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Florida officials on Thursday said they have trapped the first mosquitoes that tested positive for the Zika virus in the Miami area, further confirming reports of local U.S. transmission of the illness that can cause severe birth defects. Three mosquito samples tested positive from a small area in Miami Beach where increased trapping and intensified mosquito control measures are being implemented, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said. The Florida Department of Health has said there have so far been 49 cases of Zika in people believed to have contracted the virus in a small area of Miami, but until now, the department had not found infected mosquitoes....

In 1995 the late actor Christopher Reeve, who most famously played Superman, became paralyzed from the neck down after a horseback-riding accident. The impact from the fall left him with a complete spinal cord injury at the neck, preventing his brain from communicating with anything below it. Cases like Reeve’s are generally considered intractable injuries, absent any way to bridge the gap to restore disrupted communication lines. When Reeve died in 2004 a means of reconnection had yet to be built....

Rising air pollution in the wake of the Industrial Revolution seems to be the explanation for a long-standing enigma in glaciology. The emission of soot from Europe’s proliferating factory smokestacks and steam locomotives explains why glaciers in the Alps began their retreat long before the climate warming caused by human activities kicked in, a study suggests. The 4,000 or so large and small Alpine glaciers — which today are acutely threatened by rising air temperatures — did well throughout the relatively cool 500-year period known as the Little Ice Age, which began around the end of the thirteenth century....

Deep below the bright, smooth surface of Antarctica’s ice shelves lies a dark landscape unlike any other on earth, where inverted canyons and terraces reach far up into the ice. Fed by glaciers on land, these giant ice ledges float on the Southern Ocean’s frigid waters. This year a fleet of seven underwater robots developed by the University of Washington headed into this world on a risky mission. Their goal: to help forecast sea-level rises by observing the melting process in this hidden topsy-turvy landscape, where layers of warm and cool water mix....

Quantum particles are known to be strange or even “spooky.” But can those properties ever be useful? A new study proves that one type of wackiness—entanglement between identical particles—has practical value. Ordinarily, two objects are never exactly alike. They can only seem that way because scientists use imperfect instruments to try and tell them apart. In quantum physics, however, true indistinguishability is possible. For example, while two distinguishable electrons may seem to be the same, they can often be differentiated by measuring their respective spins....

By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - People in the European Union, who according to a United Nations body eat way more protein than necessary, could prompt big cuts in nitrogen pollution if they halved their meat and dairy consumption, a U.N.-backed report said on Friday. Nitrogen is used in fertilizer to replace nutrients which are removed by soils during plant growth but excess nitrogen can harm the environment by polluting water, air and soil....

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. “Courage.” That’s how Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller summarized the company’s rationale for removing the 3.5 mm headphone jack in the iPhone 7. I couldn’t condense my reaction to one word, and I can’t publish the two words I shouted upon hearing this, but I’m amazed by Apple’s hubris. Some might argue that I shouldn’t be surprised by the company’s bold-faced confidence in the face of an expected consumer backlash....

In the past two decades, the time between deadly international disease outbreaks has shortened, and the human and economic cost of these outbreaks has grown. In 2002, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) led to 800 deaths and US$40 billion in economic losses. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused more than 11,000 deaths and $53 billion in economic and social losses. In early 2020, COVID-19 spread rapidly worldwide, and is estimated to have contributed to more than 17 million deaths, with economic losses estimated to reach $12....

Regulators in the US will require new warnings be added to the labels of certain anesthetic and sedation drugs, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday, indicating that use of the drugs could possibly harm young children’s brains. The warnings will apply to children under 3 and to pregnant women during their third trimester, and pertain to procedures that last longer than three hours or to repeated exposure to the drugs....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every time a toddler accidentally shoots a friend or family member, a teen kills himself via gunshot or a shooter perpetrates an act of mass violence, public discussion circles back to “smart gun” technology. The concept has roots in a 1995 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study that recommended a technology-based approach to reduce the incidence of police officers killed in gun-grabs by assailants....

