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Stress can be toxic at any age. It rattles us when it strikes, shaking up our relationships and narrowing our focus. When it becomes chronic, it ravages our health. Physically, emotionally and intellectually, stress can drag us down. An even more insidious effect is the assault it can launch on a child’s brain, impeding the development of critical cognitive skills. A number of researchers, including myself, have discovered that psychological stress affects the thinking skills and brain development of even very young children, likely beginning prenatally....

One of the biggest choices an expectant mother faces is how to handle the pain of childbirth. More than 60 per­cent of American women choose relief in the form of an epi­dural, a combination of local anesthetic and narcotic administered into the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord. Although most doctors believe that the injections are safe, a new study suggests that they may increase the risk that a mother will develop a fever during labor, which could, in rare instances, pose risks to her baby....

It is a wise father that knows his own child, but today a man can boost his paternal wisdom—or at least confirm that he’s the kid’s dad. All he needs to do is shell out $30 for a paternity testing kit at his local drugstore—and another $120 to get the results. More than 60,000 people have purchased the paternity testing kits since they first became available without prescriptions last year, according to Doug Fogg, chief operating officer of Identigene, which makes the over-the-counter kits....

Domatoceras, a precursor of the squid with a hard shell, thrived 443 million years ago during the early Silurian period. More than 100 million years later during the Carboniferous period, Pentamerus, a clamlike, two-shelled invertebrate, clustered on ocean floors. Both stored rare isotopes of carbon and oxygen in their calcium carbonate shells that then fossilized. By examining the percentage of such bonded rare isotopes, scientists have now confirmed the link between carbon dioxide levels and warmer ancient climates....

For the past five years archaeologists have been tracking a series of rock art findings in north-central Chile’s Limari Valley. The experts involved say finding traces of the visual language used by the area’s inhabitants has been difficult; the paintings are highly deteriorated and cannot be identified with the naked eye. But with the help of digital technology including high-resolution cameras, tablets and specialized software, researchers have been able to detect the presence of paintings that time and erosion have almost erased....

Key concepts Physics Radio waves Electricity Electromagnetism Wireless communication Introduction Have you ever wondered how a radio can receive music and news broadcasts over thin air? Radios, as well as radio-controlled cars and cell phones, all receive information via invisible waves. Some of these waves are called radio waves. Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation, a kind of energy that also includes visible light. Radio waves are not harmful but are in fact extremely useful for communicating across long distances....

As a palliative-care researcher, Susan McClement has talked to many people dying of cancer and their families—and some of their stories are burned into her brain. One man was so concerned by the sight of his emaciated wife, whose body had been ravaged by metastatic breast cancer, that he resorted to force feeding her—pinching her nose and slipping in a spoonful of food when she opened her mouth. Convinced that food would give her the energy to fight the cancer, his daily visits became protracted battles....

While world leaders held a virtual climate emergency summit this past spring, members of another important international group were also busy reckoning with greenhouse gas emissions: beer manufacturers. Heineken’s CEO announced the company’s commitment to achieve full carbon neutrality by 2040. Colorado craft beer maker New Belgium Brewing made a point by releasing a “specialty beer” brewed from smoke-tainted water, weedy dandelions and other ingredients one might find in an overheated dystopian future....

Coral reefs throughout the world face an array of threats: nutrient pollution, starfish predation and deadly bleaching that follows warmer sea temperatures. Yet they provide between $10,000 and $100,000 in economic benefits to nearby communities, according to one estimate, including everything from coastal protection from storm surges to better fishing. More than 75 percent of the world’s reefs lie in the Pacific Ocean, where a new analysis reveals that an average of roughly 600 square miles of the marine outcroppings disappeared annually between 1968 and 2004—since 1995 the rate of their destruction has doubled....

(Reuters) - The death toll in a mudslide that devastated a rural Washington state community last month rose to 34 on Tuesday as one more body was extricated from the rubble, the Snohomish County medical examiner said. A rain-soaked hillside collapsed without warning above the north fork of the Stillaguamish River on March 22, unleashing a torrent of mud that engulfed some three dozen homes on the outskirts of the tiny community of Oso....

