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In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died from COVID-19, and life expectancy fell by 1.13 years, the biggest decrease since World War II. Many of the deaths were avoidable; COVID-19 mortality in the U.S. was 40 percent higher than the average of the other wealthy nations in the Group of Seven (G7). In a Lancet report by the Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, released on February 20, we chronicled Trump’s effects on population health....

By Andrew Seaman An influential panel of U.S. experts issued final recommendations on Monday reaffirming their controversial position that mammogram screening should start at age 50, but also said some women may benefit from screening starting at age 40. Under the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines, mammogram screening every two years for women 50 to 74 got a grade of “B”, meaning doctors should offer the service. Screening for women in their 40s got a “C” grade, meaning doctors should offer the service for select patients, depending on individual circumstances....

Time’s seemingly inexorable march has always provoked interest in, and speculation about, the far future of the cosmos. The usual picture is grim. Five billion years from now the sun will puff itself into a red giant star and swallow the inner solar system before slowly fading to black. But this temporal frame captures only a tiny portion—in fact, an infinitesimal one—of the entire future. As astronomers look ahead, say, “five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years,” as humorist Douglas Adams did in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they meet a cosmos replete with myriad slow fades to oblivion....

Instead of sequestering carbon dioxide to reduce its effects on global climate, why don’t we split it into harmless carbon and oxygen? —J. Henderson, Devon, Pa. James E. Miller, a chemical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, breaks it down: Splitting carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbon and oxygen can in fact be accomplished, but there is a catch: doing so requires energy. If hydrocarbon fuels, which produce the greenhouse gas in the first place, supply that energy, thermodynamics tells us that the net result will be more CO2 than you started with....

Editor’s note: A replay will be posted as soon as it is avaiable. For all we understand about the universe, 96 percent of what’s out there still has scientists in the dark. Astronomical observations have established that familiar matter—atoms—accounts for only 4 percent of the weight of the cosmos. The rest—dark matter and dark energy—is invisible to our telescopes. But what really is this dark stuff? How do we know it’s there?...

“To sleep, perchance to dream”—Shakespeare may not exactly have been talking about our nocturnal journeys to another world, but that does not make the phenomenon of dreams any less mysterious or meaningful. Recent research is expanding our understanding—and yielding insights into consciousness itself. Sleep provides science with a way to study consciousness in all its various forms, from vivid dreams to no awareness at all, says neuroscientist Benjamin Baird. When subjects are snoozing, researchers can isolate conscious experiences from the confounding influence of the senses....

“In this region there are 360,000 people like you and me, people who watch TV, people who enjoy a beer in the evening, people that like to go to dance parties, et cetera. And these people need electricity, these people need comfort,” said João Pimentel, director for institutional relations for Norte Energia, the company behind the controversial Belo Monte dam, speaking from the northern city of Altamira. The expansion of Brazil’s electricity supply over the next 10 years will prioritize renewable energy and especially hydropower, said Tolmasquim in an interview with ClimateWire....

Home of Hurricanes. The Invasive Species State. Land of the Rising Sea. Live Free or Die in a Sinkhole. Any of these phrases could proudly serve as the officially legislated nickname for Florida. But the legislature in Tallahassee seems really married to the Sunshine State. Even though Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas all get more sunshine than Florida does, a knowledge nugget I unearthed in the new book Oh, Florida!...

The Falcon 9 rocket, which made its fifth successful flight on 1 March, has stolen the spotlight in the commercial space race. Built by SpaceX, a young company based in Hawthorne, California, the rocket has become NASA’s choice for hauling cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). But it may soon have competition from a rocket that has kept a low profile (see ‘Battle of the rockets’). After years of delays, Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Virginia, has slated the first test flight of its Antares rocket for April....

Identical twins may look alike, but their DNA is not the same as long thought, a new study finds. Moreover, each twin grows more genetically distinct over time. Aside from maybe giving forensic investigators a way to tell which twin committed a crime, these recent findings highlight just how changeable human genomes might really be, twins or not. Identical, or monozygotic, twins result when a fertilized egg, or zygote, splits in two....

