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Atlantic coast states might be protesting President Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil drilling, but they’re increasingly embracing a different kind of seaborne energy: wind. States bordering the outer continental shelf are looking for carbon-free electricity, even as the Trump administration rolls back rules requiring it. Last week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) announced that his state will aim for 3,500 megawatts of installed offshore wind by 2030, enough to power 1 million homes....

The East Coast of the United States isn’t the first place that comes to mind as being at risk of tsunamis, but new sonar maps are now helping to show that these risks do exist. For about the past five years, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, along with other governmental and academic partners, have been gauging the potential for tsunamis generated by landslides in submarine canyons in the mid-Atlantic to strike the U....

Republicans in the US House of Representatives are expanding their request for documents related to a major climate study by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Agency researchers—led by Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina—published the analysis last June inScience. After updating and correcting problems with the temperature record, the team found no sign of an apparent pause in global warming that had been described in previous studies....

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has started testing whether livers-on-a-chip—miniature models of human organs engineered to mimic biological functions—can reliably model human reactions to food and food-borne illnesses. The experiments will help the agency to determine whether companies can substitute chip data for animal data when applying for the approval of a new compound, such as a food additive, that could prove toxic. It is the first time that a regulatory agency anywhere in the world has pursued organs-on-chips as an alternative to animal testing....

KATOWICE, Poland—The United States worked with Russia and Saudi Arabia on Saturday night to sideline climate science in U.N. negotiations, angering nations that say urgent action is needed for their survival. The three countries and Kuwait blocked nearly 200 nations involved in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change from “welcoming” a U.N. report in October saying that “unprecedented” action is required to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and stave off worldwide hardship....

It’s not your imagination. Wine really has gotten boozier. In the past two decades the maximum alcohol content of wine has crept up from about 13 percent to, in some cases, northward of 17 percent, a side effect of the growing popularity of wines with richer fruit flavor. The intoxication inflation has gotten so bad that wine scientists have begun to bioprospect for wild yeasts that turn a smaller quantity of the sugar in grape juice into alcohol during fermentation than does the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae—humanity’s partner in inebriation for thousands of years—but which can still produce a fine, finished wine....

Check your junk drawer at home, and you’re likely to find a tangled mess of electronic device chargers—many of them probably obsolete. Late last week the European Union proposed a new regulation that would solve this problem by requiring all small electronics (including phones, tablets, portable speakers and cameras) to have the same type of charging port. All such electronics sold in the E.U. would need to switch to the USB-C standard within two years....

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, two competing teams of astronomers independently discovered the first known transiting exoplanet—a world that, viewed from Earth, passed across the face of its star, casting a shadow toward watchful telescopes here. Two decades later, transits have become the lifeblood of exoplanet studies, yielding thousands of worlds via space telescopes such as NASA’s Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions and allowing researchers not only to gauge a planet’s size and orbit but also its density and bulk composition....

(Reuters) - A barge leaked oil into the Houston Ship Channel following a collision with a bulk carrier on Saturday near Texas City, and emergency responders have laid down floating barriers in an effort to contain the spill, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. The incident at the mouth of Galveston Bay has led to a shutdown of the channel for ship traffic entering and exiting the Gulf of Mexico, said a spokesman for the Galveston County Office of Emergency Management....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineAfter decades of dashed hopes, AIDS vaccine developers are allowing themselves some cautious optimism. At a conference this week in Bangkok, Thailand, scientists reported molecular clues that help to explain the first-ever success of an HIV vaccine trial in humans (see ‘Vaccine protects against HIV virus’). The results could point the way forward for designing future vaccines.“You might say this is the most successful experiment we’ve had so far,” says Adriano Boasso, an immunologist at Imperial College London....

The digestive tract and the brain are crucially linked, according to mounting evidence showing that diet and gut bacteria are able to influence our behavior, thoughts and mood. Now researchers have found evidence of bacterial translocation, or “leaky gut,” among people with depression. Normally the digestive system is surrounded by an impermeable wall of cells. Certain behaviors and medical conditions can compromise this wall, allowing toxic substances and bacteria to enter the bloodstream....