TOOLS Find Green Businesses Search for organic restaurants and green cleaning services on Ecovian, a guide to eco-friendly businesses in certain U.S. cities. The site rates the businesses on a scale of “greenness.” www.ecovian.com Recycle Everything Newspapers and aluminum cans are relatively easy to recycle. Earth911 is a database of where to recycle less conventional items—everything from printer cartridges and televisions to paint, car parts, asbestos and even explosives. http://earth911.com...

Rising temperatures have caused the amount of Arctic sea ice to shrink dramatically since global observations began in the 1970s. But on the other side of the world, sea ice in Antarctica was at first steady — and then began to slowly expand in the mid-2000s. Some researchers now say that the Antarctic trend may have been inflated by an error in the decades-long record of satellite observations of Southern Hemisphere sea ice....

Slough slog. Wet walk. Swamp tromp. Whatever you call it, it’s a hike in the knee-deep to waist-deep water of the Everglades or other aqueous environments. A slough, pronounced “sloo,” is stagnant or slow-moving water. Slough, pronounced “sluff,” is a snake’s shed skin. And the sloughs in the slough is why I won’t slog. Oh, I did a few slough slogs in my younger days. We would range from hammock to hammock, some of which might even let you hang a hammock....

Recently discovered remains of a female dinosaur are elucidating the ways in which these animals gave birth. According to a report published today in the journal Science, the fossil includes two complete eggs preserved inside the mother’s body. Tamaki Sato of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and her colleagues analyzed dinosaur remains recovered from the Jiangxi province of China. The pelvic and leg fragments are from a dinosaur, which probably measured between 10 and 13 feet, belonging to a group known as the oviraptorosaurians....

Football fans of the Seattle Seahawks and the Kansas City Chiefs routinely compete at home games to set the Guinness World Record for the noisiest stadium. On October 1, 2014, the Chiefs hit the latest peak: 142.2 decibels (dB). That level is like the painful, blistering roar of a jet engine at 100 feet—a typical example that hearing experts give for a noise that is more than loud enough to cause hearing damage....

Every decade, the U.S. Census Bureau counts the people in the United States, trying to observe the balance between gathering accurate information and protecting the privacy of the people described in that data. But current technology can reveal a person’s transgender identity by linking seemingly anonymized information such as their neighborhood and age to discover that their sex was reported differently in successive censuses. The ability to deanonymize gender and other data could spell disaster for trans people and families living in states that seek to criminalize them....

The prevalence of diabetes, a condition related to the body’s inability to appropriately produce a hormone called insulin, has been steadily increasing worldwide over the last 30 years. According to the World Health Organization, over 422 million people worldwide are currently living with diabetes. An estimated 30.3 million of those people, or 9.4% of the population, are in the US. Also in the US, as many as one in four adults with diabetes don’t even know that they have it, and another 84 million people are pre-diabetic which often means they will be diabetic within five years without treatment....

U.S. Analysis of radar records revealed that at their height more than 45 million grasshoppers—30.2 metric tons—swarmed Las Vegas one 2019 summer night. Artificial light and an unusually moist spring likely caused the onslaught. MEXICO An ancient “eagle shark” fossil, discovered in Nuevo León, has long, thin fins that stretch about 1.9 meters—farther than its 1.65-meter body length. A new study suggests the shark lived 93 million years ago and filled a filter-feeding niche that is held by manta rays today....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Editor’s Note (12/20/22): This article is being repromoted in light of the fact that former film producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in a trial in Los Angeles. The accusations against Weinstein set off the global #MeToo movement highlighting women’s experiences of sexual misconduct. The recent exposure of widespread sexual predation in the American media industry, from Harvey Weinstein to Bill O’Reilly, has elicited shock and sparked debate on violence against women in the United States....

The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann—or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. In this season, we peer into a fascinating moment in the postwar U.S. through the prism of von Neumann’s work. We explore the evolution of early computers, the vital role women played in early programming, and the inextricable connection between computing and war....