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In the Dutch countryside, a tall, older man, dressed in a maroon sports coat, his back slightly stooped, stands out because of his height and a pair of extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. His words, inflected by a British accent, are directed at a middle-aged man with long, curly brown hair, penetrating eyes and a dark, scholarly gown, who talks in only a halting English that reveals his native French origins. Their strangely clashing styles of speaking and mismatched clothes do not seem to matter to them as they press forward, with Eyebrows peering down intently at the Scholar....

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazineA Roman ship found with a lead pipe piercing its hull has mystified archaeologists. Italian researchers now suggest that the pipe was part of an ingenious pumping system, designed to feed on-board fish tanks with a continuous supply of oxygenated water. Their analysis has been published online in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.Historians have assumed that in ancient times fresh fish were eaten close to where they were caught, because without refrigeration they would have rotted during transportation....

LOS ANGELES – Honda and Hyundai unveiled fuel-cell electric vehicles at the L.A. Auto Show here yesterday, pledging to produce and sell a green car that has proved difficult to move into the mainstream. The debuts came as Toyota showed a concept fuel-cell electric vehicle (FCEV) at the Tokyo Auto Show. The launch of the FCEV is a “pivotal moment,” said John Krafcik, president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America, “the moment when our industry begins to roll out the next-generation electric vehicle....

If the utility of an invention were somehow derived from the genius of its inventor, it would be pardonable that so many sources trace the idea for the ball bearing to a 1497 drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. But good ideas, like useful evolutionary traits, tend to emerge more than once, in diverse times and places, and the idea of arranging for parts to roll against one another instead of sliding or slipping is very old indeed....

It is 11:30 on an August morning in New York City’s Central Park Zoo—breakfast time for the sea lions. A joyful crowd oohs and aahs as trainers put the animals through their paces: catching tossed fish in midair, high-fiving with their flippers, squirting water and torpedoing around the pool. Amid the raucous throng, nine small children watch in wide-eyed silence. When a sea lion zips past at stunning speed, they do not add their voices to the squeals of delight....

As I jogged along the Hudson River recently, a few lonely snowflakes fell, and I composed a haiku in my head: Every snowflake is special. But so what? They melt too fast to matter I’ve been glum lately, and I’m not sure why. My blues are overdetermined, meaning they could stem from lots of things: diminished daylight, or unfavorable comparisons of this holiday season to past ones. The COVID plague and climate change could be factors, plus the refusal of many Americans to recognize these threats....

In recent years optics researchers have come up with numerous concepts for invisibility cloaks—camouflaging that would effectively reroute light around an object to be concealed. Most of these approaches have relied on so-called metamaterials, which are carefully engineered structures that have bizarre optical properties. A much simpler cloaking apparatus could do away with the need for metamaterials entirely. Researchers at BAE Systems in Washington, D.C., Towson University and Purdue University have devised a cloaking device based on two gold surfaces, one coated on a curved lens and one on a flat piece of glass....

Workers at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant fighting to keep additional radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium and other harmful elements from being released into the environment are monitored daily for exposure to radiation. The same is true of the police and firefighters scouring the area within 10 kilometers of the plant for missing people. The general population in northeastern Japan, however, has considerably less access to accurate, non-invasive radiation dose measuring equipment, a troubling situation made more so by Wednesday’s announcement by Japan’s science ministry that small amounts of cancer-causing radioactive strontium have been detected in soil and plants outside the 30-kilometer zone around the plant where the government has advised people to stay indoors....

Severe drought in the Midwest could send insect and spider populations skyrocketing, adding insult to injury for farmers already facing billions of dollars in crop losses, entomologists and other experts said this week. “These insects are favored by hotter, drier weather,” said Sue Blodgett, the Entomology Department chairwoman at Iowa State University. “They’re feeding on agronomically important crops. They’re damaging and compromising the plant and impacting yield.” The extreme weather is especially beneficial for spider mites, which infect corn and soybean crops, destroying foliage and reducing harvest size....

Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review. Meanwhile, some independent studies documenting potentially harmful effects on animals and humans are not included in the body of research the EPA deems relevant to its safety review, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found....

Patients relying on lifesaving therapies for emergency care and cancer have long-suffered from stops and starts in drug manufacturing. The vexing problem is not going away, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration today rolled out new plans designed to help stymie the shortages. The action is good news for patients relying on some oncology drugs, antibiotics, liquid nutrition and anesthetics—all areas that have suffered from shortages in recent years....

IF THERE IS ANYTHING about your “self” of which you can be sure, it is that it is anchored in your own body and yours alone. The person you experience as “you” is here and now and nowhere else. But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions—and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion....

Biologists the world over routinely pay companies to synthesize snippets of DNA for use in the laboratory or clinic. But intelligence experts and scientists alike have worried for years that bioterrorists could hijack such services to build dangerous viruses and toxins—perhaps by making small changes in a genetic sequence to evade security screening without changing the DNA’s function. Now, the US government is backing efforts that use machine learning to detect whether a DNA sequence encodes part of a dangerous pathogen....

President Donald Trump has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. First Lady Melania Trump, senior adviser to the president Hope Hicks, at least a couple of prominent Republican officials and others have also received positive results. The president had recently attended a fundraiser with hundreds of people at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, and he and several others were at an event on Saturday announcing the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court (Coney Barrett herself reportedly had the virus this past summer)....

For almost two decades, fuel-cell electric vehicles have been another five years away. That is, until now, according to major automakers. Hyundai Motor Co. announced in November that it will begin offering a fuel-cell version of the Tucson crossover this spring, making it the first mass-market, federally certified hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle in the United States. Steady advances in fuel-cell technology, new opportunities for hydrogen production and a growing commitment to building hydrogen infrastructure have led many major automakers to believe “this is the moment” for the next generation of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, said Mike O’Brien, vice president of product and corporate planning for Hyundai....

Researchers have debated for a long time whether dumping iron into the ocean could ameliorate climate change. Iron encourages the bloom of tiny algae called phytoplankton, which take in carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolved in the ocean for photosynthesis; that process in turn draws atmospheric CO2 into the surface waters. Most scientists remain skeptical of whether iron fertilization will lead to greater carbon sequestration. But a company called Planktos, based in Foster City, Calif....

Think of it as the earliest version of the Facebook wall post: Ancient Pompeii residents revealed their social networks through graffiti on actual walls. Now, a new analysis of some of these scribbled messages reveals the walls of the wealthy were highly sought after, especially for political candidates hoping to drum up votes. The findings suggest that Pompeii homeowners may have had some control over who got artistic on their walls, said study researcher Eeva-Maria Viitanen, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki....

MOUNT ROSE SKI AREA, Nev.—Off to the side of a ski run, a cluster of people in snowshoes watch intently as Jeff Anderson demonstrates a snow survey. Anderson takes a firm stance and grips a hollow aluminum tube like King Arthur about to put Excalibur back into the stone. He twists the tube into the snow and withdraws it, removing a plug of snow in the process. Then it’s the students’ turn....

The recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson erased the constitutional right to an abortion, immediately putting reproductive freedom in jeopardy for millions across the country. This unprecedented stripping of a legal and human right that people have relied on for 50 years intensified what was already a burgeoning reality on the ground for many. Now, as we approach midterm elections, with many local and state offices up for grabs, most abortions are banned in at least 14 states, and many more are likely to follow....

“Where did the time go?” middle-aged and older adults often remark. Many of us feel that time passes more quickly as we age, a perception that can lead to regrets. According to psychologist and BBC columnist Claudia Hammond, “the sensation that time speeds up as you get older is one of the biggest mysteries of the experience of time.” Fortunately, our attempts to unravel this mystery have yielded some intriguing findings....