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Summer sunlight flickers through warm waters off the coast of Spain. The sea looks calm and peaceful. Near the surface, invisible to the naked eye, a swarm of microscopic plankton, some orange-pink and others dark green, swims in lazy circles, capturing the sun’s rays and using the solar energy to make nutrients through photosynthesis. Suddenly, a tentacled creature called Mesodinium—at 22 microns, a giant next to some of the three-micron sun-gathering plankton—comes zigzagging through the waters, drawn by sugars and amino acids leaking from the smaller organisms....

Local governments can better prepare for disasters by investing in resilience programs and tending to societal problems that are often made worse during and after catastrophes, a new scientific analysis has found. “The frequency and severity of disasters due to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes in the first decades of the 21st century have resulted in unprecedented challenges for communities in the United States,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine wrote in a 117-page report released yesterday....

When Tonya Zerkle, a mom in Cincinnati, Ohio, found out that Ontario, Canada was vaccinating any children who turn 12 by the end of the year, she wasted no time. After confirming with Canadian officials that her American 11-year-old was eligible and checking with border authorities on requirements to visit, she and her family headed for the border on a Sunday morning in late August for one dose of the Pfizer vaccine and one poutine lunch on the way back....

Jose Maliekal, an associate professor of earth sciences at the State University of New York at Brockport, explains: The adage “follow the money” is often invoked to explain the actions of politicians. The behavior of the atmosphere, too, can be explained by a balance sheet—not one of money, but of energy. Solar radiation is the main energy source driving the earth’s atmospheric system. Through a cycle of radiation absorption and re-emission, the atmosphere and the underlying surface exchange energy....

In 2017 researchers from several universities used advanced laser-based technology to peer inside ice cores pulled from high in the Alps. They found the Black Death. The ice-core record showed that during the past 2,000 years, the annual levels of lead in the atmosphere took a sudden dip only once. That period was 1349 to 1353, matching up roughly with one of the worst pandemics in human history: when the bubonic plague killed from a third to half of Europe’s population....

Hani Freeman, a research fellow in animal behavior at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida, answers: Evidence indicates that some nonhuman primates can be introverts or extraverts. In humans, introverts tend to spend more time alone focusing on their thoughts and less time engaging in group activities, whereas extraverts are often gregarious and enjoy interacting with their peers. Nonhuman primates also exhibit such qualities. Recent studies have identified extraversion/introversion in great apes, including chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans....

SHANGHAI—Chinese authorities have launched a nationwide public hygiene campaign in an effort to combat the spread of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD), which has killed 42 children and infected at least 30,000 youngsters throughout Asia since the end of April. The disease, caused by an unusually virulent strain of the intestinal flu known as enterovirus 71 (EV71), so far has spread from Mongolia to Vietnam, including most parts of eastern China, and health officials warn that the situation could get worse as the disease usually peaks during the summer heat of June and July....

By Will Boggs MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Patients with chronic pain show signs of glial activation in brain centers that modulate pain, according to results from a PET-MRI study. “Glia appears to be involved in the pathophysiology of chronic pain, and therefore we should consider developing therapeutic approaches targeting glia,” Dr. Marco L. Loggia from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts, told Reuters Health by email. “Glial activation is accompanied by many cellular responses, which include the production and release of substances (such as so-called ‘pro-inflammatory cytokines’) that can sensitize the pain pathways in the central nervous system,” he explained....

If you like honey on your toast at breakfast, you are ready to perform one of the simplest and most beautiful experiments in the physics of fluids. Plunge a spoon into the honey jar, take it out and then hold it vertically, several centimeters above the toast. The thin stream of falling honey does not approach the toast directly but instead builds up a whirling helical structure. In the late 1950s the resemblance to a pile of coiled rope led the first investigators of this phenomenon, George Barnes and Richard Woodcock, to call it the liquid rope-coil effect....

The National Association of Governors is the latest legislative group to support the American Institute of Architects’ goal of zeroing out new and renovated buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The NGA – which is convening in Biloxi, Miss., for its annual meeting – endorsed the AIA goal as part of a resolution on energy efficiency and conservation. The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties have also endorsed the AIA goal by vowing to integrate provisions related to the built environment in their energy policies....

