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The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster That Launched the War on Cancer Jennet Conant W. W. Norton, 2020 ($27.95) On December 2, 1943, a German air raid bombed a port in the Italian city of Bari. Among the 40 ships that were damaged, destroyed or sunk was the U.S. Liberty ship John Harvey, which carried a secret cargo of 2,000 mustard gas bombs. With the ship’s destruction, mustard gas leaked into the harbor and dispersed into the clouds of smoke and flame from the bombing....

Once a pest of the past, bedbugs now infest every state in the U.S.. Cimex lectularius—small, flattened insects that feed solely on mammalian and avian blood—have been living with humans since ancient times. Abundant in the U.S. prior to World War II, bedbugs all but vanished during the 1940s and ’50s thanks to improvements in hygiene and the use of pesticides. In the past 10 years, however, the pests have staged a comeback worldwide—an outbreak after the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney was a harbinger of things to come....

Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House had very little to do with his views on the spread of high-speed broadband, wireless spectrum allocation—or any number of other eye-glazing but important issues impacting technology in the country he will soon lead. Granted, there was no public thirst for a heated, televised debate over how to keep next-generation 5G wireless devices from overwhelming older networks. Yet these and other tech-related topics are closely connected with much of the rhetoric that ultimately won Trump the presidency....

The World Health Organization on Friday announced an end to the public health emergency of international concern over Zika, cautioning that the virus remains a significant and an enduring health challenge. The decision comes nine months after the UN agency first declared an emergency over Zika and its associated complications. Officials stressed, however, that the virus remains a threat wherever it can still be transmitted by mosquitoes and that health officials must not let down their guard....

The year 1915 was a big moment for physics. That was when Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity, one of the most transformative ideas about the universe ever formulated. And that was the year mathematician Emmy Noether published her Noether’s theorem, which established the importance of symmetry, a central concept in physics and in theories attempting to unify the known forces of the universe. Two public lectures at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario this week will explore the genesis and impact of these landmark advances....

Last year was the fourth-warmest on record. It’s not an official finding because the partial government shutdown has prevented NASA and NOAA from making that determination. But the data show that 2018 stacks up as one of the warmest years since the Civil War era, according to researchers from Berkeley Earth. Just three years were warmer: 2016 is first, followed by 2015 and 2017, according to NOAA. Last year, global temperatures were 1....

A good night’s sleep can be transformative. Among its benefits are improved energy and mood, better immune system functioning and blood sugar regulation, and greater alertness and ability to concentrate. Given all of these benefits, the fact that a third of the human lifespan is spent sleeping makes evolutionary sense. However, sleep appears to have another important function: helping us learn. Across a plethora of memory tasks—involving word lists, maze locations, auditory tones, and more—going to sleep after training yields better performance than remaining awake....

In the world of wine reviews, evocative writing is key. Consider the following: “While the nose is a bit closed, the palate of this off-dry Riesling is chock full of juicy white grapefruit and tangerine flavors. It’s not a deeply concentrated wine, but it’s balanced neatly by a strike of lemon-lime acidity that lingers on the finish.” Reading the description, you can almost feel the cool glass sweating in your hand and taste a burst of citrus on your tongue....

When federal climate scientists set about making their usual monthly tally of data from weather stations around the country in December, one station was glaringly missing: Utqiavik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, the northernmost community in the U.S. After some digging the scientists found that month upon month of exceptionally warm temperatures had caused their automated quality-control checks to flag the data as suspicious. Basically, the computer algorithm they were using thought the warming over the past year was too rapid to be real....

Mounting evidence indicates that chronic exposure to emotional stressors, such as anxiety or fear, can make a person more susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease. The latest study comes from a team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego that replicated the body’s reaction to mild stress by physically restraining mice for half an hour. The incident modified the tau protein, which gives neurons structural support, rendering it unable to fulfill its role....

A major solar flare that occurred Tuesday at 7:28 p.m. EST may yield a substantial aurora borealis (northern lights) over the next couple of nights. Scientists predict another solar flare early in the morning on March 8. It could be the strongest coronal mass ejection since December of 2006 Areal coverage of the display is almost impossible to gauge ahead of time. The northern lights could be visible as far south as the southern Great Lakes region....

Many of us enjoy an occasional bedtime chat with a loved one who is far away. But as more and more people trade in their landlines for mobile phones, they may find that these late-night conversations are no longer a good idea. According to recent studies, cell phone signals can alter brain waves—and the consequences will keep you up at night. Neuroscientist Rodney Croft and his colleagues at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia strapped a Nokia 6110 cell phone to the heads of 120 men and women and then monitored their brain waves....

From COOL: How The Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World, by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015, by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp. All rights reserved. Status seeking and the rebel instinct Sturgis is a sleepy little town of about seven thousand in the sparsely populated state of South Dakota. To most travelers, it’s known, if at all, as one of the few towns along Interstate 90 where you can stop and get gas between Rapid City and Spearfish....

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are projected to increase 1% in 2022, hitting a new record of 37.5 billion tonnes, scientists announced today at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. If the trend continues, humanity could pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to warm Earth to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial temperatures in just nine years. The 2015 Paris climate agreement set this aspirational limit, seeking to avoid the most serious consequences for the planet....

Two simple changes to the virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic take away its ability to jump between mammals in the laboratory. Scientists say the resulting virus is more like a bird flu that is unable to spread after taking hold in a mammal’s upper airways. The finding does not reveal whether or how exactly the feared H5N1 bird flu virus would make a reverse set of changes and begin hopping between humans, but it underscores the idea that a certain type of biological change may be crucial in causing pandemics....

The coronavirus pandemic has brought chaos to lives and economies around the world. But efforts to curb the spread of the virus might mean that the planet itself is moving a little less. Researchers who study Earth’s movement are reporting a drop in seismic noise—the hum of vibrations in the planet’s crust—that could be the result of transport networks and other human activities being shut down. They say this could allow detectors to spot smaller earthquakes and boost efforts to monitor volcanic activity and other seismic events....

The heroics of US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and his Flight 1549 crew in ditching their bird-strike disabled Airbus A320 aircraft on in the Hudson River near New York Citybetween Manhattan and New Jersey are now legendary. But as the Federation Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other regulatory bodies examine the successful water landing and the role that a flock of Canadian geese played in shutting down both of the ill-fated jet’s engines, a key question remains: Could the incident have been prevented?...

In June, an Arizona woman was told by her doctor that her nine-week-old fetus had no heartbeat and that she was miscarrying. She was given a prescription for misoprostol, a drug that would help induce her body to clear the dead fetus. She went to a local Walgreens to get that medication but the pharmacist there refused. Instead he told her she could return when he was not working or have her prescription passed along to another pharmacy....

People who dismiss climate change often claim that the earth’s warm-up is simply part of “natural climate variability.” A paper published in July in Nature puts that argument to rest. The authors show that warm and cold years were regularly interspersed during the past 2,000 years A and that even the warmest and coldest periods were experienced only by isolated regions at a given time—never across the entire globe simultaneously B....

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Governments need to plan better for rising migration driven by climate change, experts said on Thursday, citing evidence that extreme weather and natural disasters force far more people from their homes than wars. Projections by leading climate scientists of rising sea levels, heatwaves, floods and droughts linked to global warming are likely to oblige millions of people to move out of harm’s way, with some never able to return....