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Democratic presidential candidates shrunk last night from confronting tough implications of climate change. Each of the seven candidates on stage for the sixth presidential debate described the climate issue in existential terms, and some promised to declare a national emergency. But most of them avoided giving direct answers about politically perilous outcomes of global warming, like whether some communities should be abandoned because of sea-level rise. At other times, they promoted policies that seemed to clash with their climate priorities, including in foreign affairs....

The common industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA) has been linked to many ills, including reproductive abnormalities, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Much of the evidence for these associations, however, has been drawn from animal or in vitro research and has been somewhat controversial as to its precise implications for human health. Now, a human study has found strong links between BPA levels and semen quality—and the findings are not looking good, especially for men frequently exposed to the compound on the job....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Infrastructure supports and facilitates our daily lives—think of the roads we drive on, the bridges and tunnels that help transport people and freight, the office buildings where we work and the dams that provide the water we drink. But it’s no secret that American infrastructure is aging and in desperate need of rehabilitation. Concrete structures, in particular, suffer from serious deterioration....

More and more frequent fliers are wringing their hands over the fact that airplanes emit greenhouse gases where they can do the most damage—high in the atmosphere. Airline companies, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of their dependence on overseas oil for fuel. Those concerns, plus the possibility that jet-fuel prices could again spike as they did in 2008, have prompted a spate of test flights powered by biofuels: planes flying on the energy-rich extracts of flowering plants, weeds and pond scum....

Too much sugar can lead to weight gain. But for certain people, poor production of the hormone dopamine in their brain might also promote overeating, pushing them toward diabetes and obesity. The finding complements the latest understanding of how foods high in sugar and fat can hijack the brain’s reward system, motivating people to overeat. A study published in June 2013 compared individuals whose cells process insulin normally with other subjects whose cells resist insulin....

As spring begins to give way to summer, this year’s weather conditions so far have been responsible for everything from an above-average allergy symptoms to blazing wildfires. But how is the current weather affecting your health? Allergies Thanks to a wet spring in the Northeast and Midwest, many allergy sufferers are complaining of the worst season in years. Hay fever, or seasonal rhinitis, is the most common allergic condition in the U....

Vast amounts of research on postpartum depression have focused on difficulties facing new mothers, and studies of adult depression have focused on individual struggles. Depression in mothers with children over the age of six months, however, is less discussed but exceedingly common. At least 12 percent of women in any given year—many of whom are mothers—and 20 percent of disadvantaged mothers have depressive symptoms. New findings, presented May 1 at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Vancouver, Canada, provide hope, showing that proper screening and brief cognitive behavior therapy can be a big help to both the mothers and their children....

It dawned on Eian Kantor on a Saturday in early April as he brewed a cup of tea from fresh mint leaves: he had lost his sense of smell. The tea suspiciously smelled of nothing at all. Kantor proceeded to rifle through the fridge, sniffing jars of pickles, chili sauce and garlic—nothing. Ever since New York State went into lockdown in late March, Kantor, age 30, and his girlfriend had stayed isolated in their Queens, N....

There’s nothing quite as uncomfortable as a clammy, sweat-soaked shirt. For decades exercise-wear manufacturers have attempted to make this sensation obsolete; to regulate wearers’ body temperatures, they have developed synthetic fibers with coatings that wick away perspiration and experimented with loose, breathable weaves. Now scientists have developed what they claim is the first textile that automatically changes its structure in response to outside conditions, releasing more heat as temperature and humidity rise....

Mysterious forces may be a reliable trope in science fiction, but in reality, physicists have long agreed that all interactions between objects evidently arise from just four fundamental forces. Yet that has not stopped them from ardently searching for an additional, as-yet-unknown fifth fundamental force. The discovery of such a force could potentially resolve some of the biggest open questions in physics today, from the nature of dark energy to the seemingly irreconcilable differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity....

Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly. The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September....

Fraudulent images have been around for as long as photography itself. Take the famous hoax photos of the Cottingley fairies or the Loch Ness monster. Photoshop ushered image doctoring into the digital age. Now artificial intelligence is poised to lend photographic fakery a new level of sophistication, thanks to artificial neural networks whose algorithms can analyze millions of pictures of real people and places—and use them to create convincing fictional ones....

Neurosurgeon Ivar Mendez of the University of Saskatchewan often shows a video clip to demonstrate his work treating Parkinson’s disease. It features a middle-aged man with this caption: “Off medications.” The man’s face has the dull stare typical of Parkinson’s. Asked to lift each hand and open and close his fingers, he barely manages. He tries but fails to get up from a chair without using his hands. When he walks, it is with the slow, shuffling gait that is another hallmark of Parkinson’s, a progressive neurological disorder that afflicts an estimated one million Americans, most of them older than 60....

Congratulations, you survived the Mayan apocalypse. I knew you could do it. I had complete confidence that I would live past the alleged planetary expiration date of December 21, 2012, provided I didn’t get hit by a bus or slip in the bathtub. But those modes of demise are, of course, far less tantalizing than some end-of-the world fantasy dreamed up by amateur archaeologists and sucked down by people who perhaps never worry that they have undiagnosed hypertension or that the highway bridge they cross daily hasn’t been properly maintained....

Roughly every second, somewhere in our observable universe, another sun is destroyed in a stellar catastrophe—when a star pulsates, collides, collapses to a black hole or explodes as a supernova. This dynamic side of the universe, lost in the apparent calm of the night sky, has lately come to the forefront of astronomical research. For almost a century scientists have tried to trace what has happened over billions of years of cosmic evolution, but it is only recently that we have begun to parse celestial events on timescales of days and hours and so witness the volatile lives and deaths of stars....

Much has been made of the potential difficulties businesses face if numerous employees are out sick with the H1N1 “swine” flu. But there has been little information on the economic and other impacts if schools and day care centers continue to close temporarily to mitigate outbreaks. Closing all U.S. schools for a month would cost the already stressed national economy between $10 billion and $47 billion, according to a new report released today by The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy think tank....

In 2004, Rick Bright was looking for a new project. As an immunologist then at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, he had learned about a new, faster method of sequencing viral genomes. He decided to use it to test whether the influenza A virus was developing resistance to adamantanes, which at the time were the main antiviral drugs used to treat flu. Bright collected samples of the flu virus and tested them for an altered amino-acid sequence known to confer resistance....

It’s easy to see why people don’t love the idea of virtual conferences. Sitting for hours behind a computer screen, listening to a floating head, isn’t exactly a thrilling prospect. You don’t get to bask in the exotic setting of a tropical island or other international location. And virtual conferences don’t allow researchers to retreat from their everyday routines and fully immerse themselves in sharing knowledge. The lack of in-person interaction is also a problem....

In late April Democrat Kweisi Mfume of Maryland won a special election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in a landslide victory against his Republican rival. More remarkable than his win, which garnered three quarters of the vote, however, was that more than 110,000 Baltimoreans in the district cast their ballot by mail. Only 1,000 voted at one of three polling centers open there. In Georgia’s primaries in early June, more than one million voters used mail-in ballots, a huge increase over previous elections....

In February the president of the United States met with a group of CEOs from pharmaceutical companies and promised to drastically cut regulations instated by the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA) by 75-80%. The president has also issued an executive order, applicable across all federal agencies, stating that for every new regulation issued, at least two existing regulations must be eliminated. and in particular effectiveness. It is reasonable to expect a government agency that has been in place since 1904 could benefit from some rescaling, but what would an 80% cut to the FDA’s regulations and policies look like?...