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Next time you swallow a pill, think about this: you may not be the only one digesting it. You might not even be the first. By now most people are aware that our gastrointestinal tract is teeming with microbes that live mostly in harmony with us, helping us break down food, synthesize vitamins, resist germs, and relay chemical signals to our brain and immune system. But an emerging field of research with a mouthful of a name—pharmacomicrobiomics—is demonstrating that our tiny inner denizens can process our drugs in ways that both help and harm us....

Once they fall out, baby teeth are usually discarded or gathered by the tooth fairy. But Manish Arora has found a different use: extracting information from them to search other biological samples for early signs of disease. Arora, the Edith J. Baerwald Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has found that abnormalities in teeth correspond to conditions such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, cancer, and Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS....

AUGUST 1956 NEUTRINO FOUND–“A long and exciting adventure in physics has come to a triumphant end. The neutrino has been found. Frederick Reines and Clyde L. Cowan, Jr., of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory trapped the ghostly particle in an underground chamber near the Savannah River atomic pile. Phillip Morrison, in the January issue of Scientific American, compared the neutrino to the planet Neptune. The discovery of Neptune was a crowning achievement of classical physics: the motions of other planets showed it had to be there....

The fossil fuel industry may be responsible for a much greater share of the world’s methane emissions than previously estimated, according to new research that could intensify urgency around curbing the potent gas from oil and gas production. The research, published yesterday in the journal Nature, delves into the sources of “fossil” methane emissions, or methane that comes from the Earth’s geologic formations. There are two main ways fossil methane can be released into the atmosphere—human activities from fossil fuel production or natural processes, including the slow release of gas from mud volcanoes or undersea methane seeps....

Winemaker Greg Allen had a problem. As president of Far Niente Winery in Napa Valley, California, he had done the math on how much land the vineyard could possibly dedicate to solar panels, to offset energy costs. The figure—about two acres—“really hurt,” Allen says. So he compromised: Far Niente completed an array of 2,296 solar panels, 994 of which float on pontoons tethered to the bottom of the winery’s pond. The installation was the world’s first nonexperimental floating solar array....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – Scientists are pushing to create a space-based quantum communications network that could enable impossible-to-monitor transmissions. In doing so, they might make it possible for someone named Scotty to really teleport some information into space. It would be enough “to spook” Albert Einstein, said Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, one of the top researchers in the field....

In the April 2001 issue of Scientific American, I began this column with an entry entitled “Colorful Pebbles and Darwin’s Dictum,” inspired by the British naturalist’s remark that “all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service.” Charles Darwin penned this comment in a letter addressing those critics who accused him of being too theoretical in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species....

A clip from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1978 made the social media rounds in mid-July. The guest that episode—astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan—offered astute criticisms of the then recently released Star Wars film for its myopic (and whitewashed) imagining of how organisms from other galaxies might look. In this collection, reporter Leonard David examines the government report published in June that surveys our evidence for extraterrestrial life so far (see “Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report”), and two of our opinion writers contemplate some specific circumstances for alien contact....

Throughout history shamans, clerics and physicians have tried to pin down what goes awry when a person slips into sadness, insanity or psychosis. Theorists have variously blamed mental illness on an imbalance of bodily fluids, the movement of planets, unconscious mental conflict and unfortunate life experiences. Today many researchers believe that psychiatric disorders arise in large part from a person’s genetic makeup. Genes, after all, are the blueprints for the proteins that create and control the brain....

In a high-ceilinged hangar at CERN, six rival experiments are racing to understand the nature of one of the Universe’s most elusive materials. They sit just meters apart. In places, they are literally on top of one another: the metallic beam of one criss-crosses another like a shopping-center escalator, its multi-ton concrete support hanging ominously overhead. “We’re constantly reminded of each other,” says physicist Michael Doser, who leads AEGIS, an experiment that is vying to be the first to discover how antimatter — matter’s rare mirror image — responds to gravity....

