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Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf—a large ledge of ice, jutting out from the edge of the continent into the ocean—captured international attention in 2002. Over the course of just a few weeks, the ice shelf splintered, broke into pieces and collapsed entirely into the sea. Nearly 20 years later, it’s still one of the most dramatic events that scientists have observed in Antarctica. But it may not be the last. New research suggests some of the same factors that caused the demise of Larsen B could threaten dozens of other ice shelves around the Antarctic coast....

Alzheimer’s disease has beaten back another effort to tame it. Biogen and its Japanese pharma partner Eisai said Thursday that they were halting two Phase 3 clinical trials of aducanumab, a drug that was designed to slow the worsening of Alzheimer’s by targeting brain-destroying protein fragments known as beta-amyloid. The decision to stop the trials was based on an interim analysis conducted by an independent monitoring committee. This analysis concluded that aducanumab was unlikely to benefit Alzheimer’s patients compared to placebo when the trials completed, Biogen and Eisai said....

Brain implants that deliver electrical pulses tuned to a person’s feelings and behavior are being tested in people for the first time. Two teams funded by the U.S. military’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of closed-loop brain implants that use algorithms to detect patterns associated with mood disorders. These devices can shock the brain back to a healthy state without input from a physician....

In a minute, she’s handed a joystick that looks and vibrates like a chainsaw, and she’s asked to cut down a tree. As she completes the task, she feels the same sort of resistance she might feel if she were cutting down a real tree. When she leaves this forest, and re-enters the “real” world, her paper consumption will drop by 20 percent and she will show a measurable preference for recycled paper products....

Carbon capture and storage, green hydrogen, and massive deployments of wind and solar energy. Oil and gas industry leaders say they’re investing in all of that. But to make those clean technologies pay off, the industry is increasingly embracing a climate policy it once fiercely opposed: pricing emissions of carbon dioxide. “Until we’ve found a way to transparently and cleanly build in to the economic decisions that large businesses are going to make the price of carbon, it’s going to be difficult to really scale up any solutions,” said Michele Fiorentino, the executive vice president of strategy and business development at Baker Hughes....

Nearly three years ago, Cassidy’s fate was uncertain. Missing his right hind leg, virtually hairless, and 30 pounds (14 kilograms) underweight, the year-old old German shepherd mix was living in an animal shelter in the Bronx when Steve Posovsky saw him on a morning television show segment about pets. “There were tears in my eyes,” recalls Posovsky, who lives with his wife, Susan, in Long Beach, N.Y. He contacted the shelter and shortly thereafter welcomed Cassidy as a member of his family....

HONOLULU—Mysterious ultra-fast pinpricks of radio energy keep lighting up the night sky and nobody knows why. A newly discovered example of this transient phenomenon has been traced to its place of origin—a nearby spiral galaxy—but it’s only made things murkier for astronomers. The problem concerns a class of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them heavenly events known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). In a few thousandths of a second, these explosions produce as much energy as the sun does in nearly a century....

BRAZIL Online requests for abortion pills spiked dramatically this year in Brazil, Ecuador and other Latin American countries that ban or restrict abortions, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The uptick suggests that women may be choosing to end pregnancies rather than risk birth defects caused by the Zika virus. U.S. The National Institutes of Health approved the first clinical trial that involves the gene-editing technique CRISPR....

A global treaty curbing chemicals that destroy the ozone layer could prevent 443 million cases of skin cancer and 63 million incidents of vision damage that might have required cataract surgery by the end of this century, according to a new study. “We peeled away from disaster,” explained Julia Lee-Taylor, an associate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who co-authored the paper on the Montreal Protocol. The work is dedicated to Mario Molina, a Mexican chemist who shared a Nobel prize for his research beginning in 1974 predicting that chemicals commonly used for refrigerants and as propellants for aerosol cans were drifting into the stratosphere, where they emitted chlorine....

Spring football practice started this month for high schools across the country, and teams are drawing up game plans for the heat as well as this fall’s opponents. Football players are 11 times more likely to suffer heat related illnesses than all other high school sports combined, according to a recent University of North Carolina study. To block heat illnesses, several big-time high school football states have new policies for practicing in intense heat....

