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The nasty superbug MRSA has been linked to life-threatening conditions such as body-wide inflammation and organ failure, and now the NFL reports that New York Giants player Daniel Fells may lose his foot due to complications from an MRSA infection. Fells was taken to the emergency room with a high fever a week after getting a cortisone shot to relieve pain from toe and ankle injuries. Doctors found that his ankle was infected with a bacterium called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, and they fear that the infection might have spread to Fells’ bone, which could make an amputation necessary, according to the NFL....

Fifty years ago, on September 24, 1967, American Dian Fossey flew to Rwanda to study the country’s gravely threatened mountain gorillas. She hiked into the Virunga Mountains, pitched two tents and established the Karisoke Research Center. Fossey’s zealous work captivated the world, and she is widely credited with saving mountain gorillas from extinction. Although she was murdered in 1985 under still-mysterious circumstances, her legacy persists. Fifty years later Karisoke is now the longest-running gorilla research program, operated by the nonprofit Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International....

It is a conundrum that has frustrated pediatricians for decades: children get sick and need drugs, yet few medications have been approved for their use. A recent study and a government report published in February concluded that, most of the time, doctors are forced to prescribe drugs to young patients without adequate data, putting kids at risk for overdoses, side effects and long-term health problems. In late June Congress was poised to strengthen existing laws that encourage pharmaceutical companies to test medicines in kids, but that won’t solve the safety problems associated with pediatric drugs....

About 10 years ago David Adam scratched his finger on a barbed wire fence. The cut was shallow, but drew blood. As a science journalist and author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, a book about his own struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Adam had a good idea of what was in store. His OCD involved an obsessive fear of contracting HIV and produced a set of compulsive behaviors revolving around blood....

What’s the difference between matter and antimatter? Sometimes nothing, a new study finds. Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) discovered that antimatter protons, called antiprotons, act just like their ordinary-matter cousins when they are close enough to interact via the so-called strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together into atomic nuclei. Antimatter is essentially the opposite of matter, in which the subatomic particles (protons and electrons) of antimatter have charges opposite to those of ordinary matter....

On an airport shuttle bus to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., Chris Wiggins took a colleague’s advice and opened a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It had nothing to do with the talk on biopolymer physics he was invited to give. Rather the columns and rows of numbers that stared back at him referred to the genetic activity of budding yeast. Specifically, the numbers represented the amount of messenger RNA (mRNA) expressed by all 6,200 genes of the yeast over the course of its reproductive cycle....

Exposure to natural settings has been linked with a vast array of human health benefits, from reduced rates of depression to increased immune functioning. Two recent studies found evidence suggesting that urban green spaces, such as parks and gardens, may also improve cognitive development and buffer against the effects of health inequality. In research reported last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, investigators in Spain, Norway and the U....

The seeds of Alzheimer’s disease may have been transmitted along with human growth hormone into eight British patients treated decades ago, according to a study published Thursday in Nature. If supported by further research, the findings imply Alzheimer’s could potentially be transmitted via close contact with the brain tissue of someone who has the disease. That does not mean Alzheimer’s is contagious, researchers are quick to note. These eight patients all received doses of human growth hormone from the pituitary glands of numerous cadavers—a very unusual transmission route....

I am a brain surgeon who is fascinated by inflammation. Along with my laboratory colleagues, I examine molecules that cause inflammation so that we can discover methods for alleviating the pain, swelling and tissue damage that is a consequence of many diseases. Some of this work has already benefited patients. In 1987 I published the results of an experiment that targeted an inflammatory molecule called tumor necrosis factor, or TNF, to rescue lab baboons from the consequences of lethal infection—a study that contributed to the discovery of a new class of drugs for inflammatory, autoimmune and other diseases that disrupt the normal functioning of the body’s immunological defenses....

Getting a better handle on exoplanet diversity and evolution seems to be a high priority for the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA has selected the Atmospheric Remotesensing Infrared Exoplanet Largesurvey (ARIEL) project as its next medium-class space mission, with a launch targeted for 2028. If all goes according to plan, ARIEL will be the third ESA exoplanet mission to lift off in a 10-year span. ARIEL will study the atmospheres of hundreds of exoplanets, looking for a link between the composition and chemistry of the alien worlds and those of their host stars, ESA officials said....