China’s Tiangong-1 space station is predicted to enter Earth’s atmosphere sometime during Easter weekend, but the exact location of its re-entry remains a mystery. Its uncontrolled fall to Earth shares some similarities with the end of the Skylab space station in 1979; some of Skylab’s pieces rained down on rural Australia. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany, which issued the Tiangong-1 prediction, said the March 30 to April 2 window is “highly variable,” and it will not be possible to determine exactly where the space station will fall to Earth....

Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their “amazing” refusal to listen to science. It is Fauci’s profession of amazement that amazes me. As well-versed as he is in the science of the coronavirus, he’s overlooking the well-established science of “anti-science bias,” or science denial....

Falling into a black hole was never going to be fun. As soon as physicists realized that black holes exist, we knew that getting too close to one spelled certain death. But we used to think that an astronaut falling past the point of no return—the so-called event horizon—would not feel anything special. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, no signposts would mark the spot where the chance of escape dropped to zero....

Pharmaceuticals cannot always fix a malfunctioning human body. Sometimes the only way to treat what ails a person is to tinker with their genes: the blueprints for how biological systems are built and how they operate. Some researchers are using gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR to precisely alter DNA sequences. Others are genetically modifying immune cells to imbue them with the ability to fight cancer. And in the past couple of years, there has been a rapid acceleration in the development of a wide range of treatments in which disease-causing genes are replaced in their entirety....

ESSEN, Germany — In a coal heartland of Germany stands a monument to the source of its economic might: a giant mine more than a half-mile deep that once produced the largest amount of coal in the world. Built at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the Zollverein mine cemented Germany’s place as a coal behemoth. And its legendary Shaft XII was hailed as a feat of technology due to its high level of automation....

Readers responded to September’s special issue “Energy’s Future: Beyond Carbon” like there was no tomorrow–with critiques, alternatives and prescriptions to help assure that there will be. Critical letters ranged from global warming deniers to cautious skeptics, many of whom felt it was unscientific for Gary Stix to pronounce in the introduction, “A Climate Repair Manual,” that “the debate on global warming is over.” Vern Porter of Elk Grove, Calif., begged to differ: “It seems potency of water vapor as a greenhouse gas is largely ignored and its capacity to moderate temperatures unappreciated....

Society’s embrace of cannabis to treat nausea, pain and other conditions proceeds apace with the drive to legalize the plant for recreational use. Pot’s seemingly innocuous side effects have helped clear a path toward making it a legal cash crop, with all of the marketing glitz brought to other consumer products. But that clean bill of health only goes so far. Marijuana’s potentially detrimental impact on the developing brains of adolescents remains a key focus of research—particularly because of the possibility teenage users could go on to face a higher risk of psychosis....

The spotlight shines on the magician’s assistant. The woman in the tiny white dress is a luminous beacon of beauty radiating from the stage to the audience. The Great Tomsoni announces he will change her dress from white to red. On the edge of their seats, the spectators strain to focus on the woman, burning her image deep into their retinas. Tomsoni claps his hands, and the spotlight dims ever so briefly before reflaring in a blaze of red....

Gothic Structural Experimentation By Robert Mark and William W. Clark Scientific American, November 1984 Gothic builders used the cathedrals themselves as models, modifying designs as structural problems emerged. An analysis of buttressing patterns shows that information spread rapidly among building sites. To continue reading this article, please download the PDF by clicking the button below. Download PDF The Structural Analysis of Gothic Cathedrals By Robert Mark Scientific American, November 1972 Comparison of Chartres and Bourges by optical stress analysis relates the aesthetic achievement to structural imperatives and suggests that later Gothic cathedrals may have been patterned on the wrong building....

Editor’s Note (2/1/19): For years hackers have exploited a vulnerable telecommunications protocol, Signaling System 7 (SS7), in order to intercept text messages and phone calls. Most recently digital bank robbers have used SS7’s weaknesses to foil the protection of two-factor authentication. Our explanation of this protocol, written in 2016, demonstrates what it is and why it is so insecure. Apple’s ongoing standoff with the government over passcode-protected iPhones is still raising unprecedented alarms over smartphone security and privacy....