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ZHANGJIAGANG, China—On a recent winter morning, Lu Shuhang, a senior executive of a textile mill here in this port city near Shanghai, went on the hunt for an invisible enemy. Lu, together with a group of five people, searched through the ZJG Addchance Dyeing & Finishing Co. Ltd. factory floor for hours. They looked into steam pipes, tested water temperatures and examined every production process they could enter. The bandit: unnecessary energy consumption....

There is no coronavirus vaccine. Medications for COVID-19 are still being tested. Across the U.S., states that once acted as if the pandemic was going away are setting new daily records for infections, hospitalizations and deaths. There is one proved tool that has helped other countries stem the pandemic. But in the U.S. it is severely underused; the Trump administration tried to cut financing for it from the latest pandemic relief bill, reports this week say....

Researchers have sequenced the genomes of all 15 species of Darwin’s finches, revealing a key gene responsible for the diversity in the birds’ beaks. The study, published online in Nature this week, also redraws the family tree of these iconic birds, whose facial variations helped Charles Darwin to formulate his theory of natural selection. The finches are endemic to Ecuador’s Galapagos archipelago and Costa Rica’s Cocos Island. Their beaks are adapted to their preferred food: warbler finches, for example, spear insects with thin, sharp beaks, whereas ground finches crack open seeds with strong, blunter beaks....

A fire in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said. The safety of deep pools used to store used radioactive fuel at nuclear plants has been an issue since the accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in March. If the cooling water a pool is lost, the used nuclear fuel could catch fire and release radiation....

An ancient Roman gladiator school has been discovered in Austria, complete with cell blocks, a training arena and a bath complex, archaeologists say. The buried remains of the school — at the site of Carnuntum, near Vienna — were detected not through excavations but through remote-sensing techniques. Based on these findings, researchers reconstructed the gladiator center in virtual 3D models. Archaeologists have been studying Carnuntum, which is on the south bank of the River Danube, for more than 100 years....

HIV is a disease of the gut, a concept that’s easy to lose sight of with all the attention paid to sexual transmission and blood measurements of the virus and the CD4+ T cells it infects and kills. But the bottom line is that about two thirds of all T cells reside in the lymphoid tissue of the gut, where the virus spreads after exposure, even before it shows up in blood....

Four years ago schools and day cares in western Washington embarked on an experiment. Too many kids in the state were going without needed vaccines that protect them against measles, whooping cough and other preventable diseases. Part of the problem, public health officials believed, was that parents lacked accurate medical information and held misguided beliefs that the vaccines were not necessary. So they drafted some help—specifically, other parents who were trained by public health workers to answer common questions about vaccines’ risks and benefits....

In a historic move, the US government has announced that it supports waiving patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines, a measure aimed at boosting supplies so that people around the world can get the shots. “The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” said US trade representative Katherine Tai in a statement. The move came on 5 May, the first of a two-day meeting of the general council of the World Trade Organization, based in Geneva, Switzerland....

As Congress debates how to cut climate-warming emissions, insights drawn from the European carbon market can help. (Because of the timeliness of this issue, the editors of Scientific American decided to publish this article online in advance of its publication in the December issue.) The odds are high that humans will warm Earth’s climate to worrisome levels during the coming century. Although fossil-fuel combustion has generated most of the buildup of climate-altering carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, effective solutions will require more than just designing cleaner energy sources....

New York is on track to become the 21st state to legalize medical marijuana this year, and two states—Colorado and Washington—have decriminalized recreational use as well. Americans now overwhelmingly support fewer restrictions on marijuana, with 86 percent saying doctors should be allowed to prescribe the drug for medical purposes. Despite its surging popularity, the jury is still out on whether marijuana is truly the panacea its supporters claim it to be....

This story is a supplement to the feature “So You Think You Can Dance?: PET Scans Reveal Your Brain’s Inner Choreography” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. The authors found that the following brain regions contribute to dance in ways that go beyond simply carrying out motion. Anterior vermis This part of the cerebellum receives input from the spinal cord and appears to act something like a metronome, helping to synchronize dance steps to music....

A basic misunderstanding skews the entire climate debate. Experts on both sides claim that protecting Earth’s climate will force a trade-off between the environment and the economy. According to these experts, burning less fossil fuel to slow or prevent global warming will increase the cost of meeting society’s needs for energy services, which include everything from speedy transportation to hot showers. Environmentalists say the cost would be modestly higher but worth it; skeptics, including top U....

The thought of a murderous virus often conjures images of patients suffering from Ebola virus in Africa, SARS in Asia or hantavirus in the U.S. Yet those evildoers have taken far fewer lives than rotavirus, whose name is virtually unknown. This virus infects nearly all children in their first few years of life. It causes vomiting followed by diarrhea. The diarrhea is often so severe that, if left untreated, it can lead to shock from dehydration and then death....

A Russian rocket successfully lifted off from snowy Central Asia tonight (Nov. 13), carrying a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin blasted into orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft at 11:14 p.m. EST (10:14 a.m. Baikonour time; 0414 GMT Nov. 14), amid frigid and extremely snowy conditions at the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan....

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” said French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in the mid-17th century. The sentiment may be truer today than ever, according to a paper published July 4 in Science. Researchers asked participants to rate how much they enjoyed being in a room with nothing to do. Of 409 participants, nearly half said that they did not like the experience....

This feels like a lopsided fight. In one corner, we have scientists, epidemiologists, infectious-disease physicians, clinicians, engineers—many different experts in the medical community, that is—arguing that the spread of COVID-19 by aerosols (that is, tiny droplets that can remain airborne long enough to travel significantly farther than the six-foot separation we’ve been told to observe) is both real and dangerous. In the other, it’s the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), which until very recently have allowed only that aerosol spread is possible, not necessarily likely....

For decades there has been a counterintuitive and hotly debated theory about dengue infections: that antibodies generated by a previous bout of dengue could actually put a person at risk of more severe disease if they contracted the virus a second time. And now American and Nicaraguan scientists have published evidence that may silence the skeptics. Antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE as it’s known in scientific circles, can happen, they reported, when subsequent infection occurs at a time when antibodies generated by the prior infection have fallen to a specific low range....

Christopher Cox realized before dawn on Sunday that his family might not be able to stay in their Baton Rouge home much longer. They lived 10 minutes away from the Amite River, which was swelling with the continuous rainfall. Cox, 21, had been checking the water level periodically all weekend, and when he saw it had crept up to the front door, his family decided it was time to leave. Volunteers from a neighboring parish were bringing in boats to help evacuate people, and he helped his parents and grandmother—who had left her own flooded house the day before—wade through the murky water to the canoe....

Only 20 percent of computer science and 22 percent of engineering undergraduate degrees in the U.S. go to women. Women are missing out on flexible, lucrative and high-status careers. Society is also missing out on the potential contributions they would make to these fields, such as designing smartphone conversational agents that suggest help not only for heart attack symptoms but also for indicators of domestic violence. Identifying the factors causing women’s underrepresentation is the first step toward remedies....

The Americas’ western oak woodlands are fragmented into territories that are often fiercely contested—by groups of acorn woodpeckers. In each location, generations of the birds have transformed the oaks into granaries that store thousands of acorns. They nest in groups of breeding and nonbreeding members, which cooperatively raise chicks; when one member of a breeding pair in a granary-rich area dies, rival teams of nonbreeding birds sweep in from surrounding territories to fight for a chance to fill it....