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VACCINATION STRATEGY In “Wooing the Fence-sitters” [Science Agenda], the editors suggest that rather than “strong-arm tactics,” we should use a more subtle social strategy of “little nudges” to convince parents to vaccinate their children. But strong-arm tactics are nothing new to public health. How is a law that mandates vaccinations for school-age children, such as the one recently passed in California, any different from, say, fluoridating drinking water? Although forming peer-advocacy groups and promoting provaccine interactions with providers are part of the solution, I do not think these strategies alone are aggressive enough for a time-sensitive and life-threatening public health issue....

Since the earliest days of the pandemic last March, debate has raged over whether U.S. schools are a significant source of COVID-19 transmission and should remain closed—or if in-person learning can, and should, continue with safety protocols in place. Experts have expressed increasing concern over the downsides that prolonged virtual instruction might pose for academic and social development in children—especially kids in disadvantaged communities who were already struggling before the pandemic....

In a study sure to make insectphobes tremble a team of scientists visited 50 houses in the Raleigh, N.C., area and documented nearly 600 species of bugs. Some of these creatures are notorious pests. German cockroaches, for example, had infested three of the houses surveyed whereas 14 houses had termites and five had fleas. Yet the vast majority of bugs in what the scientists described as the “great indoors” are considered benign and go largely unnoticed by their human co-habitants....

The world is doing far too little to prepare for the impacts of a warming planet, even as climate-fueled storms, floods, heat waves and drought become more extreme. That’s the conclusion of the latest report from the U.N. Environment Programme, which finds that efforts to build defenses against climate change impacts—what’s known as adaptation—are not keeping up with the growing risks they pose to humanity. “The world must urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the impacts of climate change....

The Mars rover Spirit, which in January passed its sixth anniversary of landing on the Red Planet, will apparently rove no more. NASA announced in a January 26 teleconference that Spirit, stuck for months in a patch of soft soil known as Troy, has been designated a “stationary research platform.” Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, called the rover’s plight “a golfer’s worst nightmare—the sand trap that no matter how many strokes you take, you can’t get out of it....

Verizon is giving a new mission to its controversial hidden identifier that tracks users of mobile devices. Verizon said in a little-noticed announcement that it will soon begin sharing the profiles with AOL’s ad network, which in turn monitors users across a large swath of the Internet. That means AOL’s ad network will be able to match millions of Internet users to their real-world details gathered by Verizon, including—“your gender, age range and interests....

President Barack Obama has been a busy man while in office: he concocted a fake birth certificate to hide his true identity as a foreigner, created “death panels” to determine who would live and who would die under his health care plan, conspired to destroy religious liberty by mandating contraceptives for religious institutions, blew up the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig to garner support for his environmental agenda, masterminded Syrian gas attacks as a pretext to war, orchestrated the shooting of a tsa agent to strengthen that agency’s powers, ordered the Sandy Hook school massacre to push through gun-control legislation, and built concentration camps in which to place Americans who resist....

Bob Burns didn’t always love renewables. Shortly after he was elected to the Arizona Corporation Commission in 2012, the conservative Republican voted to kill what remained of the state’s subsidy for rooftop solar installations. But last week Burns managed something only a few blue-state climate hawks have pulled off: He helped pass a rule calling for the state to eliminate carbon emissions from its power grid by 2050. In doing so, Arizona becomes only the seventh state to pass a law requiring its utilities generate all their electricity from carbon-free sources....

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky Ten Speed Press, 2016 ($16.99) When bigoted colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to assign ophthalmologist Patricia Bath an office next to the lab animals, she demanded to be moved. She went on to become the first African-American woman to receive a medical patent. Edith Clarke grew up in the 1880s with a learning disability but used an inheritance to pay for college and later invented a new graphical calculator....

In my Scientific American column this month, I noted that there’s not much need to memorize anything anymore. Ask a high-schooler today to rattle off the presidents, the periodic table or state capitals, and you’ll get a blank stare—or a “Sure, let me grab my phone.” Google is always available. And when’s the last time you had to memorize a phone number? But we’ll never consult our phones for everything. Some things are so important we’ll have to commit them to memory even if we reach the age of universal digital retrieval....

