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It’s not surprising that a new report says Louisiana may have to cede flood-prone communities to nature, shift the state economy away from fishing and oil refining, and adapt to the inevitability of climate change. But the recommendations in a 1,500-page report released Wednesday may carry unusual weight because they came from Louisiana’s own state government. The report is a stark public reckoning that the Pelican State is losing landmass, is suffering repeated disaster-level flooding and will have to reconfigure its economy no matter how many levees are built....

Getting sick with measles does not just result in a dangerous infection that causes itchy blisters. It can leave the immune system vulnerable to other infections for some time to come, a new study has found. Although there had been earlier hints of such “immune amnesia,” this study is the first to show how the process might work. The researchers analyzed antibodies to essentially the entire repertoire of viruses that humans face, in drops of blood taken from 77 unvaccinated Dutch children just before and just after they came down with the measles....

UK researchers have identified a mutant plant that is able to thrive on soil contaminated with high concentrations of the explosive TNT. The finding opens the way to cleaning up the vast swathes of land throughout the world – principally military firing ranges—polluted with the highly toxic and persistent compound. In addition the team has pinpointed the mechanism by which TNT exerts its toxicity in plants, and say this could lead to the development of new herbicides....

HOUSTON—Call them the Commercial Crew Nine. NASA has unveiled the first astronauts to fly on private spaceships built by SpaceX and Boeing, and, just like the original Mercury Seven, NASA’s first astronauts announced in 1959, these 21st century space travelers have “the right stuff.” NASA made the announcement today (Aug. 3) here at the Johnson Space Center, with the agency revealing the eight agency astronauts and one Boeing astronaut before a cheering crowd of lawmakers, dignitaries and kids waving signs and American flags....

When it comes to nutrition, wheat bread in the organic aisle of the supermarket may be the same as the loaves found in the conventional bread aisle. Although some organic crops have proved more nourishing than their conventional counterparts, wheat–one of the world’s biggest cereal crops–shows no difference, according to the results of a new study. Christian Zrb, a biochemist at Germany’s Federal Research Center for Nutrition and Food, and his colleagues analyzed wheat, Triticum aestivum L....

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” In the opening of the classic 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” novelist Kurt Vonnegut depicted a future in which people who had been born superior in some way over “average” people could not use those gifts to take “unfair” advantage....

It sounds like a tiebreaker round in a mixed martial arts bout: entanglement sudden death, or ESD. In actuality it is a mysterious phenomenon by which entangled quantum objects—two electrons, for example, whose properties are linked by some instantaneous connection across space—can suddenly break off their relationship. In classical physical systems, decay is usually asymptotic—that is, the correlation between two objects approaches, but never reaches, zero. But ESD does not follow this pattern—when it strikes, the degree of entanglement drops to zero in a finite time, severing the quantum link clean....

HELPING EBOLA’S ORPHANS Thank you for the powerful article “Standing Up to Ebola,” by Molly Knight Raskin. My heart pounded in my ears! I picked it up for an education on Ebola in Liberia and devoured it, heart racing, as I began to feel connected to Katie Meyer and West Point and to the families destroyed and traumatized. And then I wanted to be connected, too. I wanted to read more about other grassroots organizations that are working to help the future generation in devastated countries....

In 2006 Alaskan senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a “series of tubes,” a quip that earned the octogenarian widespread mockery. But as Blum notes in his charming look at the physical infrastructure that underlies the Web, Stevens wasn’t all that wrong. Bits sail through a worldwide network of fiber-optic cables and come together in junctions where Internet providers connect their pipes to the networks of others. Blum’s transcontinental journey exposes some of the important issues confronting the Internet, such as the occasional disconnect between the interests of the corporations who control the physical pipes and the good of the network as a whole....

As Samuel Magadua walked along the muddy seashore littered with clothes, shoes and other debris, he spoke of a sister still missing since Typhoon Haiyan devastated the central Philippines five months ago, leaving more than 7,000 people dead and millions still without livelihood and homes. Magadua, a fisherman since he was a boy, is a resident of a coastal village where hundreds survived by clinging to coconut trees or by swimming for nearly two hours in the black ocean water that engulfed parts of Tacloban city and surrounding islands....

