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MISSOULA, Mont. – Starving polar bears, icon of the climate change movement, may be able to adapt to an ice-free summer season in the Arctic after all. Scientists have long thought that polar bears essentially starve during the summer, living off fat reserves until the sea ice returns and they can venture out to sea to capture their main source of calories: seals. But polar bears are eating on land as they adapt to a longer ice-free season, according to research shared at the North American Congress of Conservation Biology here in Missoula on Monday....

Roughly one-third of the U.S. population—or 118 million Americans—could feel one or more extreme weather events annually by 2050 if population and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, new research from the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory shows. That more than doubles the 47 million Americans who currently experience extreme heat and cold, prolonged droughts, and intensifying floods. And it reflects the greater frequency of climate disasters nationwide, the researchers said....

Chemists say they have solved a crucial problem in a theory of life’s beginnings, by demonstrating that RNA molecules can link short chains of amino acids together. The findings, published on 11 May in Nature, support a variation on the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, which proposes that before the evolution of DNA and the proteins it encodes, the first organisms were based on strands of RNA, a molecule that can both store genetic information — as sequences of the nucleosides A, C, G and U — and act as a catalyst for chemical reactions....

Aspirin-like drugs could improve the success of stem-cell transplants for patients with blood or bone-marrow disorders, a study suggests. The compounds coax stem cells from bone marrow into the bloodstream where they can be harvested for use in transplantation — and they do so with fewer side effects than drugs now in use. For patients with blood disorders such as leukemia, multiple myeloma or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, transplantation of haematopoietic stem cells — precursor cells that reside in the bone marrow and give rise to all types of blood cell — can be an effective treatment....

Pašukonis and his colleagues affixed tiny, diaperlike radio transmitters to the bottoms of seven three-striped poison frogs in Peru and 11 dyeing poison frogs in French Guiana. The researchers used radio signals to chart the frogs’ paths on 23 separate journeys, noting each time tadpole-toting fathers passed by water or deposited their young. Three-striped poison frogs traveled farthest, traversing an average distance of roughly 215 meters—when the nearest available pool was on average only 52 meters away from their home territory....

THE FOX AND THE HOUND “How to Build a Dog,” by Lyudmila Trut and Lee Alan Dugatkin, describes a decades-long experiment in Siberia in which foxes were selectively bred for tameness, resulting in physical traits we associate with dogs. Turning a fox into a dog certainly offers insight into how our ancestors tamed other animals. But maybe it also tells us something about how we tamed ourselves, changing from apes to modern humans....

Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, and Tim Palmer, a Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Physics at the University of Oxford, write: In a recent column in Scientific American, Naomi Oreskes argues that we understand the physics of climate change well enough now. She writes that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Working Group 1 (WG1)—the ones tasked with assessing the physical science basis of climate change—should “declare their job done....

Cats do not have perfect genes—our furry feline pals can inherit devastating genetic diseases. Key disease-causing versions of genes have been discovered with the rise of cat genome sequencing. And pedigree breeding can exacerbate the genetic troubles cat breeds face. Now the largest ever genetic study of domestic cats reveals the frequency with which the known disease-causing versions of genes, or gene variants, pop up in pedigreed cat breeds and their nonpedigreed cousins....

When an experiment fails to produce an interesting effect, researchers often shelve the data and move on to another problem. But withholding null results skews the literature in a field, and is a particular worry for clinical medicine and the social sciences. Researchers at Stanford University in California have now measured the extent of the problem, finding that most null results in a sample of social-science studies were never published. This publication bias may cause others to waste time repeating the work, or conceal failed attempts to replicate published research....

When an inmate needs to see a medical specialist, getting that care can be complicated. Prisons are often located in rural areas far from medical centers that have experts in cancer, heart and other disease treatments. Even if the visit just involves a trip to a hospital across town, the inmate must be transported under guard, often in shackles. The whole process is expensive for the correctional facility and time-consuming for the patient....