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you.” This may be the first empathetic utterance by a commercial machine. In the late 1990s the Boston company SpeechWorks International began supplying companies with customer-service software programmed to use this phrase and others. In the years since, we have become accustomed to talking to machines. Nearly every call to a customer-service line begins with a conversation with a robot. Hundreds of millions of people carry an intelligent personal assistant around in their pocket....

Schizophrenia is a distressing disorder involving hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and agitation. It affects around one in 100 people in the U.S., with symptoms usually first appearing between the ages of 16 and 30. Its causes have long been debated, particularly regarding whether genetics plays a role. It is known to be highly heritable, but small sample sizes and other methodology hurdles stymied early attempts to discern a genetic link. Now the biggest-ever genetic study of mental illness has found 128 gene variants associated with schizophrenia, in 108 distinct locations in the human genome....

The following is excerpted from a feature that appeared last December in the medical journal BMJ: As access to space travel for personal or employment reasons increases, clinicians may be faced with new medical challenges and questions in their daily practice. For example: How long after a hip replacement can my patient safely embark on a ballistic two–hour flight to Australia? Can my patient with stable angina and a pacemaker for complete heart block participate in a suborbital Virgin Galactic flight?...

In this, our modern, data-infused era of medicine, science has elucidated connections within our bodies that were not apparent only a few years ago. The Human Microbiome Project and similar initiatives have uncovered compelling evidence that the quality and diversity of bacteria residing inside of us can have a significant impact on both our health and susceptibility to disease. Innovations in cancer, leveraging tools of genomic sequencing, suggest that in many instances, a cancer’s geography within the body may be less important than specific genetic mutations of the tumors....

At least 3,700 years ago, Babylonian mathematicians approximated the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. They inscribed their answer, the first discovered value of pi, on a humble clay tablet: 25/8, or 3.125. Now Carl-Johan Haster, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has managed to do almost as well: in a study uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.org, he measured pi to be about 3.115. In the intervening years, researchers have calculated the true value of the ratio to a modest 50 trillion decimal places with the aid of powerful computers (you probably know how it starts: 3....

Key concepts Brain Perception Senses Smell Introduction Whether it is freshly baked cookies, smoke from a wood fire or a bouquet of roses—your nose is an amazing smell detector! Your sense of smell cannot only identify a huge variety of odors, but it is also incredibly sensitive. Think about how easily you can detect if someone in your neighborhood is having a barbecue just by smelling hints of smoke from a faraway grill....

Was Jason Bourne’s amnesia neuroscientifically accurate? What does science have to say about morality or about basketball rebounds? If nothing else, the upcoming World Science Festival (worldsciencefestival.com)—running from May 28 to June 1 in New York City—breaks through the abstruseness barrier. Some three dozen events—panel discussions, science-inspired music and dance performances, and a street festival geared toward kids—aim to reintegrate science into the broader culture. Organized by a group headed by the husband-and-wife team of Columbia University physicist and author Brian Greene and former ABC News television producer Tracy Day, the festival may become an annual event....

Early on a cold spring morning, Diana Wall is trying out a tool normally used to make holes on golf courses—and she can’t contain her excitement. Her team has always used more laborious methods to take samples of soil and its resident organisms. “Oh, that’s a beautiful core,” she says as one student bags a sample filled with tiny roundworms. “Hello, nematodes!” Wall, a soil ecologist and environmental scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, has come to this site about an hour east of the campus to collect data for one of her latest experiments....

The mood at Bäckaskog Castle in southern Sweden should have been upbeat when chemists and physicists gathered there for a symposium in May 2016. The meeting, sponsored by the Nobel Foundation, offered researchers a chance to take stock of global efforts to probe the limits of nuclear science, and to celebrate four new elements that they had added to the periodic table a few months earlier. The names of the elements were due to be announced within days, a huge honour for the researchers and countries responsible for the discoveries....