Over the past few months, I’ve been invited to speak with well-known writers, musicians and film producers regarding my recent book, Extraterrestrial. Prior to these conversations, I was on the receiving (and admiring) end of their artistic work, but now they were curious about my own research as a scientist. These exchanges led me to recognize the similarities between innovation in the arts and the sciences. In general, it appears that the craft of creating our most imaginative frontiers cannot be formulated as a cookbook recipe....

By Fathin Ungku and Aradhana Aravindan Many of Singapore’s five million people are covering up and staying indoors to avoid mosquito bites as health experts warned that the outbreak of the Zika virus in the tropical city-state would be difficult to contain. One of the world’s leading financial hubs, Singapore is the only Asian country with active transmission of the mosquito-borne virus, which generally causes mild symptoms but can lead to serious birth defects in pregnant women....

BOSTON—A novel treatment for HIV could involve changing the genes in a person’s immune cells and, ultimately, in his or her stem cells, as well. It might even lead to a cure for that deadly disease. Promising advances in that direction were presented here Monday at the 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The pieces have been coming together for some time. First came the understanding that HIV enters a cell by grabbing on to a CD4 receptor molecule on the surface, and then on to a co-receptor molecule—the one most commonly used is called CCR5....

Rarely in recent memory has the world faced such an immediate and widespread global threat as complex as COVID-19. In its face, a select few have risen to the occasion, none more cherished and admired perhaps than the health care workers staffing the front lines. But standing close behind them in the trenches are the scientists and researchers who are among the very few who truly understand the scope of our evolutionary battle with the virus....

BRAZIL Capuchin monkeys employed stones as hammers and anvils to crack open nuts at least 700 years ago, according to new archaeological evidence. The stones represent the oldest record of nonhuman tool use outside of Africa. U.S. Pilots from more than 30 countries will converge on Hawaii this month to participate in the first annual World Drone Racing Championships. TANZANIA Researchers discovered a natural reserve of helium in the Rift Valley—a finding that could help mitigate future shortages of the nonrenewable gas....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - The right mood music can influence how well people work together, a new management-oriented study suggests. Many retail establishments carefully select the music they play in order to influence consumer behavior, such as encouraging shoppers to buy more, the authors write. But employees hear the same music and its effect on them hasn’t been studied. “In our case, the new article focuses attention on the role of music in relation to management questions,” said lead author Kevin M....

According to a national survey, the majority of Americans think that it is essential for the U.S. to remain a global leader in space exploration. The U.S. has been deeply involved in the pursuit of advancing space exploration since the early days of space travel in the mid-20th century. But, as the years have gone on, other countries and private organizations have grown considerably and become rival leaders in space exploration....

With their quiet, often nocturnal lifestyles, salamanders may seem unimpressive at a casual glance. But seen in another light, they positively shine. It turns out that salamanders—and many other amphibians—have the ability to reemit light they absorb, a feat known as biofluorescence, a new study finds. The work suggests the trait is far more widespread among these animals than anyone had thought. “Even in groups where you don’t have those bright, bold patterns—in animals that might be otherwise drably colored or mottled brown—you still get fluorescence to some degree,” says Jennifer Y....

The sea otters splashing off alaska’s aleutian islands should have thrived in their home far from civilization. Instead the furry little creatures were in trouble. Their population throughout the Aleutians and southwestern Alaska had crashed by 70 percent in less than 10 years. Trying to decipher the decline, Tracey Goldstein of the University of California, Davis, and her fellow researchers went looking for disease. What they found chilled them: evidence of a distemper virus usually found in seals....

Peter Mwete, an angular Zimbabwean man in his 20s, was weeding his tiny vegetable plot in the settlement of Marimari when I met him in 2002. The 100-square-meter plot–about the size of a typical suburban backyard–was enclosed by a two-meter-high fence of stout poles cut from the bush and wired together to keep wild and domestic animals out. Peter lived with his father and a 19-year-old brother; his mother had died from AIDS, and his brother was also dying....