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This is how memory loss begins, Sophie tells me: You show up at work, forgetting that you are supposed to be at a breakfast meeting with a client. You blank on the names of your neighbors. Soon enough you walk into a room without any clue as to why you are there. Sophie, a lawyer in her early 50s, who asked to go by a pseudonym, had been suffering from frequent hot flashes and night sweats, both associated with menopause, but the forgetfulness seemed to be in another league....

NASA aims to get its Artemis 1 moon mission off the ground this weekend despite a recent glitch. The agency announced today (Aug. 30) that it’s now targeting Saturday (Sept. 3) for the launch of Artemis 1, a crucial mission whose first liftoff attempt on Monday (Aug. 29) was scuttled by a technical issue. If all goes according to plan, Artemis 1 will launch from Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida during a two-hour window that opens at 2:17 p....

Biotech Treating Diabetes May be as Simple as Growing New Pancreatic Cells​ Researchers at the Mount Sinai Diabetes Center have already developed an artificial pancreas. Next, a drug that could regenerate pancreatic cells in the body. September 12, 2018 Neuroscience Watching Memories Being Made Scientists have developed a new understanding about how memories exist in the brain, and it could change how we diagnose and treat brain disease forever. September 12, 2018...

A nurse wielding a hypodermic needle is unlikely to conjure up calm thoughts, let alone inspire you to go solo and administer the injection yourself. But a new patch lined with short needles, each the width of just a few strands of hair, may soon grant squeamish patients a reprieve as well as a relatively simple opportunity to take matters into their own hands. The innovation could eliminate the pain and fear of getting shots, researchers say, and it could also make future vaccines and medical treatments safer, more effective and easier to self-administer....

MISOGYNY’S COLD SHOULDER In “Women on Ice” [Observatory], Naomi Oreskes describes how she applied to a geologist position at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in 1981 and was rejected because she was a woman. I applied to the BAS in 1972, when they were looking for meteorological observers. I received a response similar to Oreskes’s. There was no mention of tents, but the letter essentially said, “It is not that we are misogynists, but we do not have facilities for women....

EXERCISING RESTRAINT In “The Exercise Paradox,” Herman Pontzer asserts that greater physical activity does not allow people to control weight. He goes on to describe studies on how the human body burns calories that help to explain why this is so. But in one of these studies, “couch potatoes” expended an average of around 200 fewer calories a day, compared with moderately active subjects. A difference of 200 fewer calories a day equates to more than 20 fewer pounds a year....

Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers boost the case for December’s announcement of a possible Higgs signal, but let’s not get too excited. First, there’s no new data in there—the LHC stopped colliding protons back in November, and these latest results are just rehashes that earlier run. In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), physicists have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2....

Planets that start out hot may stay hot, no matter how far they lie from their host stars. A new study suggests that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, the temperature of a planet doesn’t always stabilize over time, so hot-blooded worlds may have a hard time holding onto liquid water — even if they reside in the temperate region around their stars known as the “habitable zone.” “Being in the habitable zone is not sufficient to expect Earth-like planetary evolution,” study author Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University, told Space....

Just after researchers wrapped up fieldwork for the season in the turquoise waters between the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in 2017, back-to-back major hurricanes tore through their study sites and laboratories. It was a serious setback in the team’s work with little-known parasites called gnathiids, whose young latch onto saltwater fish and feed on their blood. But the misfortune also presented a rare opportunity to study how catastrophic hurricanes impact marine animal populations, says molecular ecologist Juan Andrés Pagán, a graduate student at the University of Porto in Portugal and lead author on a recent study in Scientific Reports....

It seems like every few months a new study points out the inefficacy of yet another wide-scale cancer screening. In 2009 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force sug­gested that many women undergo mam­mograms later and less frequently than had been recommended before because there seems to be little, if any, extra benefit from annual tests. This same group recently issued an even more pointed statement about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer: it blights many lives but overall doesn’t save them....