We all know the basics of being healthy: eat well, exercise, and get some rest (especially when you’ve got your country’s 500th anniversary to plan, your wedding to arrange, your wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it) because, as they say, if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything. But how to improve the health that happens between our ears? Today, we’ll do a checkup of seven beliefs emotionally healthy people hold....

Why do we look up to those we respect, stoop to the level of those we disdain and think warmly about those we love? Why do we hide dirty secrets or wash our hands of worries? Why do we ponder weighty subjects and feel a load lift after we have made a decision? Why do we look back on the past and forward to the future? Such turns of phrase, invoking a physical reality that stands in for intangible concepts, might seem like linguistic flights of fancy....

CLIMATEWIRE | Scientists have found the fingerprint of global warming on Typhoon Hagibis, a monster cyclone that swept through Japan in 2019, killing around a hundred people and damaging thousands of homes. A new study — published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change — found that the storm was about 67 percent more likely to happen than it would have been in a world without climate change. Researchers also went a step further, and translated the influence of warming into economic costs: Of the $10 billion Typhoon Hagibis caused in damages, they estimate that about $4 billion can be attributed to climate change....

Your tennis partner whacks the ball, and in a split second you are lunging for it—but is it the sound of the hit or the sight of the ball that tells your brain when to react? Recent research indicates that each sense has its own clock for judging the timing and duration of fleeting stimuli, but it is unclear how these clocks interact. One new study suggests they can override and deceive one another....

Every year Europe grows 900,000 hectares of rapeseed to produce biodiesel, the region’s leading biofuel. But what if this crop could provide a second ecological payoff? Scientists at Ireland’s Institute of Technology, Carlow, are trying to use it for environmental cleanup, too. Mining and industry processes contaminate soil with heavy metalsdash—including arsenic, copper and nickeldash—rendering it unusable for agriculture. Although some noncommercial plants can grow in such soils and even take up and remove the metals, potentially useful cropsdash—rapeseed, for onedash—fare poorly in these conditions....

The landscape of present-day Australia once was home to 500-pound kangaroos, tapirs as big as horses, giant wombat-like creatures and 8-foot turtles. Now new research indicates that climate change could have been the cause of these large species’ extinction some 30,000 years ago. According to a study published in the journal Paleobiology, as weather patterns in the region changed, the land started to dry out and affect the animals’ food supply....

1968 Advanced Lasers “There are now hundreds of masers and lasers, generating frequencies over most of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the radio region far into the ultraviolet. Indeed, it seems that before long the art of stimulating emission will be extended into the X-ray region. Meanwhile the development of visible-light lasers is providing excitement enough. As we go to higher and higher powers, laser light is demonstrating extraordinary nonlinear phenomena in its interactions with matter....

Sunscreens shield human skin with chemicals that either absorb or deflect damaging ultraviolet rays, most often titanium dioxide or the zinc oxide known best as the white stuff lifeguards slather on their noses. But it seems they (and others) don’t have to put up with the white mess: Zinc oxide can be made clear—and remain just as, if not more, effective as a sunblock—by shrinking it into tiny particles between one and 100 nanometers....

In the 15 years since the first planet orbiting a sunlike star outside our solar system was conclusively discovered, astronomers have compiled a vast and diverse menagerie of such so-called exoplanets. Of the more than 400 now known, many are large—10 times the mass of Jupiter or more—and a precious few are small, just a few times Earth’s mass. Little is known about these faraway worlds beyond bulk properties such as their orbital periods, estimated masses and, on relatively rare occasions, their diameters....

Like the lapis lazuli gem it resembles, the blue, cloud-enveloped planet the we recognize immediately from satellite pictures seems remarkably stable. Continents and oceans, encircled by an oxygen-rich atmosphere, support familiar life-forms. Yet this constancy is an illusion produced by the human experience of time. Earth and its atmosphere are continuously altered. Plate tectonics shift the continents, raise mountains and move the ocean floor while processes not fully understood alter the climate....