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Since the pandemic began, the question of where the coronavirus came from has been one of the biggest puzzles. It almost certainly originated in bats, and a new study out this week—the most comprehensive analysis of coronaviruses in China—adds further weight to that theory. But the lack of clarity around how the virus passed to people has meant that unsubstantiated theories—promoted by US President Donald Trump—that it escaped from a laboratory in China persist....

For a documentary on horror movies that seem cursed, I was recently asked to explain the allegedly spooky coincidences associated with some famous films. Months after the release of Poltergeist, for example, its 22-year-old star, Dominique Dunne, was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend; Julian Beck, who played the preacher “beast,” succumbed to stomach cancer before Poltergeist II’s release; and 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke died months before the release of what would be her last starring role in Poltergeist III....

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these technologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation....

A flexible battery made of gauzy silk films could power electronics and then melt away after a preset number of days (ACS Energy Lett. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00012). The biodegradable battery produces a high enough voltage to power temporary medical implants designed to harmlessly dissolve in the body in a few weeks once their work is done. Scientists have been making rapid progress on medical sensors and devices that could transmit images, stimulate wounds to heal, or deliver drugs for a short while before degrading....

By Steve Holland U.S. President-elect Donald Trump named a vociferous critic of Obamacare and a policy consultant on Tuesday to help him overhaul the healthcare system that Republicans have targeted since Democrats enacted sweeping reforms in 2010. Republican Representative Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, will be Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, and consultant Seema Verma will lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a powerful agency that oversees government health programs and insurance standards....

President Trump has dismissed global warming as a hoax, snubbed the Paris emissions pact and scrapped U.S. EPA climate rules. But executive actions can be fleeting—as the Trump administration has shown by moving swiftly to unravel many of President Obama’s climate change policies. Yet there’s a major piece of Trump’s climate legacy that could be more enduring: his court picks. The Trump administration has acted expeditiously to fill vacancies on top courts around the country, including the Supreme Court and powerful lower courts that could decide the fate of regulatory challenges and novel lawsuits, like localities suing oil companies for damages caused by sea-level rise....

By Reuters Staff (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved Medtronic Plc’s “artificial pancreas” designed to automatically deliver the right dose of insulin to patients with type 1 diabetes. The eagerly-awaited approval offers patients “greater freedom to live their lives without having to consistently and manually monitor baseline glucose levels and administer insulin,” Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s medical device division said in a statement....

Scientists have extracted the hardy, fibrous protein collagen from a 68-million-year-old thighbone that belonged to a Tyrannosaurus rex, jettisoning the long-held belief that ancient fossils could not provide protein samples for analysis. The protein was discovered in a femur (thighbone) unearthed four years ago under a thousand cubic yards of rock on a cliff in the Hell Creek Formation, which spans Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas in the northwestern U.S....

My mother loves watching the weather news on television. When I was a kid, she insisted on total silence during the five minutes near the end of the evening broadcast when the meteorologist stood in front of a map of New York City and pointed at the various temperature readings. Her face rapt, she gazed at the radar images of storm clouds sweeping through the tristate area. I asked her once why she loved the weather news so much, and she said with a shrug, “I want to know what to wear tomorrow....

An outbreak of deadly lung injuries in vapers in the United States—many of them adolescents—shows no signs of stopping. So far, 805 e-cigarettes users have fallen ill, 12 of whom have died. The illnesses are fueling a push among lawmakers and regulators to rein in the sale of e-cigarettes, in particular those with flavors that could be contributing to a worrying surge in youth vaping. It’s illegal for vendors in the U....

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the iPad Mini with Retina Display sales launch may be one of the most product-constrained to date for Apple. The prevailing wisdom is that Apple can’t get enough displays. There are enough credible analysts – some speaking with CNET – and reports that it’s likely to be true. Even CEO Tim Cook sounded less-than-optimistic about the new Mini when he said last month that “it’s unclear whether we’ll have enough for the quarter or not....

The early signs of autism are visible in the brains of 6-month-old infants, a new study finds, suggesting that future treatments could be given at this time, to lessen the impact of the disorder on children. Researchers looked at how the brain develops in early life, and found that tracts of white matter that connect different regions of the brain didn’t form as quickly in children who later developed autism, compared with kids who didn’t develop the disorder....

Bengt Samuelsson won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 for his work on providing an exacting picture of how the body generates prostaglandins. These hormonelike substances play a role in regulating various biological processes, including the pain induction, fever and inflammation that are blocked by aspirin, ibuprofen and related drugs. Samuelsson did his research, along with Sune Bergstr?m, another of that year’s co-winners, on the red-brick campus of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which also selects the annual Nobel medicine prize....

Americans chucked more than 21 billion pounds of clothing and other textiles into landfills in 2015, according to the latest available estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, a steep increase from 12.5 billion pounds in 2000 and 4.6 billion pounds in 1980. And that growing trash pile is just one of the apparel industry’s array of environmental problems—which also include water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions—fueled in part by the rise of the cheap, disposable clothing called “fast fashion....

After years of financial woes, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, is slashing US$3 million from its annual budget for science operations, which include a $10-million program for research on the institution’s collection of some 25 million specimens of fossils, plants and animals. Museum president Richard Lariviere unveiled the cuts to museum staff on 18 December as part of a plan to reduce the museum’s total budget by $5 million next year....

Dinosaurs were neither sluggish like lizards nor high-energy like mammals, but something in between, a study suggests. The work stakes out a rare middle ground in the long-running debate over whether dinosaurs were ‘cold-blooded’ ectotherms, which use the environment to adjust their internal temperature, or ‘warm-blooded’ endotherms, which regulate their body temperature from within. “There’s a third way,” says John Grady, a biologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque....

The Great Recession led to a dramatic increase in the number of Americans living with day-to-day economic insecurity. According to the Survey of Economic Risk Perception and Insecurity, 93 percent of U.S. households experienced a decline in their wealth between 2008 and 2009. A more recent study by the Federal Reserve suggests that financial insecurity is fairly common. For example, 47 percent of survey respondents said they would have difficulty covering an emergency expense of $400....

Scientists have demonstrated that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is correct to a remarkable degree of accuracy, despite having been around for more than a century. The team behind the research wanted to test a component of Einstein’s theory of general relativity called the weak equivalence principle, which states that all objects, regardless of their mass or composition, should free-fall the same way in a particular gravitational field when interference from factors like air pressure is eliminated....

How much does each state need to reduce its carbon load to comply with the federal government’s landmark carbon rule? Since yesterday’s unveiling of the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon rule for existing power plants,TheGreenGrok has been rooting around in the details. One of the signature features is the flexibility each state will have in implementing how to reach its state-specific goal. The reductions needed to reach the state goals in 2030 vary immensely as you can see in the chart below....

When health workers in Malawi began rolling out the first vaccine proven to protect against malaria, it was a moment 32 years—and more than US$700 million—in the making. The country began giving the vaccine, called RTS,S, to children under age 2 on 23 April. Soon Ghana and Kenya will join in, as part of a large-scale pilot programme backed by the World Health Organization (WHO). The effort could immunize more than one million children by 2023—a welcome boost in the fight against malaria, which kills an average of 1,200 people worldwide per day....