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A long-awaited experimental result has found the proton to be about 5% smaller than the previously accepted value. The finding has helped to prompt a redefinition of the particle’s official size and seems to spell the end of the ‘proton radius puzzle’, which has enthralled physicists since 2010. The result, published in Nature on 6 November, puts the particle’s radius at 0.831 femtometres. This measurement, together with a concurring one made using a different technique that was published in Science in September, has been known to experts since last year....

Red, purple, green, blue. Red, purple, green, blue. Why is this important? Well, hold that thought. Have you ever been about to leave your house in the morning rush and realized that you have no idea where you last left your car keys? Have you ever asked yourself, did I schedule that dentist appointment for today or tomorrow? What was it that I needed to get at the store, or what is my boss’s kid’s name again?...

Ever since physicians started regularly ordering CT (computed tomography) scans four decades ago, researchers have worried that the medical imaging procedure could increase a patient’s risk of developing cancer. CT scanners bombard the human body with x-ray beams, which can damage DNA and create mutations that spur cells to grow into tumors. Doctors have always assumed, however, that the benefits outweigh the risks. The x-rays, which rotate around the head, chest or another body part, help to create a three-dimensional image that is much more detailed than pictures from a standard x-ray machine....

Buried under the Antarctic ice, the IceCube experiment was designed primarily to capture particles called neutrinos that are produced by powerful cosmic events, but it is also helping scientists learn about the fundamental nature of these ghostly particles. At a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Washington, D.C., this week, scientists with the IceCube collaboration presented new results that contribute to an ongoing mystery about the nature of neutrinos....

Veggie burgers have been around for decades. And as the popularity of plant-based and flexitarian diets has grown, there are more and better options in this category than ever. You probably wouldn’t ever have mistaken one of these for actual beef. But if you’re looking for something meatless to put on a hamburger bun, there are plenty of choices. There’s a new meatless burger on the market that claims to look, cook, taste, and chew so much like actual ground beef that you might not be able to tell the difference....

After unleashing days of torrential rains and devastating floods that swamped Houston and much of southeastern Texas, the former Hurricane Harvey is now threatening NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC)—and with it some of the space agency’s most valuable assets, such as the $8.6 billion James Webb Space Telescope. As the home of the nation’s astronaut corps and the control center for the International Space Station, JSC is the heart of NASA’s human spaceflight program....

Biotech Gene Therapy Gene tinkering opens the door to treatments for an array of diseases January 14, 2019 — Herb Brody Biotech Realizing the Promise of Gene Therapy through Collaboration and Partnering: Pfizer’s View Gene therapy for single-gene disorders is at a pivotal period in its evolution, with continued successful development requiring tight collaboration among industry, academic, regulatory, clinical and patient communities… January 14, 2019 — Anna P. Tretiakova, Biotech...

By Brendan Borrell Administrators at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater have abruptly cancelled an anthrax vaccine study that would have killed dozens of baboons.The project, funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by Shinichiro Kurosawa of Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts, had been approved by the OSU animal-care committee in September and was awaiting review by the biosafety committee when OSU president Burns Hargis vetoed it in October, calling the study “controversial....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the story with west coast salmon runs? I’ve heard conflicting reports in regard to whether the fish are abundant or going extinct. —Rebecca Shur, Kirkland, Wash. West coast salmon runs have been in decline for decades, stemming largely from the damming of rivers and the pollution throughout the fish’s extensive range from freshwater mountain streams to deep offshore ocean currents. Analysts estimate that only 0.1 percent of the tens of millions of salmon that used to darken rivers every summer and fall up and down the west coast before white settlement still exist....

How does the sense of smell work? Today two competing camps of scientists are at war over this very question. And the more controversial theory has just received important new experimental confirmation. At issue is whether our noses use delicate quantum mechanisms for sensing the vibrations of odor molecules (aka odorants). Does the nose, in other words, read off the chemical makeup of a mystery odorant—say, a waft of perfume or the aroma of wilted lettuce—by “ringing” it like a bell?...

