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Maia Majumder was on Twitter earlier this month when she saw a map that terrified her. The map recorded the number of local newspapers in each county across the United States. Large swaths were shaded light pink, denoting a county that had no local newspaper at all. As a record of the decline of the American newspaper industry, it was disconcerting. But Majumder, a scientist who specializes in mathematical modeling, saw something different in the splotches of light pink: a disaster for infectious disease surveillance....

Patrick J. Bird, dean of the College of Health and Human Performance at the University of Florida, explains. We all do tend to fatten up with age, although there are interesting differences based on age and gender. Hormones drive the deposition of fat around the pelvis, buttocks, and thighs of women and the bellies of men. For women, this so-called sex-specific fat appears to be physiologically advantageous, at least during pregnancies....

Scientists have made some progress in coping with the onslaught. For instance, within days the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will debut a website including tools to help telescope operators predict satellite locations so that they can point their instruments elsewhere. But accumulating evidence reveals just how much these satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will interfere with astronomical observatories and other skywatchers around the globe. And satellite companies have not yet found a solution. SpaceX had been trying to address the problem by putting sun-blocking shades on its Starlinks to dim their appearance in the night sky....

1971 Social Strata of Turkeys “We made a detailed study of a population of wild turkeys living in and around the Welder Wildlife Refuge in Texas and found an astonishing degree of social stratification, greater than had previously been seen in any society of vertebrates short of man. The status of each individual in this turkey society is determined during the first year of life, and it usually remains fixed for the animal’s lifetime....

The first sign that something was wrong was trouble breathing. “I thought my lungs were giving out on me,” Marcus recalls. “When I breathed in, my lungs hurt.” About a week later he began vomiting violently, unable to hold down food. It was the beginning of an ordeal last October that landed the otherwise healthy 18-year-old (who prefers to keep his last name private) in an intensive care unit. Doctors at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo found that the teenager’s blood oxygen level had plummeted into the 80s (normal levels are 95 and above)....

People told me medical school would be a flood of information, a prolonged inundation, but in the beginning, it felt dry and incomplete. After moving from New York City to North Carolina to begin medical school, I decorated a new apartment with photographs of places I wish I were, leased a car for the first time, and sat on Zoom for hundreds of hours between orientation, classes and research. Despite months of being in a new school, I have met about eight people in person, befriended half that number, set foot in one building on campus, and have yet to meet any professor or physician or surgeon or research mentor in the flesh....

What can former U.S. president Richard Nixon possibly teach us about artificial intelligence today and the future of misinformation online? Nothing. The real Nixon died 26 years ago. But an AI-generated likeness of him shines new light on a quickly evolving technology with sizable implications, both creative and destructive, for our current digital information ecosystem. Starting in 2019, media artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teamed up with two AI companies, Canny AI and Respeecher, to create a posthumous deepfake....

Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self by Jennifer Ouellette Penguin, 2014 How can we learn who we really are? For science journalist, Scientific American blogger and veteran author Ouellette, the journey of self-discovery involved genome sequencing, brain imaging, psychological analysis and even a hallucinogenic trip. In Me, Myself, and Why, Ouellette takes her readers from Gregor Mendel’s pea plants to the personal genome-sequencing services of the 21st century....

By Cassandra Willyard On February 17, retired American-football player Dave Duerson committed suicide. The 50-year-old former defensive back for the Chicago Bears left this haunting note for his family: “Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL’s brain bank.” Then he shot himself in the chest, leaving his brain intact.The brain bank Duerson referred to, located at Bedford VA Medical Center in Massachusetts, is funded by the U.S. National Football League (NFL) and run by Ann McKee, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University in Massachusetts....

In June, when U.S. president Donald Trump announced he would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, all eyes anxiously looked to China. Without participation from the nation that historically has been the world’s biggest polluter, pundits worried President Xi Jinping would see a way out of his country’s carbon-reduction pledge, and the deal would unravel. Instead Xi, a former chemist, staunchly reaffirmed his country’s commitment to investing in renewable energy and meeting its emissions goals....

As familiar to everyone as the COVID-causing coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has become over the past two years, feverish research is still trying to parse a lingering puzzle. How, in fact, does the pandemic virus that has so changed the world cross over into the brain after entering the respiratory system? An answer is important because neurological complaints are some of the most common in the constellation of symptoms called long COVID. The mystery centers around the fact that brain cells don’t display the receptors, or docking sites, that the virus uses to get into nasal and lung cells....

Science in the 1990s and into the early 21st century continued to advance the frontiers of knowledge—but less efficiently than it did earlier in the 20th century, according to a new study commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The report examines scientific publication trends in the top 200 U.S. academic research and development institutions from 1988 to 2001. Whereas funding and other research inputs rose dramatically, the yield of published research papers fell....

In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million. That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists....

Elizabeth Caruso is a town official in Caratunk, Maine, a community of 70 people about an hour’s drive south of the Canadian border. Like many people in this part of rural New England, her livelihood is tied to tourism. That’s why she’s leading the opposition to a 145-mile transmission line that would cut a 150-foot-wide path through the forest around Caratunk. She worries the proposal would splinter the Maine woods and the businesses that rely on it....

An error has forced researchers to go back on their claim that humans across the whole of Africa carry DNA inherited from Eurasian immigrants. This week the authors issued a note explaining the mistake in their October 2015 Science paper on the genome of a 4,500-year-old man from Ethiopia—the first complete ancient human genome from Africa. The man was named after Mota Cave, where his remains were found (For more about the initial findings, please read the following article: “First Ancient African Genome Reveals Vast Eurasian Migration”)....

I am the proud descendant of people who, at least 1,000 years ago, made one of the riskiest decisions in human history: to leave behind their homeland and set sail into the world’s largest ocean. As the first Native Hawaiian to be awarded a Ph.D. in genome sciences, I realized in graduate school that there is another possible line of evidence that can give insights into my ancestors’ voyaging history: our moʻokuʻauhau, our genome....

Only about half of the people who could vote in the 2012 U.S. presidential election actually did so (53.6 percent of the voting-age population). This puts turnout in the U.S. among the worst in developed countries. By way of contrast, 87.2 percent of Belgians, 80.5 percent of Australians and 73.1 percent of Finns voted in their last elections. In a nation quick to defend democracy both within its borders and beyond, why are more Americans not exercising what is arguably their biggest democratic right?...

The new James Webb Space Telescope is topped off and one step closer to taking flight. Mission team members have finished fueling the James Webb Space Telescope at ahead of its planned Dec. 22 launch from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, the European Space Agency announced Monday (Dec. 6). The fueling for Webb, which is an international collaborative effort between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, took 10 days and was completed on Dec....

New Jersey on Tuesday threw its weight behind a growing effort by local governments to hold oil and gas companies financially accountable for allegedly lying to consumers about the fossil fuel industry’s role in accelerating climate change. The Garden State’s lawsuit—one of two dozen climate liability cases filed by cities, states and counties nationwide—comes as the Supreme Court weighs two industry petitions that seek to quash the liability cases. It also comes almost exactly 10 years after Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, killing 38 and leaving more than 300,000 homes damaged....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation UK, an online publication covering the latest research. By Ian Wilmut, University of Edinburgh It is unlikely that a mammoth could be cloned in the way we created Dolly the sheep, as has been proposed following the discovery of mammoth bones in northern Siberia. However, the idea prompts us to consider the feasibility of other avenues. Even if the Dolly method is not possible, there are other ways in which it would be biologically interesting to work with viable mammoth cells if they can be found....