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Kaiba was six weeks old in 2011 when he stopped breathing and turned blue. His parents rushed him to the hospital, where they learned that his left bronchial tube had collapsed because of a birth defect. The attacks recurred for weeks until January 2012, when surgeons implanted a 3-D-printed tube to hold the baby’s airway open. The tube will dissolve after a few years inside the boy’s body, giving his bronchus time to grow strong enough for normal breathing....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s going on in the music industry with all the CDs and plastic CD holders undoubtedly generating a lot of plastic waste? – John S., via email According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), CDs and DVDs are typically manufactured by combining various mined metals (aluminum, gold, silver and nickel) with petroleum-derived plastics, lacquers and dyes. Given what complicated beasts CDs and DVDs are—products with thin layers of different materials mixed together are nearly impossible to recycle—most municipal recycling program won’t accept them, leaving consumers to fend for themselves in figuring out how to dispose of them....

One of the most surprising discoveries noted in the report was Danionella cerebrum, found in southern Myanmar. This tiny transparent fish—only slightly longer than a thumbnail—has been used in research by neuroscientists for years because it has an open brain cavity that lets researchers noninvasively observe how its neurons function. But the scientific community had thought the species was the visually similar Danionella translucida. It was only after a team of researchers studied the DNA sequences that they realized the fish represented an entirely new species, which split apart evolutionarily about 13 million years ago....

A fuel to slow climate change lies 3,000 meters below a new wellhead in China’s Sichuan Province. There, shale gas production has begun, and it just might help wean China off the coal that has made it the world’s worst carbon dioxide polluter—and blanketed the nation in bad air. Getting that world-changing gas requires pumping millions of liters of specially treated water down a deep well to fracture subterranean shale. It also requires the know-how to thread a well through a layer perhaps just a few tens of meters thick at the bottom....

Dozens of cities across China are applying an unusual forensic technique to monitor illegal drug use: chemically analysing sewage for traces of drugs, or their telltale metabolites, excreted in urine. One southern city, Zhongshan, a drug hotspot, is also monitoring waste water to evaluate the effectiveness of its drug-reduction programmes, says Li Xiqing, an environmental chemist at Peking University in Beijing who is working with police in these cities. Li says Zhongshan police have already used the technique to help track down and arrest a drug manufacturer....

It was not until a year and a half after his voyage on board the Beagle that Charles Darwin first came face to face with an ape. He was standing by the giraffe house at the London Zoo on a warm day in late March of 1838. The zoo had just acquired an orangutan named Jenny. One of the keepers was teasing her–showing her an apple, refusing to hand it over....

The European Union has an idea to help save the planet from the future ravages of climate change: Make a duplicate. The initiative, known as “Destination Earth,” will draw on a host of environmental, socioeconomic and satellite data to develop digital “twins” of the planet that aim to help policymakers — and eventually the public — better understand and respond to rising temperatures. It will pair that data with artificial intelligence techniques to analyze human and natural activity and allow for simulations that will predict future environmental change and its impacts....

The neutrino is the oddball of particle physics. It has no charge and rarely interacts with other particles, but it comes in three flavors—electron, muon and tau—and madly oscillates from one flavor to the next as it travels along. For the past five years, researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have been firing beams of muon neutrinos at the MiniBooNE detector, a huge spherical tank filled with 800 tons of mineral oil, to see how many of the particles changed in flight to electron neutrinos....

By Naomi Lubick High levels of antibiotic resistance have been found in bacteria that live downstream from a waste-water treatment plant in Patancheru, near Hyderabad in India.Two years ago, Joakim Larsson of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and his colleagues reported that the treatment plant released drugs in its effluent water at levels sometimes equivalent to the high doses that are given therapeutically. The antibiotic-containing water reaching the plant came from 90 bulk pharmaceutical manufacturers in the region, near Hyderabad, they determined....