Is there anything more American than the pursuit of happiness? Not merely written into the Declaration of Independence, it seems to be one of the more important metrics by which we measure our progress through life. In 2016 I remember reading a fascinating article on Vox.com by Ruth Whippman, a British writer, who made an intriguing observation after having lived in both countries. Americans’ obsession with being happy, and our many efforts to achieve it, she wrote, was in fact making us miserable....

From Simons Science News (find original story here) Billions of years ago, all of Earth’s carbon erupted into existence inside distant, dying stars. At first, each atom’s nucleus arose in a swollen, squashed state with little chance of survival. For every 2,500 that immediately fizzled, only one shape-shifted into a stable form capable of supporting life. That primordial, unstable nuclear state, called the Hoyle state, was discovered more than 50 years ago, but it has taken the rise of modern supercomputers and the development of new mathematical techniques to figure out just how the laws of physics cook it up....

The future looks bright—maybe too bright. The sun is slowly expanding and brightening, and over the next few billion years it will eventually desiccate Earth, leaving it hot, brown and uninhabitable. About 7.6 billion years from now, the sun will reach its maximum size as a red giant: its surface will extend beyond Earth’s orbit today by 20 percent and will shine 3,000 times brighter. In its final stage, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf....

He is one of the world’s best known and most successful entrepreneurs, with hundreds of patents to his name—including the Segway scooter. But you will never see Dean Kamen in a suit and tie: the eccentric inventor dresses almost exclusively in denim. He spent five years in college before dropping out, does not take vacations and has never married. Kamen presides (along with his Ministers of Ice Cream, Brunch and Nepotism) over the Connecticut island kingdom of North Dumpling, which has “seceded” from the U....

Pfizer aims to have an Omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccine ready by March. Assuming it gains approval, it will mark the first revision of its messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine Comirnaty since the initial Emergency Use Authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Dec. 11, 2020. The variant-specific booster will also test the responsiveness of the FDA and other major regulators in showing how quickly they can approve applications for vaccine revisions....

The brain-training giant Lumosity is recalibrating its strategy and facing new challenges as it reels from a federal crackdown on bold health claims about its digital games. The company behind the Lumosity brand, Lumos Labs, has dramatically cut back on TV advertising. It is facing sharp questions about its much-touted research, which found that users enjoyed a bump in IQ. And there are signs that the growth of Lumosity’s once impressive mobile app business may have stalled....

Parents tend to favor children of one gender in certain situations—or so evolutionary biologists tell us. A new study used colored backpack sales data to show that parental wealth may influence spending on sons versus daughters. In 1973 biologist Robert Trivers and computer scientist Dan Willard published a paper suggesting that parents invest more resources, such as food and effort, in male offspring when times are good, and in female offspring when times are bad....

Why is there such chaos and doubt when it comes to parenting? Why, in fact, do most parents continue to parent pretty much the way their own parents did—or, if they disliked the way they were raised, the exact opposite way? Shouldn’t we all just find out what the studies say and parent accordingly? A growing body of research conducted over the past 50 years shows fairly clearly that some parenting practices produce better outcomes than others—that is, better relationships between parent and child and happier, healthier, better functioning children....

An expected whistleblower complaint is the latest escalation in a fight between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its former head of climate work. George Luber, who led the CDC’s Climate and Health Program, plans to file his complaint this week, E&E News has learned. It will allege that the agency retaliated against him for speaking out on climate change and will raise concerns that the CDC is shifting climate funds to other programs....

Are your friends more popular than you are? There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason to suppose this is true, but it probably is. We are all more likely to become friends with someone who has a lot of friends than we are to befriend someone with few friends. It’s not that we avoid those with few friends; rather it’s more probable that we will be among a popular person’s friends simply because he or she has a larger number of them....