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For the first time ever, researchers have managed to reduce people’s risk for dementia — not through a medicine, special diet, or exercise, but by having healthy older adults play a computer-based brain-training game. The training nearly halved the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and other devastating forms of cognitive and memory loss in older adults a decade after they completed it, scientists reported on Sunday. If the surprising finding holds up, the intervention would be the first of any kind — including drugs, diet, and exercise — to do that....

Most of us have seen it happen: a friend or colleague with enviable energy and dedication to a stressful job suddenly burns out. In place of tireless toil comes un­relenting exhaustion, difficulty falling asleep, low mood and a sense of inefficacy. These symptoms may look a lot like depression, but new research suggests that burnout is subtly different in the body and brain. Although burnout is not recognized as a distinct psy­chiatric disorder, it seems to cause a unique profile of changes to neurological functioning, ac­cording to work by psychologist Agneta Sandström of Umeå University in Sweden....

In the world of digital health, Silicon Valley-based Mindstrong stands out. It has a star-studded team and tens of millions in venture capital funding, including from Jeff Bezos’ VC firm. It also has a captivating idea: that its app, based on cognitive functioning research, can help detect troubling mental health patterns by collecting data on a person’s smartphone usage—how quickly they type or scroll, for instance. The promise of that technology has helped Mindstrong build incredible momentum since it launched last year; already more than a dozen counties in California have agreed to deploy the company’s app to patients....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Scientists have spent decades debating whether asteroids and comets hit the Earth at regular intervals. At the same time, a few studies have found evidence that the large extinction events on Earth—such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66m years ago—repeat themselves every 26m to 30m years. Given that there’s good evidence that an asteroid triggered the dinosaur extinction, it makes sense to ask whether showers of asteroids could be to blame for regular extinction events....

Pregnancy brain typically refers to lapses in attention and memory. About 80 percent of new mothers report difficulties remembering things that once came naturally, and although not all studies support this, the weight of the evidence shows that during pregnancy, women exhibit measurable declines in important cognitive skills. But it’s not all bad news. The maternal brain also features important enhancements. Mother rats score higher in tests of attention, foraging and planning than peers who have never given birth....

Jacob Walter likes to remind people that what has transpired in Oklahoma over the past decade is unprecedented in human history. Walter is Oklahoma’s state seismologist, and he is talking about the surge of earthquakes that has plagued his state since its most recent oil-and-gas boom. Production techniques—including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—led to large-scale underground wastewater disposal, which scientists have tied to the state’s 900-fold increase in quakes since 2008. After 2015, when oil demand fell as prices dropped and Oklahoma instituted new wastewater-disposal rules, earthquake rates fell sharply....

First in a three-part series. SUMMIT STATION, Greenland – The midnight sun is shining on the Greenland ice sheet, and Yeti Robot is out for a spin. The probe’s chunky tires crunch a trail through the snow, then jerk to a stop. A blue plastic sled carrying a ground-penetrating radar crashes into Yeti’s boxy black chassis, still tied to the robot by nylon ropes. Yeti’s handlers try to diagnose the problem....

The history of science has beheld the steady replacement of the paranormal and the supernatural with the normal and the natural. Weather events once attributed to the supernatural scheming of deities are now understood to be the product of natural forces of temperature and pressure. Plagues formerly ascribed to women cavorting with the devil are currently known to be caused by bacteria and viruses. Mental illnesses previously imputed to demonic possession are today sought in genes and neurochemistry....

By Fayaz Bukhari SRINAGAR India (Reuters) - Rescuers raced to help communities hit by landslides in Indian Kashmir on Friday while thousands were stranded, homeless and hungry in the city of Srinagar, most of which was submerged by the region’s worst flooding in 50 years. Both the Indian and Pakistan sides of the disputed Himalayan territory have been hit by extensive flooding since the Jhelum river, swollen by unusually heavy rain, surged last week....

