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Freshwater sources in the northeastern U.S. are becoming increasingly salty, mainly as a result of increased roadway construction, a new report suggests. The findings, published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that at the current rate of change, some surface waters in the region could become toxic to freshwater life within the century. Researchers led by Sujay Kaushal of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. On June 18, 1983, 35 years ago, Sally Ride became the first American woman to launch into space, riding the Space Shuttle STS-7 flight with four other crew members. Only five years earlier, in 1978, she had been selected to the first class of 35 astronauts—including six women—who would fly on the Space Shuttle....

Name: Omar Fadhil Title: M.A. student in biology and laboratory teacher, University of Baghdad Location: Baghdad, Iraq I grew up in the city of Bag­h­­dad, but on weekends the men in my family—my brother, grandfather, father and I—would go off into the coun­try to practice falconry. Passed down through the generations, this sport is some­­thing I still love. As a child, I became fascinated by birds of prey, like falcons and other raptors, but also by the birds that serve as prey, like the houbara (above), a timid, turkeylike species....

On a collection trip to Guyana in 2006, botanist Kenneth Wurdack was strolling along an airstrip at Kaieteur National Park when he noticed something unusual about the flowers on two species of yellow-eyed grasses. Unlike the species’ typical blooms, they were a more orange shade of yellow, tightly clustered and spongy in texture. “I just sort of filed it away as an incidental thing,” Wurdack says. On subsequent trips, he observed more examples of the strange phenomenon....

“This isn’t something I do.” Patients do not want to hear this from doctors. Yet, sadly, many of my transgender patients have heard this from at least one medical provider. Confused and exasperated, my patients come to me saying their requests for medical care, primary care or HIV-prevention medication are met with shrugs. It leaves them with a sense that it is the patient’s job to educate their physician, and that their health and well-being aren’t a priority....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, “Matrix”-like, as some sort of human battery....

Almost 8% of adults and 9% of children in the U.S. suffer from nasal allergies or hay fever, and the symptoms result in over 11 million visits to the doctor annually. Three million people in the U.S. further report an allergy to peanuts, or tree nuts or both, including 8% of children, according to the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology. The prevalence of allergies also appears to have increased over the last 50 years and shows no signs of slowing down....

Tesla Motors says the Autopilot system for its Model S sedan “relieves drivers of the most tedious and potentially dangerous aspects of road travel.” The second part of that promise was put in doubt by the fatal crash of a Model S earlier this year, when its Autopilot system failed to recognize a tractor-trailer turning in front of the vehicle. Tesla says the driver, Joshua Brown, also failed to notice the trailer in time to prevent a collision....

Just because they make it doesn’t mean you need it. The big tech companies chase after new ideas like first-grade soccer players chasing the ball en masse. They’re running that way not because it’s strategic but because everyone else is running that way. Maybe we can forgive them. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs, capable of knowing what the masses want before they do themselves. Without that insight, all the companies can do is imitate their competitors so they won’t be left out....

The World Health Organization last week drew global attention to a nearly year-old outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), calling it a “public health emergency of international concern.” The designation signals a public health risk to other countries and indicates that a coordinated international response might be needed. The agency based its decision in part on the first confirmed case of Ebola in Goma, a DRC city of nearly two million people on the country’s eastern border with Rwanda....

People who live in the southern U.S. are used to evacuating when severe hurricanes are headed their way. Yet in the case of 2017’s Hurricane Irma—which was the costliest tropical cyclone ever to hit Florida and caused $50 billion in damages in the U.S.—the choice to leave or remain turned into a political storm. According to a study published on September 11 in Science Advances, Florida residents who probably voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election were up to 11 percentage points more likely to flee than those who probably voted for Donald Trump....

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears its 7th week, Western governments and independent observers continue to warn that Russia’s military could escalate from indiscriminately bombing cities to using non-conventional warfare, in particular chemical weapons. The Kremlin has denied any intention to use chemical weapons. But the Russian government has been linked over the past two decades with this type of attack. And concern over President Vladimir Putin’s intentions spiked on 28 March, when The Wall Street Journal reported that envoys and mediators in Russia–Ukraine peace talks earlier in the month had been poisoned—although at least one Ukrainian government source has reportedly denied the story....

If we try and peer along the continuum of invention we can probably figure out that we will be able to communicate more easily, move faster, live longer and accomplish more work by relying more heavily on the increasingly powerful technical servants at our beck and call. When this magazine was founded in 1845, my forerunner might have climbed the rickety stairs to a cramped “7 by 9” office and penned these words with a fountain pen on cotton rag paper, which would have been carried to our printer (a few minutes’ walk away) for composition with movable type on a letter press (thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention)....

What can one say about Frederick D. Funkle? Revered as perhaps the greatest semi-upper continuous functional analyst who ever lived, his contributions continue to confound us and often contradict one another. His body of work is broad but unnervingly shallow. His writing style is impertinent, presumptuous, and tinged with an undeniable disdain for the very material he studies. His disregard for standard notation and his penchant for starting in the middle of a proof and simultaneously working toward the beginning and end have made it extremely difficult to evaluate the contributions of this iconoclastic individual....

In the mid-2010s it became common to say that natural gas would be a bridge fuel to a zero-carbon future, in which solar, wind and other renewable technologies provide all of our energy without any carbon dioxide emissions to worsen climate change. But if natural gas is really a bridge, then it’s not part of the long-term plan. And if we actually build the bridge, we’re likely to stay on it....

Permafrost is melting, imperiling roads from Alaska to Patagonia. Mountain snowpacks thaw earlier in the year, imperiling water supplies in the southwestern U.S., China and India, among other places. And rising temperatures are causing plant and animal species to migrate in search of cooler climes, whether they live in the ocean or on land; there are now new species of plants in formerly forbidding Antarctica. “For the first time, the anthropogenic warming that Working Group I has identified has been linked to [its] impacts,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a coordinating lead author on the Working Group II report and head of the climate impact group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University....

A Chinese rocket roared into space Tuesday (June 11) carrying a crew of three on their way to the nation’s space module orbiting Earth. The trio of astronauts — two men and a woman — blasted off aboard their Shenzhou 10 spacecraft toward the Tiangong 1 module from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert at 5:38 a.m. EDT (9:38 GMT) — 5:38 p.m. local time. Shenzhou 10’s astronauts Nie Haisheng, Zhang Xiaoguang and Wang Yaping — the second female Chinese spaceflyer — are the fifth Chinese crew to launch into space....

Every morning, Avigael Wodinsky sets a timer to keep her 12-year-old son, Naftali, on track while he gets dressed for school. “Otherwise,” she says, “he’ll find 57 other things to do on the way to the bathroom.” Wodinsky says she knew something was different about Naftali from the time he was born, long before his autism diagnosis at 15 months. He lagged behind his twin sister in hitting developmental milestones, and he seemed distant....

The near-intact skeleton of a delicately built teenage girl, who died more than 12,000 years ago in what is today’s Mexico, could help to solve the riddle of how the Americas were first populated. Cave divers discovered the skeleton seven years ago in a complex of flooded caverns known as Hoyo Negro, in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. They called her Naia, after the naiads, the water nymphs of Greek mythology....

When I was 14 years old, I had an unusually talented maths teacher. One day after school, I excitedly pointed him out to my mother. To my amazement, she looked at him with shock and said with disgust: “You never told me that he was black”. I looked over at my teacher and, for the first time, realized that he was an African-American. I had somehow never noticed his skin colour before, only his spectacular teaching ability....