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(Reuters Health) - Babies begin to learn words and what they mean well before they begin talking, and researchers are beginning to understand how they do it. “I think it’s especially intriguing that we find evidence that for infants, even their early words aren’t ‘islands’: even with a very small vocabulary they seem to have a sense that some words and concepts are more ‘similar’ than others,” Dr. Elika Bergelson from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina told Reuters Health by email....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Parents and teachers are painfully aware that it’s nearly impossible to get a teenager to focus on what you think is important. Even offering them a bribe or issuing a stern warning will typically fail. There may be many reasons for that, including the teenager’s developing sense of independence and social pressure from friends....

WHEN AI PRESSES the touch-sensitive computer screen, the Arabic numerals 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 pop up in random order. She correctly taps the numbers in ascending order, earning a handful of raisins as a reward. Ai, a chimpanzee, also reveals a lightning-fast short-term memory for numbers. When white boxes mask the numerals right after each is displayed, she still strikes the boxes accurately—unlike some of the human volunteers who take the test....

A brand of specialty mozzarella cheeses. A collection of natural-gas storage terminals. And America’s top-selling emergency contraception. At a moment when half of U.S. states stand poised to outlaw or sharply curtail abortion services, the last-ditch pill for women aiming to stave off an unwanted pregnancy rests in the unlikely stewardship of two private equity firms whose investment portfolios range from Italian foods to vineyard management to children’s cough medicine. Kelso & Co....

Eight million metric tons of plastic waste enter the oceans every year. This equates to one garbage truck’s worth of plastic being dumped into our oceans every minute. The total weight is the equivalent of 90 aircraft carriers. On top of that, models project that by 2050, there will be more plastic by weight than fish in the oceans. This is tragic for many reasons. Whales, fish, seabirds, turtles and many other animals are eating the plastic and dying en masse....

Where there are fishery boats docking after a day’s catch, there are usually seabirds hovering in hopes of lifting scraps. Discards from fisheries supplement the diets of these flying scavengers, but it is less clear how commercial fishing affects the foraging behavior of birds when they are out at sea and out of sight. Using satellite transmitters to track bird movement, a study published in the January 28 issue of Current Biology found that the foraging range of two types of seabirds off the eastern coast of Spain—Balearic shearwaters and Cory’s shearwaters—shrinks on days when fishery boats are operating....

Every year, from late May to early July, a global team of students, paleoanthropologists, geologists and faunal experts, traveling from South Africa, Australia, the United States and Europe, make the trip to Drimolen, a system of caves located north of Johannesburg in South Africa and within the “Cradle of Humankind.” This fossil excavation team, which I am part of, arrives each year with renewed hope of unearthing preserved and complete skulls of human ancestors....

The U.S. is currently experiencing the largest outbreak of measles since 1992. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been more than 1,000 confirmed cases since January. Scientific research overwhelmingly supports the use of vaccinations against measles. Mistaken worries about their harms has led to a reduction in the number of immunizations, contributing to the return of a disease that was said to be eliminated in the U....

President Obama confronted Republicans on the science of climate change in a sometimes barbed State of the Union address that described rising temperatures as the greatest threat to future Americans. The speech collided with the promises of newly empowered Republicans in Congress to depict Obama’s climate and energy policies as symbols of excessive liberalism before the presidential elections next year. Obama was still delivering his address when a senior Republican senator described his climate views as part of a “socialist agenda....

Ocean warming has led to more whales being entangled in fishing gear off the California coast, according to research published yesterday in Nature Communications. The study found connections among changes in forage species from heat waves, a recovery of whale populations and an increased number of whales being entangled in fishing nets. And the paper proposes an index for assessing the risks to marine life and fisheries’ economic stability. “Warming of the ocean is impacting the ecosystem shift, and so we’ve had to come up with a new index to better monitor it,” said Jarrod Santora, the study’s lead author, an ecosystem oceanographer with NOAA Fisheries and an associate researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz....

Researchers at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris have made the most precise measurement of one of the fundamental constants, called the fine-structure constant, providing physicists with a vital tool to verify the consistency of their most cherished theoretical models. The fine-structure constant determines the strength of the electromagnetic force, and is central in explaining a number of phenomena including the interactions between light and charged elementary particles such as electrons....

During his campaign, candidate Donald Trump said little about space science and exploration other than that he thought it was “terrific,” hastening to add, “We have to fix our potholes, too.” As president he has been slightly more outspoken, telling Congress in February, “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,” and pushing for NASA to accelerate its plans for sending astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. Speaking from his desk in the Oval Office, he has mused about sending humans to Mars during his second term and has promised “we’re going to lead again” in space, which he calls “the next great American frontier....

The nation’s top scientists yesterday proposed the most ambitious research agenda yet to limit global warming by midcentury. It centers on “negative emissions technologies,” or NETs. These technologies would pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and either store it underground or, as described in the second of two new reports, combine it into useful products like concrete and paving materials. Stephen Pacala, chairman of one of the committees within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that worked on the project, said NETs would be a companion to other efforts aimed at lowering greenhouse gases....

In the world of recreational and professional sports, many athletes—particularly in contact sports—suffer concussions. These mild traumatic brain injuries cause headaches, memory problems and confusion, but usually resolve on their own with rest. Some players, however, especially after repeated concussions, continue to experience symptoms for many months—a phenomenon termed post-concussion syndrome. A few of these players will eventually develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes dementia symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease....

Within mathematics, there is a vast and ever expanding web of conjectures, theorems and ideas called the Langlands program. That program links seemingly disconnected subfields. It is such a force that some mathematicians say it—or some aspect of it—belongs in the esteemed ranks of the Millennium Prize Problems, a list of the top open questions in math. Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has even dubbed the Langlands program “a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics....

As the scientific community scrambles to find a drug that can effectively treat tens of thousands of patients sickened by a new respiratory virus, they are trying some surprising remedies: medicines targeting known killers like HIV, Ebola and malaria. American drugmakers have shipped two antiviral medications to China as doctors and public health officials there seek an effective treatment for patients sickened by the novel coronavirus, which has recently been named COVID19....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power returned to New York on Thursday after a brief visit to Ebola-stricken West Africa and will report her temperature twice daily to the New York state health department for the next 20 days. Traveling on a U.S. government plane, Power’s delegation did not come in contact with any Ebola patients during a visit to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the three countries worst affected by the deadly hemorrhagic fever that has killed some 5,000 people....

Avid listeners of this podcast may recall my past revelations that I have a super power. When I encounter poison ivy or poison oak, even in the tiniest amount, my body’s immune system explodes in a systemic reaction, creating a situation that requires fast treatment. It’s itchy, uncomfortable, and I’ve spent many sleepless weeks on steroids trying to keep the rash at bay. Well, stop rolling around in poison ivy, you might be thinking....

What would make you happier? Perhaps a bigger house or a better car; a sexier or more understanding mate; surely, wealth and fame. Or maybe you would simply be happy with finishing everything on your to-do list. Well, stop deluding yourself. Psychological research suggests that none of these things is very likely to increase your happiness significantly. Take money, for example. Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, David G. Myers documented an interesting discrepancy between wealth and happiness....

“The catalog of brilliant achievements of surgery must now include the operation performed by Dr. Carl Schlatter, of the University of Zurich, who has succeeded in extirpating the stomach of a woman. The patient is in good physical condition, having survived the operation three months. Anna Landis was a Swiss silk weaver, fifty-six years of age. She had abdominal pains, and on examination it was found that she had a large tumor, the whole stomach being hopelessly diseased....