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BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s capital Beijing issued an emergency pollution alert for the first time on Thursday, warning residents to reduce outdoor activities and construction sites to control dust given a forecast of heavy smog over the next three days. Pollution is an increasing concern for China’s leaders, keen to douse potential unrest as affluent city dwellers turn against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has tainted much of the country’s air, water and soil....

Baseball legend Yogi Berra is said to have fretted, “I don’t want to make the wrong mistake.” As opposed to the right mistake? A mistake that is both wrong and right is the alleged connection between cell phone use and brain cancers. Reports of a link between the two have periodically surfaced ever since cell phones became common appendages to people’s heads in the 1990s. As recently as this past May 17, Time magazine reported that despite numerous studies finding no connection between cell phones and cancer, “a growing band of scientists are skeptical, suggesting that the evidence that does exist is enough to raise a warning for consumers—before mass harm is done....

Liberal states’ carbon-cutting plans are stuck in traffic. Literally. Transportation emissions threaten to undercut blue states’ climate goals, raising questions about their ability to lead U.S. climate efforts at a time when the federal government is rolling back environmental regulations. Emissions from cars, trucks and other mobile sources are on the rise nationally. In 2016, they overtook power plants as America’s largest source of greenhouse gases. But the situation is exacerbated in blue states, where power-sector emissions have plummeted and planet-warming tailpipe pollution remains stubbornly high....

High status confers a rosy worldview, according to research available online last August in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Psychologists asked college students to write essays about having more prestige than others or being low on the totem pole, thus priming them to think of themselves as having either high or low status. Then the students were told they could send $10 to an unseen partner; the money would be tripled, and the phantom partner would return as much as he wanted....

Josiah “Jody” Rich, co-director and co-founder of the Rhode Island–based Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, has spent more than 20 years fighting a multifront war against opioid addiction among the U.S.’s incarcerated. The physician and his colleagues battle prison systems with onerous and outdated rules for inmate health care—and the double stigma that shadows prisoners who are also drug addicts. But Rich’s determination to see that these inmates get the treatment they need has not wavered....

In the spring of 2016 I was at a reception with Freeman Dyson, the brilliant physicist and mathematician, then 92 and emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He never says what you expect him to, so I asked him, “What’s new?” He smiled his ambiguous smile and answered, “Apparently we’re going to Alpha Centauri.” This star is one of our sun’s nearest neighbors, and a Silicon Valley billionaire had recently announced that he was funding a project called Breakthrough Starshot to send some kind of spaceship there....

As the situation at Japan’s 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant goes from bad to worse—four of the plant’s six boiling-water reactors have been damaged by explosions or fire, and radiation has begun leaking into the atmosphere—officials there continue to pump seawater into the reactors in a desperate attempt to cool down fuel rods and avoid a complete meltdown that could release radioactive fallout across much of the country and beyond. The move by Tokyo Electric Power Co....

Stem-cell researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been left frustrated and confused following the demise of the agency’s Center for Regenerative Medicine (CRM). The intramural program’s director, stem-cell biologist Mahendra Rao, left the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, on 28 March, and the center’s website was taken down on 4 April. Although no official announcement had been made at the time Nature went to press, NIH officials say that they are rethinking how they will conduct in-house stem-cell research....

Without oxygen, there would be no carnivores. Without carnivores, there would be no Cambrian explosion, the stunning evolutionary burst of diversity in species and body forms that began 540 million years ago. Those are the findings of a new study that stitches together competing models for why meat-eating appeared simultaneously with the Cambrian explosion. Previously, one camp of scientists had proposed that rising oxygen levels gave animals the extra power to evolve complex body forms....

In recent years scientists studying genital microbiomes have focused on the possible connection between HIV incidence in men and the penile microbiome, the community of microorganisms living on the penis. A number of studies have investigated how circumcision affects HIV incidence in men, but few have focused on the penile microbiome. A 2007 study showed an association between male circumcision and reduced HIV incidence in Ugandan men and a 2010 paper found that circumcision was associated with a decrease of anaerobic bacteria—microbes that thrive in areas deprived of oxygen such as what you might find underneath the foreskin—on the penises of HIV-negative men....

As rising ocean temperatures threaten coral reefs worldwide, identifying the most heat-resilient coral colonies is crucial for conservation efforts. Typical methods require flying samples to distant laboratories and subjecting them to high temperatures for weeks. Now a new heat-stress test brings the lab to the reef, yielding results within a single day. The Coral Bleaching Automated Stress System (CBASS), made from materials commonly available at hardware stores, consists of four 10-liter tanks that can be set up on the same boats researchers use to reach the reefs....

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) report that they silenced symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in rats using skin cells from an adult mouse that they reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells. The M.I.T. group was one of three teams that last year created embryoniclike stem cells by introducing four genes into adult mouse skin cells. They then used the so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells) to reverse a mouse version of the genetic disorder sickle-cell anemia, which causes normally circular red blood cells to form sickle-shaped, thereby impeding blood flow....

Editor’s Note: This article was originally printed in the 2008 Scientific American Special Report on Robots. It is being published on the Web as part of ScientificAmerican.com’s In-Depth Report on Robots. In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology’s rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies....

If bigger brains were always better, every animal would have them. Thus, scientists reasoned, there must be a downside. Human brains, for example, are only 2 percent of our bodies, but they take up a whopping 20 percent of our energy requirements. Which body parts have paid the price? The expensive-tissue hypothesis, developed in the early 1990s, suggests that our guts took the hit but that intelligence made up for the loss through more efficient foraging and hunting....

As human cases rise in a mysterious viral outbreak that originated in China, scientists are rushing to identify the animals, where they suspect the epidemic began. In a controversial study published last night, a team of researchers in China claimed to have an answer: snakes. But other scientists say there is no proof that viruses such as those behind the outbreak can infect species other than mammals and birds. “Nothing supports snakes being involved,” says David Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK....

Neutrinos come in three types, or flavors: electron, muon and tau. But physicists suspect that others may be out there and that they will be weird—almost never interacting with other particles. These “sterile” neutrinos may resolve some of physics’ biggest mysteries. For example, they could contribute to the befuddling dark matter that apparently pervades the universe and exerts a gravitational pull on regular matter. Despite decades of looking, however, sterile neutrinos remain elusive, and the latest attempt to catch them in action recently turned up empty, too....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the “All One Ocean” campaign?—Bill O’Neill, Los Angeles All One Ocean is a non-profit campaign launched in 2010 by long-time author, activist and organizer Hallie Austen Iglehart with the goal of reducing the amount of plastic and other trash that ends up in the ocean where it compromises the health of marine wildlife and ecosystems. Iglehart was incensed to learn that a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles die each year from ingesting plastic in the water column—and created All One Ocean to do something about it....

Warming continues to shrink the snow and ice cover that defines the Arctic, signaling the region’s shift to a new climate pattern, scientists said yesterday. The area covered by sea ice hovered near its historic low this summer. In Greenland, record-high temperatures this year have helped accelerate the melting of the country’s massive ice sheet. Throughout the Arctic, permafrost is warming and the blanket of snow is shrinking. Those changes appear to be long-lasting, said an international team of climate experts who wrote the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report....

IT USED TO BE TOUGH to get porn. Renting an X-rated movie required sneaking into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, and eyeing a centerfold meant facing down a store clerk to buy a pornographic magazine. Now pornography is just one Google search away, and much of it is free. Age restrictions have become meaningless, too, with the advent of social media—one teenager in five has sent or posted naked pictures of themselves online, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy....

Some of the most breathtaking zen garden patterns on the planet owe their existence to an unlikely artist: thousands of tiny “ice needles.” From swirls to circles to orderly rows, each delicate design is created when similarly-sized stones clump together across a landscape. New research published Oct. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents, for the first time, how ice needles create intricate patterns of stone in various landscapes....