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A single gene that codes for one odor receptor (of more than 400 functional receptors in humans) can determine whether someone perceives a particular steroid derivative of testosterone as odorless, smelling like urine—or sweet vanilla. A team of scientists at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and The Rockefeller University in New York City had nearly 400 blood-tested volunteers sniff 66 scents to determine whether there is a genetic link to the way an individual perceives the odor of androstenone (a key component in male sweat and urine)....

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a small, never-before-seen moon around Neptune, boosting the giant blue planet’s total satellite count to 14 satellites, new photos reveal. The newfound Neptune moon — called S/2004 N 1 — was discovered July 1 during a fresh analysis of older Hubble Space Telescope images, scientists said. The newly discovered satellite is Neptune’s smallest known moon and is just 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. Hubble telescope scientists announced the new Neptune moon’s discovery today (July 15)....

When Pres. Donald Trump announced he was nominating Alex Michael Azar II to be the next secretary of health and human services, Trump called him a “star for better healthcare and lower drug prices.” The catch is that Azar, who served as president of pharmaceutical giant Lilly USA until January, has been widely criticized for raising medication costs. During his decade at Lilly, the company tripled the price of its insulin and was fined for colluding to keep its prices high in Mexico....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineOfficials with the European Space Agency (ESA) say that they have lost contact with Envisat, their premier Earth-observing satellite.Launched in 2002, the satellite is billed as the most sophisticated environmental monitor in orbit, with ten instruments providing streams of valuable data on everything from ozone, clouds and greenhouse gases to land-use trends and sea-surface temperatures – data that have figured in more than 2,000 scientific publications, ESA says....

WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton led a health care reform effort in the 1990s, promoted medical research as a senator, and has been bashing price-hiking drug companies on the campaign trail and in TV ads. So there’s every reason to expect her to make health care a major theme when she accepts the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia on Thursday night. What she says about the future of medical research, public health, and the uninsured will give a valuable preview of what her priorities would be—and how far she’s willing to go to co-opt the ideas of her defeated rival, Bernie Sanders....

Last summer a South Carolina man named McKrae Game, who founded a network to promote “conversion therapy” for gay people, disavowed his own work. The Hope for Wholeness group Game established tries to help individuals follow his entreaty to attain “freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ.” But Game, who revealed that he was gay last year, pleaded on Facebook: “I WAS WRONG! Please forgive me!” It might be assumed from this refutation that any attempts to forcibly change a young person’s sexual orientation are about to go the way of bloodletting, frontal lobotomy and trepanation....

Due to a complex interplay of Earth’s and the moon’s gravitational fields, our planet’s rotation has gradually slowed over the millennia. It hasn’t been the designated length of one solar day—the time it takes Earth to make a full rotation, or slightly more than 86,400 seconds—since about 1820. As a result, our global standard of time, known as Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, occasionally becomes misaligned with UT1—the marker used to measure the actual length of one mean solar day....

What causes headaches? —MIKE A., WILMINGTON, DEL. Dawn A. Marcus, associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s department of anesthesiology, offers this answer: Although they may feel as if they emanate from the brain, headaches actually arise as a result of irritation in nearby structures: skin, joints, muscles, nerves or blood vessels. Brain tissue, encased in the protective coating of the skull, has not evolved the ability to respond to pressure sensations....

An automotive chip shortage has led to production cuts around the globe, just as many carmakers are gearing up to expand their fleets of electric vehicles. The shortage is a result of pandemic-related constraints on supply chains and other factors. And it could prolong the world’s sluggish transition to electric vehicles if chips remain scarce in the coming months, experts say. “If we’ve got an ongoing chip shortage for an extended period of time, that means those [electric] vehicles can’t get built, and they can’t get sold, and we continue to have more older vehicles staying on the road longer,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at the market research firm Guidehouse Insights....

Close but no cigar, the saying goes. But new research shows that when it comes to gambling, the human brain seems to take a very different approach. In our head, near misses, such as a lottery ticket just one number away from the jackpot, are interpreted as wins. Using functional MRI, Luke Clark of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues looked at the brains of 15 volunteers who were playing a computerized slot machine....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign-up here. Are you in need of a “dose of optimism” about the pandemic, at least in the U.S.? Check out this 10/12/20 story at The New York Times by by Donald McNeil Jr., who has covered infectious diseases and epidemics for many years. McNeil notes the 215,000 people in the U....

Hip fractures kill and cripple far too many elderly women and men. Every year roughly 350,000 people in the U.S. shatter their hips and end up in the hospital, where more than 14,000 of them die. Another 24 percent die within a year of the injury; half lose their ability to walk. Most of these fractures, which cost about $17 billion in medical care annually, result from a withering of the skeleton known as osteoporosis....

Listener Melissa writes from San Francisco, “I struggle with letting go of any kind of injustice. Whether it’s on the national level such as the unfair treatment of minorities, or something as small as another customer skipping me in line at the store, I really tend to dwell on this wrongdoing.” She points out that even though human brains often wander to thoughts of revenge, she doesn’t think she would derive much satisfaction from it....

Making predictions hinders the brain’s ability to remember the present moment, new research suggests. The hippocampus, a brain structure usually associated with remembering events, also uses experiences to make forecasts (neuroscientists call this “statistical learning”). But scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA have now demonstrated that the latter function can disrupt the former. Researchers showed participants a series of photographs on a screen without telling them that some image categories always followed others: mountains always came immediately after beaches, for example....

PARIS (Reuters) - France published a decree on Monday to prevent the planting of genetically modified maize as a stopgap measure, while the government works on changes to domestic and European laws to ensure a longer-term ban. The French government, which maintains that GM crops present environmental risks, has been trying to institute a new ban on GM maize (corn) after a senior court twice struck down similar measures. But in a surprise move, the French Senate late on Monday rejected a proposed domestic law banning GM maize crops with a majority of voters adopting a motion of inadmissibility claiming the attempt as unconstitutional....

From Nature magazine How the brain responds to and processes images of people from different racial groups is an emerging field of investigation that could have major implications for society. Psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, in New York, who in 2000 led one of the first studies in this area, tells Nature what her latest review of the field reveals about the neuroscience of race. What does psychology tell us about race?...

Networks pervade our lives. Every day we use intricate networks of roads, railways, maritime routes and skyways traversed by commercial flights. They exist even beyond our immediate experience. Think of the World Wide Web, the power grid and the universe, of which the Milky Way is an infinitesimal node in a seemingly boundless network of galaxies. Few such systems of interacting connections, however, match the complexity of the one underneath our skull....

India’s long-standing push to approve genetically modified (GM) food crops has been controversially delayed, after an environmental campaigner launched a lawsuit that accuses scientists of deceiving the public about the benefits of transgenic mustard. The claims are untrue, says Deepak Pental, a plant geneticist at the University of Delhi who has led research into the crop. “These attacks are only calculated to bring a bad name to Indian science,” he says....

This morning I had a surprisingly lengthy discussion with my wife about whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. I’m writing this in early April from New York City, currently the global epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. We’ve already been mostly indoors for weeks, and the days have a sameness that brings to mind the movie Groundhog Day, but with body counts. As this is allegedly a humor column, I’ll look for some humor in this horror....

It’s time for scientists to start thinking about the instruments they’d like to put on a potential life-hunting lander mission to Jupiter’s ocean-harboring moon Europa, NASA officials said. Yesterday (May 17), the space agency issued a “community announcement” about the possible Europa lander mission, telling researchers to get ready for an upcoming science-instrument competition. “The possibility of placing a lander on the surface of this intriguing icy moon, touching and exploring a world that might harbor life, is at the heart of the Europa lander mission,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D....