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GOWANUS, BROOKLYN—Superstorm Sandy’s surge halted a little more than a block from my home, mirroring almost precisely the border of two different nearby flood zones on New York City’s evacuation map. Homes, stores and warehouses closer to the Gowanus Canal at the westernmost end of Long Island—one of the most polluted sites in the U.S. as a result of an industrial legacy paired with sewage overflows in heavy rains, qualifying its bottom muck, waters and adjacent land for Superfund designation—saw basements and lower floors turned into stinking pools....

Technical standards set by EPCglobal enable RFID tags to be grouped according to minimum capabilities. Each class adds to features of the basic class 1 tag, which is “passive”: it depends on a reader to initiate communi­­­­­­­­­­­­cation and supply power. Passive tags can be read from as far away as 30 feet, active tags from 300 feet or more. Minimum Function Some uses Class I (Passive) Unique identifier number “Kill function” to disable tag Memory programmable only once Newer “Gen 2” versions may be rewritable and password-protected...

With every breath you take, they’ll be watching you—and anticipating their next blood feast. It’s true—mosquitoes get dinner signals from your exhaled carbon dioxide, along with your body heat and moisture. But what if there was a way, other than holding your breath, to keep a mosquito from detecting the giveaway gas? Researchers on the hunt for a cheaper, safer and more environmentally friendly mosquito repellent recently happened on a clue for just such a strategy....

Worms have been living inside the human body since Homo sapiens have been around. About half the world’s population (over 3 billion people) are in infected with at least one of the three worms forming what Columbia University parasitologist Dickson Despommier calls the “unholy trinity”—large roundworm, hookworm and whipworm. Most of those afflicted live in developing countries, where there is not enough clean drinking water or effective sanitation systems to keep infected feces from contaminating food and water, and where human excrement is used to fertilize crops....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). If you make a discovery and at first people tell you that it can’t be right, and then they eventually switch to telling you ‘we knew that all along,’ then you are probably on to something.” It’s a quip that has stuck in Clifford Brangwynne’s mind. For the biophysicist at Princeton University, that is “exactly what happened with our findings on intracellular liquid phases....

Nathan Lakey practically has to shout to be heard over the whirring machinery in the laboratory at Orion Biosains near Kuala Lumpur. One source of the din, and a major point of pride for Lakey, is a microwave-oven-sized robotic assembler that is snapping plastic widgets together and laser-etching them with serial numbers. The devices are leaf punches, destined for Indonesia, Malaysia and Myanmar. And Lakey—an American biochemist and chief executive at Orion—hopes that they will help revolutionize a much-maligned industry....

By Colin Packham SYDNEY, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Australia will spend A$1.3 billion ($965.3 million) in the next five years to improve the water quality and wellbeing of the Great Barrier Reef to prevent the World Heritage Site being placed on the United Nation’s “in danger” list. But activists say the money - in addition to the A$1 billion fund announced earlier - is insufficient and want the government to take more concrete action to protect the reef....

Most people believe that intelligence plays the key role in children’s academic achievement. A recent study by Pennsylvania State University researchers, however, found that the ability to self-regulate—to pay attention to a task and inhibit impulsive behavior—was more important than intelligence for early academic success. The study focused on three- to five-year-olds and showed that preschoolers’ capacity for self-control was the best predictor of their performance in math and reading in kindergarten....

The human brain must constantly screen incoming stimuli for relevance. Without such screening, the brain would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer number of stimuli we experience every day. Some of the most profound stimuli–such as other people’s faces–trigger an emotional response, but there are times when fear or even happiness must be kept at bay as the brain works to solve a problem. New research has shown how the brain goes about accomplishing this task....

The portion of our planet affected by serious drought has doubled in the last three decades, a new study suggests. Findings to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in San Diego, Calif., indicate that the fraction of global land characterized as “very dry” has increased from 10 to 15 percent in the 1970s to nearly 30 percent in 2002. Dry conditions in the U.S. are classified according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which compares the amount of moisture in the soil to that in the air closest to the surface....

