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By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Over the course of a year, taking cranberry capsules did nothing to stave off urinary tract infections (UTIs) among older women living in nursing homes, a U.S. study finds. There was no significant difference in the presence of bacteriuria plus pyuria in those who took cranberry capsules and those who took placebo capsules, the researchers found. “I think it reinforces what many of the other studies have said so far,” said lead author Dr....

Fully functional quantum computers and a new quantum industry may appear much sooner than many have anticipated—thanks to five new National Quantum Information Science Research centers just announced by the U.S. Department of Energy. This latest development in the recently launched National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December 2018, comes with $625 million in funding over five years. It’s a huge deal: for the first time, researchers from academia, U....

Few biological facts seem as irrevocable as brain death. It has long been assumed that when we die, our neurons die with us. But a new study on the neuron-packed tissue of the eye is beginning to challenge that dogma. In the new work, researchers restored electrical activity in human retinas—the light-sensitive neural tissue that sits at the back of our eyes and communicates with our brains—from recently deceased organ donors....

Children growing up in low-income homes score lower than their wealthier peers on cognitive tests and other measures of scholastic success, study after study has found. Now mounting evidence suggests a way to mitigate this disadvantage: learning another language. In an analysis published online in January in Child Development, Singapore Management University researchers probed demographic data and intellectual assessments from a subset of more than 18,000 kindergartners and first graders in the U....

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON Idaho (Reuters) - Conservationists filed a lawsuit on Monday demanding that the Obama administration give greater protection to the Canada lynx, a type of rare wild cat that roams mountainous areas across the northern United States and the Rocky Mountains. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in September it was extending federal Endangered Species Act safeguards to the animals wherever they are found in the lower 48 U....

Do those with more testosterone coursing through their bodies make riskier, more aggressive decisions? To test the popular idea, researchers from Switzerland and the U.K. gave 121 women either 0.5 milligram of the hormone or a placebo and had them play an ultimatum bargaining game in pairs. With real money on the line, one player of the pair had to propose how to split the funds. The other player could reject the offer if she thought it unfair—and if the game ended in a stalemate, no money was distributed....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that most of the big car rental companies have gone “green” lately. What’s the story? – Ari Zucker, New York, N.Y. No doubt, rental car companies large and small have responded to increased consumer demand for fuel efficiency in the last few years by stocking up on gasoline-electric hybrids and other vehicles with better mileage and lower emissions. But whether or not these companies will continue their commitment to fuel efficiency as gas prices fall and consumers begin to look again at bigger cars remains to be seen....

The three of us were sitting together in a café in Seefeld, a small town deep in the Austrian Alps. It was the summer of 2012, and we were stuck. Not stuck in the café—the sun was shining, the snow on the Alps was glistening, and the beautiful surroundings were sorely tempting us to abandon the mathematical problem we were stuck on and head outdoors. We were trying to explore the connections between 20th-century mathematical results by Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and quantum physics....

Elaine Mardis and her colleagues first encountered 39-year-old Lucy (not her real name) in 2010 at the Genome Institute at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Lucy had been referred there after a confusing leukaemia diagnosis. Her doctors thought she had a subtype of the disease called acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL) — one of the most treatable forms — which usually occurs when parts of chromosomes 15 and 17 get mixed up, or translocated, triggering overproduction of blood-forming cells....

Daniel A. Lashof NRDC Climate Center The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) establishes the objective of preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” While a “non-dangerous” concentration level has not been defined under the UNFCCC and is not a purely scientific concept, the European Union has set a goal of avoiding an increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels in order to avoid the most dangerous changes to climate....

One of the most intriguing aspects of the history of the human quest to discover whether or not there is other life in the universe, and whether any of it is recognizably intelligent in the way that we are, is just how much our philosophical mood has changed back and forth across the centuries. Today we’re witnessing a bit of a “golden age” in terms of active work towards answers. Much of that work stems from the overlapping revolutions in exoplanetary science and solar system exploration, and our ongoing revelations about the sheer diversity and tenacity of life here on Earth....