From weakening vehicle emissions to blocking warnings about how coastal parks could flood or the impact on the Arctic, the Trump administration is accused of muzzling climate science. Here six whistleblowers and former government scientists describe being sidelined by the administration—and why they won’t be quiet. Jeff Alson Role: A former senior engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s vehicles lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan What did the work involve? “I was an engineer at the EPA, working for 40 years in a very technical job....

By Laura Zuckerman(Reuters) - An unprecedented wintertime outbreak of West Nile virus has killed more than two dozen bald eagles in Utah and thousands of water birds around the Great Salt Lake, state wildlife officials said on Tuesday.At least 27 bald eagles have died this month in the northern and central parts of Utah from the blood-borne virus, and state biologists reported that five more ailing eagles were responding to treatment at rehabilitation centers....

From Our Partner At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, American Walter Winans took the podium and waved proudly to the crowd. He had already won two Olympic medals—a gold for sharpshooting at the 1908 London Games, as well as a silver for the same event in 1912—but the gold he won at Stockholm wasn’t for shooting, or running, or anything particularly athletic at all. It was instead awarded for a small piece of bronze he had cast earlier that year: a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot....

Inside Scoop: Wi-Fi routers susceptible to hacking LAS VEGAS – More major brand-name Wi-Fi router vulnerabilities continue to be discovered, and continue to go unpatched, a security researcher has revealed at Defcon 21. Jake Holcomb, a security researcher at the Baltimore, Md.-based firm Independent Security Evaluators and the lead researcher into Wi-Fi router vulnerabilities, said that problem is worse than when ISE released its original findings in April. The latest study continues to show that the small office and home office Wi-Fi routers are “very vulnerable to attack,” Holcomb said....

A friend invites you to his new apartment. As he cues up an old jazz record, you look around his cluttered room for somewhere to sit. Works of literature and philosophy are stacked waist-high next to the desk. Thumbtacks anchor a colorful Picasso print to the wall. His collection of foreign films and documentaries topples out of an unpacked box. His housemate’s digs—which you spy across the hall—are a different story: a framed Monet poster hangs over the neatly made bed; top-40 CD cases and box sets of TV sitcoms line the shelves; carefully arranged gossip magazines fill a nearby rack....

As a young mathematician in the 1950s, Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was … trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled. One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution....

Scientists are concerned that climate change research may be in the crosshairs at the Department of Energy under the Trump administration. Reports that agencies like U.S. EPA and the Department of Agriculture are facing communications restrictions, along with recent proposals from the Trump transition team for drastic cuts in environmental science in federal agencies, have some researchers at DOE’s venerable national laboratories worried that they might be next. “[Climate change research] does seem particularly vulnerable because this administration has not given us any indication that they take it seriously as an issue affecting us and affecting the world,” said Hansi Singh, a postdoctoral research fellow at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash....

Arizona regulators gave the state’s largest utility the cold shoulder last week, essentially rejecting Arizona Public Service Co.’s plans to double its natural gas fleet over the next 15 years. Instead, they imposed a temporary freeze on most new natural gas projects and asked the power company to draw up plans for acquiring more renewable energy. The decision sent tremors across the Southwest. Observers said they could not recall a time when Arizona’s utility commission, where Republicans control all five seats, had rebuffed a long-term plan from one of the state’s utilities....

Chiral molecules are those that come in two forms: versions that are mirror images of one another but cannot be superimposed, like right and left hands. Life seems to prefer molecules of a single chemical handedness, however. All DNA, for example, twists clockwise like the threads on a right-handed screw. Nearly all amino acids, meanwhile, are left-handed. Why one or the other? “It’s pretty well established that once an excess [of one chirality] is present, life is going to go with it,” says Brett McGuire, an astrochemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va....

The powerful lithium-based batteries used in electric vehicle systems, laptops and cell phones are prone to overheating and even blowing up, but adding less than a gram of a new substance could keep both temperatures and costs down, federal researchers say. The molecule, developed by researchers Khalil Amine and Zonghai Chen at Argonne National Laboratory, is being tested as an additive in the electrolyte of lithium batteries to keep cell voltage from going too high....