Thanks to COVID vaccines, more people were immunized in 2021 than in any other year in history. Yet that same year, with tragic irony, more children ended up at risk of highly preventable infectious diseases than before the pandemic began. This is because of what the World Health Organization and UNICEF have described as the largest backslide in childhood vaccinations in three decades. It means that, for the second year in a row after 2019, at a time when the COVID pandemic has focused the world’s attention on the need for vaccination, the number of children missing out on basic vaccines has increased....

Nearly a year after the first COVID vaccines became available for adults in the U.S., the moment millions of parents have been waiting for has arrived: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine against COVID for use in children ages five to 11. An FDA advisory committee voted nearly unanimously Tuesday to recommend authorizing the vaccine for young kids, which the FDA did today. Next week, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory group will meet to review the data and will likely recommend the vaccine for all children ages five to 11....

Current official guidelines hold that fans are worse than useless in extreme heat. But new research shows they can still help cool people off in ultrahot conditions—as long as the humidity is relatively high. Right now, government organizations such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency base their recommendations on either temperature or the heat index, which factors in temperature and humidity to reflect how hot it feels. The EPA’s Excessive Heat Events Guidebook warns against relying on fans when the heat index is above 99 degrees Fahrenheit....

Cities—the best of which are bastions of transit networks, bike paths, compact apartments and chirpy baristas—are growing faster than litters of sewer rats, exacerbating their already-high hungers for energy. The trend is so steep that a new analysis projects that urban centers will be burning through three times more energy in the year 2050 than was the case in 2005. But what sounds like a threat could also be viewed as an opportunity....

“Only recently have educators turned their attention to the physical condition of the average school child, and in the south they have done so largely because of the discovery of the enormously important part played by hookworm. Pupils at school become infected, with the school as a site of exchange. In a comparatively short time the premises around the homes of all the schoolchildren are polluted, and we have the change (which anemia produces) coming over the community....

A mathematical puzzle that resisted solution for more than 80 years—including computerized attempts to crack it—seems to have yielded to a single mathematician. On September 17, Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose body of work earned him the prestigious Fields Medal in 2006, submitted a paper to the arXiv preprint server claiming to prove a number-theory conjecture posed by mathematician Paul Erds in the 1930s....

Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina–Forensic anthropologist Cheryl Katzmarzyk stands above three metal tables pushed together, hundreds of finger bones laid out neatly before her. Not long ago the metacarpals had been found dumped together in a mass grave, the jumbled remains of bodies dug up and moved several times in an effort to conceal a massacre. “There are about 22 people here,” she estimates–bits and pieces of the roughly 8,000 Bosniak men and boys killed in Srebrenica alone....

SpaceX successfully launched its 28th rocket of the year early Thursday morning (Dec. 9), ferrying an X-ray observatory into space for NASA. A used Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 1 a.m. (0600 GMT) from Pad 39A here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). The mission marked the fifth flight for this particular booster. “Liftoff of Falcon 9 and IXPE, a new set of X-ray eyes to view the mysteries of our skies,” NASA TV’s launch commentator Derrol Nail said during a live webcast of the launch....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Picture the U.S. struggling to deal with a deadly pandemic. State and local officials enact a slate of social-distancing measures, gathering bans, closure orders and mask mandates in an effort to stem the tide of cases and deaths. The public responds with widespread compliance mixed with more than a hint of grumbling, pushback and even outright defiance....

SciCheck likely will have no dearth of false and misleading claims to cover next year, when a new Congress convenes and takes up the agenda of President-elect Donald Trump. The incoming president has vowed to reverse eight years of Democratic policies, and he has a Republican majority in Congress to help him accomplish his goals. But, for now, here are some of the more questionable science-related claims from 2016 on topics such as climate change, Zika, GMOs, marijuana and the human mind....