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The full scope of Zika-related birth defects may extend far beyond abnormally small heads and brain damage. Research to be presented next week at a teratology conference in San Antonio, Texas, suggests that serious joint problems, seizures, vision impairment, trouble feeding and persistent crying can be added to the list of risks from Zika exposure in the womb. The new findings confirm doctors’ concerns that even when Zika-exposed babies are born without microcephaly and appear largely normal at birth they can go on to have health issues including seizures and developmental delays that only become apparent in the weeks and months after birth....

Northeastern states are engaged in a game of renewable one-upmanship. Early last month, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed a bill into law calling for 2 gigawatts of offshore wind, or roughly enough to meet a third of the state’s electric demand. New Jersey followed a few weeks later with its first contract for a 1.1-GW project off the coast of the Garden State. The biggest announcement of all arrived last week, when New York announced two contracts worth 1....

Former White House science adviser John Holdren has condemned US President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily ban all refugees and citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Holdren, who served eight years under President Barack Obama, told Nature on January 30 that the ban is “perverse” and “an abomination, and a terrible, terrible idea”. The executive order enacted on 27 January will not increase the country’s security, he adds, and may damage it by sending an offensive message to Muslims, who make up a quarter of the world population....

After a large portion of a Miami-area apartment building spontaneously collapsed in June, Scientific American contributor Katherine Harmon Courage sat down with social scientist and clinician Pauline Boss to learn about the particular sort of grief that comes with ambiguous loss. Such losses occur when, for example, a relative’s remains cannot be recovered from an accident or when a child goes missing. Chances are that the person is gone, but there is no certainty....

Join us below at Noon EDT on Friday (August 17) for a live 30-minute online chat with shark conservation biologist and blogger David Shiffman, who will discuss the health of worldwide shark populations in recent years and his efforts to educate the public about shark conservation. Shiffman is a Ph.D. student at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, where he works with Neil Hammerschlag, a marine affairs and policy professor and director of the R....

KARANGASEM, Indonesia (Reuters)—The question Indonesian volcanologist Devy Kamil Syahbana gets most is the one he cannot answer—when, or if, rumbling Mount Agung on Bali island will blow up in a major eruption. The 3,000 meter (9,800 ft) Agung—a so-called strato-volcano capable of very violent eruptions—has recorded a sharp rise in activity that has raised worries about a repeat of a 1963 eruption that killed more than 1,000 people. “There’s no instrument in the world that can estimate precisely when there will be a major eruption,” said Syahbana, who runs an observatory monitoring the towering volcano, just outside a 10-km exclusion zone....

You know this guy: bellowing at the bar, cutting off cars in packed traffic or mocking a crestfallen sports star. He’s the testosterone ape, the swaggering embodiment of male aggression. For years scientists have pointed fingers at him as the living example of testosterone’s brutish, self-centered, antisocial expression. But Swiss neuroscientist Christoph Eisen­egger of the University of Zurich wondered about this stereotype. To explore it further, he and his team designed a study involving women, not men, along with testos­terone and the root of all evil, money....

In his new book, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform and Heal (National Geographic Publishing, November 2016; 288 pages), science writer and Scientific American contributor Erik Vance seeks to explain one of our brain’s most remarkable powers: its ability to heal both mind and body. Vance explores the profound influence our thoughts, feelings and expectations can have on our well-being—how a positive outlook can, for example, help ease physical pain....

The world is on the cusp of a counterattack on COVID thanks to several vaccines that are currently seeking regulatory approval and a swift rollout. For entrepreneurs and the tech industry, this is a moment when their value to society is demonstrated: business and technology is (along with medicine) leading us out of the pandemic. But Germany’s Turkish community, and Europe’s minorities in general, are celebrating for a different reason. Turkish-Germans are an often marginalized group, similar to other minorities around the world....

More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin coined the now famous dictum that equated passing minutes and hours with shillings and pounds. The new millennium—and the decades leading up to it—has given his words their real meaning. Time has become to the 21st century what fossil fuels and precious metals were to previous epochs. Constantly measured and priced, this vital raw material continues to spur the growth of economies built on a foundation of terabytes and gigabits per second....

You’ve still got to eat to live, but now you can purportedly back this up by vaping your vitamins. One company claims a few puffs on their e-cigarette packs your lungs with 10 times the recommended daily dose of vitamin B12. Other products contain a cocktail of vitamins including A, C or D or other nutrients such as amino acids and collagen—all in a liquid that is vaporized on a heated metal coil, then inhaled....

Summer and fall 2017 saw an unusual string of record-breaking hurricanes pummel the U.S. Gulf Coast, eastern seaboard, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Hurricane Harvey brought unbelievable floods to Houston. Irma, one of the two strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the northern Atlantic, wreaked havoc on Florida and many Caribbean islands. Maria devastated Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The destruction begs the question: Has climate change influenced these extreme events?...

Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And “approved by consensus” is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition was silenced. Our brains seem to work not by generating only “correct” actions and executing them in serial, but rather by representing many possibilities in parallel, and suppressing all but one....

When SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon Heavy booster Tuesday (Feb. 6) from the same Florida pad used by NASA’s Apollo missions, the company claimed the title for the most powerful rocket. And for some companies, that might be a year-defining feat. But SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk, have a lot more coming this year, including launching astronauts on its crewed Dragon spacecraft and preparing its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) for potential tests in 2019....

“WELL, that’s just great.” Quick, what does that sentence mean? Is the speaker acknowledging some good news, celebrating a joyful event that just took place? Do we take the statement at face value? Or could the person who said it mean something quite different, maybe even the opposite? Perhaps his pleasure is not genuine. The fact is we do not know. The words are ambiguous. The comment could be kind and authentic: imagine his daughter has just announced that she made the school honor roll for the first time....

Not long after he founded the Mirror Laboratory at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in 1984, astronomer Roger Angel threw some Pyrex custard cups into a backyard kiln to get a feel for how borosilicate glass melts. He has been playing with fire ever since. On a sweltering July day in Tucson, his seventh giant mirror takes shape in a 200-ton rotating oven underneath the campus football stadium. After a week of heating, the borosilicate blocks in the oven have reached 1,170 degrees Celsius and begun to liquefy, sending molten glass seeping over hexagonal pillars to form a 21-ton honeycomb that is 8....

Oil companies accused of raising ocean levels might not question the existence of climate change in federal court today. Chevron Corp. is expected to take a lead role in a climate science “tutorial” at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The unusual hearing was required by Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing lawsuits filed by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland claiming that five oil giants are contributing to damages related to climate change....

Why do some disciplines have more male researchers than female ones? The differences can’t be chalked up to mere quirks: in some fields, notably mathematics and science, women face barriers that do not seem to limit men in the same way. A study published on January 16 in Science suggests that one hurdle may stem from popular opinion. Women—at least in the United States—are less likely to pursue fields in which success is thought to arise primarily from raw aptitude, rather than hard work....

The scientific evidence is crystal clear: Early experiences literally shape the architecture of the developing brain. This widespread understanding is driving increased public support for universal pre-K to enhance school readiness for all children and level the playing field for kids who face adversity. But here’s something that’s less well-known by the public: Since the brain is connected to the rest of the body, early experiences affect all of our biological systems, for better or worse, beginning in utero and all the crucial years that follow....

Key concepts Physics Simple machines Forces Energy Friction Introduction Before the industrial age people largely had to rely on muscle power to move and lift heavy objects. Simple machines such as pulleys, levers and ramps made it easier for humans to lift heavy objects like rocks and logs. In this project you will use simple household materials to explore one of these classic machines: the pulley. Background Pulleys are simple machines that can make the job of lifting objects easier....