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By Tomasz JanowskiTOKYO (Reuters) - The message from Beijing could not be clearer: China needs to shift to a more balanced economy that is socially and environmentally sustainable.That was the conclusion of a key Communist Party meeting a decade ago, yet what followed was more of the same: rapid investment-led expansion, which turned China into the world’s no.2 economy, but left it laden with debt, environmental damage and excess capacity.Fast forward to 2013 and China’s new leadership is again promising more harmonious development and the question is how to tell whether, this time, it is for real....

Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. this is not a metaphor. hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past....

Is it safe to bogart that e-cig or even be in the same room with an e-cig bogarter? OK, in this post we’re going to clue you in on some of the potential issues with electronic cigarettes or e-cigs, as they’re diminutively known. But before we do, we need to get one thing straight: Smoking cigarettes kills. Per the Centers for Disease Control, smoking “is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, accounting for more than 480,000 deaths, or one of every five deaths, each year....

Promising treatments for those blinded by an often-hereditary, retina-damaging disease are expanding throughout Europe and making their way across the pond, offering a ray of hope for the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. left in the dark by retinitis pigmentosa. The disease—which affects about one in 4,000 people in the U.S. and about 1.5 million people worldwide—kills the retina’s photoreceptors, the rod and cone cells that convert light into electrical signals, which are transmitted via the optic nerve to the brain’s visual cortex for processing....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Your DNA is supposed to be your blueprint, your unique master code, identical in every one of your tens of trillions of cells. It is why you are you, indivisible and whole, consistent from tip to toe. But that’s really just a biological fairy tale. In reality, you are an assemblage of genetically distinctive cells, some of which have radically different operating instructions. This fact has only become clear in the last decade....

A shadow looms over this year’s United Nations climate change meeting. The 23rd Conference of the Parties—or its shorthand, COP 23—begins Monday in Bonn, Germany. It commences just five months after Pres. Donald Trump announced he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, which aims to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius—or ideally, 1.5 degrees C. The international community strongly reprimanded the Trump administration for its decision, and it has vowed to disregard that setback and forge ahead at COP23....

Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. As the U.S. and U.K. vaccinate their populations much faster than initially anticipated, two disparate concepts have been swirling online in English-language vaccine discourse: the moral need for global vaccine equity and the consumer-driven desire for vaccine passports....

Some people, no matter what they do, simply cannot fall asleep until the wee hours—and do not feel rested unless they get up much later than most of us. These night owls may have a common form of insomnia called delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), which studies have suggested is at least partly heritable. Now researchers at the Rockefeller University and their colleagues have uncovered a genetic mutation that could elucidate what causes these often awkward sleep schedules....

When the new Apple Watch heart monitoring app can get a reading, it can accurately detect that a person has an irregular heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation 99 percent of the time, according to a study of the new device that Apple submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. The agency shared with STAT a summary of the clinical data that Apple submitted as part of its clearance application. In one study, Apple tested the watch in more than 580 people, half of whom had atrial fibrillation....

When physician Melanie Swift got her first COVID shot in January 2021, she felt as though the vaccines marked a turning point. “If we just get ’em in enough arms, we can beat this thing and not spread it,” says Swift, who co-chairs the COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation and Distribution Work Group at the Mayo Clinic. Soon breakthrough infections came along, yet most hospitals seemed to hold up. Public health messaging began to pivot away from a focus on case numbers....

The greenhouses that sprawl across the coastline of southeastern Spain are so bright that they gleam in satellite photos. Since the 1970s, farmers have been expanding this patchwork of buildings in Almería province to grow produce such as tomatoes, peppers and watermelons for export. To keep the plants from overheating in the summer, they paint the roofs with white lime to reflect the sunlight. That does more than just cool the crops....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineBill Murray is a man with secrets. Along with a handful of other scientists based at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, Murray is one of the few researchers with access to the latest data on the Higgs boson – the most sought-after particle in physics.Looking at his laptop, he traces a thin black line that wiggles across a shaded area at the centre of a graph....

Billions of dollars in climate spending have been cut from the bipartisan infrastructure deal. Public transit and electric vehicle spending could be roughly $20 billion lower under the infrastructure deal announced yesterday compared with the bipartisan framework that senators and the White House announced in June. The Biden administration is touting the deal for $550 billion in new spending as the single largest infrastructure investment in U.S. history. But the lower funding levels could threaten President Biden’s goal of building a half-million charging stations, if not his larger ambition of cutting emissions in half by 2030—the minimum that’s needed, scientists say, to maintain a safe climate....

Any way you slice it, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the boldest, highest-stakes gambles in the space agency’s storied history. Just building and testing the observatory has proved to be a dauntingly complex technological enterprise, pushing the observatory’s astronomical price tag to nearly $9 billion and requiring participation from the European and Canadian space agencies. JWST is both a barrier-breaking and budget-busting undertaking. Conceived in the late 1980s as a way to peer back over 13....

To much of the world, the virus behind the devastating Ebola outbreak in Africa seems to have stormed out of nowhere. But Leslie Lobel thinks we should have seen it coming. In 2012, Lobel and a team of researchers spent six months in Uganda studying the Ebola virus and related viruses. Over the course of their stay, these pathogens caused at least four separate outbreaks of disease in central Africa, affecting more than 100 people....

The aging Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island—soon to be the site of Cornell University’s new NYC Tech Campus—holds a significant place in 20th-century medicine. During World War II, Goldwater researchers participated in a government program that recruited conscientious objectors from the Civilian Public Service (CPS)—set up in 1941 for draftees willing to serve their country but unwilling to engage in military service—to take part in various medical experiments. CPS volunteers became human guinea pigs....

Global warming and decades of outmoded fire prevention strategies are merging to set the stage for massive “mega-fires” that scar communities’ homes and pocketbooks, according to a new assessment. Preliminary findings from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released this week trace the circumstances around eight mega-fires across the world in a quest to uncover clues on how best to ward them off and minimize their damage. Such fires are defined more by their impact on people and the environment than by their specific size....

Fasting to start the New Year may also kick off a complex cascade of chemical interactions that keep brain cells alive and appetites up in the absence of food. Until now, researchers believed that neurons or nerve cells survived fasting thanks to leptin, a hormone secreted by fat when the body is starved. But a new study suggests that the process is actually similar to another mechanism in the body linked to obesity and diabetes, and could provide insight into the molecular processes behind those conditions....

By Philip Pullella ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Thursday he believed that man was primarily responsible for climate change and that he hoped this year’s Paris conference would take a courageous stand to protect the environment. The Pope said his long-awaited encyclical on the environment was almost finished and that he hoped it would be published in June, ahead of the U.N. climate meeting in Paris in November....

The promising Comet ISON continues on its way in toward a late November rendezvous with the sun, cosmic close encounter that will bring the celestial object to within 800,000 miles (1.2 million km) of the sun’s surface. Many have already christened ISON as the “Comet of the Century,” but this may be premature, since the comet’s performance will hinge chiefly on whether it can survive its extremely close approach to the sun on Nov....