Saira Diaz uses her fingers to count the establishments selling fast food and sweets near the South Los Angeles home she shares with her parents and 13-year-old son. “There’s one, two, three, four, five fast-food restaurants,” she says. “And a little mom and pop store that sells snacks and sodas and candy.” In that low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood, it’s pretty hard for a kid to avoid sugar. Last year, doctors at St....

The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects by Jeffrey Lockwood Oxford University Press, 2013 Salvador Dalí, the surrealist painter, was so afraid of grasshoppers that he jumped from a second-floor window at the sight of one. The 19 million Americans who suffer from insect phobias can relate, and I count myself among them. Lockwood suffered his own debilitating bout of grasshopper phobia after encountering a seething swarm, “a bristling carpet of wings and legs....

Reuters Health - The United States needs to curb excessive opioid prescribing and improve access to pain management techniques, suggests a new government study. Researchers found that more than one third of U.S. adults were prescribed the medications in 2015 and many also misused the drugs. “A very large proportion and large number of adults use these medications in a given year,” said study author Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland....

An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs; now Earthlings are fighting back. The sight of saurian fossils in most any science museum is a potent reminder that asteroids can threaten Earth as they swing around our sun, occasionally coming dangerously close to our planet—or, 66 million years ago, too close. Now scientists have tested a method that might save our planet from future doomsdays. In the past hour, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos....

Four weeks into my first semester of college, my academic confidence was completely shredded. I had back-to-back tests in cell biology, chemistry, and calculus, and my time management skills weren’t quite there yet. I failed my calculus exam, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I had the intelligence or the ability to get a degree in science. My story has a happy ending—at least to me. Through stress eating, meltdowns, and support from my professor and older students, I studied my way to an A-minus in that calculus class....

LIMA (Reuters) - The Philippines, Cambodia and India were the countries hardest hit by extreme weather events in 2013, according to a study unveiled on Tuesday at U.N. talks in Lima on a global deal to limit climate change. The report by Germanwatch, a think-tank partly funded by the German government, said the Philippines suffered most because 6,300 people died when Typhoon Haiyan struck a year ago and caused $13 billion in damage....

Few people know the pig business like North Carolina’s Don Webb. Webb raised pigs in Wilson County, North Carolina, until, in the late 70s, residents told him the smell near his farms was unbearable. He tried some solutions. They didn’t work. “I was riding down the road and got to thinking of my own mother and father and what would I do if one of these was their homes [near the pig farms],” Webb said in his heavy Southern drawl....

Government officials in Washington have shut down mail delivery to the US Senate after detecting ricin in a letter addressed to Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, a Republican, on 16 April. Here are some facts about the toxin. What is ricin? According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ricin is a poison found naturally in castor beans, and can be derived from the waste product, called ‘mash’, left over when castor beans are processed to make castor oil....

Rather than deliver an ultimatum to those on either side of the debate, the recent White House statement related to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (PIPA) encourages the entertainment and technology industries to work together to find a solution. This call for a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to clamping down on Internet intellectual-property piracy while preserving free speech has many wondering whether lawmakers will simply rework SOPA (pdf) and PIPA (pdf) using different language or if they will take anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA concerns to heart....

Workers uncovered a tar mat weighing some 18,000 kilograms just offshore of a natural barrier island in Louisiana in the summer of 2013. Although the tar mat turned out to bear more sand than oil, it represented another small fraction of the hydrocarbons that went missing after BP’s blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The sum of all the dispersed oil located thus far, from tar mats to oily marine snow, hardly accounts for at least four million barrels of oil spewed into the cold, dark bottom of the Gulf of Mexico from the deep-sea well named Macondo five years ago....

The Supreme Court’s decision in the case known as West Virginia et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al. is a serious blow to the EPA’s ability to fight climate change—and could have dangerous repercussions beyond this case. The timing of the decision feels especially harsh, as the nation is in the throes of the “Danger Season” for hazards such as heat waves, drought, wildfires and hurricanes, all worsened by climate change....