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FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY I read “The Pandemic We Forgot,” Scott Hershberger’s article on the 1918 influenza pandemic, and noted your call for stories at the end of the online version about ancestors who experienced it. Among the 675,000 people in the U.S. who lost their lives 102 years ago were nearly all of my great-grandmother’s immediate family. Both of her parents and a brother died. Her first husband and their one-year-old daughter died the same day in October 1918 and were buried together in the same coffin....

Gems and Gemstones by Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn. University of Chicago Press, 2009 Eye candy abounds in this volume on gems based on the newly revamped Grainger Hall of Gems at the Field Museum in Chicago. The book covers such topics as how gems form in nature, how they are classified, and the fascinating history of humanity’s love of jewels. EXCERPT From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean Carroll....

Chemists have sped up evolution, harnessing a process that can take millions of years in the natural world and using it—in months or weeks—to make novel molecules that today are used for everything from “green” biofuels to cancer drugs. Today that speed and efficiency was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Frances H. Arnold won half of the 2018 prize for directing evolution in a test tube, speeding up the natural selection of the most productive enzymes to drive chemical reactions....

Geologists have produced evidence of abundant marine life on the earth from a period when others say a thick layer of ice gripped the entire planet. The find lends considerable support to one side of a scientific controversy that has been widely debated for decades. The hullabaloo is over a glacial period dating to about 750 million to 600 million years ago. Experts agree about the presence of ice on the planet then–even at the equator–but how much and to what extent is still up in the air....

There’s a plate of cookies on my desk. I put it there myself, so I can only blame myself for avoiding work with the prospect of a sweet snack. I don’t even want to know exactly how many calories there are in a single little cookie. Yet this is exactly what you should know if you want to lose weight. The calorie is a unit of energy and is actually out-of-date....

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – The smell of wood-burning stoves seems to permeate this gateway to the Grand Canyon and pit stop on the legendary Route 66. In this corner of the state, trees, wood and fire have an ever-evolving relationship. Surrounded by the Coconino National Forest, this northern Arizona town sat at the edge of the 2010 Schultz fire, which burned 15,000 acres. While the Schultz fire visibly marked the landscape, the damage was relatively benign compared with the floods that came a month later....

Americans love to gripe about ridiculous-sounding regulations. We scoff at state rules that bar kids from running lemonade stands without proper permits and federal code that makes it a crime to sell earplugs when their noise-reduction rating isn’t written in a particular font (Helvetica Medium, for the record). There is even a popular twitter account, @CrimeADay, that churns out mentions of absurd-sounding regulations on a daily basis. Certainly, not all laws are equally enforced, nor do they affect us all in the same ways....

Psychologists study how humans make decisions by giving people “toy” problems. In one study, for example, my colleagues and I described to subjects a hypothetical disease with two strains. Then we asked, “Which would you rather have? A vaccine that completely protects you against one strain or a vaccine that gives you 50 percent protection against both strains?” Most people chose the first vaccine. We inferred that they were swayed by the phrase about complete protection, even though both shots gave the same overall chance of getting sick....

Dear EarthTalk: What are “catch shares” as a strategy for rescuing fish populations that are on the brink?—Peter Parmalee, New Orleans The term “Catch shares”—also called Limited Access Privilege Programs (LAPPs)—refers to a fisheries management technique whereby individual fishermen, cooperatives or fishing communities are guaranteed a certain percentage of the overall “Total Allowable Catch” (TAC) for a certain fish species (or “fish stock”) in a given area. Catch shares are typically implemented to protect established fishermen’s livelihoods during efforts to scale back commercial harvesting of overfished species....

The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals—guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively. Now scientists have doubled this number of life’s building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA. In a study published on 22 February in Science, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life....

Her finalist year: 1952 Her finalist project: A paper arguing that Native Americans had contact with other cultures from across the Pacific What led to the project: Alice Beck Kehoe always loved archaeology and anthropology. Her parents subscribed to National Geographic, and when she discovered Alfred Kroeber’s lengthy textbook, Anthropology, in a public library, she read it straight through. Because of that fascination, when the Mount Vernon, N.Y., resident looked for a summer job at age 16, she had her eyes on the anthropology department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City....

The recent discovery of dozens of remarkably well-preserved footprints in the southern Arizona desert provides new insights into how Native people practiced a complex system of irrigation agriculture in the region between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago. The find also offers new evidence in a long-standing debate over possible migration patterns from Mesoamerica and gives a unique snapshot of daily life at a time when people were transitioning from nomadic hunter–gatherers to more sedentary village dwellers....

To the average person, it must seem as if the field of artificial intelligence is making immense progress. According to some of the more gushing media accounts and press releases, OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can seemingly create spectacular images from any text; another OpenAI system called GPT-3 can talk about just about anything—and even write about itself; and a system called Gato that was released in May by DeepMind, a division of Alphabet, reportedly worked well on every task the company could throw at it....

Aug 6 (Reuters) - A team of U.S. regulators probing contamination at a Colorado gold mine accidentally released a million gallons (3.8 million liters) of orange-hued waste water containing sediment and metals into a local river system, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday. The waste water that had been held behind a barrier near the abandoned Gold King Mine spilled on Wednesday into Cement Creek, which flows into the Animas River in San Juan County, EPA spokesman Rich Mylott said....

Key concepts Physics Viscosity Blood Introduction With Halloween just around the corner, pretend-bloody scenes are just a block away. Whether it is dripping vampire teeth or a leaky bandage, fake blood is sure to bring characters to life—so to speak. Although chocolate syrup might make convincing fake blood in black-and-white pictures, it is not so believable in full color—or in real-life encounters. In this activity science helps you engineer your latest product: good-looking (and tasty!...

For thousands of years only one side of the moon was visible to humankind as a result of synchronous rotation, a sort of orbital lockstep that keeps the moon rotating once for every lap it takes around Earth. Astronomers had to settle for this near-side view until 1959, when a Soviet craft took the first photographs of the moon’s far side. But could the view from Earth have been different early in lunar geologic history?...

A lot can happen during a life—career changes, marriages, divorces, births, deaths, not to mention all the small stuff in between—but childhood lays an important foundation that can last a lifetime. A long-running study published in September 2016 in Psychological Science found that men who grew up in warmer, more nurturing family environments had stronger relationships as older adults. The research is a continuation of Harvard University’s Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study of adult health and well-being that has spanned almost eight decades....

The Greenland ice sheet may be even more sensitive to the warming climate than scientists previously thought. A new study finds that rising air temperatures are working with warm ocean waters to speed the melting of Greenland’s seaside glaciers. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shed new light on the forces driving ice loss on the world’s second largest ice sheet. The Greenland ice sheet is losing an average of around 250 billion metric tons of ice per year....

As a record-breaking heat wave roasted the Pacific Northwest last summer, anxiety rose with the temperatures. Surveys of residents in British Columbia—where the heat in some places soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—suggest the disaster caused a spike in negative mental health related to climate change. The results of the surveys, recently published in The Journal of Climate Change and Health, highlight growing concerns among mental health experts around the issue of “climate change anxiety”—a psychological response to the threats posed by climate change....

A $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases? Many companies advertise a laundry list of disease risks associated with your genes. But your genome is unlikely to reveal whether or not you will actually get one of these conditions, according to a study published online April 2 in Science Translational Medicine. “Whole-genome testing is not a crystal ball,” Bert Vogelstein, director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, and co-author of the new paper says....