Shouting during a nightmare. Struggling to balance a checkbook. A weakened sense of smell. Hallucinations. Chronic constipation. This bizarre mix of symptoms often stumps doctors, but they are some of the telltale signs of Lewy body dementia—the second most common type (after Alzheimer’s disease), affecting an estimated 1.4 million Americans. Lewy bodies are protein clumps that kill neurons. Depending on where they cluster in the brain, they can cause either Parkinson’s disease or Lewy body dementia, although the two conditions tend to overlap as they progress....

As the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, rapidly spreads across the globe, governments are implementing strict measures to limit its devastating effects. According to the latest counts, there are more than 220,000 confirmed cases worldwide—and many more are likely going undetected. To stem the spread, nations are sealing borders, shuttering schools and businesses, and encouraging social distancing. Some countries are locking down residents in their home. The extent of the virus’s spread will also depend on the actions of individuals, many of whom may lack any symptoms of infection—meaning a crucial factor that will determine the effectiveness of the new rules and regulations over several weeks, or even months, is the way people behave ....

One hundred years after Captain Robert Scott’s trip to the South Pole, his own photos of the otherworldly polar landscape and his crew have been col­lected for the first time. Historian David M. Wilson, great-nephew of an expedition member, provides context for the haunting images. “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” So remarked George to Jerry in a classic Seinfeld line that turns out to encapsulate a scientific explanation for why we lie....

Corn crops—and global food security—could be at risk due to climate change, new research shows. Rising temperatures may cause significant declines in the global production of the staple food crop, according to a study published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s the latest study to suggest that climate change may threaten some of the world’s most globally important crops—a major concern for food security in nations around the world....

A WOMAN WHO HAD been married for 14 years called into Dr. Laura’s radio show. The woman says she recently realized that she has never loved her husband, and she informs Dr. Laura that she has told her husband that. The couple has received marriage counseling, but Dr. Laura tells the caller that counseling is useless because of her attitude, according to a YouTube recording of the episode. The conversation continues:...

Seven-year-old Quinn Gerlach got a gift certificate from his grandpa a few years back—not for a toy, a book or a game. It was for a kidney. Gerlach was born with a single kidney, instead of the usual two, and it doesn’t fully function. So, one day, he may need a transplant. Quinn’s grandfather, retired Tulare County Superior Court judge Howard Broadman, 68, of Visalia, Calif., learned he has the right blood and tissue types to be a donor for Quinn....

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is often called the “gold standard of evidence” in medical research involving humans. In such an experiment, a random sorting leads to only some subjects getting the real intervention being tested. The first known RCT took place in 1747, when Dr. James Lind, surgeon on the HMS Salisbury, staked out his place in history by giving some scurvy patients citrus fruits. At first, anyway. Then all the sailors got citrus, as it became obvious that scurvy was preventable through the inclusion in the diet of vitamin C via consumption of oranges, lemons and—of key importance to etymologists—limes, which led to all British sailors, and then all Brits in general, to become known as Limeys....

[Editor’s note: This story was updated on Sept 22 to accurately state the years between the 1985 and 2017 quakes.] Mexico City is badly rattled. On Tuesday—32 years to the day after a giant earthquake killed as many as 10,000 people in this very place—seismologists and city dwellers got another major shock. A rupture in a fault that had not worried building planners or seismologists caused heavy damage throughout the city and took the lives of more than 200 people....

My friend Bertrand can easily imagine never meeting his wife, Laura. The circumstances were peculiar. He was visiting an unfamiliar town for work, not too far from his home. An acquaintance who happened to be there at the same time invited him out to a dance club in yet another neighborhood he otherwise wouldn’t have visited. At the last minute he decided to go. He arrived late, so he had to wait in line in the wintry cold....

By Daniel CresseyA tenet of modern fisheries science may be unfounded, suggests a study of how catches are affecting marine ecosystems. The finding has sparked a heated debate about how best to measure humanity’s impact on the ocean.A landmark study in 1998 found that we are ‘fishing down the food chain’ worldwide – in other words, exhausting stocks of top predators such as cod before switching attention to smaller marine animals....