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A Russian scientist says he is planning to produce gene-edited babies, an act that would make him only the second person known to have done this. It would also fly in the face of the scientific consensus that such experiments should be banned until an international ethical framework has agreed on the circumstances and safety measures that would justify them. Molecular biologist Denis Rebrikov has told Nature he is considering implanting gene-edited embryos into women, possibly before the end of the year if he can get approval by then....

The flu takes a formidable toll each year. Researchers and health workers save lives by routinely rolling out seasonal vaccines and deploying drugs to fight the virus and its secondary infections. But in the U.S. alone the flu still kills tens of thousands of people and hospitalizes hundreds of thousands more. A big part of the problem has been correctly predicting what strains of the influenza virus health officials should try to combat in a given season....

A robot surveying the underside of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf has made a startling discovery: Clinging upside-down from crannies in the ice shelf with their tentacles dangling into the icy water were thousands and thousands of tiny sea anemones. The creatures are a new species dubbed Edwardsiella andrillae. Other anemones have been found in Antarctica, but these are the first reported to live in the ice. The tiny, white invertebrates reside in burrows in the ice and extend their tentacles to filter-feed from the water below....

As if dainty, iridescent fairies are racing around a cosmic track, Neptune’s rings sparkle in a stunning new view captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful off-world observatory yet built. This is the sharpest image of the planet’s rings obtained since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, and it reveals a plethora of never-before-seen details. “For me, looking at JWST’s new Neptune image is like catching up with a friend you haven’t seen in ten-plus years—and they look GREAT,” wrote Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as the agency’s JWST operations project scientist, in an e-mail to Scientific American....

Morality is not just something that people learn, argues Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: It is something we are all born with. At birth, babies are endowed with compassion, with empathy, with the beginnings of a sense of fairness. It is from these beginnings, he argues in his new book Just Babies, that adults develop their sense of right and wrong, their desire to do good — and, at times, their capacity to do terrible things....

Pop open a bottle of champagne and pour yourself a glass. Take a sip. The elegant surface fizz—a boiling fumarole of rising and collapsing bubbles—launches thousands of golden droplets into the air, conveying the wine’s enticing flavors and aromas to tongue and nostrils alike. A percussive symphony of diminutive pops accompanies the tasty mouthful, juxtaposing a refreshing carbonated chill and a comforting alcoholic warmth. Such is the enchantment of bubbly, the classic sparkling wine of northeastern France’s Champagne district, a libation that has become a fixture at festive celebrations worldwide....

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry recently stated that in order to reach net zero emission goals by 2045, we’ll “need technologies we don’t yet have.” Well, he’s half right. It’s true that battling climate change requires innovative, technologically driven ideas that can be tested, replicated and scaled, at warp speed. But inventing wholly new technology isn’t necessarily the answer, nor is the idea we can deploy today’s technology all the way to 100 percent clean energy....

With nearly 50,000 drug overdose deaths from opioids last year and an estimated two million Americans addicted, the opioid crisis continues to rage throughout the U.S. This statistic must be contrasted with another: 25 million Americans live with daily chronic pain, for which few treatment options are available apart from opioid medications. Opioid drugs like morphine and Oxycontin are still held as the gold standard when it comes to relieving pain....

Four gun-toting biologists scramble out of a helicopter on Southampton Island in northern Canada. Warily scanning the horizon for polar bears, they set off in hip waders across the tundra that stretches to the ice-choked coast of Hudson Bay. Helicopter time runs at almost US$2,000 per hour, and the researchers have just 90 minutes on the ground to count shorebirds that have come to breed on the windswept barrens near the Arctic Circle....

Quantum mechanics, which rules the world of the teensy-tiny, may help explain why genetic mutations spontaneously crop up in DNA as it makes copies of itself, a recent study suggests. Quantum mechanics describes the strange rules that govern atoms and their subatomic components. When the rules of classical physics, which describe the big world, break down, quantum comes in to explain. In the case of DNA, classical physics offers one explanation for why changes can suddenly appear in a single rung of the spiraling ladder of DNA, resulting in what’s called a point mutation....

