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Building jet engines out of superconducting materials may offer a way to lower aircraft emissions in the long run. Researchers have determined that superconducting turbines would be lightweight and powerful enough to run on electricity from clean-burning hydrogen fuel cells or generators that consume relatively small amounts of fossil fuel. Although such technology would be costly to develop, “it will become a viable option, I’m pretty confident,” says electromechanical engineer Philippe Masson of Florida A&M University and Florida State University, both in Tallahassee....

When bacteria make their way into wounds, they literally threaten life and limb—unless they are detected as quickly as possible. Now a new sensor can nestle in bandages and alert a nearby smartphone when the bacterial population tips over into dangerous territory. Healthy human skin is covered with bacteria that are quick to colonize an open wound, such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. To prevent these organisms from spreading through the body, which can permanently injure or kill a person, the infected wound may need to be cleaned and treated with antibiotics or—in the most extreme situations—an affected limb may require amputation....

When one thinks of iconic fish, Lake Ontario’s lake trout probably don’t come to mind. They don’t have the spear of a marlin or the taste of a tuna. There are no singing, dancing lake trout hanging on cabin walls. Great Lakes anglers often catch them while targeting the more popular chinook and coho salmon. But the white-bellied natives of these deep, cold transnational waters have a unique reputation – one considerably nobler than taking bait or adorning plates: They are a barometer for global pollutants....

Can a device given the somewhat baffling name of “PV peaker plant” begin to solve some of the nation’s most pressing climate-related energy problems? That is a question that utilities, some states and most recently the Department of Energy have begun to wrestle with. Among the leaders in this technology exploration are the sun-drenched islands of Hawaii. During the past four years, while the Trump administration has been focused on reviving the nation’s coal industry, AES Corp....

Members of a House of Representatives committee hammered the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday at a hearing titled “Making EPA Great Again,” accusing it of basing its regulations on biased, politicized science, and calling for reforms in the EPA’s rule-making process. But a number of scientific organizations call this an attempt to covertly strip the agency’s power—and ultimately to interfere with the scientific process itself. In his opening statement at the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing, Chair Lamar Smith—a Republican from Texas—excoriated the EPA over what he has called its “secret science....

I’m giving away my non-millennial age here, but remember when the internet was new and experts crowed about how much less time we’d spend searching out information and how much more time we’d spend, say, relaxing at the beach with our families? Easy access to news and information was supposed to save our time and sanity. Turns out… not so much. Instead, the internet, a 24-hour news cycle, smartphones, and an unprecedented political climate are all conspiring to make us feel lousy....

As the saying goes, what goes up must come down—and, as it turns out, a lot of what goes up comes down into the world’s oceans. Iron particles, released by human industrial activities, are one example of a pollutant that goes into the atmosphere and eventually settles into the sea. Now, new research suggests that human-emitted iron is accumulating in the ocean in much greater quantities than scientists previously estimated. And it may also be dissolving into the water more easily than suspected....

An influenza A virus called H7N9 exploded onto the global infectious-diseases radar on April 1 when the World Health Organization revealed China had found three people infected with a new form of bird flu. Since then 77 cases (as of 1 P.M. EDT, April 16) have been confirmed, and the virus has spread from China’s largest megalopolis, Shanghai, and several surrounding provinces to the capital, Beijing, more than 950 kilometers to the north....

Key concepts Physics Earth’s rotation Time Sundial Introduction Have you ever watched a movie set in an earlier era, and when a character asks what time it is the other characters, who don’t have watches or cell phones, all look at the sky? They are not looking at a giant digital clock above, they are using the position of the sun in the sky to tell time, as people have done for generations....

By David Stanway and Kathy Chen BEIJING (Reuters) - China plans to take more than five million ageing vehicles off the roads this year in a bid to improve air quality, with 330,000 cars set to be decommissioned in Beijing alone, the government said in a policy document published on Monday. Pollution has emerged as an urgent priority for China’s leaders as they try to reverse the damage done by decades of breakneck growth and head off public anger about the sorry state of the nation’s air, water and soil....

