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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Dental erosion is one of the most common tooth problems in the world today. Fizzy drinks, fruit juice, wine, and other acidic food and drink are usually to blame, although perhaps surprisingly the way we clean our teeth also plays a role. This all makes it sound like a rather modern issue. But research suggests actually humans have been suffering dental erosion for millions of years....

For more than 25 years one idea has dominated scientific thinking about Alzheimer’s disease: the amyloid cascade hypothesis. It holds that the disorder, which afflicts about one in 10 Americans age 65 or older, is caused by a buildup in the brain of abnormal amyloid-beta protein, which eventually destroys neurons and synapses, producing the tragic symptoms of dementia. There’s plenty of evidence for this. First, the presence of sticky clumps or “plaques” containing amyloid is a classic hallmark of the disease (along with tangles of a protein called tau)....

The landmark lawsuit by a group of children against the Trump administration over climate change is headed to trial. Thomas Coffin, a federal judge in Oregon, set a trial date of Feb. 5, 2018. It will take place in Eugene, Ore., before U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken. In a court order yesterday, Coffin also released three fossil fuel trade groups from the case. They opposed the plaintiff’s claims before exiting the case....

The bulky, modern human brain evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago and, for the most part, has remained largely unchanged. That is, it is innately tuned to analog information—to focus on the hunt at hand or perhaps the forage for wild plants. Yet we now pummel our ancient thinking organ with a daily deluge of digital information that many scientists believe may have enduring and worrisome effects. A new study published today in Nature supports the concern....

The saying “like a moth to a flame” might have to be snuffed out. Some moths in light-flooded urban areas have evolved to resist artificial lights, according to a new study in Biology Letters. While in graduate school in Basel, Switzerland, evolutionary biologist Florian Altermatt kept tabs on the number of nocturnal insects that flocked to street lamps. “I was mostly interested in what species were coming to the light, and then I noticed there were fewer species coming to the light when in a city,” says Altermatt, who is now at the University of Zurich....

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND—Snorri Sturlusson is the first name in geothermal development here. That’s because this original Icelander tapped Earth’s heat for a pool in his backyard, according to the medieval Icelandic Sagas. That pool, recently restored, still sits atop a grassy hill in the town of Reykholt. It’s about 15 feet (4.5 meters) across, perfectly round, paved with gray and brown basalt tiles, and as warm to the touch as it was when Snorri built it almost a thousand years ago....

When Qaurat al-Ain brought her fever-stricken daughter Mariam to a doctor in this city 90 miles east of Karachi, she assumed the one-year-old had a chest cold. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and sent her on her way, but the fever persisted. Another doctor tried antimalarial drugs, also to no avail. That’s when al-Ain got really worried—the fever had already lasted two weeks. She sought a third opinion, and finally doctors at a specialized maternal and child care hospital in Hyderabad said her child likely had typhoid....

NASA researchers instructed the Phoenix Mars Lander perched near the Red Planet’s north pole to unstow its 7.7-foot (2.3-meter) robotic arm in preparation for collecting samples of subsurface ice surrounding the probe, the space agency announced today. Phoenix operators were forced to delay deployment of the arm by one day when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which had been relaying transmissions between Phoenix and Earth since the craft landed Sunday, switched off communications unexpectedly....

A bug trapped in a precious gem could offer new clues in the hunt for ancient life on Earth and Mars. The opal, pulled from rock in Indonesia and nicknamed “Beverly,” contains the shell of a tiny cicada nymph. In June in Scientific Reports, researchers explained how it likely formed. Other opal fossils have been found among silica-containing rocks that form near geysers, says Boris Chauviré, a geologist at Grenoble Alpes University in France....

“You’ll never be deaf,” Dr. Hoffman said to me years ago. At the time, I thought he meant I’d never lose all my hearing. But what I know now is that technology would take over when my ears no longer worked. Through a cochlear implant, I would continue to hear long after my ears ceased to function. Research holds the promise that the kind of hearing loss I have may someday be reversible, returning the ear to close to its original pristine condition....

