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The new coronavirus outbreak has made headlines in recent weeks, but there’s another viral epidemic hitting countries around the world: flu season. But how do these viruses compare, and which one is really more worrisome? So far, the new coronavirus, dubbed 2019-nCoV, has led to more than 20,000 illnesses and 427 deaths in China, as well as more than 200 illnesses and two deaths outside of mainland China. But that’s nothing compared with the flu, also called influenza....

FREMONT, Calif.—Tesla Motors builds one of the world’s safest cars out of cheap, lightweight metal in a factory it practically stole from General Motors and Toyota. That’s one of the most important ways the electric car company reduced the price of an electric vehicle (EV) from a carbon-fiber Roadster above $100,000 to a mostly aluminum Model S at around $70,000. (Those prices exclude any rebates or tax incentives.) Yet, at the same time, the Model S achieved the highest crash safety rating ever from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA)....

Lately I find myself feeling increasingly anxious, angry and demoralized after reading the news. Still, I refresh my phone’s news app (my main news delivery device these days) multiple times a day, like a rat looking for one more drop of sugar water. I believe, as do most people, that citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to remain informed, but I fear this constant deluge of information has overwhelmed our ability to process it well....

After their son’s suicide, one Wisconsin couple was desperate for answers. They tried to log into his e-mail and Facebook accounts but failed. The grieving parents finally got a court order to access these online records, arguing that just as their son’s death gave them ownership of his tangible assets, so it also gave them rights to his digital contributions. In courtrooms around the country, the online legacies of the departed are becoming the subject of painful battles for mourning families....

Scientists can study Earth’s climate as far back as 800,000 years by drilling core samples from deep underneath the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Detailed information on air temperature and CO2 levels is trapped in these specimens. Current polar records show an intimate connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature in the natural world. In essence, when one goes up, the other one follows. There is, however, still a degree of uncertainty about which came first—a spike in temperature or CO2....

CANADA Sapphires have been found in only one region of the Great White North, but a recent study reports that the gems can form under a wider range of pressures and temperatures, giving clues to where more may be hidden. IRELAND A joint American and Irish research team has found that the best aid for people stung by a lion’s mane jellyfish is a vinegar wash followed by a heat pack....

Loneliness is not just a feeling; it is also a public health problem that has been linked to increased risk of mental health issues, heart disease and even death. With rates of loneliness on the rise in the U. S. and around the world, people are addressing this crisis using everything from companion robots to social networking sites and apps. A new study in JAMA Psychiatry suggests that a better solution may lie in a much older, more ubiquitous form of technology: phone calls....

Scientists have long sought to prevent sharp memories from dulling with age, but the problem remains stubborn. Now research published in Scientific Reports suggests virtual reality might help older people recall facts and events based on specific details. The study involved 42 healthy older adults from the San Francisco Bay Area. Half spent a dozen hours over four weeks playing a virtual-reality game called Labyrinth; they strapped on headsets and walked in place, roaming virtual neighborhoods while completing errands....

The thin atmosphere of Pluto may be far more resilient than scientists thought The dwarf planet’s thin shell of air is generated by the vaporization of surface ices, which leads to the lofting of nitrogen and small amounts of methane and other gases. That vaporization is driven by sunlight, the intensity of which varies greatly during Pluto’s highly elliptical, 248-year-long trek around the sun. Many scientists have thought that Pluto’s atmosphere waxes and wanes dramatically as a result, probably even collapsing completely when the dwarf planet is at its farthest from the sun....

Copper, lead and zinc are essential for modern technology’s electronics and batteries. Demand has skyrocketed, and mining companies are depleting known deposits faster than prospectors can find more. Now an international team of scientists has discovered a relationship between deposits of these metals and the thickness of the lithosphere (the earth’s crust and upper mantle), providing a reliable way to locate these crucial resources. The project began by chance, says Mark Hoggard, first author of the new study and a geologist at Harvard University and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory....

