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Mind-altering psychedelics are back–but this time they are being explored in labs for their therapeutic applications rather than being used illegally. Studies are looking at these hallucinogens to treat a number of otherwise intractable psychiatric disorders, including chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency. The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs....

A distant, Neptune-size planet 500 light-years from Earth appears to be the youngest fully formed exoplanet ever found crossing its star, raising questions about how it formed so close, so quickly. Researchers first found the planet, which whisks around its star every five days, using the Kepler space telescope currently orbiting the sun alongside Earth. Its star is only 5 million to 10 million years old, suggesting that the planet is a similar age—incredibly young, on a cosmic scale....

The first thing Ian Burkhart did after he got to the Outer Banks in North Carolina one afternoon in 2010 was dive into the ocean. Nineteen years old, Burkhart had just completed his freshman year of college and come to the beach to vacation with friends. Joyously and with abandon, he pitched himself into the waters. As he swam and bobbed in the surf, a wave flung his body onto a sand bar, jerking his neck with a force stronger than anything he had experienced before....

By Geoff BrumfielA team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical “ground state”– the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still....

Key concepts Biology Ecology Taxonomy Animals Biodiversity Introduction Have you ever wondered how many different types of animals live near you—in your backyard or a local park? And we’re not just talking about deer or even birds. Animals come in all shapes and sizes—from big bears down to the tiniest bugs—each a unique part of the amazing diversity of life. The differences among animals can help us classify animals into different groups....

When it comes to improving fuel economy, engines, powertrains, fuels and batteries seem to get all the attention. But what about the car’s traditional steel side panel or rooftop? Using advanced lightweight materials on even the most basic car parts can improve overall fuel efficiency, too. According to the Department of Energy, reducing a vehicle’s weight by 10 percent can improve fuel economy by 6 to 8 percent. Steel has traditionally made up about 60 percent of a vehicle’s total weight....

This year will likely be the hottest on record for the planet, with global temperatures 1.03 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 1961-to-1990 average, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization. This would make 2014 the 38th consecutive year with an anomalously high annual global temperature. The estimate comes from the WMO’s annual compendium on the “Status of the Global Climate.” This year’s report was released during the U....

Renewable energy is in Africa’s future. But coal and natural gas is the future for the power-starved continent. That message from energy ministers as part of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit yesterday came as officials also emphasized how deeply threatened the region is by climate change. But on a continent where 600 million people still lack access to basic energy services, one leader after another said tapping into new power—clean or dirty—is their top priority....

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - More than 20,000 African elephants were killed for their ivory in 2013, driven by demand in China and Thailand, and some local populations face an immediate threat of extinction, a U.N.-linked wildlife conservation agency said on Friday. Criminal gangs and rebel militias hunt dwindling herds for tusks that fetch many thousands of dollars per kilo, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species said. “Today we are confronting a situation of industrial-scale poaching and smuggling, the involvement of organized transnational criminal organizations, the involvement of rebel militia,” CITES secretary-general John Scanlon told a briefing....

The patients walk into Dr. Melissa Marshall’s community clinics in Northern California with the telltale symptoms. They’re having trouble breathing. It may even hurt to inhale. They’ve got a cough, and the sore throat is definitely there. A straight case of COVID-19? Not so fast. This is wildfire country. Up and down the West Coast, hospitals and health facilities are reporting an influx of patients with problems most likely related to smoke inhalation....

In the 1930s the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane offered an explanation of why the gene for sickle-shaped red blood cells, which can produce lethal anemia, persisted in tropical populations. He suggested that the mutation offered a trade-off: although the sickle cells raised the risk of death, they also made a person one tenth as likely to contract malaria—a boon in the mosquito-ridden tropics. His striking idea that an infectious disease can drive evolution can now be directly tested in the laboratory with complex creatures, as reported this summer by Spanish researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA....

The COVID pandemic has killed more than half a million people in the United States and caused the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. If this pandemic taught us one thing, it’s that we weren’t ready for it. The scientific and medical community wasn’t ready. The government, the military and industry weren’t ready. And most of us at home weren’t ready either: scrambling for basic supplies, regretting not having a deeper pantry and struggling with the financial fallout....

Former Vice President Joe Biden had already assembled a task force of activists and liberal officials to rewrite his climate plan. But there was a problem: Organized labor hadn’t been invited to the weekly Zoom calls. Biden had tailored his presidential campaign to accommodate the unions that build and maintain natural gas projects, and unions had returned the favor by boosting Biden’s candidacy during his lowest points in the Democratic primary....

When Rachel Stein (not her real name) was a small child, she would pace around in a circle shaking a string for hours at a time, mentally spinning intricate alternative plots for her favorite television shows. Usually she was the star—the imaginary seventh child in The Brady Bunch, for example. “Around the age of eight or nine, my older brother said, ‘You’re doing this on the front lawn, and the neighbors are looking at you....

By Joseph J. Kolb ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (Reuters) - The Los Alamos National Laboratory has found a temporary home in Texas for roughly 1,000 barrels of radioactive junk left in limbo after a radiation leak led to a prolonged shutdown of New Mexico’s only nuclear waste disposal facility. Los Alamos, one of the leading U.S. nuclear weapons labs, said earlier this month it had been forced to halt shipments of its radioactive refuse some 300 miles across the state to the nation’s only underground nuclear repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad....

The science and technology of motor vehicles made small advances during the year, but the landscape, especially in America, was changing in response. As the internal combustion engine became more reliable and easier to operate, the vehicles built around these engines became more useful. The desire for reliability, compact power, and ease and quality of manufacturing pushed the technology forward relentlessly. Along with the expanding sales of motor vehicles came an explosive growth in facilities for manufacturing and selling them, and supplying them with spare parts, fuel and oil....

Like many biotech companies, Ablynx emerged from the confluence of a serendipitous discovery, an open window of opportunity and an unreasonable ambition. Housed on two floors in a nondescript gray laboratory on a technology campus outside the university town of Ghent, Belgium, the three-year-old company employs just 45 people, 33 of them scientists and bioengineers. It is a minimal staff with a simply stated mission: find the tiniest sliver of protein that will do the job of a full-size antibody, then turn it into a billion-dollar medicine–or better yet, into the first of a whole new class of “nanobody” drugs against cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, perhaps even Alzheimer’s disease....

The first Mars landing in more than six years is just a week away. NASA’s $850 million InSight lander will arrive at the Red Planet on the afternoon of Nov. 26, hopefully amid a flurry of celebratory whoops akin to those elicited by the successful touchdown of the Curiosity Mars rover on Aug. 5, 2012. But success is far from guaranteed. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: 10 Surprising Facts] “Although we’ve done it before, landing on Mars is hard, and this mission is no different,” Rob Manning, chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a recent video about InSight’s upcoming landing....

This past summer three international groups published the DNA sequences of the parasites that cause Chagas’ disease, African sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis. These deadly ailments, transmitted by bloodsucking insects such as the “kissing bug” and the tsetse fly, take an enormous toll on tropical and subtropical populations–not only do they kill 125,000 people every year, but they can also compromise blood banks and disfigure patients so badly that they are ostracized from society....

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has sparked a long-needed discussion about the role of the monarchy and the legacy of the British Empire. This empire included 15 countries for which the queen was the head of state, including my family’s Jamaica, as well as 40 other Commonwealth members, of which she was the leader. Many commentators defended her imperial record, one declaring that, “she oversaw a decolonization process that played out around the world, and did so with a great sense of responsibility and duty....