Path integration may not be as widely known as the American Express card, but you’d better not leave the house without it. After all, path integration is the ability of animals, including humans, to return home from somewhere else. How animals keep their bearings on hunting trips is somewhat of a mystery. Celestial navigation and electromagnetic fields help ants, honeybees, birds and sea turtles keep track of directions. More puzzling: how animals measure distances....

Polar bears may have trod the planet for millions of years, according to a new genetic analysis. That suggests the white-coated, massive bears have weathered previous natural climate changes, and may predate the Arctic ice that is their preferred—and only—habitat today, which is why the species future remains uncertain presently. “There’s no guarantee that they’ll survive this time,” says geneticist Webb Miller of Pennsylvania State University, an author of the study published July 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

As a young Ph.D. student studying human and ape evolution, I was in Kibale National Park that summer to measure how much chimpanzees climb each day. It seemed to me that the energy spent climbing might be a critical factor in chimpanzee ecology and evolution, shaping their anatomy to maximize climbing efficiency, thus sparing calories for reproduction and other essential tasks. Months earlier, while mulling over summer research plans from the comfort of my desk at snowy Harvard University, I envisioned chimpanzees waging a heroic struggle for existence, working hard on a daily basis to eke out a living....

Evolution is one of nature’s greatest shows. From humble beginnings, it gave rise to fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals; it took the ancestors of apes and sculpted them into humans. These grand spectacles play out across millions of years, dazzling us with their before-and-after shots. But if we look closely, we can sometimes glimpse evolution unfolding in real time. And often we are surprised to find ourselves directing the show....

A new study predicts there’ll be more than 1 million deaths a year from extreme heat in India by the next century if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current level. Research by the Climate Impact Lab with the University of Chicago’s Tata Centre for Development projects India’s average annual temperature will rise 4 degrees by 2100. When broken down by location, 16 of India’s 36 states and union territories will become hotter than Punjab, which is currently the hottest state, with an average annual summer temperature around 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius)....

When it comes to predicting the sex of a baby sea turtle, biologist Jeanette Wyneken has often heard her students use a simple guideline: “hot chicks, cool dudes.” That’s because unlike humans, the sex of sea turtle isn’t determined by chromosomes. A host of external environmental factors can influence whether an egg hatches a male or female turtle, and one of those factors is temperature: Warmer conditions birth more females, whereas cooler ones produce males....

A report this month from the National Research Council (NRC) has called NASA’s overall trajectory into question. It pointed out the national disagreement over the U.S. space agency’s goals and objectives, a disparity detrimental to the organization’s planning and budgeting efforts. The 12-person blue-ribbon study group observed that the White House should take the lead in forging “a new consensus” on NASA’s future in order to more closely align the agency’s budget and objectives and remove restrictions impeding NASA’s efficient operations....

The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann—or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. In this season, we peer into a fascinating moment in the postwar U.S. through the prism of Dán von Neumann’s work. We explore the evolution of early computers, the vital role women played in early programming, and the inextricable connection between computing and war....

Doctors that work for professional football teams have conflicts of interest that could jeopardize players’ health, according to a report by Harvard researchers. The report released Thursday, funded by the NFL players’ union, states that because doctors are paid by the teams, they may put teams’ business above players’ health interests. However, it doesn’t identify any specific instances when this has occurred. League sources flatly denied the existence of any such conflict of interest, calling the report nothing more than an academic exercise....

Ice fields in southern South America are rapidly losing volume and in most cases thinning at even the highest elevations, contributing to sea-level rise at “substantially higher” rates than observed from the 1970s through the 1990s, according to a study published Wednesday. The rapid melting, based on satellite observations, suggests the ice field’s contribution to global sea-level rise has increased by half since the end of the 20th century, jumping from 0....

In 2007 Alexander Shapovalov suggested an unusual coin-weighing problem for the sixth international Kolmogorov math tournament [5]. A judge is presented with 80 coins that all look the same, knowing that there are either two or three fake coins among them. All the real coins weigh the same and all the fake coins weigh the same, but the fake coins are lighter than the real ones. A lawyer knows that there are exactly three fake coins and which ones they are....