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Using a beam shot through the Earth’s crust, physicists have found the first direct proof of a metamorphosis between two of the three known types of neutrinos—those known as ‘muon’ and ‘tau’ flavours of the elementary particles. The experiment, OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus) at the Gran Sasso underground lab in central Italy, made headlines in 2011 after it announced that it had detected neutrinos travelling faster than light, in apparent violation of Einstein’s special theory of relativity....

Dear EarthTalk: What is “perchlorate” in our drinking water supply, and why is it controversial?—David Sparrow, Chico, Calif. Perchlorate is both a naturally occurring and man-made chemical used in the production of rocket fuel, missiles, fireworks, flares and explosives. It is also sometimes present in bleach and in some fertilizers. Its widespread release into the environment is primarily associated with defense contracting, military operations and aerospace programs. Perchlorate can be widespread in ground water, soils and plants, and makes its way up the food chain accordingly—even into organically grown foods....

Solar is about to boom in the Sunshine State as the price of photovoltaic cells and related installation costs drop to all-time lows. Although Florida’s two biggest utilities, Florida Power & Light Co. and Duke Energy Corp., still favor natural-gas-driven electricity over solar and its current governor remains a skeptic about climate change, the state’s drive toward renewable energy is likely to break existing records annually for the next five years....

Astronomers have discovered the Methuselah of stars — a denizen of our Solar System’s neighborhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big Bang. “We believe this star is the oldest known in the universe with a well determined age,” says Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who announced the finding 10 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California....

Most Americans sit for at least six hours a day—an act that has been linked to obesity and heart disease, among other ailments. Mounting evidence suggests long hours staring at computer monitors may also be taking a toll on the eyes. People peering for hours into a screen tend to blink less often and have tears that evaporate more quickly, which dries out the eye and can cause blurred vision or pain....

Attendees at the 2015 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in Orlando, Florida, were presented with a head scratcher. At a poster session on renal cancer, a team at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, led by Laurence Albiges, now at Gustave Roussy near Paris, presented its findings from a study of 4,657 individuals with metastatic kidney cancer. Almost two-thirds were classified as overweight or obese on the basis of their body mass index (BMI)1....

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli called her “The Onion Madonna,” after she discovered that the nucleus of the atom has an onionlike layered structure. Maria Goeppert Mayer, the last woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, claimed that honor in 1963. Since then many other women have been widely considered worthy, too: Vera Rubin, who died last year, was regarded as a strong candidate for uncovering the existence of dark matter. Jocelyn Bell Burnell played a major role in discovering pulsars but was left off the relevant 1974 Nobel Prize snagged by her (male) graduate advisor....

Chaos theory says that a tiny, insignificant event or circumstance can have outsized influence in shaping the way a large, complex system evolves into the future. Many people are familiar with this so-called butterfly effect, an idea often traced to science fiction author Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder.” In that tale, a man who has time-traveled into the deep past to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex inadvertently crushes a butterfly under his foot....

Researchers looking for signals from technologically advanced aliens pick up countless strange pings—but so far, nothing has convinced them that a message really came from aliens. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of overblown media headlines about potential alien detections. So a team of researchers pursuing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has decided to revive a scale meant to ground these detections in reality. They shared their scale, called Rio 2....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations, a move meant to bolster domestic energy production but which environmentalists have vowed to challenge in court. The decree, dubbed the “Energy Independence” order, will seek to undo former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan requiring states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris in December 2015....

Dec 31 (Reuters) - Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma braced for more flooding on Thursday as rain-swollen rivers, some at record heights, overflowed their banks, washing out hundreds of structures, closing major highways and leaving thousands of people displaced from their homes. Days of downpours from a winter storm that set off deadly tornadoes in Texas and significant snowfall in New England has pushed rivers in the U.S. Midwest to levels not seen in decades, the National Weather Service and local officials aid....

When President Joe Biden was diagnosed with COVID, he started taking an oral treatment of the antiviral Paxlovid almost immediately. Four days after finishing the Paxlovid regime and testing negative, however, Biden once again tested positive for COVID—but without any symptoms of the disease. This is perhaps the highest-profile example of what people are calling “Paxlovid rebound.” Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical advisor, also experienced it. This condition has been reported in a minority of people who have received the antiviral and remains an active area of research....

Nearly two dozen women who traveled from the U.S. to the Dominican Republic in search of less-expensive tummy tucks and other cosmetic procedures came home with more than they bargained for—severe surgical infections that required months of antibiotic treatment or additional surgeries, or both. The pathogen that caused their problems—Mycobacterium abscessus—is distantly related to both tuberculosis and leprosy and has become more and more of a problem in a growing number of medical settings around the world, according to the U....

In late October the Financial Times published a report about an interesting pedagogical exercise being perpetrated by creationists in Turkey: “A series of books for primary schoolchildren, describing Charles Darwin as a Jew with a big nose who kept the company of monkeys and other historical figures in anti-Semitic terms, has caused outrage in Turkey amid fears of rising religious intolerance. This attempt to insult Darwin by categorizing him as Jewish surprised me because I thought everyone always knew Darwin was “a member of the tribe....

Never in American political history have hacked and stolen emails played such a central role in a presidential campaign. But hackers are likely to target you as well—though perhaps with smaller repercussions for the world as a whole. Every one of October’s surprises, from the leaks of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s purported emails to those of the Democratic National Committee, was achieved using a surprisingly simple email deception technique called “spearphishing....

Most of us have had the experience of struggling mightily to solve a problem only to find, while taking a walk or doing the dishes, that the answer comes to us seemingly from nowhere. Psychologists call these sudden aha! moments “insight.” They occur not only when we are faced with a problem but also when we suddenly “get” a joke or crossword puzzle clue or are jolted by a personal realization....

Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle by Andreas Wagner Current: 2014 Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed our understanding of life’s diversity, but it could not fully answer a basic question that still vexes scientists: How does nature introduce complex traits? As evolutionary biologist Wagner puts it, natural selection “does not innovate, but merely selects what is already there.” The latest evolutionary science, however, is beginning to reveal how new traits arise in the first place....

An artificial womb that could someday sustain extremely prematurely born infants has managed to keep baby sheep alive for four weeks. The womb, called a “biobag,” is a plastic bag filled with fluid to mimic the conditions inside of a uterus. A baby born too early could spend a few weeks in the bag, where tubes from their umbilical cord to an external device would provide oxygen to their blood. After that, the baby would be taken out of the bag and hooked up to a mechanical ventilator, which would help them breathe until they develop sufficiently to breathe on their own....

LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. — For decades, scientists here at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have sent spacecraft deep into the solar system. Now, they’re exploring another mysterious terrain: the human breast. The lab’s primary mission, of course, is to dream up and create robotic spacecraft to look for water on Mars or peer below the dense clouds that shroud Jupiter. But in recent years, top scientists here have realized that JPL’s powerful technology for exploring the cosmos might also help solve daunting medical questions here on Earth....

Paul Farmer, an iconic figure in publicizing public health problems in developing nations, has now joined a campaign to highlight the issue of cancer in Latin America, Africa and other areas where treatment of this chronic illness is often lacking. As he outlines in this interview with journalist Mary Carmichael, Farmer has devised an innovative approach to compensating for the lack of high-tech treatments in countries like Haiti. He has organized the provisioning of pro bono donations of medicines and diagnostics from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, both institutions affiliated with Harvard Medical School where Farmer holds an appointment....