Seen through the eyes of some omnipotent time traveler, our solar system—like any planetary system—is a heaving, pulsing thing. Across millions and billions of years its contents ebb and flow. Planetary orbits shift in shape and orientation, and billions of ancient asteroidal pieces shuffle through the skeletal disk that defines the major architecture of all that surrounds the sun, itself a star that sheds mass and energy as it gradually climbs an-ever brightening staircase of thermonuclear fusion....

A decades-long assault on science threatens democracy and civic progress in the U.S. and around the world, according to The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters and What We Can Do about It (Milkweed Editions, 2016), the latest book by Shawn Lawrence Otto. Despite the overwrought title, Otto marshals an astonishingly broad range of facts, trends and history to make his case that “scientific advances in public health, biology and the environment are being resisted or rolled back....

Damage assessments of flood-ravaged communities used to rely on post-disaster surveys. That’s changing. Scientists at one of the nation’s leading climate research consortiums last week released an “augmented reality” smartphone application that simulates how floodwater would inundate specific houses under varying storm surge conditions. While AR simulations are still an emerging technology, experts say they could help fill a long-standing knowledge gap around flood risk, flood-zone mapping and flood mitigation, experts say....

Could your eating habits be better? You’re in good company. Despite decades of haranguing by parents, health professionals, government agencies, and podcasters, the average American is still eating too much sugar and highly processed foods and too few fruits and vegetables. We’re taking in too many calories and too few nutrients. As a result we’re both overweight and undernourished. The causes of our dietary discretions are well-documented. The proliferation of cheap, high-calorie, and hyper-palatable food and beverages, as well as the normalization of huge portion sizes and constant snacking have created an environment and culture in which it takes super-human effort and willpower to not overeat....

Some of the waste that humans flush away every day could become a powerful source of brain cells to study disease, and may even one day be used in therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Scientists have found a relatively straightforward way to persuade the cells discarded in human urine to turn into valuable neurons. The technique, described online in a study in Nature Methods this week, does not involve embryonic stem cells....

The accident buried the small historic town of Bento Rodrigues, a subdistrict of Mariana, under mud. At least 11 people have died and more than 600 were displaced. In addition, the water supply of more than 250,000 people in the area was interrupted due to its concentrations of heavy metals. Tons of mud formed by iron ore waste and silica, originally estimated to be about 25,000 olympic swimming pools in volume, have spread over 800 km and reached one of the largest Brazilian rivers, the Rio Doce....

A new composite material that can simultaneously withstand mechanical loads and store electrical energy has been created by scientists in the UK and Belgium. Based on activated carbon fibres, the structural supercapacitor has been formed into a full-size car boot lid that can power LEDs. The composite can be seen as an alternative to assembling two separate components so could benefit electric vehicles by creating bodywork that also stores power, saving both space and weight....

The ability to convert, or “reprogram,” cells into other types has raised hopes for regenerating damaged limbs and organs. But existing methods are risky or inefficient and have been tried only on laboratory animals. A new technology could overcome these limitations, however. Researchers have used it to restore injured mouse legs and claim the technique is safe enough to test in humans. Cells are typically reprogrammed using mixtures of DNA, RNA and proteins....

The U.S. hurts, according to a survey of 3,982 Americans. In an attempt to understand daily aches, Alan B. Krueger of Princeton University and Arthur A. Stone of Stony Brook University asked respondents to rate their pain on a scale of 0 (none) to 6 (very strong) at three random intervals during the waking hours of every day. The study reveals that a “pain gap” exists: poorer, less educated people tend to suffer more than wealthier, more educated individuals....

Any teacher can tell you that smarts alone do not a good student make. But psychologists had never rigorously studied the connection between self-discipline and academic success, says former teacher Angela L. Duckworth, now a psychology graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth and her adviser, Martin E. P. Seligman, gave 300 eighth graders, their teachers and their parents a questionnaire about the students’ ability to control impulses and follow rules....