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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. This past April, business traveler Tom Stuker became the world’s most frequent flyer, logging 18,000,000 miles of air travel on United Airlines over the last 14 years. That’s a lot of time up in the air. If Stuker’s traveling behaviors are typical of other business flyers, he may have eaten 6,500 inflight meals, drunk 5,250 alcoholic beverages, watched thousands of inflight movies and made around 10,000 visits to airplane toilets....

Haiti has long had difficulty supplying clean drinking water to its more than 9.7 million inhabitants, a situation compounded by last year’s devastating earthquake and more recently by a cholera outbreak that has claimed more than 3,800 lives since October. Whereas the most promising short-term solution to this problem has been treating household water—often collected from bacteria-infested rivers, streams and wells—with chlorine, the logistics of delivering disinfectants and monitoring their use in a country largely devoid of transportation infrastructure has greatly hindered progress....

Last month astronomers were thrilled by the confirmation that a second known interstellar object is flying through our solar system. Named 2I/Borisov—after its discoverer, Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov—it has already attracted huge attention. Countless observatories, from the Very Large Telescope in Chile to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, are studying the object, and plenty more science is on the way as 2I/Borisov approaches its peak brightness in December. “It’s been a rapid assembly of telescopes around the world,” says Michele Bannister of Queen’s University Belfast....

In a new study published in the Lancet, our team presents a simple, yet surprising finding: one of the most direct and immediate harms posed by the COVID pandemic to children is death—specifically, the death of a loved caregiver such as a mom, dad or grandparent. The consequences of orphanhood, defined as occurring when a child has lost a mother, a father or both, can last a lifetime. As the world passes the grim milestone of four million reported COVID-19 deaths, our study reveals that 2 million children at a minimum have been directly affected by this hidden pandemic....

From the embryonic stages to late life, cells often make incredible journeys, sometimes even traversing an entire organism. They reach their destination by chemotaxis, following signals that lead them to the goal like a chemical yellow brick road. The catch is that different levels, or gradients, of a chemical drawing cells to a target only work over short distances. What guides them over the hills and valleys of a longer journey through the body has been unclear....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In February 2013, the journal Frontiers in Psychology published a peer-reviewed paper which found that people who reject climate science are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Predictably enough, those people didn’t like it. The paper, which I helped to peer-review, is called “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation”....

Imagine jumping into a self-driving car with two other commuters in the morning, the electric engine humming as you drive through smooth traffic and past empty parking lots, before arriving at work and paying a couple of dollars for the ride. The auto industry and researchers say this utopian view of transportation is on the horizon, and it could cut nearly all of the carbon emissions from the transportation sector. Maybe....

President-elect Donald Trump now has free rein to make good on his pledge to “cancel” last year’s landmark climate deal. Trump has said throughout this year’s presidential campaign that if elected, he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, or at least “renegotiate” it. Now he can try. “President-elect Trump’s oft-repeated promises in the campaign are fairly black-and-white,” said Myron Ebell, head of his U.S. EPA transition team, in an email yesterday morning....

EPA yesterday trumpeted the United States’ progress in lowering greenhouse gas emissions, tying the reduction to “President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda.” The problem, according to experts, is that EPA is patting itself on the back for a decline that’s largely due to the rise of natural gas and renewable energy. And that rise is sharply at odds with Trump’s vows to save the struggling domestic coal industry. “EPA is taking credit for emission reductions that are a direct result of the decline of coal in America,” said John Larsen, an analyst with the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm....

As night fell on Friday in Japan, workers and soldiers continued heroic efforts to douse the potential meltdown underway at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The covering darkness is not the only reason for confusion: vital systems monitors have lost power, making the status of critical elements—such as the integrity of the nuclear fuel rods in reactor No. 2 or of the steel vessel containing them—unavailable. But what measurements are available are worrying....