Step aside, huge magnets and radioactive tracers—soon some brain activity will be revealed by simply training dozens of red lights on the scalp. A new study in Nature Photonics finds this optical technique can replicate functional MRI experiments, and it is more comfortable, more portable and less expensive. The method is an enhancement of diffuse optical tomography (DOT), in which a device shines tiny points of red light at a subject’s scalp and analyzes the light that bounces back....

SAN FRANCISCO—Radar surveys of the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, have found the most compelling evidence yet for “cold” volcanoes on a celestial body other than Earth. The discovery may help solve a long-standing mystery concerning the presence of methane in that body’s atmosphere, and suggests that future missions may have a shot at sampling any life-forms that could exist in its depths. In a flyby of Titan, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft scanned a region called Sotra Facula and spotted at least three geologic features that are in all likelihood volcanoes spewing liquid water through the moon’s icy surface....

You reach over a stove to pick up a pot. What you didn’t realize was that the burner was still on. Ouch! That painful accident probably taught you a lesson. It’s adaptive to learn from unexpected events so that we don’t repeat our mistakes. Our brain may be primed to pay extra attention when we are surprised. In a recent Nature study, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found evidence that a hormone, noradrenaline, alters brain activity—and an animal’s subsequent behavior—in these startling moments....

How does a nuclear reactor work? Most nuclear reactors, including those at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi generating station, are essentially high-tech kettles that efficiently boil water to produce electricity. They rely on harnessing nuclear fission—the splitting of an atom into two smaller atoms, which also yields heat and sends neutrons flying. If another atom absorbs one of those neutrons, the atom becomes unstable and undergoes fission itself, releasing more heat and more neutrons....

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have met with enormous public opposition over the past two decades. Many people believe that GMOs are bad for their health – even poisonous – and that they damage the environment. This is in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that proves that GMOs are safe to eat, and that they bring environmental benefits by making agriculture more sustainable. Why is there such a discrepancy between what the science tells us about GMOs, and what people think?...

The F-150 notwithstanding, Americans are choosing more efficient cars. George Will has been described as an “intellectual,” as “erudite,” “brilliant,”even “brainy.” If you’ve ever heard him on television, you’d have to admit that his opinion of his own intellect seems to be quite high. And yet for such an erudite and brainy fellow, it’s amazing how often he gets it wrong when it comes to things environmental. (No comment on his other positions....

Yesterday marked a milestone in the world of corporate sustainability, prompting a flood of praise from environmentalists. Then came the criticism. At issue is Daimler AG’s announcement that it plans to make its passenger fleet carbon neutral by the end of 2039. It appeared to mark the most ambitious commitment of any automaker to clamp down on planet-warming emissions (Climatewire, May 13). “To us the Paris Agreement is more than an obligation—it’s our conviction....

Time seems to move faster at the National Space Science Center on the outskirts of Beijing. Researchers are rushing around this brand-new compound of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in anticipation of the launch of the nation’s first X-ray telescope. At mission control, a gigantic screen plays a looping video showcasing the country’s major space milestones. Engineers focus intently on their computer screens while a state television crew orbits the room with cameras, collecting footage for a documentary about China’s meteoric rise as a space power....

COVID-19 will continue in pandemic form, surging in one or more regions and disrupting daily life, until the world reaches herd immunity. With that, most scientists say, the SARS-CoV-2 virus will become endemic—always present but transmitted among people at modest, predictable rates. After several years the infamous 1918 influenza pandemic made that transition, and the virus is still circulating, 104 years later, in mutated strains. Almost all influenza A infections since 1918 have descended from that strain....

The blood of a man who survived an Ebola outbreak nearly 20 years ago is helping scientists to develop a treatment against the disease. The survivor produced some of the strongest protective proteins, or antibodies, against Ebola found so far, researchers report in two papers published today in the journal Science. One of these antibodies, dubbed mAb114, is capable of saving monkeys infected with Ebola. “It’s really stunning that a single antibody can protect against Ebola,” says Nancy Sullivan, a viral immunologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research identifying the antibody....