Cuckoos are notorious freeloaders, conning other species into rearing their young, often at the expense of the hosts’ chicks. But a new study suggests that the parasitic birds are not mere opportunists. Like thieves who yell “fire” to clear a store before robbing it, cuckoos appear to have evolved hawklike plumage patterns and physical traits that temporarily scare potential hosts from their nests so they can lay eggs in them and get other birds to rear them....

When the race to sequence the first human genome was rushing toward the finish line about 20 years ago, I remember feeling mesmerized by what was about to happen. It was the dawn of a new century, and it seemed we were on the cusp of unlocking the meaning behind the blueprint of life, DNA. Once we could line up all 3.1 billion base pairs of the molecule in our genome, I thought—I was an undergraduate student at the time, dazzled by science—we would understand everything there is to know about human health and disease....

By Alla KatsnelsonWhat makes two individuals different? Biologists now know that the genome sequence holds only a small part of the answer, and that key elements of development and disease are controlled by the epigenome–a set of chemical modifications, not encoded in DNA, that orchestrate how and when genes are expressed. But whereas faster, cheaper and more accurate sequencing technologies have developed rapidly, techniques to map the epigenome have lagged behind....

Social media platforms are where billions of people around the globe go to connect with others, get information and make sense of the world. The companies that run these sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, collect vast amounts of data based on every interaction that takes place on their platforms. And despite the fact that social media has become one of our most important public forums for speech, several of the most important platforms are controlled by a small number of people....

Cows, oil and gas wells, rice paddies, landfills. These are some of the biggest sources of methane staining the atmosphere today. Methane is the most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, and its concentration reached a record 1,875 parts per billion (ppb) last year, more than two and a half times preindustrial levels. Peak methane in the atmosphere feels as elusive as a cure for the (next) coronavirus.
As scientists at the Global Carbon Project, we and dozens of our colleagues just published a four-year study and public data sets of the Global Methane Budget to estimate methane sources from land, oceans, agriculture and fossil fuel use....

As data come in from around the world, a clear picture is emerging of who is being affected by the recent outbreak of monkeypox (MPX): Outside Africa, 99 percent of the cases have been in men, and 92 to 98 percent have been in self-identified men who have sex with men. Also, many of the cases in the Europe Union, the U.S. and the U.K. have been in men who are living with HIV....

Humans were long thought to have a monopoly on metacognition, which is the ability to contemplate one’s own mental states. Captive apes have recently shown this skill by demonstrating that they are aware of the extent of their knowledge—they know when they are missing crucial information to solve puzzles or find food. Now a study in semiwild rhesus monkeys provides important evidence that metacognition is not the province of humans, apes or trained animals alone....

Each metro line usually has its own color on the map. For obvious reasons, these colors should be maximally different. Suppose a new metro line is built. We now explain a strategy to choose the color or several colors for the new lines, making them as different as possible from both the old ones and each other. This is illustrated by using the Moscow metro map. •Have you seen the new terminal on the green?...

Quantum computers can theoretically blow away conventional ones at solving important problems. But they face major hurdles: their basic computational units, called quantum bits or qubits, are difficult to control and are easily corrupted by heat or other environmental factors. Now researchers have designed two kinds of qubits that may help address these challenges. Conventional computer bits represent either a one or a zero. But thanks to an eerie quantum effect known as superposition—which allows an atom, electron or other particle to exist in two or more states, such as “spinning” in opposite directions at once—a single qubit made of a particle in superposition can simultaneously encompass both digits....

The U.S. coal power industry has been declining, thanks to the abundant availability of cheap natural gas, falling prices of solar and wind power, and the clear global imperative to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Trump administration has long promised to fight that so-called “war on coal.” Several weeks ago the U.S. Department of Energy, led by Secretary Rick Perry, offered up an aggressive salvo: The nation’s power grid, the DoE said, would become vulnerable if more coal-fired power plants closed down....