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While holding a medical license, Mehmet Oz, widely known as Dr. Oz, has long pushed misleading, science-free and unproven alternative therapies such as homeopathy, as well as fad diets, detoxes and cleanses. Some of these things have been potentially harmful, including hydroxychloroquine, which he once touted would be beneficial in the treatment or prevention of COVID. This assertion has been thoroughly debunked. He’s built a tremendous following around his lucrative but evidence-free advice....

A study comparing the environmental impact of various ‘last-mile’ delivery methods — which take a package on the final leg of its journey — finds that greenhouse-gas emissions per parcel were 84% lower for drones than for diesel trucks. Drones also consumed up to 94% less energy per parcel than did the trucks. The research, published on 5 August in the journal Patterns, indicates that using drones to deliver medication and other small items could cut the environmental impact of product deliveries....

The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals By Gerardo Ceballos, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Paul R. Ehrlich. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015 White Eskimo: Knud Rasmussen’s Fearless Journey Into the Heart of the Arctic By Stephen R. Brown. Da Capo Press, 2015 The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age By David S. Abraham. Yale University Press, 2015 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age By Sherry Turkle....

Key concepts Physics Forces Molecules Surface tension Introduction Have you ever wondered how water droplets form on a window on a rainy day, why some bugs can walk on water or why you use soap to wash your hands? All of these things are related to the phenomenon called surface tension. In this activity you will learn how you can use surface tension to make a fish cut from a piece of paper seem to swim around on its own!...

Gardner, who died in 2010 at age 95, presided over Mathematical Games for 25 years, to the delight of millions of readers. Given the title of his column, it’s no surprise that Gardner had a lot to say about games and puzzles. There was fun in every essay—and sometimes even juvenile humor. But he also ventured far beyond the customary territory of “recreational” math. He wrote on the theory of knots, on paradoxes of free will, on learning by induction....

During his campaign, president-elect Donald Trump promised to defund Planned Parenthood, nominate pro-life justices to the Supreme Court and ban abortions after the 20-week pregnancy mark. Vice President–elect Mike Pence reinforced these messages, specifically attacking the landmark Supreme Court decision protecting abortion rights. Pence stated he would like to “send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.” Following the duo’s surprising win last Tuesday, there is a great deal of concern about how the new administration’s policies will affect women’s reproductive rights....

DANGEROUS BELIEFS In “Fueling Extremes,” Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam repeatedly lay blame on the victims, as in, for instance: “counterterrorism efforts in many countries give little consideration to how our responses may be upping the ante.” Unfortunately, pacifism will not work with the Islamic extremists who believe that it is their mission to establish a Muslim caliphate on earth and that all nonbelievers must be killed. All of the love and understanding that the authors would like us to bring to these folks will not deter them, for one moment, from committing horrific acts that they believe advance the caliphate....

I remember meeting H.M. in the spring of 1967, when he was perhaps 40 years old and I was 16 years his junior. My mentor, Hans-Lucas Teuber, brought him to my tiny office across from the psychology department library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I recall H.M.’s thin, smiling, rather handsome face as he squeezed into the doorway with Teuber, who introduced us as “Don” and “Henry,” as if we might become buddies....

Not quite four decades ago the Chinese settlement of Shenzhen was a modest fishing village, with a population of roughly 30,000. Today, thanks to a policy begun in 1979 that encouraged foreign investment, that sleepy community is a manufacturing hub with about 10 million people. The success of Shenzhen is consistent with the broader development of China’s Pearl River Delta. Once mostly agricultural land, it has become, according to a recent World Bank report, the largest urban area on earth....

As the weather gets chillier and people spend more time indoors, COVID is once again not-so-gently rapping at the door. COVID cases in the U.S. are fairly flat at about 38,000 cases a day right now, but a slew of new Omicron subvariants could drive another fall or winter surge, experts say. And the best way to protect yourself is to get a new bivalent booster shot. The new boosters target both the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, as well as the Omicron BA....

When I was eight years old, my family moved out of our 100-year-old house in the Netherlands. Its ivy-covered brick walls, dark green door and matching window shutters remain vivid to me. I still keep a framed photo of my golden retriever and me scampering down the pebble driveway, which led past rhododendrons to a separate garage. Behind it rose a majestic dune. The passing of decades inevitably weakens the brain connections that hold such slices of time in place....

By Valerie VolcoviciWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two of the U.S. Senate’s biggest environmental boosters have launched a drive to revive the issue of climate change in Congress and defend President Barack Obama’s climate action plan against opposition from Republicans.Democratic senators Barbara Boxer of California and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told reporters on Thursday they would launch a new climate action task force with more than a dozen members and the full support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid....

On Valentine’s Day 2014 Jack Metta (then known as Elizabeth Droge-Young) admitted themself to a hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. For more than a year they had been struggling with depression—not eating well and losing interest in the movies, books and music that usually delighted them. They had withdrawn from friends and were routinely missing classes at Syracuse University, where they were a fifth-year graduate student in evolutionary biology. Some days that winter they could not even make it out of bed, despite the fact that they had started taking antidepressants the previous fall....

Some 135 kilometers off the coast of Libya, 70 technicians are working around the clock to raise a sunken smuggler’s ship from a watery grave more than 365 meters below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. The old fishing vessel, a mere 20 meters long, went down more than a year ago with as many as 950 migrants crammed onboard (see video, below). Only 28 survived, and although dozens of bodies have been recovered, the rest are believed to be inside the boat, perhaps locked in chambers belowdecks....

A French spacecraft designed to discover new worlds beyond our solar system has made one of its most significant finds yet—a planet that looks like a cousin to those in our own celestial backyard. COROT 9 b, named by astronomical convention for the instrument that discovered it, the COROT (for COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) satellite, is less massive than Jupiter and orbits a star, called COROT 9, at about the same distance Mercury orbits the sun....

Assessing adults: Just moments earlier, the teenager had been laughing so hard he was in tears. He had spent the day doing improv and other drama-based activities—part of a six-week summer camp in Boston designed to help children with autism build social skills. But when his mother showed up and asked about his day, the boy clammed up. “Do you mean you just sat in a corner and stared at the wall all day?...

Before they hatch, developing baby gulls seem to prepare for the worst when they hear the piercing predator-warning calls of nearby adults—and may also alert their less-developed nestmates. Yellow-legged gull embryos exposed to the warnings of adults and neighboring embryos that had not been exposed to the sounds both displayed a series of behavioral and physiological changes when newly hatched, according to a study published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution....

California is poised to launch the nation’s biggest program to prevent food waste from going into landfills as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and generate clean energy. A law taking effect in January will require municipalities across the state to collect food waste for its potential use in making renewable natural gas for electricity. The law targets methane, a potent warming gas that forms when organic material like food scraps sits in trash dumps....

It’s summertime and the driving ain’t easy. With the nation baking in the August heat and its highways packed with vacationers, the AAA Traffic Safety Foundation has just released its first-ever survey of aggressive behavior behind the wheel: Nearly 80 percent of U.S. drivers say they committed at least one antisocial act on the road in the past year. Remember that reckless idiot who cut you off intentionally the other day?...

Negative emotions have been linked to poor health outcomes, such as heart disease and even a shorter life span. Research suggests inflammation may be responsible for this link, at least in part. The molecules involved in inflammation are essential for our body’s response to infection and injury, but high levels over the long term have been linked to everything from diabetes to depression. Few studies have assessed the health effect of positive emotions, so a team led by Jennifer Stellar of the University of Toronto (who also began studying awe in Keltner’s lab at U....