Perovskites have arguably transformed solar energy more in the last few years than other technologies have in decades. But British researchers have called into question optimistic predictions of undiscovered perovskites. Hybrid perovskites are a mix of organic and inorganic ions with the same crystal structure as calcium titanium oxide (CaTiO3). Halide perovskites are a subset of these structures containing halide ions such as fluoride or chloride. Iodide perovskites such as methylammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3) can convert sunlight to electricity....

If space exploration was a popularity contest, Mars would be struggling for admirers. Once the darling of 20th-century planetary scientists, the world’s allure has cooled somewhat as other exciting locales—the woefully unexplored Venus, for example, or Saturn’s thrilling moon Titan—begin to turn more heads. But Mars is not relinquishing its time in the limelight quite yet. This summer, three new missions are launching to the Red Planet—and at least one of them could reinvigorate interest in Mars with a renewed search for life there....

A 51-year-old man I will call “Mr. Pinocchio” had a strange problem. When he tried to tell a lie, he often passed out and had convulsions. In essence, he became a kind of Pinocchio, the fictional puppet whose nose grew with every fib. For the patient, the consequences were all too real: he was a high-ranking official in the European Economic Community (since replaced by the European Union), and his negotiating partners could tell immediately when he was bending the truth....

Touching Textures Modern prostheses can provide amputees with a wide variety of motor functions, but they cannot give patients back their sense of touch. Until now, that is. In a collaborative effort, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, developed a bionic fingertip that allowed an amputee to distinguish between smooth and rough textures with 96 percent accuracy....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). We tend to think about two biological sexes: male and female. But before the evolution of eggs and sperm—before sex cells began to diverge in size and form—organisms couldn’t be classified by sex. The same holds true for many fungi, algae and protozoans today. Instead of sexes, these species have mating types, with sex cells that differ at the molecular level but not anatomically....

Scientists often become immersed in their data, and sometimes even lost. The AlloSphere, a unique virtual reality environment at the University of California, Santa Barbara, makes this easier by turning large data sets into immersive experiences of sight and sound. Inside its three-story metal sphere researchers can interpret and interact with their data in new and intriguing ways, including watching electrons spin from inside an atom or “flying” through an MRI scan of a patient’s brain as blood density levels play as music....

The nation of Bahrain tried to get money from the Green Climate Fund to help its oil industry. The Persian Gulf kingdom was hosting a crucial meeting of the U.N. climate fund in the capital city of Manama in October when it proposed a project to clean up water pollution caused by oil and gas producers in Bahrain. That could in turn free up industry capital for investment in exploration and production....

Frothy mucus might not sound like the most inviting living space, but for some frogs’ offspring it is a lifesaving refuge from drought. The amphibians often lay their gelatinous eggs in pools of water to provide the moisture needed to develop properly—but those pools can dry up. “The biggest cause of [frog] offspring mortality is desiccation,” says University of Newcastle ecologist John Gould. When studying frogs in Australia’s Watagan Mountains, Gould was surprised to find evaporated puddles where eggs thrived for days, swaddled in nests their mothers whip up by aerating mucus secretions with their toes....

Four years ago in Scientific American, I warned readers of a growing problem in American democracy. The article, entitled “Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy,” charted how it had not only become acceptable, but often required, for politicians to embrace antiscience positions, and how those positions flew in the face of the core principles that the U.S. was founded on: That if anyone could discover the truth of something for him or herself using the tools of science, then no king, no pope and no wealthy lord was more entitled to govern the people than they were themselves....

As French police scoured Paris and surrounding areas in search of those responsible for Friday’s terrorist attacks on the French capital, a group of cyber activists took aim at the Islamic State’s online presence. The computer-hacker federation known as Anonymous claims to have disabled at least 5,500 pro-ISIS Twitter accounts and exposed thousands of the terror group’s supporters who use the social media site. Anonymous announced its current campaign on November 14, the day after ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) claimed responsibility for murdering at least 129 people and injuring more than 300 in various locations throughout Paris....