a significant percentage of the more than 8,500 pieces of automated processing equipment that the USPS uses nationwide. The move also coincided with new USPS cost-cutting measures—instituted by Louis DeJoy, a former Republican Party fundraiser whom President Donald Trump appointed postmaster general earlier this year—which have been blamed for mail backlogs and delayed deliveries....

The Antikythera mechanism is one of the most astonishing discoveries in archaeology. Salvaged from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck in Greece in 1900, the intricately geared contraption was quickly recognized as a machine for calculating the movement of the moon and planets. It continues to surprise, as researcher Tony Freeth reveals. The gears are more delicate and complex than we knew when Freeth shared his team’s results in 2009, predicting more celestial events with precision and ingenuity....

A couple of days ago, I received two letters from my health insurance company. One welcomed me to its autopay system – which was a touch odd, given that I had been in its autopay system for many years. The second told me that I was about to have my health insurance cut off, as I hadn’t paid my monthly bill. Please forgive me, then, if I’m not bathed in admiration for the way health insurance companies do business....

“A Sunshade for Planet Earth,” by Robert Kunzig, describes various geoengineering proposals to slow or reverse global warming. As an engineer, I appreciated the proposed technologies, but as an economist, I was appalled at what they would mean. First, it has been established that regulating a risky behavior only encourages more of that behavior. This tendency would mean that a technical fix to global warming would only encourage more carbon emissions....

A routine shopping trip in a market in central Laos has yielded much more than a good bargain. Scientists have discovered a unique long-whiskered rodent representing a previously unknown mammal family. The locals were already familiar with the species, which they had dubbed Kha-Nyou. But when Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society first spied it for sale on a table at the hunters market, he immediately recognized it as exceptional....

Before dawn on Saturday, if all goes well, Crew Dragon will leave for the International Space Station—one last test flight before it actually carries astronauts for the first time. No U.S. company has ever launched a space traveler into orbit in its own ship before. “It’s great to get that feeling again of getting ready to go flying,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, after the final flight readiness review on February 22....

Key concepts Physics Liquids Solids Size Density Introduction Have you ever poured sand out of a bucket or cereal out of a box and noticed it seems to flow’ a lot like water? This is because both sand and cereal are granular materials. That means they’re made up of solid particles, but they can actually flow like liquids! Candies such as Skittles, M&M’s, Nerds and many others are also granular materials....

One of the underappreciated thrills of reading science fiction is the possibility, however unlikely, that some far-out fiction will eventually prove to be at least partial fact—its wild speculation maturing over time until, like fine wine forgotten in a cellar, it is finally remembered and savored. Sometimes reality’s similarity to an author’s imaginings can be downright eerie such as H. G. Wells’s vision of nuclear war from 1914’s The World Set Free or Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which in 1865 predicted many key features of the Apollo 11 lunar landing....

In 2020, as the bodies piled up during the pandemic, it became clear that people of color were dying at far higher rates than white people. They had the jobs that exposed them to infections, the comorbidities that made them more likely to get very sick, and less ability to access quality health care than white Americans. The toll revealed in very stark ways that racial disparities and racism were alive and well in the U....

Christmas trees are dead or dying. But some conifers and other trees theoretically could live forever, according to a recent essay that reviews accumulating evidence on extremely long-lived trees—and calls for more scientifically rigorous methods to determine their age and study their longevity. Across the board, trees do not die so much as they are killed, write the authors of the review essay, entitled “On Tree Longevity.” Their killers are external physical or biological factors rather than old age alone....

Ukrainian number theorist Maryna Viazovska is among the four winners of the 2022 Fields Medals, one of the highest honours in mathematics that is conventionally awarded to people aged under 40. The other winners are James Maynard, a number theorist at the University of Oxford, UK; June Huh, a specialist in combinatorics at Princeton University in New Jersey; and Hugo Duminil-Copin, who studies statistical physics at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) near Paris....

The year was 1902. Paul Bartsch, a mollusk researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, wondered whether the aquatic snails he was studying could be spread from one body of water to another by aquatic birds. To find out, he needed to track the movements of birds. Bartsch hatched a plan. He fastened lightweight aluminum rings inscribed with the year, a serial number and a Smithsonian return address around the legs of 23 nestling black-crowned night herons that he captured along the Anacostia River outside Washington, D....

Editor’s Note (1/3/19): On January 3, the Chang’e-4 lander touched down near the center of Von Kármán crater on the lunar farside, then deployed its rover, called Yutu 2. With the successful deployment of Yutu 2, China now has two operational spacecraft on the moon—the nation’s Chang’e-3 lander remains operational on the lunar nearside. China is once again on the threshold of a historic first in its fast-paced exploration of Earth’s moon....