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Physicians, nurses and other medical staff who are the first line of defense against the spread of Ebola are not always adequately protected from the virus, a situation that has contributed to more than 200 health worker deaths in west Africa since the outbreak began in December 2013. As the virus spreads outside of Africa, so do reports that problems with procedures, protective equipment and training for using that equipment are putting health workers at risk....

High in the remote Andes of central Chile, the night sky is so dark that the constellations are hard to see, swallowed up in swarms of fainter stars. The familiar yet alien view can be disconcerting, but something else troubles Bruce Macintosh when he looks up late one May evening in 2014. Even here, at 2,700 meters above sea level, he is still staring through an ocean of air, and the wind is rising....

It is estimated that the world’s cities spew some 70 percent of global greenhouse gases, but often, they don’t know where those gases are coming from. To address that knowledge gap, a sustainability group and a coalition of the world’s largest cities are banding together to come up with a universal protocol for measuring and reporting heat-trapping gases. The aim is to ensure that local lawmakers know where to look when trying to curb warming temperatures and provide mayors across the globe with a standard template to compare information with each other....

Despite decades of taking measurements, scientists cannot agree on how long neutrons live. Neutrons are stable inside atoms, but on their own they decay in about 15 minutes, more or less, into a few other particles. Exactly how much more or less is the sticking point. Each experiment seems to yield a different answer. The lack of resolution is frustrating. Understanding the lifetime of the neutron is important not only for knowledge’s sake but also to answer other more fundamental questions about new physics beyond the known particles and processes in the universe, says Jeffrey Nico, who leads a neutron lifetime experiment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md....

The world will experience a record drop in greenhouse gas emissions this year, but it will be barely perceptible in the atmosphere, according to an analysis released today by the Global Carbon Project. In their annual examination of the global carbon budget, the team of international climate scientists determined that emissions will likely fall by 7% in 2020, a reduction unmatched in history. But the atmospheric buildup of CO2 will register around 2....

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future Michael Levi Oxford University Press, 2013 ($27.95) The U.S. is in the midst of a transformation in the way the country produces and uses energy. Blasting deep shale formations with water—also known as fracking—and the ability to drill wells horizontally as well as vertically have freed a bonanza of previously untapped oil and natural gas. At the same time, government programs have mandated more efficient vehicles and helped to jump-start the development of alternative sources of energy, such as solar and wind power....

Engineering with Steel Metallurgists have known for centuries that iron is soft, weak and brittle compared with steel. Add the right amount of carbon to iron under the right conditions and you get a material that is harder and stronger and much more useful. With steel you can make girders and cables that hold more weight as well as steel containers and plates that can withstand higher pressures and greater force....

PITTSBURGH – Chuck Wichrowski remembers the first car he ever worked on, when he was just a college graduate and knew nothing about cars: His wife’s 1970 Chevy Nova. The second? A 1964 Studebaker Wagonaire. “I just sort of applied the college model, which is: You look the things up, you get a book, and then you do it,” Wichrowski said. As the years rolled by, Wichrowski put his wrench to the cars that drove the Steel City through its industrial heyday....

What’s good for the planet’s climate is also good for its food systems. Halting global warming and feeding the world’s rapidly growing population both require major overhauls to the way that humans manage the land they live on, according to a much-anticipated report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report, released this morning, tackles the broad connections between climate change and land. With contributions from more than 100 scientists who reviewed thousands of research papers, it dives deeply into the ways that climate change affects the planet’s landscapes and how managing those landscapes better can insulate Earth and humans from the risks of rising temperatures....

The exact cause of death has not been announced, but Le Guin’s son told the Times that his mother had been in poor health for months. Le Guin earned a plethora of awards and honors during her writing career. In 1969, “The Left Hand of Darkness” won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards (which are considered the premier awards in that genre). She snagged both prizes again with her novel “The Dispossessed” (Harper & Row, 1974)....