Last October the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit with 12,000 doctor members, asked Philadelphia’s Office of the District Attorney to launch a reckless-endangerment investigation. The trigger for this extraordinary request was not a new attempt by the tobacco industry to sell cigarettes to children or by the petroleum industry to reintroduce lead into gasoline. It was a set of papers and proposed dietary guidelines, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggesting it’s fine for Americans to continue eating a diet rich in red and processed meats....

In the summer of 2006 Marshall W. Nirenberg chanced on a just published biography of a prominent molecular biologist. It was entitled Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code. “That’s awful!” he thought. “It’s wrong—it’s really and truly wrong!” Nirenberg himself, along with two other scientists, had received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 “for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis,” and neither of his co-winners happened to be named Crick....

Researchers in nanomedicine have long dreamed of an age when molecular-scale computing devices could be embedded in our bodies to monitor health and treat diseases before they progress. The advantage of such computers, which would be made of biological materials, would lie in their ability to speak the biochemical language of life. Several research groups have recently reported progress in this field. A team at the California Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Science, made use of DNA nanostructures called seesaw gates to construct logic circuits analogous to those used in microprocessors....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. lawmaker who was President Donald Trump’s pick for drug czar withdrew on Tuesday after it became public he spearheaded a bill that hurt the government’s ability to crack down on opioid makers flooding the market with the addictive painkillers. Trump had pegged Representative Tom Marino, a Republican from Pennsylvania, to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy, as the administration faces an epidemic of opioid overdoses that is killing tens of thousands of Americans annually....

The world needs to tackle head-on the market failures undermining dementia research and drug development, UK Prime Minister David Cameron told a summit of world health and finance leaders in London in June. He announced an investigation into how to get medicines to patients earlier, extend patents and facilitate research collaborations, to report this autumn. But just how much difference will these sorts of measures make when scientists are still grappling with exactly what causes different types of dementia?...

WASHINGTON—Until now, health care hasn’t been a big part of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. But conventions are about more than the nominee, and Republicans are likely to have something to say about issues including Obamacare, abortion, and perhaps even medical research. Here are the five biggest things to watch in health and medicine: Will Pence take the pressure off? Before Trump announced his running mate, he was under pressure from anti-abortion groups to make the case he’s really on their side....

Simple mathematical concepts such as counting appear to be firmly anchored in the natural process of thinking. Studies have shown that even very young children and animals possess such skills to a certain extent. This is hardly surprising because counting is extremely useful in terms of evolution. For example, it is required for even very simple forms of trading. And counting helps in estimating the size of a hostile group and, accordingly, whether it is better to attack or retreat....

New York City children exposed in the womb to high levels of pollutants in vehicle exhaust had a five times higher risk of attention problems at age 9, according to research by Columbia University scientists published Wednesday. The study adds to earlier evidence that mothers’ exposures to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are emitted by the burning of fossil fuels and other organic materials, are linked to children’s behavioral problems associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichThe fourth time he is asked what the dental floss is for, John Reppy seems to hear. He picks up a pair of scissors, and starts snipping away at the plastic strands wound round the shiny beryllium-copper components of his torsional-oscillator experiment. “I want to make a change to it anyway,” he says. As he snips, pieces of wire and piping begin to pop out of the neat cylindrical column he has built, making it completely clear what the floss is for: to hold everything down....

Do plants prefer the hazy skies brought on by pollution to the clean atmosphere envisioned by environmentalists, regulators and the public? That’s the implication of a new study of exactly how much plants, ranging from broadleaf trees to grasses, have been benefiting from the pollution brought on by the particles—from soot to sulfur dioxide molecules—that burning fossil fuels leaves in the air. That apparent benefit is because plants do their best photosynthesis—the chemical process that uses chlorophyll in their leaves to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO2) into plant food and oxygen—under so-called diffuse radiation, or hazy skies, that scatters the sunlight, thereby distributing it more evenly....