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Scientists have successfully generated new lines of human embryonic stem cells that are exact genetic matches for individual patients, according to a new study. The results bring researchers a small but significant step closer to using stem cell transplants to treat a variety of diseases. Last year, a team led by Woo Suk Hwang and Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University in Korea announced that they had harvested embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos, although their technique yielded just 30 blastocysts and a single cell line....

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy as big as the Milky Way that consists almost entirely of dark matter, a mysterious and invisible substance that scientists have been trying to figure out for decades. Only one-hundredth of one percent of the galaxy is ordinary, visible matter like stars and planets. The other 99.99 percent of the stuff in this galaxy can’t be seen. No one really knows what dark matter is made of, but scientists believe it exists because they can see the effects of its gravity on other things in space....

President Trump has nominated Indiana’s health commissioner, Dr. Jerome Adams, to be the next surgeon general, the White House announced Thursday. If confirmed, Adams would replace Dr. Vivek Murthy, who was ousted by the Trump administration in April. Adams was appointed to his current post in Indiana by Vice President Mike Pence when he was governor. Adams would be at least the second top health official in the Trump administration who had previous connections to Pence....

If you watched football or the final game of the World Series yesterday, you may have noticed the following: When the announcers were speaking on camera, it seemed as though the sound of their voices were coming from their mouths. But when the commentary occurred off-screen as the game action was shown, it was quite apparent the TV speakers were the actual sound source of the endless color-commentary babble. This processing phenomenon in which a visual cue affects how one perceives an auditory stimulus—ventriloquism is another example—may be explained by new research that pinpointed neurons in a primitive brain area that responds to both visual and auditory information....

By Reuters Staff GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that men and women returning from areas where the Zika virus is actively spreading should practice safer sex or abstinence for 6 months, regardless of whether they are trying to conceive or showing symptoms. The guidance is a change from the WHO’s interim recommendation on June 7, which referred only to men and had a shorter timeframe of at least 8 weeks....

Key Concepts Temperature Heat transfer Thermal sensitivity Thermodynamics Introduction Thanks to our sense of touch, we can all tell the difference between hot and cold. But does the same temperature always feel the same? Have you ever noticed that the bathroom tile feels very cold to your bare feet but your towel, which has been hanging in the same room, feels warm? Why is there such a difference? Try this fun activity and find out!...

Dodge Pond, which sits on the outskirts of Lyme, Conn., is an ordinary New England lake. It’s home to fish like bluegill and alewife, along with smaller organisms like water fleas, algae, and bacteria. There are viruses in Dodge Pond, too, most of which infect its bacteria. And one of Dodge Pond’s viruses, known as OMKO1, has now earned it a place in medical history. Earlier this year, in an experimental treatment, doctors put 100 million OMKO1 viruses into a man’s chest to save his life....

In the wee hours of the morning on August 8, 1983, while I was traveling along a lonely rural highway approaching Haigler, Neb., a large craft with bright lights overtook me and forced me to the side of the road. Alien beings exited the craft and abducted me for 90 minutes, after which time I found myself back on the road with no memory of what transpired inside the ship. I can prove that this happened because I recounted it to a film crew shortly afterward....

In 1338 or 1339 “Bačaq, a faithful woman” in her 40s who stood just four feet, eight inches, died and was buried in the Kara-Djigach cemetery, about seven miles outside Bishkek, the capital of what is now Kyrgyzstan. Her tombstone was inscribed in Syriac, an Aramaic dialect. She was one of 114 people buried there during those two years—who accounted for one quarter of all the cemetery’s burials while it was in operation from 1245 to 1345....

Back in 2015, I got pretty serious about reducing or offsetting my carbon footprint. I don’t have kids, I don’t own a car and I don’t eat meat, so I already had three of the biggies covered. To make up for my electricity use, I started buying credits from a nonprofit that funds wind turbines and other renewable energy projects in New England. Then it was time to examine my habit of boarding kerosene-fueled jet aircraft....

