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A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information. Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program....

When TikTok videos emerged in 2021 that seemed to show “Tom Cruise” making a coin disappear and enjoying a lollipop, the account name was the only obvious clue that this wasn’t the real deal. The creator of the “deeptomcruise” account on the social media platform was using “deepfake” technology to show a machine-generated version of the famous actor performing magic tricks and having a solo dance-off. One tell for a deepfake used to be the “uncanny valley” effect, an unsettling feeling triggered by the hollow look in a synthetic person’s eyes....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Another suite of Apple iPhones, another media frenzy. Much has been written about the $999/£999 iPhone X, the demise of the home button, the “face ID” function, wireless charging and so on. Somewhere down the list of improvements was extra battery life, at least for the iPhone X, thanks to its new souped up A11 bionic processor....

Hayley has finished making a beautiful butterfly with a cookie cutter, which she pressed into the lump of Play-Doh that she just took from Pat. “So whose Play-Doh did you use?” Pat asks. “Yours,” Hayley replies. “And whose butterfly is that?” Pat says. “Mine,” answers Hayley confidently. In a court of law, a jury would be disinclined to agree with Hayley. Most adults would think that the original owner of the material, Pat, has some rightful possession despite Hayley’s creative input....

In four days of speeches lasting more than eight hours at the Republican National Convention, climate change was never mentioned as a threat to the country. That silence stands apart from the climate alarm bells that have been sounding since Donald Trump accepted his first nomination for president four years ago. Thousands of Americans have been killed in natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires during Trump’s first term in office....

We rarely think of scorpions as beneficial. But researchers have isolated two new compounds in the arachnids’ venom that show promise for treating staph infections and drug-resistant tuberculosis. Scorpion venom is beyond expensive: harvesting a milliliter would cost about $10,300, says Richard Zare, a chemist at Stanford University and senior author of a study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He estimates that “milking” venom from one scorpion can yield only a few thousandths of a milliliter at a time at most, and it takes two or more weeks for an individual’s supplies to replenish....

It is not the cartoons that make your kids smack playmates or violently grab their toys but, rather, a lack of social skills, according to new research. “It’s a natural behavior and it’s surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant,” says Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, who has spent more than two decades tracking 35,000 Canadian children (from age five months through their 20s) in search of the roots of physical aggression....

The president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., came to that job in 1999 with a stellar resume. Besides being the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shirley Ann Jackson headed the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Clinton administration and was a physicist at Bell Laboratories and other notable research institutions. How did this lightning-quick thinker develop her interest in both science and education policy?...

Geologists say that they have unearthed some of the oldest known evidence for life on Earth. The discovery, yet to be confirmed, suggests that life arose quickly on the young planet. In this week’s Nature, Australian and British researchers report finding layered structures called stromatolites in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks from Greenland. Stromatolites, which look a bit like geological cauliflowers, form when microbes trap sediment and build up layer after dome-shaped layer. But the discovery involves some of the most physically tortured rocks on Earth, which have been squeezed and heated over billions of years as crustal plates shifted....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Anti-immigrant policies, race-related demonstrations, Title IX disputes, affirmative action court cases, same-sex marriage litigation. These issues are continually in the headlines. But even thoughtful articles on these subjects seem always to devolve to pitting warring factions against each other: black versus white, women versus men, gay versus straight. At the most fundamental level of biology, people recognize the innate advantage of defining differences in species....

With the wave of statue-felling currently sweeping across the United States and United Kingdom, it is clearer than ever that we are living at a time of iconoclasm. From the Protestant Reformation to the American War of Independence, image-breaking has served as a powerful demonstration of a break with the old order. These are not simply acts of destruction: they should rather be understood as moments of what the philosopher Bruno Latour has called “Iconoclash,” generating new images that can be powerful agents of social change....

Mimicking the breakdown of atmospheric organic compounds has led to a cleaner way to make a key nylon raw material. Today, adipic acid is produced by opening cyclohexane using large volumes of nitric acid, a process that emits the ozone-depleting greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. But Kuo Chu Hwang and Arunachalam Sagadevan from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan have discovered that ozone and UV light provide an effective alternative. ‘Our process is far greener, milder and more environmentally friendly,’ Hwang tells Chemistry World....

With each passing year, the crow’s-feet framing your eyes and the creases lining your forehead grow deeper. And those pits and craters, constant reminders of junior high acne, just won’t disappear. Cosmetic and dermatological companies have many potential fixes for your dermal woes—fillers to minimize the appearance of wrinkles, laser treatments to smooth imperfections, even injections of bacterial proteins (Botox) that paralyze your face muscles to prevent skin stretching.* And at least one company is searching for the fountain of youth in baby foreskins—yes, we’re talking about that flap of skin sliced away during male circumcision....

Antibiotics kill bacteria, not the viruses that cause the common cold and the flu. Yet doctors frequently overprescribe them—out of habit or to satisfy patients’ demands—fueling antibiotic resistance. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that up to 50 percent of antibiotic prescriptions in the U.S. are unnecessary or not optimally effective as prescribed. One new approach may help curb the drugs’ overuse. A recent randomized controlled study reported that having clinicians sign a letter pledging to “avoid prescribing antibiotics when they are likely to do more harm than good” reduced inappropriate antibiotic use during flu season....

As a result of inspiring election victories, many by first-time candidates, a dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate now have science, technology or medical backgrounds—more than ever before. We are excited by what you bring to our nation’s legislature. Of course, the current government shutdown has everyone in limbo, but as soon as it ends we hope you can quickly take charge on some crucial issues that are driven by science....

By Matt Siegel and Colin PackhamSYDNEY (Reuters) - A searing heatwave is baking central and northern Australia, piling more misery on drought-hit cattle farmers who have been slaughtering livestock as Australia sweltered through the hottest year on record in 2013.Temperatures have topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit)in large parts of Australia’s key agricultural regions for most of the past week, with the mercury topping 48 degrees Celsius in the central west Queensland town of Birdsville....

Seven-month-old infants cannot talk, nor can they do arithmetic. But a new study seems to show that babies do have an inherent sense of numbers, regardless of whether they can add two and two to get four. Neuroscientists Kerry Jordan and Elizabeth Brannon had previously shown that rhesus monkeys have a natural ability to match the number of voices they hear to the number of individuals they expect to see. When presented with a soundtrack of “coo” sounds, the monkeys chose to look at a picture containing the same number of fellow monkey faces....

Track Your Cat Your Wild Life and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences http://cats.yourwildlife.org Live with a cat that goes outside? Investigators know very little about where cats go when they leave the home and even less about why some travel the open road and others stay nearby. In this project, set up a GPS cat-tracking device and find out where your cat goes. Cat Tracking Down Under Discovery Circle, University of South Australia www....

A survey of more than 1,000 UK-based university staff suggests that the country’s vote to leave the European Union could drive an academic exodus. Forty-two per cent of lecturers and professors surveyed say they are more likely to consider leaving the UK higher-education sector as a result of the referendum outcome. The proportion was even greater (76%) among the non-UK EU citizens in the survey, commissioned by the University and College Union, which represents tens of thousands of academics and is based in London....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every winter, local governments across the United States apply millions of tons of road salt to keep streets navigable during snow and ice storms. Runoff from melting snow carries road salt into streams and lakes, and causes many bodies of water to have extraordinarily high salinity. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, my colleague Rick Relyea and his lab are working to quantify how increases in salinity affect ecosystems....