“Today we sense we are close to be being able to alter human heredity,” Nobel Laureate and California Institute of Technology virologist David Baltimore said December 1 at the opening of a much-anticipated human gene editing summit taking place in Washington, D.C. this week. Gene editing, or tweaking the human genome with additions, subtractions or alterations, is becoming increasingly realistic with modern technologies. “When will we be prepared to say we are justified to use gene editing for human enhancement purposes?...

Dean Carpenter zigzags his way through a row of men seated in hard plastic chairs at Detroit’s Tumaini Center, a crisis support organization for the chronically homeless in Michigan’s biggest city. The center has no beds, so some men have been living in those chairs for weeks, even years, while case workers try to secure them housing. Carpenter, the center’s nurse practitioner, has seen patients with many ailments over the years: scabies, trench foot and, most recently, hepatitis A, which he is on a mission to vanquish....

A decade ago I traveled on assignment to a Rocky Mountain rehab facility where the rich and famous go to dry out and confront their drug habits. It offered every imaginable therapy to its well-heeled clientele and claimed strong results. But I will never forget what the director of operations told me about the clinic’s biggest failure: “Our results with meth addicts are dismal,” he admitted. Poor results remain all too typical for what is more formally known as methamphetamine use disorder....

Many boys and men with autism suffer from diminished social and communication skills. They may also suffer from a diminished number of neurons in their amygdala, according to the results of a new study. David Amaral and Cynthia Mills Schumann of the University of California, Davis, surveyed the number of neurons in the amygdala of nine autistic males and 10 nonautistic males ranging in age from 10 to 44. Painstakingly counting them under a microscope revealed significantly fewer neurons (electrical signaling cells) in the area of the brain associated with fear and memory....

At 14 years old, I switched schools to a much larger, public institution and was required to take intelligence and reasoning tests so the guidance counselors could place me in the appropriate-level courses. I remember little about those tests—perhaps they contained spatial reasoning questions, perhaps basic logic questions. At the end, the results declared my aptitude, and I was channeled into high school life. For more than a century we’ve known that under the correct conditions we can accurately determine individual cognitive ability....

To distant, Earthling eyes, the gap between Saturn and its rings looks calm, like a deep breath of empty space between one beautifully intricate structure and another. But in 11 new papers, born from the demise of one of NASA’s most beloved planetary science missions, scientists destroy that illusion, laying out a set of unexpectedly complicated phenomena dancing through that emptiness. Those papers, published today in two key science journals, represent the first research to be published with data from the Cassini mission’s so-called “Grand Finale,” a daring set of orbits during which the spacecraft threaded itself between Saturn and its rings....

In the very first lecture of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in June, a University of Cambridge biologist assured the 10 journalists in his audience that science and religion have gotten along much better, historically, than is commonly believed. After all, scientific pioneers such as Kepler, Newton, Boyle and even Galileo were all devout Christians; Galileo’s run-in with the Church was really a spat between two different versions of Catholicism. The notion that science and religion have always butted heads is “fallacious,” declared Denis Alexander, who is, not coincidentally, a Christian....

A newly discovered planet 39 light-years away is being called the closest Earth-size exoplanet ever discovered—and a potential “Venus twin”—providing the mouth-watering opportunity for a close-up look at the environment on a rocky alien world. One of the dire frustrations of studying planets around other stars (and, really, any astronomical object) is their distance from Earth, which makes it onerous or impossible to get many basic details about them. Exoplanets are doubly frustrating because any light they emit (light that would give hints about what’s happening on the surface) is often overwhelmed by the light of the parent star....

At no point in my life have I felt less heroic than the last five months. And yet, on or about March 2020, people began calling me a hero. I struggle to describe how angry this makes me. Make no mistake, as a physician, I’m grateful that the public recognizes the tireless and heartbreaking sacrifices of health care workers. In calling someone a hero, one conjures an image of courage, perseverance, honor....

The net neutrality debate rests largely on hypothetical scenarios—for example, that broadband providers will favor content providers like Netflix and Google that are capable of paying more for faster download speeds. The unresolved issue has spawned another, more tangible problem, however: Broadband providers are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to reach the poorest parts of the U.S. More than a third of Americans living in rural areas—23 million people—lack access to broadband, which the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 defined as internet speeds of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads....