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Want to design a new material for solar energy, a drug to fight cancer or a compound that stops a virus from attacking a crop? First, you must tackle two challenges: finding the right chemical structure for the substance and determining which chemical reactions will link up the right atoms into the desired molecules or combinations of molecules. Traditionally answers have come from sophisticated guesswork aided by serendipity. The process is extremely time-consuming and involves many failed attempts....

Asthma attacks can be scary and painful—yet some of them may be avoidable if asthma sufferers can alter their expectations. Evidence is mounting that believing an odor or activity will trigger an asthma attack is sometimes all it takes to induce real physical symptoms. In one recent study, 17 patients with moderate, persistent asthma took whiffs of a nonirritating odorant. For some patients the bottle was labeled “asthmogenic”; for others the label read “therapeutic....

American homes and their energy consumption account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. emissions, 626 million metric tons of carbon in 2005 alone. But 33 simple actions—ranging from improving the insulation to carpooling—could cut those annual carbon emissions by 123 million metric tons. That savings would more than entirely offset emissions from petroleum refineries, iron and steel works, and aluminum smelters combined. “We did a careful analysis of the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from changes in energy use by households....

Bad news on climate diplomacy continues to pile up. A spate of studies has shown over the past year that even if countries honored the pledges they made in the Copenhagen Accord in December 2009, warming would still blow past the agreed limit of two degrees. Most other elements of the accord, which was designed to keep momentum until a formal climate treaty could be reached, are under shadow as well....

Starting this month, roughly one quarter of the world’s population will lose sleep and gain sunlight as they set their clocks ahead for daylight saving. People may think that with the time shift, they are conserving electricity otherwise spent on lighting. But recent studies have cast doubt on the energy argument—some research has even found that it ultimately leads to greater power use. Benjamin Franklin is credited with conceiving the idea of daylight saving in 1784 to conserve candles, but the U....

Farmers have been warned for years that climate change will disrupt growing conditions and crop yields. Pennsylvania State University researchers released findings this week suggesting those changes could come within the lifetimes of many current farmers and that warming could have major implications for the Corn Belt, the heart of the U.S. agricultural economy. Moreover, the research shows the core Corn Belt states may no longer represent the center of American corn and soybean production, and that more suitable conditions for the commodity crops may shift northward from Illinois and Iowa to Minnesota and the Dakotas....

A single component will make or break Chevrolet’s new Volt “extended-range electric vehicle”—and with it, potentially, the fate of America’s largest carmaker, General Motors: its battery. It’s no wonder then that some GM executives call the Volt’s battery “our diva.” After all, the new lithium-based pack provides the essential spark that makes the new design go in more ways than one—from its green performance and driving range, right down to its wind-cheating looks....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. With the car windows down on the first warm day of spring, the urge is unshakable. You extend your arm into the wind, tracing the city skyline in a natural motion somewhere between swimming and waving. As you move your hand, you alter the flow of the air. The redirected air in turn exerts a force on your hand....

Why don’t men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. It appeared on cocktail napkins (“Real men don’t ask directions”) and became a staple of stand-up comics as well as jokes that made the rounds: “Why did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years?...

Blood thinners made from the complex carbohydrate heparin have been routinely used in the U.S. since the 1930s to keep veins, arteries and lungs clear of potentially fatal clots and to reduce the amount of time that kidney failure patients spend on dialysis machines. These drugs are so popular that there is not enough heparin—the active pharmaceutical ingredient (primarily derived from pig intestines) that enables these blood thinners to stop or prevent blood from clotting during medical procedures and treatments—to meet the daily U....

Meteorites have punched at least 222 impact craters into the Moon’s surface in the past 7 years. That’s 33% more than researchers expected, and suggests that future lunar astronauts may need to hunker down against incoming space rocks. “It’s just something that’s happening all the time,” says Emerson Speyerer, an engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe and author of a October 12 paper in Nature. Planetary geologists will also need to rethink their understanding of the age of the lunar surface, which depends on counting craters and estimating how long the terrain has been pummelled by impacts....

Every hour, there are an average of 17 automobile fires somewhere in the U.S., according to government data. Mechanical failure in internal combustion engines cause the majority, and burning cars filled with gasoline result in more than 200 deaths per year. Yet far more attention is being paid to one all-electric Tesla Model S that caught fire on October 1 after metallic debris pierced a module in its battery pack. The driver of the car walked away....

BATON ROUGE, La.—After Hurricane Ida slammed into the Louisiana coast in August 2021, it took more than 100 lives and cost billions of dollars in damage. To some here, the storm was just one more justification for a desperate measure to preserve the coast by intentionally flooding parts of the state. “I don’t mean to be alarmist about it, but anybody who’s spent any time along our coast, whether you’re fishing, hunting or working, you’ve seen the changes to our coast....

Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, activates feelings of trust and attraction between people when it is released in the brain, and it rises in the early stages of romantic love. Yet it is not just a Cupid’s arrow that spurs you to fall in love with the nearest person, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Instead oxytocin’s social magic depends on whether or not a person is in a monogamous relationship....

By Syed Raza Hassan KARACHI, June 26 (Reuters) - Sea breezes brought lower temperatures on Friday to ease a heat wave that killed more than 1,150 people around Pakistan’s teeming port city of Karachi during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Mass funerals were held for 50 unidentified victims on Friday before their bodies were hastily buried. The extreme heat of up to 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit) - the hottest since 1981 - coincided with power failures and triggered sharp criticism of the government’s response in the city of 20 million people....

As newborns, we enter the world by inhaling. In leaving, we exhale. (In fact, in many languages the word “exhale” is synonymous with “dying.”) Breathing is so central to life that it is no wonder humankind long ago noted its value not only to survival but to the functioning of the body and mind and began controlling it to improve well-being. As early as the first millennium B.C., both the Tao religion of China and Hinduism placed importance on a “vital principle” that flows through the body, a kind of energy or internal breath, and viewed respiration as one of its manifestations....

For years there have been warnings that advances in science could make it possible to cook up killer diseases in laboratories and unleash them on the world. This week came news that scientists at the University of Alberta have put together from scratch a relative of the smallpox virus — and a reminder that the threat of deadly viruses created by humans is more than theoretical. The smallpox virus, which triggered brutal disease for centuries, was declared eradicated in 1980 after a successful global effort to end its reign of terror....

As is true of virtual and augmented reality, spatial computing builds on the “digital twin” concept familiar from computer-aided design (CAD). In CAD, engineers create a digital representation of an object. This twin can be used variously to 3-D-print the object, design new versions of it, provide virtual training on it or join it with other digital objects to create virtual worlds. Spatial computing makes digital twins not just of objects but of people and locations—using GPS, lidar (light detection and ranging), video and other geolocation technologies to create a digital map of a room, a building or a city....

Medicine accomplished a huge feat at the start of 2020, when researchers produced the first mRNA vaccine to protect humans from SARS-CoV-2 infection. It was certainly not new technology—the vaccine platform had been under development for more than a decade and tested against multiple diseases, from flu to rabies. It represents our rapidly advancing understanding of how the body manufactures proteins, the molecules that are coded for by our genes. The potential to manipulate the very blueprints that our cells use to build the molecules and cells at the heart of disease is undoubtedly a game changer....

Young children can crudely add and subtract numbers before they have learned the rules of arithmetic, a new study finds. Researchers presented five- and six-year-old children with problems such as, “Sarah has 15 candies and she gets 19 more; John has 51 candies. Who has more?” To answer correctly, researchers say, the children must be harnessing an intuitive sense of how large different numbers are, which could help ease the pain of learning arithmetic....