Ahhh, midsummer, when space travelers fail their sobriety tests. Of course, NASA’s inebriated astronauts debacle was well covered. Here are some perhaps lesser-known tales of whoa. For instance, in late July, the Times of London published its list of the 50 best movie robots ever, in conjunction with the release of the movie Transformers. Little did I know that I owned a transformer—I left the car lights on all night twice last week, and my vehicle turned into a really big paperweight....

Lawmakers have floated a proposal to fast-track electric cars, but some in the clean-car field are worried that the wheels may fall off. Last week, House and Senate legislators released bipartisan plans to speed up the deployment of electric vehicles. In each plan, the centerpiece was a “targeted deployment” approach: Rather than offer the same incentives nationwide, the government would award federal funds to the regions that come up with the best blueprints for rolling out tens of thousands of plug-in cars....

MOORLAND, England (Reuters) - The village of Moorland in southwest England lies largely deserted, eerily silent save for the creaking of flood defenses which failed to stop the flow of muddy brown water now standing chest-high along its main street. Its residents were among thousands across England who fell victim to the country’s wettest January in nearly 250 years, with heavy rain and storms damaging homes, businesses and transport links and heaping pressure on a government criticized for being too slow to react....

The dead rise in Louisiana. All it takes is some floodwater. People in this low-lying state are typically buried in aboveground vaults—the bane of Charlie Hunter, chief investigator for the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office, who has to hunt down the caskets that get washed away during floods. It’s become a serious part of his job over the past decade. The caskets and their surface vaults are sealed airtight, so pressure builds inside them when a hurricane or flash flood covers them in water....

Three years ago HPE (formerly Hewlett–Packard) laid out its vision for a radical redesign of the computer that would deliver hitherto unimaginable performance in a single system. By combining all the memory that is usually tied in small chunks to each processor into one vast pool and connecting everything with fiber optics instead of copper wires, HPE sought to turbo-charge computers in ways that packing ever-more transistors on microchips would never achieve....

Dear EarthTalk: I understand a recent government report concluded that our global food system is in deep trouble, that roughly two billion people are hungry or undernourished while another billion are overconsuming to the point of obesity. What’s going on?—Ellie Francoeur, Baton Rouge, La. The report in question, “The Future of Food and Farming”, synthesized findings collected from more than 400 scientists spanning 34 countries and was published in January 2011 by the British government’s Department for Business Innovation & Skills....

Do You See What I See? “One has the feeling that Gordon Bell will eventually begin to record his reviewing of his record of his experiences, setting him in an endless loop terminating only when his registers overflow.” —David Hopp - Durham, N.C. Colorful Origins According to “Illusory Color and the Brain,” by John S. Werner, Baingio Pinna and Lothar Spillmann, an object’s color is made relatively stable by the brain despite environmental changes....

By Naomi Lubick of Nature magazineTwo small, mobile torpedo-shaped buoys plying the waters of the Mediterranean Sea have captured the seismic signature of a magnitude-7 earthquake occurring some 10,000 kilometers away. The earthquake, in the Aleutian Islands near Alaska on 24 June, was documented by two floating seismic observatories nicknamed MERMAIDs (for Mobile Earthquake Recorder in Marine Areas by Independent Divers), and reported in the journal Eos this week by a team led by Yann Hello of the Géoazur laboratory at the University of Nice in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France....

NASA is set to handle some unfinished business across the solar system, as evidenced by four possible missions it announced yesterday. They are the finalists in the space agency’s Discovery Program competition, a Shark Tank–like face-off in which labs and universities have proposed small, focused spacecraft to explore disparate worlds. More than a dozen ideas, each designed to cost less than $500 million, were submitted to NASA for consideration. Of the four now remaining, only two or perhaps just one will be chosen next year for eventual flight....

The strength of a mussel, the shellfish’s ability to grasp tightly to rocks, docks and ships despite crashing waves or prying fingers, is legendary. Scientists have even studied how mussels, using slender fibers called byssal threads that are simultaneously hard and stretchy, are able to cling so tight in a rough, wet environment, in hopes that humans could mimic that technology to create strong, flexible textiles. Now, climate change is impairing that ability to cling....