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Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue antibodies, known as autoantibodies, are also present in a small proportion of healthy, uninfected individuals—and their prevalence increases with age, which may help to explain why elderly people are at higher risk of severe COVID-19. The findings, published on 19 August in Science Immunology, provide robust evidence to support an observation made by the same research team last October....

When Bill de Blasio first ran for New York City mayor four years ago, ending “stop-and-frisk” police searches was a cornerstone of his campaign. Critics warned halting the practice would fuel crime. But this week de Blasio coasted into reelection against a backdrop of historically low crime rates. The city of more than 8.5 million people has seen fewer than 300 murders so far in 2017. That puts its body count lower than much-smaller jurisdictions including Baltimore, a city of fewer than 620,000 people where 303 people have been murdered this year, and Chicago, where the number has risen above 580 in a population of 2....

Nuru was prepared for the worst when she went to get screened for HIV eight years ago. After caring for her mother in Uganda, who died as a result of the virus, Nuru moved to the United Kingdom to study, and decided to take her health into her own hands. “I was ready to be told I had HIV,” she says. “I felt, ‘That’s okay. I’ve looked up to my mother’....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Society pays a heavy price for traffic. It leads to lost time, more pollution and increased spending on gasoline. In metropolitan areas, road congestion in 2012 led consumers to waste 2.9 billion gallons of fuel and spend 5.5 billion hours sitting in traffic. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, the average commuter wastes 42 hours a year stuck in traffic – more than an entire week of full time work....

In September 2014, a group of leading plant and agricultural researchers sat down at Washington University in St. Louis to discuss a looming question – how will agriculture in the Midwest be affected by climate change? This wasn’t just an academic exercise. Midwestern farmers grow the majority of the country’s corn and soybeans, and scientists had predicted that yields could take a substantial hit from changing weather patterns, with potential impacts on food prices and farmers’ earnings....

The new coronavirus is not an equal-opportunity killer: Being elderly and having other illnesses, for instance, greatly increases the risk of dying from the disease the virus causes, Covid-19. It’s also possible being male could put you at increased risk. For both medical and public health reasons, researchers want to figure out who’s most at risk of being infected and who’s most at risk of developing severe or even lethal illness....

Veterinarian Paul Miller of the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains. The inner eyelid of cats–more properly called the palpebra tertia but also known as the nictitating membrane, third eyelid or “haw”–has been regarded by some as a biological curiosity much like the human appendix or wisdom teeth. In fact, some veterinary articles in the early 1900s describe methods for removing this supposedly irrelevant structure so as to facilitate examination of the eye....

It was a glorious day in the hills above Edinburgh, Scotland, when old friends and scientific colleagues Ian Wilmut and Alan Trounson set off on a hike two decades ago. High over the city, Wilmut confided that he had a secret to share. As part of a larger study, he and several co-workers had successfully birthed a lamb in the lab—not from egg and sperm but from DNA taken from an adult sheep’s mammary gland....

My husband has this bad habit. When prescribed a week or two of antibiotics, he rarely completes the full course. Once his symptoms subside, he tosses out the rest of the pills, despite warnings on the bottle to finish the prescription. Ignoring doctors’ orders is not a good idea, yet in this case he may be onto something. Dozens of studies show that for many bacterial infections, a short course of antibiotics, measured in days, performs as well as the traditional course, measured in weeks....

CLIMATEWIRE | Water levels have fallen so low on the Colorado River that they are threatening a dam relied upon by millions of Americans. In Texas, it was so hot last week the state’s grid operator had to twice ask people to conserve electricity. And in western Kansas, it is so dry that barely any wheat sprouted this year, further straining global agricultural markets upended by the war in Ukraine. Such events are a sign of how climate change is altering life in the United States....

Far beyond the eight planets of the solar system, beyond even Pluto and the diminutive dwarf planets, may lurk a major new world called “Planet Nine.” Few if any discoveries can be as sensational as finding another planet orbiting our sun, making the feat a Holy Grail for astronomers, who have managed to pull it off only a few times over the centuries. No one yet knows exactly where this ephemeral world might be—or even if it really exists at all....

