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After years working in the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), Joanne Loades, an independent nurse and health educator from Norwich left in 2010 to pursue her own healthcare consulting business. Since then, Loades has set up programs, advised the NHS and trained more than 5,000 healthcare providers to encourage high-quality, evidence-based care for cardiovascular disease. But when Loades returned to acute care in early 2020 to help treat COVID-19 patients, she was shocked by what she saw....

“A very interesting new mammal has recently been received at the British Museum in the form of a sh-eating rat from the mountain streams of Central Peru. The animal is about the size of a common house rat, but has a flattened head, strong and numerous whisker bristles, and very small eyes and ears. The chief interest of the new form centers in the fact of its being wholly a sh-eater, having its incisor teeth modied for catching a slippery, active prey by the development of their outer corners into long sharp points, and its intestines altered by the reduction almost to nil of its caecum, an organ in vegetarian Muridae....

Scientists are taking a hard look at tweaking the planet’s thermostat with geoengineering methods, which were once a taboo avenue for research, as a way to stave off some of the worst-case scenarios for the warming Earth. Earlier this week, the National Research Council convened a committee to review approaches that could cool the world, with the goal of creating a scientific foundation that could help resolve political, ethical and legal issues surrounding these controversial techniques....

Investigators can utilize a variety of tools to determine whether currency or historical documents are counterfeit. But figuring out whether a digital image has been tampered with can be more difficult, because the product is less tangible. Now scientists have developed a technique based on holograms that they say will help curb digital fraud. The approach relies on an invisible watermark that is embedded into a digital file. Giuseppe Schirripa Spagnolo from the University of Roma Tre in Rome and his colleagues developed a system in which an image such as a company logo is first transformed into a computer generated hologram (CGH)....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Often, you can tell where someone grew up by the way they speak. For example, if someone in the United States doesn’t pronounce the final “r” at the end of “car,” you might think they are from the Boston area, based on sometimes exaggerated stereotypes about American accents and dialects, such as “Pahk the cahr in Hahvahd Yahd....

Dear EarthTalk: I hear that many school cafeterias have nutrition standards no better—even worse—than those of fast food chains. What can be done about this? — Betsy Edison, Nashville, TN Americans have done a great job making sure that our kids have something to eat at school regardless of socioeconomic status, with the National School Lunch Program providing low-cost or free lunches to upwards of 31 million students at 92 percent of U....

The ability to generate natural-sounding speech has long been a core challenge for computer programs that transform text into spoken words. Artificial intelligence (AI) personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and the Google Assistant all use text-to-speech software to create a more convenient interface with their users. Those systems work by cobbling together words and phrases from prerecorded files of one particular voice. Switching to a different voice—such as having Alexa sound like a man—requires a new audio file containing every possible word the device might need to communicate with users....

Climate change was riding an updraft in 2008. More Americans than ever before—or since—saw it as a troubling issue. And President-elect Obama had just pledged in his campaign to do something about it. So did his Republican opponent. It went from a salesman’s pitch to a presidential commitment two weeks after the election. Obama vowed to rewrite the nation’s energy profile, eliminating all but 20 percent of existing emissions within 40 years....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Cassava is one of the developing world’s most important crops. Its starchy roots and leaves are a staple food for more than 500 million people in Africa each day. And Africa produces half of the world’s total cassava output; the continent’s main growers are the Congo, Côte d’lvoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. It’s also climate resilient, as it is predicted to improve yield in higher temperatures....

My past students and collaborators are starting to organize a scientific conference for my 60th birthday to be held about a year from now. Their gesture reminded me of Rabbi Hanina’s words: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and the most from my students.” We all started as students. Just as kids bump into things as they’re learning to maneuver through the world, many of us have scars and bruises from early encounters with our mentors....

During the Apollo 15 moon mission in 1971, astronauts David Scott and James Irwin unfolded NASA’s electric-powered lunar rover from the lunar module and became the first humans to take a spin on another world as they traversed the moon’s craggy surface. That maiden lunar drive will be revisited—at least in spirit—today and tomorrow as NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center hosts its 16th annual Great Moonbuggy Race at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala....

The gut microbiome has stolen the show when it comes to the recent explosion of research on the bacteria that thrive within us. But bacteria also live in a woman’s breast tissue—and the mix of those microbes may have an equally important effect on health, according to a new study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The results “suggest that microbes in the breast, even in low amounts, may be playing a role in breast cancer—increasing the risk in some cases and decreasing the risk in other cases,” says Gregor Reid, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Western University in Ontario and the study’s senior author....

You have to go to extreme lengths to find places on Earth that don’t reveal that they’re part of a water-rich planet. Even the highest and driest deserts, like the Atacama Plateau in South America, still get a minimum of a couple of millimeters of annual precipitation on average (although there are places where we don’t yet know what the average is because it’s simply not rained for years). And if you whip out your handy mass spectrometer on a desert walkabout the chances are that you’ll be able to detect at least a few atmospheric water molecules....

It’s a cool November day near Bologna, Italy. We are strolling through the woods with truffle hunter Mirko Illice and his little dog, Clinto. Clinto runs back and forth among the oak trees sniffing the ground, pausing, then running again. Suddenly, he stops and begins to dig furiously with both paws. “Ah, he’s found an Italian white truffle,” Mirko explains. “He uses both paws only when he finds one of those....

Graduate and medical school interviews are not democratic spaces. Whatever the interviewer says during that 30 minutes, is the rule of law. Surely there were policies about the legality of certain questions, but those often aren’t operational during the interview. Those of us in the chair only hope that the questions aren’t too difficult, that the interviewer doesn’t focus on (or conjure) a flaw in our application, spend the 30 minutes of our engagement berating us for it, breaking our self-esteem for all of eternity....

The International Space Station (ISS) will soon host the coldest spot in the entire universe, if everything goes according to plan. This August, NASA plans to launch to the ISS an experiment that will freeze atoms to only 1 billionth of a degree above absolute zero—more than 100 million times colder than the far reaches of deep space, agency officials said. The instrument suite, which is about the size of an ice chest, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL)....

In one decade, cars replaced horses (and bicycles) as the standard form of transport for people and goods in the United States. In 1907 there were 140,300 cars registered in the U.S. and a paltry 2,900 trucks. People and goods still travelled long distances on land by railroad, and short distances by foot or horse-drawn carriage. Almost nobody rode horses, but plenty of people rode bicycles for pleasure and for transport....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. E. coli outbreaks hospitalize people and cause food recalls pretty much annually in the United States. This year is no different. Obviously some E. coli can be deadly for people. But not all strains of these bacteria make you sick. In fact, you have a variety of strains of E. coli in your intestines right now—including one that’s busy making the antioxidant vitamin K, crucial for your and its survival....

Your temples throb as you enter the pharmacy. For months you have been battling daily migraine headaches. You have tried your doctor’s every suggestion—drinking more water, changing your diet, getting extra sleep—and downing a host of pain pills. Now you are armed with a prescription for a totally different kind of treatment. The pharmacist guides you to a shelf of headgear, labeled with different brain regions. She fits you for a cap, the underside of which features thin conductive metal strips, called electrodes, coated in adhesive gel to stick gently to your scalp....

The feminine mystique is not just figurative—it also extends to women’s reproductive anatomy. For decades women were excluded from research studies, leading to a dearth of information about female physiology that is only just starting to be filled in. Some insights have come from research on tissue grown in standard petri dishes but these studies still cannot represent the intricacies of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Now in a bioengineering first, researchers have created a miniature laboratory model of the entire female reproductive tract, complete with hormone signaling....