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Biologists have found a hormone in the liver that spurs the growth of insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas, a discovery they hope will lead to new treatments for diabetes. A team led by Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, identified the hormone, betatrophin, by inducing insulin resistance in mice using a peptide that binds to insulin receptors. That caused the animals’ insulin-secreting pancreatic β cells to proliferate....

Tiny robots that swim through our blood vessels attacking invaders have not quite crossed the line that separates science fiction from science—but there might be a way to jump-start their development. Rather than designing such minuscule machines from scratch, some scientists have been experimenting with the idea of enlisting the thousands of species of bacteria swarming inside our bodies. In recent years researchers have saddled microorganisms with useful nanoparticles and bits of DNA....

We now know where NASA’s first-ever robotic moon rover will touch down. The ice-hunting Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will land just west of Nobile Crater, which sits near the moon’s south pole, NASA officials announced today (Sept. 20). In late 2023, VIPER will fly to the moon aboard Griffin, a lander built by Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic that will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. “Selecting a landing site for VIPER is an exciting and important decision for all of us,” Daniel Andrews, VIPER project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, said in a statement....

On October 2, 2004, Mount St. Helens let out a noontime burp of steam; nearly an hour’s worth of low-frequency tremors soon followed. Magma, it seemed, might be moving underground. Fearing an imminent threat to human life, scientists at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in southwest Washington State issued a volcanic alert level 3, aviation code red. The next day the Federal Aviation Administration restricted air traffic within five and a half miles of the summit, diverting and delaying flights....

By Ben Garside LONDON (Reuters) - Nations including the United States and Sweden are advancing plans to launch a new fund this year to pay for methane emission reduction projects in the developing world. The countries are aiming to set up a so-called Methane Abatement Facility with pledges of $100 million under the auspices of the World Bank to buy and cancel carbon credits, initially from projects that cut emissions at landfill waste sites....

As a longtime emergency department physician, I have a case study I’d like to share with you. The patient’s right thumb knuckle is inflamed, swollen and often painful, especially toward the end of the day, and the inside part is a little numb. Her grip is slightly weakened, and her palm aches. Her middle finger intermittently has a new “catch” to it when bent. The second and third fingers are slightly swollen....

In early October 2022 a wave of high-energy radiation swept over Earth from a gamma-ray burst, one of the most singularly catastrophic and violent events the cosmos has to offer. Astronomers quickly determined its distance and found it was the closest such burst ever seen: a mere two billion light-years from Earth. Or, if you prefer, 20 billion trillion kilometers away from us, a decent fraction of the size of the observable universe....

All this cocoa production does more than feed our collective sweet tooth: the five million to six million farmers in the tropics who cultivate the cacao trees from which cocoa is produced rely on the sales of the seeds to feed themselves and their families. Workers extract the seeds (often called beans) from football-shaped pods and then ferment and dry them to form cocoa liquor, butter and powder. Roughly 50 million livelihoods depend on the long production road the cacao seeds travel from farm to candy on store shelves....

Cédric Villani’s new book describes the work that went into a mathematical proof of nonlinear Landau damping. If that sounds like Greek to you, have no worries. The subject of the book is not the math—which has to do with the stability of waves in a hot gas—but rather the world of mathematicians. Like few have before, Villani—a mathematician at the University of Lyon in France and director of the Henri Poincaré institute—imparts a sense of what it is like to search for mathematical truths....

Akili Interactive Labs on Monday reported that its late-stage study of a video game designed to treat kids with ADHD met its primary goal, a big step in the Boston company’s quest to get approval for what it hopes will be the first prescription video game. In a study of 348 children between the ages of 8 and 12 diagnosed with ADHD, those who played Akili’s action-packed game on a tablet over four weeks saw statistically significant improvements on metrics of attention and inhibitory control, compared to children who were given a different action-driven video game designed as a placebo....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Green: Your Place in the New Energy Revolution by Jane and Michael Hoffman. Greenwashing is what happens when a hopeful public eager to behave responsibly about the environment is presented with “evidence” that makes an industry or a politician seem friendly to the environment when, in fact, the industry or the politician is not as wholly amicable as it or he might be....

Scientists have created a swarm of over a thousand coin-sized robots that can assemble themselves into two-dimensional shapes by communicating with their neighbours. At 1,024 members, this man-made flock — described in the August 15 issue of Science — is the largest yet to demonstrate collective behaviour. The self-organization techniques used by the tiny machines could aid the development of ’transformer’ robots that reconfigure themselves, researchers say, and they might shed light on how complex swarms form in nature....

In the mid-1990s boy scout David Hahn used household objects and his scientific knowledge to start building a nuclear reactor in his backyard. Police and the Environmental Protection Agency stopped him before he could finish. Twenty years later, revolutions in manufacturing and computing have made projects such as Hahn’s a lot more feasible; if he had access to a 3-D printer, for example, he might have finished his reactor before authorities intervened....

Alzheimer’s disease may have evolved alongside human intelligence, researchers report in a paper posted this month on BioRxiv. The study finds evidence that 50,000 to 200,000 years ago, natural selection drove changes in six genes involved in brain development. This may have helped to increase the connectivity of neurons, making modern humans smarter as they evolved from their hominin ancestors. But that new intellectual capacity was not without cost: the same genes are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease....

If you are caring for an elderly or ailing relative, you are not alone. Nearly one out of five American adults serves as a caregiver to a loved one—an elderly parent or in-law in almost half of cases but in other instances a spouse, a child or other relative who has become sick or disabled. As the population ages, even greater numbers of us will assume these duties. It can be a tough job, no matter how strong the bond between caregiver and receiver....

How many mothers have looked at their children and thought, “Ah, they keep me young”? Now we know how right they are. Caring for the young may delay—and in some cases, even reverse—multiple negative effects of aging in the brain. Gro Amdam, who studies aging in bees at Arizona State University, observed tremendous improvements in cognition among older bees that turn their attention back to nursing. She has reason to believe that changes in social behavior could shave years off the human brain as well....

Although clutter can be a nuisance, it does not typically pose a health threat—unless you’re an aging neuron. As brain cells get older, some proteins within and around the cell misfold. They twist into the wrong shape, unable to do their routine job. Then they glom together to form menacing clumps. If left to accumulate, this “junk” can overwhelm nerve cells’ quality control systems, triggering incurable brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s....

Patrick Thornton, a 40-year-old math teacher in Houston, Tex., relies on his voice to clearly communicate with his high school students. So when he began to feel he was recovering from COVID, he was relieved to get his voice back a month after losing it. Thornton got sick in mid-August and had symptoms typical of a moderate case: a sore throat, headaches, trouble breathing. By the end of September, “I was more or less counting myself as on the mend and healing,” Thornton says....

Three congressional Democrats have asked a psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine to consult with them about forming an expert panel to offer the legislators advice on assessing President Trump’s mental health. Yale’s Dr. Bandy Lee told STAT that over the last few weeks members of Congress or their staff have asked her to discuss how members might convene psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals “to review the president’s mental health, and review it on a periodic basis....

Family estrangement is one of my most requested topics from listeners and readers coping with the loss and isolation they feel when someone cuts family ties. In a way, the grief of family estrangement can be more painful—or at least more complicated—than the grief over a loved one who has died. When a family member voluntarily walks away, you may miss them and feel confused, ashamed, frustrated, and disappointed, especially if the hope of reunification is dashed....