Election Day in the United States is a little more than a month away, and scientists are watching the outcome of the presidential race closely. President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, actions to downplay climate change and perpetuation of misinformation have horrified many scientists. “We face a national crisis unlike any we have witnessed,” says a statement of concern about the state of democracy in the country, drafted by US scientists and signed by more than 3,400 supporters in response to Trump’s leadership....

We don’t know that there were Three Kings. The Gospel according to Matthew doesn’t say, but since three gifts were brought to the Infant Jesus, it’s been assumed that three men were associated with them. Neither does the Gospel say that they were kings, they are described as wise men – Magi, from the Greek magoi. For centuries they were thought of as philosophers. It was only in the second millennium that they came to be seen as kings, and shown in art as crowned figures....

With the global population of humans well beyond seven billion, it is difficult to imagine that Homo sapiens was once an endangered species. Yet studies of the DNA of modern-day people indicate that, once upon a time, our ancestors did in fact undergo a dramatic population decline. Although scientists lack a precise time line for the origin and near extinction of our species, we can surmise from the fossil record that our forebears arose throughout Africa shortly before 195,000 years ago....

Most industrial chemists spend their days separating the components of large quantities of chemical mixtures into pure or purer forms. The processes involved, such as distillation, account for 10–15% of the world’s energy consumption. Methods to purify chemicals that are more energy efficient could, if applied to the US petroleum, chemical and paper manufacturing sectors alone, save 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and US$4 billion in energy costs annually (see ‘Cutting costs’)....

Ever since it was approved in 2000 as an abortion pill, mifepristone has been regulated as if it were a dangerous substance. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration required doctors to be specially certified to prescribe it. Patients had to sign an agreement confirming that they had been counseled on its risks. Most onerously, the pill had to be given in person in an approved clinical setting—even though a second drug used to complete the abortion, misoprostol, could be taken at home....

Astronomers have been witnessing the ends of worlds for millennia. Even in antiquity, sky watchers noted the rare star suddenly bursting into brightness and then fading away over months or years. These outbursts are supernovae, explosive stellar deaths that can also annihilate a star’s accompanying planets. Today modern researchers can see black holes shredding entire stars (alongside any unseen companions) and find evidence for debris from shattered rocky worlds raining down on white dwarf stars, which are the cinderlike corpses of expired suns....

While examining brain tissue through a microscope of hospital patients in the 1930’s, Hungarian neuropathologist Ladislaus Meduna made an intriguing observation: Brain cells, called glia, increased greatly in tissue taken from people with epilepsy. But samples from patients with schizophrenia and depression had far fewer glia in the cerebral cortex than normal. Unlike neurons, glia cannot fire electrical impulses, so they were (and still are) largely ignored by most neuroscientists. But Meduna speculated that schizophrenia and depression might result from a deficiency of glial cells, so he reasoned that by inducing a seizure, he could increase their numbers and cure his patients....

The brains of children with autism fold differently than those of their typical peers, two new studies suggest. But whether they are unusually smooth or convoluted depends on location and age. Certain regions of the brain’s outer layer, the cerebral cortex, are more intricately folded in school-age children and adolescents with autism than they are in controls, according to one of the studies. In young people, this folding difference may be the most obvious structural feature of the autism brain, says Ralph-Axel Müller, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who led the study....

My hometown of Los Angeles is home to the earliest reported earthquake dating back to 1769 (and, of course, many more since then). The largest recorded earthquake in the world occurred in Chile in May of 1960 measuring at a magnitude of 9.5 moment magnitudes. A single earthquake can cause destruction costing hundreds of millions of dollars to repair and, far more importantly, can end in fatalities. In 2009, scientists in Italy were convicted of manslaughter for failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake that killed more than 300 people....