It was only in March of this year that the massive wildfires that began tearing through the national park in January near Australia’s capital city of Canberra were finally declared out. In the intervening weeks they consumed more than 80 percent of the park. This is just one example of the enormous toll taken recently by southeastern Australia’s unprecedented bushfires, which collectively killed more than 30 people, destroyed nearly 6,000 structures and wiped out hundreds of millions of animals....

People who struggle with basic arithmetic may get a boost from a tool that electrically stimulates the brain, according to a study that appeared November 23 in Current Biology. Researchers at the University of Oxford and University College London studied people with normal math skills using a noninvasive technique called transcranial direct-current stimulation, in which scalp electrodes emit current that modulates neural activity. The team focused on the right parietal cortex because it contributes to spatial and math­ematical thinking....

A biodegradable, implantable battery could help in the development of biomedical devices that monitor tissue or deliver treatments before being reabsorbed by the body after use. “This is a really major advance,” says Jeffrey Borenstein, a biomedical engineer at Draper Laboratory, a non-profit research and development center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Until recently, there has not been a lot of progress in this area.” In 2012, materials scientist John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign unveiled a range of biodegradable silicon chips that could monitor temperature or mechanical strain, radio the results to external devices, and even heat up tissue to prevent infection (see ‘Biodegradable electronics here today, gone tomorrow’)....

GENEVA, Oct 30 (Reuters) - The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere grew at record rate in 2016 to a level not seen for millions of years, potentially fuelling a 20-metre rise in sea levels and adding 3 degrees to temperatures, the United Nations said on Monday. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main man-made greehouse gas, hit 403.3 parts per million (ppm), up from 400.0 in 2015, the U....

Monika Sobiesiak wasn’t expecting the morning of April 2 to start with such an adrenaline jolt. But as she scrolled through a list of earthquakes on her mobile phone, she saw that overnight a series of quakes had rocked the coast of northern Chile — almost exactly where she had installed a seismometer network a few years earlier. “I saw the 8.2,” says the geophysicist, who works at the University of Kiel in Germany, “and I rushed to get to my desk....

Our universe is flying apart, with galaxies moving away from each other faster each moment than they were the moment before. Scientists have known about this acceleration since the late 1990s, but whatever is causing it—dubbed dark energy—remains a mystery. Now the latest measurement of how fast the cosmos is growing thickens the plot further: The universe appears to be ballooning more quickly than it should be, even after accounting for the accelerating expansion caused by dark energy....

Building a strong and stable core is arguably the most critical part of any exercise program—especially if you have plans on continuing to be mobile and fit well into your senior years. At the same time, because the core itself is so complex and responsible for so many mechanical functions in our torsos, it is also arguably the most poorly understood component of fitness. I blame a lot of this misunderstanding on all the Instagram photos of people pointing to their rock-hard six-packs alongside a hashtag like #coregoals, #hardcore or #shreddedcore....

Two pharmaceutical companies have halted clinical trials of gene-targeting therapies for Huntington’s disease (HD), following the drugs’ disappointing performance. Researchers had hoped that the treatments—known as antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs)—would be a game changer for HD, an incurable genetic condition that affects cognition, behaviour and movement. But back-to-back announcements from Roche, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and Wave Life Sciences, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have dealt a crushing blow to those affected by the disease....

A variety of tomato that has been genetically engineered to produce large quantities of potentially health-boosting compounds—including flavanols and anthocyanins—has been developed by researchers in the UK. A single tomato of the new variety contains the same amount of resveratrol as 50 bottles of red wine, or the same amount of genistein (a compound found in soy beans that is thought to have health benefits) as 2.5kg of tofu. As tomato plants grow quickly and produce a lot of fruit, farming this new variety could be a way to produce these nutrients in industrial quantities much more cheaply than synthesising them chemically, or extracting small amounts from other plant sources....

Learning Morse code, with its tappity-tap rhythms of dots and dashes, could take far less effort—and attention—than one might think. The trick is a wearable computer that engages the sensory powers of touch, according to a recent pilot study. The results suggest that mobile devices may be able to teach us manual skills, almost subconsciously, as we go about our everyday routines. Ph.D. student Caitlyn Seim and computer science professor Thad Starner of the Georgia Institute of Technology tinker with haptics, the integration of vibrations or other tactile cues with computing gadgets....