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In rural sub-Saharan Africa, only one in six people has access to electricity. Kerosene lamps provide a primary light source in many households—at a cost to both health and wealth. A villager in Kenya or Rwanda pays dozens of times more for kerosene than an American spends on grid electricity for a comparable amount of lighting. Charging a mobile phone at a kiosk is even more expensive. “The poorest people in the world are not just paying a bit more for their energy; they’re paying a disproportionate amount,” says Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Azuri Technologies, a solar services firm based in Cambridge, England....

Asteroids might look dry and barren, but the Solar System’s biggest asteroid — Ceres — is chock full of water, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has found. “It’s just oozing,” says Thomas Prettyman, a nuclear engineer at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. He led the team that built the neutron-counting instrument aboard Dawn, which reported its findings on 15 December in Science1. Today, the water is either frozen as ice, filling pore spaces deep inside Ceres, or locked inside hydrated minerals at the surface....

By David CyranoskiFor someone who had just emerged from a 40-month trial, Byeong-Chun Lee seemed remarkably energetic. “He’s pigs; I’m dogs,” said the Seoul National University cloning specialist with a smile, distinguishing his presentation from his junior researcher’s, which was to follow.Lee, who was speaking at the Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, on 29 October, is Woo Suk Hwang’s former student and collaborator, but, unlike Hwang, Lee has maintained his university position....

In April a team of physicists at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., announced anomalous behavior in the magnetic wiggle of the muon. The signal suggests that there may be other forces at work affecting the particle’s behavior besides those predicted by the Standard Model of physics (see “Long-Awaited Muon Measurement Boosts Evidence for New Physics”). But as physicist Sabine Hossenfelder outlines in her fascinating analysis of this finding, whether or not this discovery upends the classical rules depends on mind-bending statistics and higher-level calculations aided by computers to determine whether we have seen something significant or are merely observing a number- crunching fluke (see “Is the Standard Model of Physics Now Broken?...

How will technology change your life in the near future? Artificial intelligence will greatly hasten the design of innovative drugs and materials. Advanced diagnostic tools will enable increasingly personalized medicine. Augmented reality will be everywhere, overlaying information and animation on real-world images to help you with everyday tasks—and to help industry to operate more efficiently. If you get sick, doctors will be able to implant living cells in your body that will act like drug factories, treating what ails you....

One morning a few weeks ago I was chatting with my friend Horacio, a mathematician in the New York City area. He told me he’d lost his sense of smell for a couple of weeks in April. He was cooking for Passover and couldn’t even smell the gefilte fish. He didn’t think much of it and didn’t connect it to the fact that he had been slightly ill for a few days....

At a research institute in Hungary not far from the banks of the Danube, an emotional bond began to grow between an elderly night janitor and an old watchdog living there named Balthasar. The dog would sometimes spend the day at the janitor’s home. “Unfortunately, this relationship lasted only a few months, because the janitor became ill … and eventually died,” writes animal behaviorist Vilmos Csányi, founder of the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, in his book If Dogs Could Talk....

Researchers have long known that the chemical structure of the molecules we inhale influences what we smell. But in most cases, no one can figure out exactly how. Scientists have deciphered a few specific rules that govern how the nose and brain perceive an airborne molecule based on its characteristics. It has become clear that we quickly recognize some sulfur-containing compounds as the scent of garlic, for example, and certain ammonia-derived amines as a fishy odor....

Outside Al Jawf, Libya, a verdant oasis blooms in the middle of a desert. Farmers irrigate their Saharan fields, which receive only 2.5 millimeters of rain a year, with so-called fossil water from a massive aquifer beneath a large swath of northeastern Africa. The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System is a remnant of wetter eras going back 20,000 years, when heavy rains fell that ultimately penetrated more than three kilometers into the earth....

Donald Trump may have been more ill than anyone suspected when he checked in at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 2, 2020. The then president, 74 years old at the time, had serious signs of disease in his lungs and low blood oxygen levels. He was quickly started on an aggressive course of treatments, including an intravenous infusion of the antiviral medication remdesivir and a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies....

In 1908, when President Teddy Roosevelt was asked about what birds could be seen around the White House, he listed an impressive 93 species. That list included iconic Mid-Atlantic breeding birds like Eastern whip-poor-wills and Baltimore orioles. Unfortunately, due to habitat loss and destruction, these birds and many others on Roosevelt’s list cannot be seen at the White House today. In fact, the past century has witnessed tremendous losses in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, insects, plants and literally billions of birds in just the past 50 years....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Vaccination efforts will speed up “pretty massively” in the next couple of weeks, says a U.S. federal health official heading up the distribution of vaccines against the new coronavirus, Andrew Joseph at STAT reports (1/5/21). The recent holidays as well as unfamiliar procedures for working with the new messenger-RNA vaccines account for some of the slow roll-out, the story suggests....

When COVID shut down life as usual in the spring of 2020, most physicians in the U.S. focused on the immediate physical dangers from the novel coronavirus. But soon pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris began thinking of COVID’s longer-term emotional damage and those who would be especially vulnerable: children. “The pandemic is a massive stressor,” explains Burke Harris, who is California’s surgeon general. “Then you have kids at home from school, economic hardship, and folks not being able to socialize....

Imagine a time in your life when you felt out of control—anything from getting lost to losing a job. Now look at the top illustration on this page. What do you see? Such a scenario was presented to subjects in a 2008 experiment by Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleague Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University. Their study, entitled “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” was published in Science....

Dear EarthTalk: Could it really be true that we are in the midst of the worst drought in the United States since the 1930s?—Deborah Lynn, Needham, Mass. Indeed we are embroiled in what many consider the worst drought in the U.S. since the “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s that rendered some 50 million acres of farmland barely usable. Back then, drought conditions combined with poor soil management practices to force some 2....

Three years ago archaeologists found a skull on the Indonesian island of Flores that belonged to a hominin so small that it earned the nickname “Hobbit.” A furious debate ensued: the fossil discoverers classify the meter-tall hominin as part of a separate species that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago; others maintain it was a modern human who had microcephaly, in which the brain fails to reach normal size. Fresh evidence has fired up the newspecies camp....

“Roses are red….” They are also fragile and almost always flown to the U.S. from warmer climes in South America. In Europe, roses are most often imported from Africa. On either continent the flowers are hauled in temperature-controlled trucks and locked up overnight in cold boxes before their final journey to the local florist. According to Flowerpetal.com, which tries to limit the environmental impact of floral purchases, supplying the 100 million roses ordered for a typical Valentine’s Day produces 9,900 tons of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions....

More children are now immunized across the globe than ever before, according to the 2009 The State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization Report, released Wednesday. An estimated 106 million infants received vaccinations in 2008, noted the analysis published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and The World Bank. “This represents more than 2.5 million deaths prevented,” Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), said at a press briefing about the results....

A NASA spacecraft has entered a previously unexplored region of the Solar System—the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The long-awaited milestone, which happened in April but was announced on 14 December, is a major accomplishment for the Parker Solar Probe, a craft that is flying closer to the Sun than any mission in history. “We have finally arrived,” said Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, located at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC....

Wireless, ultrasonic personal health monitoring system: Instantaneous and personal health information at your fingertips—that is the oft-imagined innovation that could change medicine. Physician-inventor David Albert, chief medical officer of AliveCor, headquartered in San Francisco, first envisioned a portable, easy way to measure personal heart health when Palm Pilots debuted in the late 1990s. Smartphone processors, however, were not powerful enough until the latest generation of devices such as the Droid and the iPhone....