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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is ready to start testing 67 pesticide ingredients for their possible endocrine disruption effects. But the testing program the agency plans to use is only a pitiful skeleton of what it needs to be. This battery of tests, first recommended in 1998, is outdated, insensitive, crude, and narrowly limited. Each test and assay was designed under the surveillance of corporate lawyers who had bottom lines to protect and assorted toxicologists who were not trained in endocrinology and developmental biology....

Even a mile underground, our planet is teeming with microbes. Scientists long assumed that these subterranean microbial communities, which dwell in aquifers and geothermal wells, saw little ecological change. But recent research suggests that their populations are actually quite dynamic, shifting species composition within days rather than centuries—and geologic activity, such as when rocks split from compression or expansion, could be behind such changes. Aquatic bacteria and viruses living below Earth’s surface are insulated from ecological disruptors such as solar radiation, changes in weather and meteorite strikes....

DOWNERS GROVE TOWNSHIP, Ill. – With current battery systems reaching their performance limits, researchers are scrutinizing every component of lithium-ion cells in order to develop energy storage mechanisms that can make electric vehicles better competitors to fossil-fueled engines. Lithium-ion systems have made tremendous strides since they were invented in the 1970s. The cells have matured beyond expensive, fire-prone energy systems, becoming the go-to chemistry to power new mobile devices and electric vehicles....

Getting people out of cars and onto bicycles, a much more sustainable form of transportation, has long vexed environmentally conscious city planners. Although bike lanes painted on streets and automobile-free “greenways” have increased ridership over the past few years, the share of people relying on bikes for transportation is still less than 2 percent, based on various studies. An emerging body of research suggests that a superior strategy to increase pedal pushing could be had by asking the perennial question: What do women want?...

Experts see a way to help cities prepare for tropical storms that will likely be larger, less predictable and more damaging than hurricanes of the past. One focus is on inland areas that have recently come within reach of stronger climate-driven hurricanes and stand to benefit from improved emergency planning and stronger building codes. The proposed adaptation efforts come as intensifying storms could pose costly surprises to insurance companies and reinsurers because they draw their strength from warming sea surface temperatures....

Antony van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of London in a letter dated September 17, 1683, describing “very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” which he had seen under a microscope in plaque scraped from his teeth. For more than three centuries after van Leeuwenhoek’s observation, the human “microbiome”—the 100 trillion or so microbes that live in various nooks and crannies of the human body—remained largely unstudied, mainly because it is not so easy to extract and culture them in a laboratory....

By Yasmeen Abutaleb NEW YORK (Reuters) - Overuse of antibiotics made Americans more vulnerable to a strain of bacteria that caused nearly half a million infections and contributed to at least 29,000 deaths in a single year, U.S. public health officials warned in research published on Wednesday. The study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on the Clostridium difficile bacterium, which can cause deadly diarrhea. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, highlight how overprescription of antibiotics has fueled a rise in bacteria that are resistant to treatment....

Every bite forms a memory, and the most powerful ones are the first, says food writer Wilson. As children, we do not simply learn what we like and dislike by putting new foods in our mouth. We also learn by watching others eat—at home, at school and on TV. By the time we turn 18, we have each had some 33,000 unique learning experiences with food, Wilson estimates. In First Bite, she details the complex, often fraught relationship humans have with food and explores why, for some of us, eating can go so wrong....

A recently discovered stellar neighbour of the Sun penetrated the extreme fringes of the Solar System—the closest encounter ever documented—at around the time that modern humans began spreading from Africa into Eurasia. During occasional flare-ups that may have lasted minutes to hours, the dim interloper might even have been bright enough for our ancestors to see. The red dwarf star, which has a mass about 8% that of the Sun and is orbited by a ‘brown dwarf’ companion—a body with too little heft to sustain the thermonuclear reactions that enable stars to shine—was discovered in 2013 in images recorded by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission....

In an eagerly anticipated development, astronomers have created the largest and most precise 3-D map of the Milky Way galaxy. The European Space Agency’s $1-billion Gaia mission released its newest data set in April, detailing the positions and motions of more than a billion stars. The Gaia spacecraft, launched in 2013, scans the entire sky from its orbital parking spot above the side of Earth opposite the sun. Its unprecedented map is based on 25 separate observations of individual stars and their movements over about two years and contains a representative sample of 1 percent of the Milky Way’s orbs....

