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ZMapp, the drug that has been used to treat seven patients during the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, can completely protect monkeys against the virus, research has found. The study, published online today in Nature, comes the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the Ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 1,500 people, is worsening and could infect 20,000 people before it ends. A fifth West African nation, Senegal, reported its first case of the disease on Friday....

By Toni Clarke (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration opened the door on Tuesday to a change in its blood donor deferral recommendations, which currently prohibit donations from gay men for a year following their last sexual encounter in order to reduce the risk of transmitting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In December the FDA overturned a 30-year ban on all blood donations from men who have sex with men, saying the change was based on science showing an indefinite ban was not necessary to prevent transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus....

Why do people do good things? Is kindness hardwired into the brain, or does this tendency arise via experience? Dacher Keltner, director of the Social Interaction Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, investigates these questions from multiple angles and often generates results that are both surprising and challenging. In his recent book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (W. W. Norton, 2009), Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover human emotion’s innate power to connect people with one another, which he argues is the path to living the good life....

President Donald Trump’s outspoken doubts about climate change and his administration’s efforts to roll back regulation to combat it have stirred a sleepy faction in U.S. politics: the Republican environmental movement. The various groups represent conservatives, Catholics and the younger generation of Republicans who, unlike Trump, not only recognize the science of climate change but want to see their party wrest the initiative from Democrats and lead efforts to combat global warming....

When a developer abruptly dropped plans for a waste-incineration plant in North Las Vegas, a few hundred residents fighting the plans saw victory – the end of a contentious, if short-lived, proposal. But for organizer Christie Linert it was only the beginning. The city’s handling of the proposal left her concerned that her community, or others across the county, could be blindsided by similar projects in the future. Indeed, North Las Vegas is far from the first to be caught off-guard by high-tech incinerator proposals in recent years....

With each new incident of record monsoon floods, fires and earthquakes, more tremors shake the global economy. The latest disaster is unfolding in Australia, where the northeastern state of Queensland has been inundated after a month of rain, and is proving every bit the catalyst for rising commodity prices as the 2010 floods in Pakistan and the wildfires in Russia were. Flooding in Australia has roiled Asia-Pacific markets for coal, cotton, wheat and sugar....

This past July astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released the deepest astronomical image ever obtained, leaving the world in awe. Against the background of a galaxy cluster named SMACS 0723, seen as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, myriad galaxies of different shapes and sizes appear like bright gems in the darkness of the cosmos. Some of these lighthouses were already shining when the universe was just a few hundred million years old....

Science knows no borders. Fundamental research, done by domestic or foreign talent, underpins progress and drives innovation—and ultimately, improves our lives. Continuing to attract foreign highly skilled scientists to the United States and retaining them is crucial for building a bright future that relies on emerging technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI). We need these scientists—and we need them badly. Over the years, foreign-born physicists, chemists, computer scientists, mathematicians, you name it, have been contributing greatly to the U....

Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gary F. Marcus, New York University psychologist and head of the Infant Language Learning Center, about how computing, genetic biology and psychology together can help probe the wonders of human language development. JONAH LEHRER: What first made you interested in studying the development of language in children? GARY F. MARCUS: I came to language development through early exposure to computers, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was in grade school....

One of the more disturbing things about parasites is an ability to manipulate their hosts, sometimes to suicidal extremes. The classic example is the liver fluke. It infects an ant as an intermediate carrier, then drives the insect to climb a blade of grass where it is likelier to get eaten by the parasite’s adult-stage host: a cow or other grazing ruminant. Over the past few years scientists have come to recognize that something along similar lines happens to humans under the influence of one of the deadliest pathogens in our species’s history: The Plasmodium parasite not only causes malaria but also makes victims more attractive to mosquitoes—which then transmit the parasite to still more victims....

Backers of algae-based biofuels tout the simplicity of their feedstock. Sunlight and water are all that’s needed to convert carbon dioxide into fuel. Now, some scientists are testing the notion that sunlight might be optional. Researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology are planning to grow algae for fuel in abandoned mines using light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. “About this time in the conversation, someone usually raises their hand and says, ‘But it’s dark,’” said David Summers, a mining engineering professor....

The January 2014 chemical spill in West Virginia that resulted in a large quantity of (4-methylcyclohexyl)methanol (MCHM) and stripped polyglycol ethers (PPH) contaminating local water supplies is unlikely to have harmed residents. That is the conclusion of a final report from the US National Toxicology Program (NTP), released earlier this month. ‘Most of the spilled chemicals had no effect in the studies that were performed,’ the NTP found. In tests the chemicals were only linked with harmful effects when they occurred at levels considerably higher than either the drinking water screening levels for MCHM and PPH recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or the estimated levels found in contaminated drinking water....

Hurricane Sam, at its peak, was the most powerful storm so far this season. It topped out as a high-end Category 4 with maximum wind speeds around 155 mph, spending eight consecutive days as a major hurricane before finally beginning to weaken. It was the strongest hurricane ever observed so far east so late in the calendar season, according to meteorologist Phil Klotzbach. And now, scientists know what the storm looked like from the inside out....

By Stuart Grudgings and Aubrey BelfordTACLOBAN, Philippines (Reuters) - The death toll from one of the world’s most powerful typhoons surged to about 4,000 on Friday, but the aid effort was still so patchy bodies lay uncollected as rescuers tried to evacuate stricken communities across the central Philippines.After long delays, hundreds of international aid workers set up makeshift hospitals and trucked in supplies, while helicopters from a U.S. aircraft carrier ferried medicine and water to remote areas leveled by Typhoon Haiyan a week ago....

Editor’s Note: Yesterday morning, renowned physicist John Archibald Wheeler died of pneumonia. He was an iconic figure: a veteran of the Manhattan Project, a pioneer of the search for a quantum theory of gravity, and an originator of such evocative terms as “black hole.” Most physics students know him as co-author of the standard textbook on Einstein’s general theory of relativity—a tome that defies almost every stereotype of a textbook, much as Wheeler’s own career defied almost every generalization....

Columbia University researchers are urging the winner of this year’s presidential election to launch a moonshot-style mission to develop new clean energy technologies, a critical step on the path to net-zero carbon emissions. The group, which includes two former Obama energy officials and staff from the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, this week unveiled a road map of policies that would allow “the next administration and Congress to hit the ground running” on clean-tech development....

On the evening of Sept. 27, the moon will once again become immersed in the Earth’s shadow, resulting in a total lunar eclipsethe fourth such event in the last 17 months, As with all lunar eclipses, the region of visibility for Sunday’s blood-moon lunar eclipse will encompass more than half of our planet. Nearly 1 billion people in the Western Hemisphere, nearly 1.5 billion throughout much of Europe and Africa and perhaps another 500 million in western Asia will be able to watch as the Harvest Full Moon becomes a shadow of its former self and morphs into a glowing coppery ball....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The human eye is optimised to have good colour vision at day and high sensitivity at night. But until recently it seemed as if the cells in the retina were wired the wrong way round, with light travelling through a mass of neurons before it reaches the light-detecting rod and cone cells. New research presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society has uncovered a remarkable vision-enhancing function for this puzzling structure....

Nanotechnology’s image is sleek, modern and clean. But that’s not its reality. Turns out that designing and manufacturing materials so small that 100,000 of them can fit comfortably on the width of a hair strand absorbs tremendous amounts of energy and is anything but neat. “You can make a very green product with a very messy process,” said Mark Greenwood, a Washington lawyer and former director of U.S. EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics....

Of the ten clinical genetics labs in the United States that share the most data with the research community, seven include ‘Caucasian’ as a multiple-choice category for patients’ racial or ethnic identity, despite the term having no scientific basis. Nearly 5,000 biomedical papers since 2010 have used ‘Caucasian’ to describe European populations. This suggests that too many scientists apply the term, either unbothered by or unaware of its roots in racist taxonomies used to justify slavery — or worse, adding to pseudoscientific claims of white biological superiority....