Deployment of smart grid technology from U.S. utility control centers and power networks to consumers’ homes could cost between $338 billion and $476 billion over the next 20 years, but will deliver $1.3 trillion to $2 trillion in benefits over that period. The benefits will include greater grid reliability, integration of solar rooftop generation and plug-in vehicles, reductions in electricity demand, and stronger cybersecurity, according to a new study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)....

IRINGA, TANZANIA—Farmers need only survey their parched fields during the ever-intensifying dry seasons here to know climate change is happening. Rain falls less frequently than it did a decade ago because of “destruction of the environment” says Sopian Kinyoge, a 27-year-old farmer. His older sister says rains are more fleeting from “cutting down of the trees.” Alfred Mofuga, 63, simply says, “I cannot know the ways of God.” Even as the government of Tanzania invests in enhanced food production as a way to fight poverty and raise this country’s standard of living, it faces challenges on many fronts, including resistance from farmers reluctant to change their old ways, and the ongoing difficulty of adapting to a changing—and less predictable—climate....

SAN FRANCISCO — Formula 1 racing is so loud that fans would have to wear both earplugs and earmuffs in order to enjoy the spectacle at safe noise levels, new research suggests. “Noise levels at Formula 1 races are loud enough to potentially cause hearing loss,” Craig Dolder, a doctoral candidate in acoustical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said at a news conference Wednesday (Dec. 4) here at the 166th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America....

Forget views of side streets and poorly parked cars – why not explore the International Space Station (ISS) instead? Earlier this week Google Maps released its first-ever Street View in space, and now, Earthlings can virtually navigate through astronauts’ home away from home. Because no one could drive a van and camera around the ISS, Thomas Pesquet, a European Space Agency astronaut, collaborated with NASA and Google to take images with DSLR cameras already aboard the craft....

The brain is very good at alerting us to threats—and it is also adept at letting us know when a threat no longer exists. Sometimes this system fails, however, and unpleasant associations stick around—a malfunction thought to be at the root of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). New research has identified a neuronal circuit responsible for the brain’s ability to purge bad memories, findings that could have implications for treating a broad range of anxiety disorders, including PTSD....

A truly great scientist not only makes significant technical contributions but also reshapes a discipline’s conceptual landscape through a commanding depth and breadth of vision. Theoretical physicist John D. Barrow, who passed away on September 26 at the age of 67, was one such individual. Barrow’s career spanned the golden age of cosmology, in which the subject was transformed from a scientific backwater to a mainstream precision science. He was both a player and a commentator in these heady times, producing several hundred research papers and scholarly articles, as well as a string of expository books, each a model of wit and clarity that made him a public intellectual worldwide....

When animals go extinct, their functions in an ecosystem can be lost, oftentimes leading to the extinction of other species that depend on those functions. Can nonnative species, which are often regarded as invasive pests by conservationists, fill the roles left vacant by extinctions? This question is easy to ponder in the Hawaiian Islands, which are often regarded as a model system for studying both the extinction and invasion of species....

Dear EarthTalk: Isn’t spray sunscreen a health and environmental nightmare when it seems that more of the sunscreen ends up going up my nose than on the kid at the beach next to me?—Lillian Robertson, Methuen, Mass. Spray cans of sunscreen may no longer contain chlorofluorocarbons (also known as CFCs, which were phased out in the 1990s for causing holes in the stratospheric ozone layer), but many contain other chemicals that are not good for our health or the environment....

The sun is starting to give up some of its most closely guarded secrets. The first science results are in from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP), which has flown faster and closer to the sun than any other human-made object in history. The initial PSP returns, which are reported in four papers published online today (Dec. 4) in the journal Nature, begin to lift the veil on Earth’s star, which has remained surprisingly mysterious despite forever being the brightest light in our sky....