In a famous series of stories in the 1940s, physicist George Gamow related the adventures of one Mr. C.G.H. Tompkins, a humble bank clerk who had vivid dreams of worlds where strange physical phenomena intruded into everyday life. In one of these worlds, for instance, the speed of light was 15 kilometers per hour, putting the weird effects of Einstein’s theory of special relativity on display if you so much as rode a bicycle....

Excerpted with permission, Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, by Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2012. (Scientific American is part of Macmillan Publishers.) “The world is heavy on us sometimes,” says Katsunobu Sakurai, recalling the day it almost crushed the life out of his city. The disaster began for him, as for millions of other Japanese, at work....

Ideally, any potential date deserves a fresh look, unaffected by what you thought of the last person you saw. But new research suggests that we may not be giving prospects a fair chance when we switch or swipe from one profile to another on dating apps and Web sites. In a study described in March in Scientific Reports, female subjects saw men’s faces on a screen for 300 milliseconds—about the length of a very short view on a dating app such as Tinder....

Fifty-four percent of American adults are coffee drinkers with the average intake being at least three cups of coffee per day. As you can guess, this adds up: the U.S. spends roughly $40 billion on coffee each year. But the U.S. doesn’t even break the top 20 in a ranking of countries by coffee consumption per capita, coming in only at number 22. Coffee consumption proves highest in the land of the midnight sun: Finland and Norway rank #1 among the top coffee drinking countries in the world, although the Netherlands and Slovenia are not far behind....

Editor’s Note (9/21/20): This article was originally published online on March 23, 2016. We are republishing it in light of the news that a woman in Germany died as a result of a ransomware attack on the hospital where she was being treated. Experts suggest this event could be the first known case of a cyberattack directly contributing to someone’s death. Earlier this month a Los Angeles hospital became yet another victim of ransomware—a type of cyber attack where hackers encrypt data on individuals’ or institutions’ computers and demand a ransom to unlock the information....

By Bill Berkrot The U.S. National Institutes of Health said it will fund a study to monitor U.S. athletes, coaches and members of the Olympic Committee staff for exposure to Zika virus while in Brazil, with the hope of gaining better understanding of how it persists in the body and the potential risks it poses. The study, announced on Tuesday, seeks to determine the incidence of Zika virus infection, identify potential risk factors for infection, evaluate how long the virus remains in bodily fluids, and study the reproductive outcomes of Zika-infected participants for up to one year....

On June 23, 2022, the Senate passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was subsequently signed into law. This welcome but tepid measure enhances background checks for purchasers under 21 years of age and incentivizes states’ implementation of protection (“red flag”) laws that allow families and law enforcement to petition courts to remove guns from people at risk of harming themselves and others. It also expands financial support for community mental health care....

We have roughly the same amount of bacterial cells in our body as we do human cells, if not more. Our microbiome of bacteria, fungi, and viruses are populated by more than 10,000 different species that help protect us against infections and even assist in our reproductive health. The microscopic creatures living in our gut specifically help us digest food, aid our metabolism, and fight off gastrointestinal infections. In fact, our gut microbiome plays such an important role in our health that doctors are looking at ways to harness that power for fighting off infections....

Life for female rhesus macaques is a little like being trapped in high school—groups have intense social hierarchies where those at the top spend more time socializing and those at the bottom endure passive-aggressive overtures from peers. A study published today in Science reveals that social status in macaques can actually impact their immune system, resulting in significant differences in immune function between high- and low-status monkeys. In the study, which was a collaboration among scientists at Duke University, Emory University and the University of Montreal, researchers organized 45 adult female macaques into social hierarchies and measured the animals’ immune functions....

A lot of worry has been triggered by discoveries that variants of the pandemic-causing coronavirus can be more infectious than the original. But now scientists are starting to find some signs of hope on the human side of this microbe-host interaction. By studying the blood of COVID survivors and people who have been vaccinated, immunologists are learning that some of our immune system cells—which remember past infections and react to them—might have their own abilities to change, countering mutations in the virus....