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But as government priorities apparently change, and as the federal money that historically created and preserved many of these biological resource repositories in the U.S. dries up, their infrastructure is at risk of deteriorating. With less funding for daily curation—such as occasionally reviving strains to maintain viability, in addition to licensing and distributing them—the less accessible these collections become. Plant pathologist David Geiser oversees The Pennsylvania State University’s collection of 20,000 samples of species in the genus Fusarium, a ubiquitous soil fungus that can be pathogenic....

Thanks in part to an abundance of fossil discoveries in recent decades, scientists now recognize more than 200 species of pterosaur—the winged reptiles that dominated the world’s skies for 160 million years. But almost nothing is known about how they bred or how their young developed. As recently as 2014 the available scientific evidence on those topics added up to a grand total of just three pterosaur eggs, all badly flattened....

To conserve water, members of my household abide by the old aphorism “If it’s yellow, let it mellow.” You’re in a state of ignorance about that wizened phrase? If so, it recommends that one not flush the toilet after each relatively innocent act of micturition. But there’s one exception to the rule: after asparagus, it’s one and done—because those delicious stalks make urine smell like hell. To me and mine, anyway....

Educators have known for 30 years that students perform better when given one-on-one tutoring and mastery learning—working on a subject until it is mastered, not just until a test is scheduled. Success also requires motivation, whether from an inner drive or from parents, mentors or peers. Will the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) quash these success factors? Not at all. In fact, digital tools offer our best path to cost-effective, personalized learning....

Esther Choo only had a few thousand followers on Twitter before August 2017. Choo, an emergency physician at the Oregon Health & Science University, interacted mostly with other doctors. But when she tweeted one day about the racism she had endured while practicing medicine, her posts went viral—and her follower count shot up to 20,000 almost overnight. Now, she has nearly 80,000 followers. “The professional benefits have been so concrete,” Choo says....

Humans dominate the animal world. Whether hunting or competing for limited space and resources, we are the planet’s superpredator. Other animals seem to understand this, avoiding people if they can help it. But as the human population expands, it is getting harder for other creatures to find somewhere to hide during the day. Now new findings indicate mammals around the world have come up with another strategy: They are becoming nocturnal....

Would a rat risk dying just to satisfy its desire for chocolate? A few years ago I found out. In my laboratory, we gave rats unlimited access to standard chow as well as to a mini cafeteria full of appetizing, high-calorie foods: sausage, cheesecake, chocolate. The rats decreased their intake of the healthy but bland items and switched to eating the cafeteria food almost exclusively. They gained weight. They became obese....

We all know we should exercise. But few realize that being physically active is the single most important thing that most of us can do to improve or maintain our health. Regular movement not only lowers the risk of developing or dying from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, it also prevents certain cancers, improves mood, builds bones, strengthens muscles, expands lung capacity, reduces the risk of falls and fractures, and helps to keep excess weight in check....

Arizona State University is designing a museum that will have no permanent collections, no rare artifacts and no famous artwork on display. In fact, all of its content and curation will come from anyone willing to participate. It will never be found on a map, either, as it has no walls, displays or even a physical address. That’s because the museum, set to launch in the fall of 2017, will be digital, and it is intended to get people thinking about the future of science using a very old tale....

NEW YORK – The federal stimulus package and the city’s ambitious “green building” initiative should provide a jobs bonanza for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) specialists, city officials said yesterday. Addressing HVAC specialists at a gathering here, a senior policy adviser for Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) said plans to bolster buildings’ energy efficiency include a “green work force” package that relies on the City University of New York, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) to train workers....

The smell of acrid metal fills the air as Takashi Taniguchi reaches into the core of one of the world’s most powerful hydraulic presses. This seven-metre-tall machine can squeeze carbon into diamonds—but they aren’t on its menu today. Instead, Taniguchi and his colleague Kenji Watanabe are using it to grow some of the most desired gems in the world of physics. For the past eight days, two steel anvils have been crushing a powdery mix of compounds inside the press at temperatures of more than 1,500 °C and up to 40,000 times atmospheric pressure....

Christian Angermayer is an unlikely proselyte of psychedelia: The German financier didn’t drink so much as a sip of beer for the first three decades of his life. But five years ago, after careful consideration (and the encouragement of a personal physician), Angermayer boarded a yacht with a handful of his closest friends. They sailed into the crystalline, tropical waters of a jurisdiction in which such substances are legal (he is very emphatic on this point), and had his very first psychedelic trip....

Ukrainian graduate student Oleksandr has gone from worrying about his thesis defence to fearing for the safety of himself and his colleagues. His PhD plans were put on hold after he was swept up in antigovernment protests in Kiev that have claimed at least four lives. Among the dead is geophysicist Yuriy Verbitsky, whose body was discovered on 22 January after he was kidnapped from the hospital where he was being treated for wounds received in the protest....

Editor’s Note (11/16/21): Washington State and British Columbia have been deluged by a relentless series of atmospheric rivers that in some places have delivered as much as three feet of rain in the past four weeks. In 2019 scientists released a new scale to rate the severity of these events, explained in our original story from that time, below. It is fair to say the ongoing deluge would rank as a Category 4 or 5....

You might not know it but fertilizer is the explosive of choice for budget-conscious terrorists. The blasts at the World Trade Center in 1993, Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995 and on rush-hour London buses and trains in 2005 all contained ammonium nitrate fertilizer (which is manufactured in bulk as an explosive by the U.S. and other countries as well as by companies.) But what’s an honest farmer to do? Well, Honeywell International—the Morristown, N....

Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it and point to a random spot on the page, and mark the first two letters you see. Say they’re I and N. Write down those two letters on your page. Now, take another random book off the shelf and look through it until you find the letters I and N in succession....

It begins like many other tests at the doctor’s surgery: a quick swipe inside the nostrils with what looks like a giant cotton bud, which is then plunged into medium designed to keep the sample fresh. But it is what happens next that makes the Xpert Xpress molecular influenza test different. A technician places the sample into the machine, which then makes copies of any genetic information it contains. Fluorescence detectors scan for the presence of specific genes....

In the long-running debate over just what causes Alzheimer’s disease, one side looks to have scored a victory with new results with an in-development drug. But there’s enough variation in the data to ensure that the squabbling factions of Alzheimer’s will have plenty to fight about. At issue is the so-called amyloid hypothesis, a decades-old theory claiming that Alzheimer’s gradual degradation of the brain is caused by the accumulation of sticky plaques....

A pair of fitted shorts may not look much like the high-tech robotic exoskeletons of Hollywood films. But this seemingly simple device, which tugs on the wearer’s legs with each step, probably represents the first exosuit capable of significantly assisting humans in both walking and running. Until recently, no exosuit design had succeeded in reducing the amount of energy required for both types of motion. Earlier generations of such suits, also known as wearable robots, had stumbled in that challenge because of the different biomechanical actions required for walking versus running....

Science has spoken: Getting a border collie to stop herding city pigeons or a Doberman pinscher to be more companionable or a springer spaniel to stop flushing prey is going to be a heavy lift for even an expert dog whisperer. On the bright side, even humans who struggle to train their canine companion to leave the upholstery alone will almost certainly not mess up their whippet’s ability to hunt by scent, their miniature schnauzer’s talent for controlling vermin, or their golden retriever’s instinct for living up to its name....