A core tenet of the classic American dream holds that, given sufficient effort, children can climb the social ladder to a higher niche than the one occupied by their parents. In what seems like a perverse twist on an Arthur Miller play, a new study from Northeastern University found an inverse association between social mobility and gun homicide rates. In U.S. counties where social mobility is higher, gun homicide rates are substantially lower than in those where movement up the ladder remains stagnant....

Adapted from My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, by Brian Switek, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2013 by Brian Switek I was shuffling through Chicago’s O’Hare international airport when I saw it: a magnificent, towering skeleton of a dinosaur. At first I thought it was a mirage created by my travel-addled brain. But the scene did not evaporate as I approached....

The world got hot in a hurry 56 million years ago. In just 10,000 years—an eyeblink of geologic time—temperatures shot up by as much as eight degrees Celsius, according to paleoclimate data. In one swampy lowland that is now part of Wyoming, the average annual temperature reached about 26 degrees C, similar to the humid tropical coasts of today’s Indonesia. One of the locals, loping along in the heat, was a small, brownish animal, with pointy ears and long legs made for running....

Dawn Bradley, an early-childhood teacher, has spent enough time with three-, four- and five-year-olds to know that they often do not get the credit they deserve. Children “are just told to follow orders or are told to only answer yes-and-no questions,” she says. But in five years of teaching at Libertas School of Memphis in Tennessee, Bradley has seen kids persistently try to solve math problems until they get them right, learn to show courtesy when they accidentally bump into a friend, and ask astute questions about parts of insects or features of the nearby Mississippi River....

A hole wider than the island of Manhattan is eating away at one of Antarctica’s fastest melting glaciers. Scientists estimate the enormous cavity—1,000 feet high and 6 miles long—previously contained about 14 billion tons of ice, all of which disappeared within the last three years. It’s the latest bad sign for the Thwaites Glacier, which has recorded some of the most rapid melt rates out of anywhere in Antarctica. Currently thought to be pouring about 50 billion tons of ice into the ocean each year, scientists estimate Thwaites is responsible for about 4 percent of global sea-level rise all on its own....

The cups fell to the floor with a crash. Was this the alarm signal? Or was it forgetting his sister’s phone number the other day, even though he calls her often? Was the telling event last weekend, when he burst into a string of curse words and tailgated the driver who had just cut him off? Incidents that to other people may seem like simple clumsiness, forgetfulness or an overreaction brought on by stress could mean disaster for Martin, a 48-year-old shipping agent....

NASA’s exoplanet-hunting telescope has always had an unsung talent for star physics on the side. Now that Kepler’s primary mission is compromised by broken reaction wheels on the spacecraft, some scientists hope to refocus it on an unprecedented study of the most massive stars in our galaxy, whose inner workings are the least well understood of all star classes. During the four years since its launch, Kepler has discovered more than 3,000 exoplanet candidates, multiplying many times over the tally of known worlds beyond our solar system....

The first full analysis of a 4.4-million-year-old early human paints a clearer picture of what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may have looked like, which is not, after all, that much like a chimp at all. The ancient Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”, as the most complete female specimen is known) is described in 11 research papers published online today in Science. The prodigious research effort combines Ardi’s fossils with those from many other Ar....

Among the many sea changes in policy President Barack Obama is bringing to Washington is his support for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Ever since the U.S. Senate rejected the CTBT in 1999, the treaty has languished in parliamentary purgatory. Yet during last fall’s presidential campaign, Obama told the journal Arms Control Today, “As president, I will reach out to the Senate to secure the ratification of the CTBT at the earliest practical date....

Disease begins at the cellular level. Deviant proteins often wreak havoc in a dying cell long before a larger ill such as cancer or infection spreads throughout the body. Efforts to understand these proteins and how they interact with one another are at the very core of basic biomedical research, but progress has been slow. “It’s pretty hard to look under the hood of a cell,” says Frederick Roth, a biophysicist at the University of Toronto....