Key concepts Mathematics Geometry Psychology Introduction Juice boxes sure are convenient—just poke a straw in and sip away! But have you ever noticed that some juice boxes don’t seem to have as much juice as others, even when they have a lot of packaging? You might be amazed how much thought goes into designing a juice box. Each manufacturer has carefully calculated how big each side of the box needs to be to hold a certain amount of juice inside and how altering the box’s dimensions affects its overall appearance and packaging....

As the United States grows warmer and extreme weather more common, the federal government’s flood insurance maps are becoming increasingly important. The maps, drawn by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, dictate the monthly premiums millions of American households pay for flood insurance. They are also designed to give homeowners and buyers the latest understanding of how likely their communities are to flood. The government’s response to the rising need for accurate maps?...

A new wine delivery service called Vinome is promising to deliver “the ultimate personalized wine experience”—customized to your DNA. There isn’t much (or, really, any) science to back it up. But it’s got a very big name in its corner. Vinome just inked a deal with a startup called Helix, which in turn is backed by the world’s biggest DNA sequencing company, the powerhouse known as Illumina. For the past 15 years, Illumina has been selling machines that can quickly decode the human genome....

About three decades ago a British epidemiologist named David P. Strachan proposed a simple, if counterintuitive, idea to explain why hay fever, eczema and asthma had become increasingly common over the preceding century. Strachan linked rising rates of these allergic illnesses in the U.K. with improvements in living standards since the industrial revolution—in particular, a sharp drop in the number of infections experienced in early childhood. He surmised that exposure to bacteria and viruses in the first years of life (provided an infant survived them) somehow protected against these conditions showing up later....

With the way this year is going, the idea of living under a rock has become—possibly for the first time in our lives—alluring. But it turns out there’s a plant that beat us to it. That plant is moss. Yes, moss. The fuzzy green stuff famed for its love of waterfalls, rainforests, glades filled with frolicking elves, and assorted other moist locales. It turns out they have some hardscrabble kin that live in the desert....

Do you think it is possible to increase your intellectual ability? For decades I have studied the power of this belief—a belief that intellectual abilities can be developed—to become reality, and I have watched as the concept of maintaining a “growth mindset” has taken root in education and parenting circles. My colleagues and I have now shown repeatedly that students who believe their intelligence can grow tend to learn more, acquire deeper knowledge and do better—especially in hard subjects and in negotiating difficult school transitions—compared with equally able students who believe their intelligence is a fixed trait....

AN ERA OF BREATHLESS ANTICIPATION came to an end on March 7, 1912, when Roald Amundsen landed in Tasmania and sent telegrams announcing that he and his team of Antarctic explorers had reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911. Just weeks after that historic announcement—on or about March 29, 1912—Amundsen’s one-time rival for this feat of geographic primacy, Robert Falcon Scott, and the last surviving members of his fiveman team perished on the windswept snow of the Ross Ice Shelf, although news of Scott’s death did not reach the outside world until months later....

That “viral” metaphor for social media just got a little more bona fide. According to a recent slate of independent studies, Twitter can accurately track the spread of a virus or disease – and do it much faster than traditional surveillance methods. From Iowa to Brazil, researchers are discovering there is a distinct association between complaints, worries and random rants on the social media site and the spread of medical issues as wide-ranging as the flu, dengue fever and pollen-induced allergies....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Energy Department report calls for incentives to boost coal-fired and nuclear power plants following a slew of closures that it said undermined reliable sources of electricity. The findings of the study, released late on Wednesday, drew scorn from renewable energy advocates but praise from the coal and nuclear industries. The report dovetails with President Donald Trump’s promise to revive the ailing mining sector. But it differs from conclusions presented in an earlier draft, which had said big increases in renewable power generation remained possible without undermining grid reliability....

Fifty years ago, when the Mount Sinai School of Medicine opened its doors, four Nobel Prize winners gathered for its dedication and made predictions about how science would transform our understanding of our bodies and our world. One of the most intriguing was that doctors would one day understand the physical basis of memory—the structures and processes that allow the brain to store and retrieve experiences. They were right. After decades of research, much of it at Mount Sinai, doctors now have a deep understanding about how memory works, down to the molecular and cellular levels....