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California mandated a switch yesterday to nonpolluting shuttles and buses running short hops at its largest airports. The California Air Resources Board unanimously passed the policy, the first of its kind in the nation. It requires by 2035 a switch to zero-emission vehicles at 13 airports: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland and Ontario International, along with commuter airports in Orange County, Burbank-Hollywood, Long Beach, Palm Springs, Fresno and Santa Barbara....

The World Health Organization declared three years ago that circumcision should be part of any strategy to prevent HIV infection in men. The organization based its recommendation on three randomized clinical trials in Africa that found the incidence of HIV was 60 percent lower in men who were circumcised. Although this “research evidence is compelling,” wrote the WHO panel assigned to the topic, there was little evidence explaining how circumcision might reduce a man’s risk of acquiring HIV....

If it had not been for two storms 2,000 years apart in the same area of the Mediterranean, the most important technological artifact from the ancient world could have been lost forever. The first storm, in the middle of the 1st century B.C., sank a Roman merchant vessel laden with Greek treasures. The second storm, in A.D. 1900, drove a party of sponge divers to shelter off the tiny island of Antikythera, between Crete and the mainland of Greece....

On the Atlantic coast of the U.S., archaeologists found oyster shells left by Native Americans more than 4,000 years ago. In Morocco, paleontologists excavated the fossils of a dinosaur that roamed Earth 168 million years ago. How did the researchers determine these ages? When examining remnants from the past, experts use radiometric dating, a versatile technique that involves counting radioactive atoms of certain elements that are still present in a sample....

Face it, movie fans: the DVD is destined to be dead as a doornail. Only a few Blockbuster stores are still open. Netflix’s CEO says, “We expect DVD subscribers to decline steadily every quarter, forever.” The latest laptops don’t even come with DVD slots. So where are film enthusiasts suppose to rent their flicks? Online, of course. There are still some downsides to streaming movies—you need a fast Internet connection, for example, and beware the limited-data plan—but overall, this should be a delightful development....

Every day the forest elephants convened at Dzanga Bai to drink the mineral-rich waters. Their gathering in this clearing—located in a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Central African Republic—was so reliable that researchers and tourists flocked there for guaranteed sightings of these elusive cousins of the larger savanna elephants. Then, on May 6, poachers from Sudan arrived. They gunned down at least 26 of the animals, hacked off their valuable tusks and left the bodies to rot....

The Australian government unleashed a strain of a hemorrhagic disease virus into the wild earlier this year, hoping to curb the growth of the continent’s rabbit population. This move might sound barbaric, but the government estimates that the animals—brought by British colonizers in the late 18th century—gnaw through about $115 million in crops every year. And the rabbits are not the only problem. For more than a century Australians have battled waves of invasive species with many desperate measures—including introducing nonnative predators—to limited avail....

Something is amiss among today’s youth. This observation isn’t the perennial “kids these days” plaint by your middle-aged correspondent. According to San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, as reported in her book iGen (Atria, 2017), to the question “Do you have [a] psychological disorder (depression, etc.)?” the percentage of college students born in 1995 and after (the Internet Generation, or iGen) answering affirmatively in a Higher Education Research Institute study rose between 2012 and 2016....

When you look in the mirror, you know you are seeing yourself. Your dog, on the other hand, thinks its reflection is a fellow canine (if anything). So far scientists thought this lack of self-recognition was ubiquitous in the animal kingdom—with the exception of apes, elephants and dolphins. But a new study presents evidence that self-recognition has also evolved in a bird species. Helmut Prior of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and his team tagged magpies with a brightly colored mark below their beaks, where the birds could not see it directly....

Salvador Jorgensen has spent more than 15 years studying great white sharks near California’s coast. The senior research scientist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and his team have attached tracking tags to 165 of the toothy predators, which routinely visit islands west of San Francisco and prey on elephant seals. But something odd happened one autumn: “In 2009, 17 of those tagged white sharks were simultaneously swimming around the Farallon Islands, when they abruptly departed....

Up to 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans. That conclusion comes from scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, who pieced together the first draft of the Neandertal genome—which represents about 60 percent of the entire genome—using DNA obtained from three Neandertal bones that come from Vindija Cave in Croatia and are more than 38,000 years old....

The first modern antidepressants were originally tuberculosis medications, created from leftover World War II rocket fuel. In 2019, the Federal Drug Administration approved Spravato for depression, a chemical that was originally a veterinary anesthetic and later used recreationally as a club drug. Why shouldn’t tomorrow’s antidepressants also come from unexpected sources? Rising COVID infection rates and death tolls lead millions to worry about their own health and safety as well as that of loved ones....

LEARNING TO WALK AGAIN I was amazed at the article by Amanda Boxtel, “Walking 2.0,” and at her undaunted courage in her efforts to walk after being paralyzed in a skiing accident. Her story of learning to use an exoskeleton is truly remarkable and a great example for everyone faced with disabilities. I was particularly interested in Boxtel’s story because I suffer from some wearing out of lower back vertebrae. My ailment is commonplace in the aging population, and the only solution seems to be tailored exercises and painkillers....

Nations Claim Large Overlapping Sections of Arctic Seafloor The five coastal countries will have to rectify their science and their politics. The Great Ocean Divide More than two million square kilometers are being carved up, leaving little for the rest of the world. A New Reality Up North Climate change is dramatically altering life at the top of the planet. Arctic Tensions Are Rising, but Cooperation Could Benefit Nations Most Actions that seem provocative may actually be beneficial....

Imagine what our economy would be like if almost half of our electricity came from renewable energy resources. No fuel price shocks, no foreign control, no worries about climate change—just clean, abundant, affordable electricity. Before World War II, Americans actually lived that way, thanks to hydropower. The massive public works projects undertaken during the Great Depression built a fleet of huge facilities on some of the country’s biggest waterways. Job creation, electrification and inexpensive power modernized the rural South and helped to industrialize the West....

The West is going nuclear. A Bill Gates-backed developer and one of the largest utilities in the Western United States announced Thursday they were launching a study to determine if up to five coal plants could be equipped with advanced nuclear reactors. The move further cemented the relationship between TerraPower, a nuclear developer, and PacifiCorp, a six-state utility headquartered in Portland, Ore. The pair agreed last year to build a 345-megawatt Natrium nuclear reactor at the site of a retiring coal plant in western Wyoming....

Perhaps you’re familiar with Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, an android endowed with advanced artificial intelligence but no feelings—he’s incapable of feeling joy or sadness. Yet Data aspires to more. He wants to be a person! So his creator embarks on a multiseason quest to develop the “emotion chip” that would fulfill that dream. As you watch the show, it’s hard not to wonder about the end point of this quest....

Birds of a feather may flock together, but do birds that flock together develop distinct cultures? Two studies published today in Science find strong evidence that, at the very least, monkeys that troop together and whales that pod together do just that. And they manage it in the same way that humans do: by copying and learning from each other. A team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, created two distinct cultures — ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ — among groups of wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) in South Africa....

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded today to Bruce Beutler at the Scripps Research Institute in California, Jules Hoffmann at the French National Center for Scientific Research and Ralph Steinman at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Beutler and Hoffman helped to elucidate innate immunity, the non-specific array of initial responses by the body’s immune system that can recognize invading microorganisms as being foreign and try to destroy them....

This episode is dedicated to my neighbor Todd. Whenever we are outside hanging out in the evening, and the sun starts to set and the mosquitoes begin to appear, I know that he will act as cover. I’ll escape with only a few or often no bites at all, while he, unfortunately, will end up coated in them. Todd is not alone. Scientists estimate that 20% of people are more likely to attract mosquitoes and thus get bitten more often....