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five features on carbon capture and storage, running daily from April 6 to April 10, 2009. From GreenGen in Tianjin, China, to the Edwardsport facility in Edwardsport, Ind., power plants are beginning to be built with so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS)—technology that captures the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and locks it away from the atmosphere. In fact, all the elements of industrial CCS technology already exist....

After five years of deliberation, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has officially rejected a petition that would have reclassified marijuana under the Federal Controlled Substance Act. The drug is currently listed on Schedule I, meaning that it is viewed as having “no acceptable medical use in treatment,” and is therefore banned in the United States. The proposed change would have moved marijuana to Schedule II, making it available by prescription nationwide. That would have been good for patients and scientists, and it would have represented a major step toward resolving the hypocritical mess that characterizes our current laws on marijuana....

Multiple researchers who received grants from the US Department of Energy (DOE) have been asked to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from the descriptions of their projects. In one case, a lab official at the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, asked an ecologist to elide references to climate change from her grant proposal in order to satisfy US President Donald Trump’s “budget language restrictions”....

“Where do we live? How did we get here? What’s it all about?” asks cosmologist Kendrick Smith of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario. “These are some of the oldest, most self-motivating questions in science.” Smith will take on those big questions Wednesday, February 4 at 7 P.M. Eastern time in a public lecture that will be broadcast live here on this page. The talk, “Cosmology in the 21st Century,” is part of the Perimeter Institute’s public lecture series presented by Sun Life Financial....

The ancient pterosaur was a slow flier that coasted on light air currents and could soar for hours. Colin Palmer, a graduate student at the University of Bristol, arrived at this conclusion by employing his expertise as a turbine engineer to carry out first-of-a kind tests on models of pterosaur wings in a wind tunnel. Pterosaurs were enormous reptiles (but not dinosaurs) that lived and flew until 65 million years ago....

High-end restaurants have begun adding a new piece of equipment to the kitchen that until recently was found mainly in medical laboratories and university chemistry departments. The bigger versions look a bit like washing machines, but the spin cycle in these ultracentrifuges is a lot more powerful than that of any Maytag. They whirl vials around tens of thousands of times a minute, generating centrifugal forces up to 30,000 times as strong as Earth’s gravity....

Its nickname is “Isla del Encanto,” or “Island of Enchantment,” and on the surface, Puerto Rico seems to fulfill every paradisiacal promise made about it by glossy travel magazines. The 111 x 36 mile island has a remarkable range of geological, biological, and habitat diversity, including a rain forest, a dry forest, mangroves, karst formations, three bioluminescent bays, and one of the largest underground cave systems in the world. Mona, one of the five islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago, has been called the “Galapagos of the Caribbean,” and approximately 75 miles offshore is the Puerto Rico Trench, recognized by the U....

Sleep on it: subjects pondering a complex decision and then distracted by puzzles made more satisfying choices than those who deliberated continuously. Evidently, the unconscious mind is better at plowing through information without bias. Science, February 17 One concern about carbon nanotubes has been their toxicity—they can build up inside the body and damage organs. Special chemical modifications of the tube surface, however, enabled the nanotubes to be excreted intact in urine....

Evidence is mounting that repeated concussions can do long-term harm to the brain. Athletes who play contact sports are particularly at risk. But a concussion can be difficult to diagnose, and many sports teams, especially those at the youth level, lack medical personnel. Neurology researchers at the University of Pennsylvania think they may have found a solution—an easy-to-use two-minute reading test that can assess the likelihood that a concussion has occurred....

I hereby stick out my tongue at everyone who’s ever accused me of filming too much. Yes, I was that dad with a camcorder, on every vacation, at every birth, wedding and graduation as my kids grew up. More times than I can count, I’ve been chastised for “hiding behind that damn machine instead of living the moment” and told that “you’ll never even watch those tapes.” Even Steve Jobs essentially said I was an idiot....