BEYOND THE PLACEBO EFFECT Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility by Ellen J. Langer. Random House, 2009 ($25) When she was in her 20s, Harvard University psychologist Ellen J. Langer fainted occasionally, and doctors have epilepsy. She decided to take the matter into her own hands, mentally “catching” herself sooner and sooner when she felt faint, until the fainting disappeared. That empowering experience set the tone for her remarkable 30-year career, much of which she has spent fi guring out how to help people take almost miraculous control over their lives....

Anyone who has ever flown east or west at 500 knots for more than a few hours has experienced firsthand what happens when the body’s internal clock does not match the time zone in which it finds itself. Up to a week may be needed to get over the resulting jet lag—depending on whether the master clock, which is located deep inside the brain, needs to be advanced or slowed to synchronize when the body and brain want to sleep with when it is dark outside....

Salmonella watch: Tomatoes in the clear, but watch out for hot peppers The Food and Drug Administration this week gave the all-clear to tomatoes but warned that some varieties of hot peppers were still suspect in a salmonella outbreak that has sickened 1,200 people in some 40 states and Canada, leaving victims with symptoms including diarrhea, vomiting and fevers. This news came as a relief to the beleaguered tomato industry, which was considered an early culprit in the scare....

Bleak grey skies mirror the mood of the skeleton staff trickling through the gates of the main National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md. Most of the principal investigators are absent: without students to advise or meetings to attend, there is little point in being there. Perhaps one out of every ten windows is lit up, revealing lonely postdocs working on what few experiments they are allowed to maintain as the U....

Senate Democrats on Tuesday pressed President Donald Trump’s nominee for the top health post to explain how he would fight skyrocketing drug prices—demanding to know why they should trust him to lower costs since he did not do so while running a major pharmaceutical company. Alex M. Azar II, the former president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, presented himself as a “problem solver” eager to fix a poorly structured health care system during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee....

One of the universe’s oldest mysteries is also one of its most puzzling. During the big bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, both matter and antimatter—which are thought to be identical, save for the former having the opposite electrical charge of the latter—should have been created in equal amounts. When these two come into contact with each other in today’s universe, they are annihilated in a burst of light and more exotic fundamental particles....

Huge volcanic blasts occur less frequently than scientists would expect, and now volcanologists think they can explain why: super-eruptions and smaller eruptions are triggered by fundamentally different processes. Small volcanoes, such as Italy’s Stromboli, erupt when molten rock rises from deep within Earth and then stalls in an underground chamber until enough pressure builds to blast it out to the surface. But the magma chambers of giant volcanoes—such as the one that erupted 2 million years ago beneath what is now Yellowstone National Park in the western U....

A few years ago, I wrote a puzzle column for parents called Parent’s Corner. The idea was for parents to teach their kids some math and logic through puzzles. One of those puzzles, called “Polish Hand Magic,” was a method used by Polish schoolchildren to multiply pairs of numbers between 5 and 10 knowing only how to multiply pairs of numbers between 1 to 4 and to add. Here is how it went: suppose you are multiplying 6 times 8....

“I was surprised, of course,” says Brassard, now a professor of information science at the University of Montreal, “but I listened politely.” The conversation, he says, turned out to be a life-changing experience. His new acquaintance was Charles Bennett, a research physicist at IBM. Bennett had recognized Brassard from a conference they were attending. Although they were both intrigued by the quantum-banknote idea, they knew it was technically infeasible. Even today no one knows how to capture, immobilize and store photons in a piece of paper....

By Julie Steenhuysen Over Wynwood, the Miami neighborhood where Zika gained a foothold in the continental United States, low flying planes have been spraying naled, a tightly controlled pesticide often used as a last resort. It appears to be working, killing at least 90 percent of the target mosquitoes. Across the Biscayne Bay in Miami Beach, wind and high-rise buildings make aerial spraying challenging. So, the effort in the popular tourist destination has focused on ground-sprayed pyrethroids - pesticides that are safer but don’t always work....