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It has taken a century so far for scientists to not figure out the cause of multiple sclerosis (MS). The inflammatory disease, which affects more than 2.1 million people worldwide, has been blamed on toxins, viruses and even food. Most recently, scientists have placed their bets on two major ideas: The first (and far more popular) hypothesis suggests MS begins in white matter, which influences how parts of the brain work together....

Viewed end on, the arrays of photomulti­plier tubes on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment look like beds of flowers. The hope is that they will capture sparks of light emitted when particles of dark matter collide with liquid xenon.With 122 detector tubes, LUX is much more sensitive than its closest rival in the competitive field of dark-matter searches — and in just days, physicists the world over will know whether that advantage has yielded definitive results....

The parallel existence of an intelligent species closely related to us has long fascinated scientists and the public alike. The most debated issue is why Neandertals ultimately disappeared. Potential explanations include violent conflict with Homo sapiens, disease, difficulty adapting to rapid environmental and climate change, interbreeding with modern humans and differences between the two species in technical, social and cognitive abilities. Now new research from a group led by paleoanthropologist Takeru Akazawa of Kochi University of Technology in Japan has shed light on the question using computational techniques to reconstruct the Neandertal brain and estimate differences in the size of specific regions between species....

Dogs can be trained to be cancer-sniffing wizards, using their sensitive noses to detect cancerous fumes wafting from diseased cells. This sniffing is noninvasive and could help diagnose countless people, which begs the question: If these pups are so olfactorily astute, why aren’t they screening people for cancer right now? Here’s the short answer: Dogs do well in engaging situations, such as helping law enforcement track scents or guiding search-and-rescue teams in disaster areas....

People who wear contact lenses often acquire unwelcome microbial guests along with the convenience afforded by this eyewear. In fact, a higher diversity of bacteria lives on the eye surface of lens wearers than that of the naked-eye crowd, according to an extensive classification effort by microbiologists at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. This difference may help explain why lens poppers develop eye infections up to seven times more frequently than they would otherwise....

CLIMATEWIRE | Tradable credits for renewable energy generation are allowing companies to exaggerate their progress toward slashing emissions, according to a new report from Concordia University and the University of Edinburgh Business School. In the study, published in Nature Climate Change, researchers examined the emissions of 115 companies with climate goals certified by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a partnership that involves the World Resources Institute and other groups. Researchers found that most of the reductions in the companies’ reported Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions — or emissions from purchased energy — were from renewable energy certificates (RECs) during the 2015 to 2019 study period....

Baby-making science has crossed a new threshold, at least in rodents. A team of scientists in China has managed to create a small number of apparently healthy mouse pups from same-sex female parents. The researchers also generated offspring from two mouse dads—but those pups all died shortly after birth, underscoring the fact that the new technique still faces serious hurdles. The team’s approach, which relies on stem cell science and CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing, is a “new way to produce offspring of same-sex mammals,” says senior author Qi Zhou, who works on stem cell and reproductive biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences....

Spring warmth had just begun to stir some activity in the brown, stubbly fields of North Dakota in mid-May of 2014. Farmers working there saw some unusual activity overhead, as well. A stubby, instrument-packed airplane with a pointy nose and twin engines began making slow, regular passes over the land, as if it was searching for something. Certainly the area, part of a huge oil and gas field called the Bakken formation, contained things that were worth searching for....

The first “atoms” in the universe were not atoms at all—they were just nuclei that had not found electrons yet. The simplest nucleus, that of common hydrogen, is a bare proton with no frills. When the universe banged into existence, energy was rampant. Everything was smashing into everything else. Protons and neutrons often collided, and some formed larger nuclei, such as that of deuterium (containing a proton and a neutron), as well as helium nuclei with two protons and two neutrons....

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic might not seem like an obvious cue for thinking about biological transcendence. But the strange thing is that in our response to this crisis we’ve been unwitting participants in just such an event. The idea of transcendence goes back a long way, under a variety of names and guises. In many religions it captures the notion of deities or phenomena that exist somehow independently of the physical universe and even beyond physical laws....

For most of the space age, the moon has been considered a waterless world. In recent years, however, a steady drip-drip of discovery has shown that at least some parts of the moon—such as the large, permanently shadowed craters at its poles—contain significant deposits of water. This week, two new studies published in Nature Astronomy turn on the tap a bit more to the prospect of an unexpectedly watery moon. The timing is good for NASA and other space agencies now planning ambitious human missions of lunar exploration and even settlement....

“I WAS DRIVING home after work,” David reported. “Things had been very stressful there lately. I was tense but looking forward to getting home and relaxing. And then, all of a sudden—boom! My heart started racing, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was sweating and shaking. My thoughts were racing, and I was afraid that I was going crazy or having a heart attack. I pulled over and called my wife to take me to the emergency room....

2:45 p.m. Thursday: In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, questions have been raised about the National Weather Service’s handling of hurricane warnings in life-threatening situations. Now, differing statements have emerged from the National Weather Service and one of their branches, the National Hurricane Center, regarding what changes will be made to hurricane policies moving forward. After Chris Landsea, Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center, released exclusive information to AccuWeather....

Twenty years ago this month the universe became a richer, stranger and decidedly less lonely place. For centuries, visionaries ranging from Isaac Newton to Gene Roddenberry had speculated about planets orbiting other suns, analogous to the worlds of our solar system—but it was only speculation. Then in October 1995 Michel Mayor, an astronomer at the University of Geneva, and his graduate student Didier Queloz discovered company: the first known planet orbiting a sunlike star....

Climate change has been overshadowed by health care, immigration and the economy on the campaign trail. But a series of ballot initiatives across the West have the potential to reshape U.S. climate policy. The races represent an important signpost of how far states are willing to push climate policy in the absence of federal action. In Arizona and Nevada, voters’ appetite for ratcheting up one of the most popular climate policies in America will be tested in a pair of initiatives asking to boost renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 50 percent....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration. For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that this was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions....

The Arctic may not have set new record lows for sea ice cover this year, but long-term warming over the past three decades continues to increase vegetation, drive species migrations, shift ice and snow patterns and spark dramatic changes to the polar ecosystem, according to a federal analysis released yesterday. In its annual “Arctic Report Card,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported a series of regional Arctic extremes in 2013, including a record 36-day heat streak in Fairbanks, Alaska, as well as record high temperatures in swaths of Alaskan and Canadian permafrost 20 meters below the surface....

In Interstellar, the science-fiction film out this week, Matthew McConaughey stars as an astronaut contending with a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. The film’s special effects have been hailed as the most realistic depiction ever made of this type of cosmic object. But astrophysicists have now gone one better. They have calculated for the first time what an observer would see if two black holes — each drastically warping the fabric of space and time according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity — spiralled into each other and merged....

(Reuters) - Carbon emissions and electricity demand in Australia have risen in the two months since the government repealed a tax on emissions, bucking a nearly six-year long trend of decline, an energy consultancy said on Thursday. Consultancy Pitt & Sherry, which tracks electricity use and emissions in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM), said emissions would continue to grow unless new policies were introduced. Emissions growth in the past two months was equivalent to an annual increase of 0....

Men who don’t have children may be at increased risk of dying from heart disease, a new study says. Childless men in the study had a 17 percent higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease than fathers, the researchers said. Only married men were included in the study. The results suggest infertility might be a risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease, said study researcher Dr. Michael Eisenberg, an assistant professor of urology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif....