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Researchers have identified a link between exposure in the womb to widely used chemicals known as phthalates and adverse effects on genital development in male babies, according to a new report. Previous toxilogical studies had suggested that fetal exposure to the chemicals can affect reproductive development in rodents, but the new results indicate that developing humans could be vulnerable as well. Phthalates are common components of items ranging from plastics to paints to personal care products such as nail polish and shampoo....

The announcement by 17 governors yesterday to jointly pursue clean energy goals was perhaps most noteworthy in what it did not include—any mention of climate change. That omission was necessary to bring a bipartisan swath of states together on energy efficiency and renewable energy, modernizing the electricity grid and promoting electric and alternatively fueled vehicles—all subjects often mentioned in the same breath as climate change. “That really wasn’t a topic of conversation,” Nevada Gov....

To succeed in school, children must master the “three R’s”—reading, writing and arithmetic—but not all students readily grasp these basic skills. Among English-speaking children, an estimated 2 to 15 percent have trouble reading or spelling, problems broadly classified as dyslexia. From 1 to 7 percent struggle to do math, a disability known as dyscalculia. Statistics vary; dyslexia appears to be more common, for example, among English speakers than among speakers of highly phonetic languages, such as German or Italian....

By Kieran Guilbert LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Over the last three decades, Burkina Faso’s poorest farmers have produced food for half a million people by restoring some 300,000 hectares of degraded land with innovative techniques to conserve water and soil, according to a report on Wednesday. The UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank said Burkina Faso’s subsistence farmers were leading the fight against climate change in the West African country, which is prone to severe droughts and increasingly erratic rainfall....

Getting time with Qiao Jie is not easy. At 7:30 a.m., the line coming out of the fertility centre that she runs blocks the doorway and extends some 80 metres down the street. Inside, about 50 physicians on her team are discussing recent findings, but Qiao, a fertility specialist and president of Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, is still in an early-morning consult. When she finally emerges, she jumps to the topic at hand: spreading awareness of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a procedure that helps couples undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) to avoid passing on genetic mutations that could cause disease or disability in their children....

The effects of climate change are steadily worsening and now threaten nearly every aspect of life in the U.S., according to a stark draft of a federal climate report released Monday. Extreme weather events are growing more frequent and severe across the country, including wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts and floods. Warming is threatening water supplies, food supplies, energy systems, natural ecosystems and human health. Rising sea levels are chipping away at coastal communities....

One of the creepier conclusions drawn by scientists studying the Anthropocene—the proposed epoch of Earth’s geologic history in which humankind’s activities dominate the globe—is how closely today’s industrially induced climate change resembles conditions seen in past periods of rapid temperature rise. “These ‘hyperthermals,’ the thermal-maximum events of prehistory, are the genesis of this research,” says Gavin Schmidt, climate modeler and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Whether the warming was caused by humans or by natural forces, the fingerprints—the chemical signals and tracers that give evidence of what happened then—look very similar....

More than 18 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with diabetes, which costs an estimated $174 billion annually. Typically, local public health agencies carry out the initiatives to manage and prevent this chronic disease, but because prevalence figures are generally given on national and state levels, local workers cannot gain the traction—and funding—to rein in rates in their areas. A new study drills down to the county level, revealing wide disparities within states and striking national patterns....

Neutrinos, dark matter and γ-rays top European physicists’ wish list for the next decade of efforts to catch high-energy particles from space. The priorities are laid out in a roadmap for 2017–26, posted online last month by a group of funding agencies from fourteen European countries, ahead of being officially unveiled in January. Twenty years ago, the field of astroparticle physics barely existed. But some of the major discoveries in particle physics—including neutrino research that earned Nobel prizes in 2002 and 2015—are now coming from space-focused detectors, rather than through the more conventional venue of atom smashers....

The length of the flu season may vary depending on where you live, with large cities enduring longer periods of transmission and smaller cities experiencing shorter, but more explosive, spread, a new study suggests. The study doesn’t assert that one’s risk of contracting influenza varies depending on the size of any given community. Rather, it argues that in less populous places, flu needs the right atmospheric conditions to spread effectively. In large cities, those conditions don’t matter quite as much....

