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In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben Fried made a difficult decision: He stopped riding New York City’s subway system. He was not alone. Ridership on the city’s notoriously packed commuter trains dropped 92% in mid-April, when New York emerged as an epicenter of the global health crisis. For Fried, the decision was especially tough because he serves as communications director for TransitCenter, an advocacy group that touts the environmental benefits of mass transit....

In a laboratory nestled at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains, the federal government is quietly working to improve the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks. That’s in contradiction to President Trump, who is overseeing a freeze on efficiency standards beginning in 2022. In the real world, that means cars would travel 30 mpg under Trump’s plan, instead of 36 mpg. The National Transportation Research Center (NTRC) is a short jaunt from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s main campus, known for its pioneering work on nuclear weapons during World War II....

Donald Trump refuted accusations by Hillary Clinton that he had once described climate change as a Chinese concoction, during a quarrelsome debate last night that set the candidates on a 42-day sprint toward the presidential election. Twelve minutes into the first face-to-face encounter between the candidates, Clinton raised the issue of climate change by pointing to Trump’s past claims that question the science behind rising temperatures. “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese,” Clinton said as Trump interrupted....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The F-35 was billed as a fighter jet that could do almost everything the U.S. military desired, serving the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy – and even Britain’s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy – all in one aircraft design. It’s supposed to replace and improve upon several current – and aging – aircraft types with widely different missions....

A group of archeologists and volunteers have discovered 600 tiles in the midst of tons of sediment removed from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—100 of which, they assert, formed part of the opulent flooring that adorned the courtyard of the Second Temple, the main sanctuary of the people of Israel. The temple was reconstructed and expanded during King Herod’s reign between 37 and 4 B.C.E. The effort was essentially a massive jigsaw puzzle....

Clinicians can reliably diagnose autism in some toddlers roughly two years earlier than the typical age of diagnosis, a new study suggests. The researchers assessed more than 1,200 toddlers for autism at least twice using standard diagnostic tools. They diagnosed roughly one in three with the condition by age 2; 84 percent of these toddlers retained the label at their last visit, which was at age 3 on average. The finding suggests clinicians should take autism traits in toddlers seriously, says co-lead researcher Karen Pierce, professor of neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego....

Sky-high blood glucose levels, a diet loaded with salt and a tendency to pack away fat sounds like a recipe for a health disaster in a human. But in a Bactrian camel, these are adaptations that may help it survive in some of the driest, coldest and highest regions of the world. Researchers in Mongolia and China have begun to unravel the genomic peculiarities behind the physiological tricks that camels use to survive in the harshest of conditions....

If you ask the average person whether in the long run it is climate change or an asteroid/comet impact that’s expected to kill more people annually, you’ll undoubtedly get some confused replies. Those asteroid movies are scary, but there are no verified instances of an asteroid strike killing any humans, are there? Meanwhile, the science of climate change is currently being overshadowed by a media-driven public debate, mainly in the U....

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. “Pfizer has begun testing its COVID-19 vaccine in children under 12,” writes Apoorva Mandavilli at The New York Times (Pfizer’s vaccine is already authorized in the U.S. for children ages 16-18). And Moderna also is starting its COVID-19 vaccine studies in children under 12, the story states....

In March, as the staggering scope of the coronavirus pandemic started to become clear, officials around the world began enlisting the public to join in the fight. Hospitals asked local companies to donate face masks. Researchers called on people who had recovered from COVID-19 to donate their blood plasma. And in Israel, the defence ministry and a start-up company called Vocalis Health asked people to donate their voices. Vocalis, a voice-analysis company with offices in Israel and the United States, had previously built a smartphone app that could detect flare-ups of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by listening for signs that users were short of breath when speaking....

Move over meat. Beetle larvae consumed as food in some parts of the world deliver as much iron to the body, gram per gram, as beef (J. Ag. Food Chem. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.6b03286). Iron is an essential dietary mineral, but there’s widespread iron deficiency among populations that eat little or no meat. That’s because humans absorb much less iron from plant-based foods than from meat, says Gladys O. Latunde-Dada of King’s College London....

Once adult lab mice learn to associate a particular stimulus—a sound, a flash of light—with the pain of an electric shock, they don’t easily forget it, even when researchers stop the shocks. But a new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign. The research may help explain why a combination of therapy and antidepressants is more effective at treating depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than either drugs or therapy alone....

Born in England in 1799, Anna Atkins was an amateur botanist (an activity then considered by British society to be an appropriate occupation for a lady). She collected and drew by hand samples of the myriad varieties of algae found along British coastlines. As Atkins told a friend, however, some specimens were so small and detailed in places that she had no choice but to experiment with an alternative and brand-new documentation technique....

Astronomers have announced a new batch of discoveries of gravitational waves—ripples in space-time caused by cataclysmic cosmic events. The haul consists of four mergers of black holes that were detected—but not disclosed—in 2017, including a hint of the largest such merger yet, which produced a black hole more than 80 times as massive as the sun. The studies were posted on the website of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration and appeared on the arXiv repository on December 3....

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazineHyenas can count up to three. Researchers playing recorded calls to the wily carnivores found that wild spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) responded differently depending on whether they heard one, two or three individuals.The result adds numerical assessment to the list of cognitive abilities that hyenas share with primates, and supports the idea that living in complex social groups–as both primates and hyenas do–is key to the evolution of big brains....

Like many low-wage restaurant workers in Boston, Su Hua Mei and her husband lost their jobs last spring as the COVID pandemic took hold. With a toddler to care for, it has been a harrowing time for this immigrant couple from China, They speak little English and only finished high school so have limited job opportunities. Mei and other Asian Americans still face potential threats of eviction and unemployment benefits running out....

1969 Restless Moon “The seismometer package left on the moon by the astronauts began reporting tremors as soon as it was installed. The first signals were produced by Armstrong and Aldrin as they walked about completing their tasks. The takeoff of the lunar module Eagle was also recorded clearly. The first group of high-frequency events seemed mysterious, but they were finally attributed to various venting processes. ‘We had no idea [the module] would be such a living, breathing monster,’ said Gary Latham of the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, the designer of the seismometer....

Yeast may be essential to producing ethanol through fermentation, but for years, biofuel production has been constrained by the fact that heat and ethanol itself can be deadly or damaging to yeast at high levels. Recently, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found ways to ameliorate both of these production problems. They published their research yesterday in the journal Science. Jens Nielsen, a professor of systems biology at Chalmers University of Technology, was among the researchers interested in improving yeast’s heat tolerance....

DECEMBER 1956 ELEMENT 101–“We watched with eyes fixed on a pulse recorder connected to the ionization chamber. An hour went by. The night dragged on toward dawn. The waiting seemed interminable. Then it happened! The recorder pen shot up to mid-scale and dropped back, leaving a neat red line which represented a large ionization pulse–10 times larger than would be produced by an alpha particle. No such pulse had been recorded from natural background radiation in test runs conducted for many days prior to the experiment....

Somewhere between Hawaii and the Philippines near the small island of Guam, far below the surface of the water, sits the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the ocean. What’s down there? How deep is the Mariana Trench? The Trench sits like a crescent-shaped dent in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, extending over 1500 miles long with an average width around 43 miles and a depth of almost 7 miles (or just under 36,201 feet)....