Long-standing collusion between Japan’s regulators and industry set the stage for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, a tragedy that could and should have been avoided, according to an independent commission investigating the accident. In a report released yesterday, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) identifies a long list of technical failures that contributed to the disaster, laying blame squarely on the shoulders of the energy utilities, regulators and the government....

The fabric of spacetime may be frothing with gigantic gravitational waves, and the possibility has sent physicists into a tizzy. A potential signal seen in the light from dead stellar cores known as pulsars has driven a flurry of theoretical papers speculating about exotic explanations. The most mundane, yet still quite sensational, possibility is that researchers working with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), which uses the galaxy as a colossal gravitational-wave detector, have finally seen a long-sought background signature produced when supermassive black holes crash and merge throughout the universe....

The thawing of the Arctic permafrost is releasing a potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that has rarely been considered as a threat despite its tremendous potential to drive global warming. Nitrous oxide, or N2O, is more of a threat to the Arctic and global warming than previously believed, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Currently, it’s not usually considered when researchers create models to predict the future warming of the region, said Carolina Voigt, a researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and a lead author of the study....

APRIL 1 Science is in the spotlight at the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s First Light Festival, a month of science-themed plays, readings, workshops and other theatrical activities. In a partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which promotes connections between science and popular culture, the acclaimed theater company investigates topics from the emotional dynamics of working in a research lab to the eccentric brilliance of Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence....

Long before the Vikings reached America, and before doomed Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sailed into the unknown for history’s first circumnavigation of Earth (completed in 1552), a group of spiders was already crossing the oceans and settling faraway lands in the Southern Hemisphere. An international team of spider experts, zoologists and biogeographers from Argentina, Switzerland and Australia has reconstructed the incredible adventure of a genus of coastal spiders called Amaurobioides, which has traveled around the world in the last eight million years....

Dear EarthTalk: Are there health or environmental concerns with LED lightbulbs, which may soon replace compact fluorescents as the green-friendly light bulb of choice?—Mari-Louise, via e-mail Indeed, LED (light emitting diode) lighting does seem to be the wave of the future right now, given the mercury content and light quality issues with the current king-of-the-hill of green bulbs, the compact fluorescent (CFL). LEDs use significantly less energy than even CFLs, and do not contain mercury....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. If the thought of taking part in the annual ritual of Black Friday gives you cold chills rather than a rush of excitement, you’re not alone. For every avid bargain hunter who plans for the day as if training for a marathon, there’s someone else who stays home, secure in the knowledge that no one will trample them, shove them or invade their personal space just to get this season’s hottest deals....

Hundreds of Turkish academics are waiting to find out whether they will be prosecuted or sacked for spreading “terrorist propaganda”, after they signed a petition calling for violence to end in Turkey’s southeast, where government forces have been fighting Kurdish separatists. After the petition provoked a furious response from Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, several universities in the country have begun investigations into signatories among their faculty — which could lead to their dismissal if accusations of unlawful political agitation hold up....

When the Obama administration promised $8 billion for rail service improvements earlier this year as part of its $787-billion economic stimulus package, it opened a flood of interest in high-speed railroads, a mode of transport that has languished in the U.S. despite successes in east Asia, Europe and other parts of the world. The lure of stimulus money, plus a separate five-year, $5 billion investment in high-speed rail beginning as part of the administration’s suggested fiscal year 2010 budget, has led to 45 applications from 24 states for a total of $50 billion in long-term, high-speed rail corridor projects, and another 214 requests from 24 states for a total of $7 billion for the smaller, “shovel-ready” work....

In the 2016 blockbuster film Arrival, aliens with inscrutable motives descend on Earth—and it is up to a scientist played by Amy Adams to help communicate with them. Were this to occur in real life, it might be Sheri Wells-Jensen who gets the call. A linguist at Bowling Green State University, Wells-Jensen has thought a lot about just how different alien minds might be. Many researchers have automatically presumed extraterrestrials would possess senses like the ones most of us use every day....