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U.S. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified elk as the primary source of a bacterial infection that has been plaguing cattle in the Greater Yellowstone Area. The disease, caused by Brucella bacteria, has been raging there for two decades—so targeting elk transmission might squash the outbreak for good. Switzerland Researchers and composers are collaborating to translate data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the world’s biggest particle accelerator, into music....

Youth soccer team members rescued more than two weeks after sudden flooding trapped them in a cave complex in Thailand are now convalescing at a hospital in the northern city of Chiang Rai. In addition to treating the boys for potential dehydration, malnutrition and oxygen deprivation, their doctors also plan to closely monitor them for symptoms of diseases that may have been transmitted by animals living in the cave system. Operations were underway at the time of publication to rescue the 12 boys (ages 11 to 17) and their coach....

Astrophysicists may have detected gravitational waves last week from the collision of two neutron stars in a distant galaxy—and telescopes trained on the same region might also have spotted the event. Rumours to that effect are spreading fast online, much to researchers’ excitement. Such a detection could mark a new era of astronomy: one in which phenomena are both seen by traditional telescopes and ‘heard’ as vibrations in the fabric of space-time....

Time and again, Martin Moore’s children get sick with a cold. He hauls them to their doctor, who then informs him that there’s nothing to be done aside from taking them home and waiting it out. The experience is maddening for Moore—especially because he’s a virologist. For everything that virologists have learned about rhinoviruses—the cause of the majority of colds—they have not invented a vaccine for them. In 2013, Moore wondered if he could make one....

Waking up at the crack of dawn. Dialing the same busy phone line for hours on end. Clicking through confusing prompts on website after website. With demand far outstripping supply, the frenzied search for a COVID vaccine appointment can be overwhelming, even for eligible people in high-priority, high-risk groups, such as older adults. “It’s been a nightmare,” says Caroline Cooper, a 78-year-old attorney in Chevy Chase, Md., who is familiar with computers and bureaucracies and still could not find herself a shot....

In a disturbing trend, scam artists are using commercially sold fake urine to fool doctors into prescribing pain medications such as hydrocodone—which can then be consumed or illegally sold. The synthetic pee lets patients pass tests intended to ensure they are not already taking opioid medications or drugs of abuse. Patrick Kyle, director of clinical chemistry and toxicology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, says that “packaging materials and containers for some of these products are being left in the restrooms” at his hospital....

Diamond has a track record of extremes, including ultrahardness, higher thermal conductivity than any other solid material and transparency to ultraviolet light. In addition, diamond has recently become much more attractive for solid-state electronics, with the development of techniques to grow high-purity, single-crystal synthetic diamonds and insert suitable impurities into them (doping). Pure diamond is an electrical insulator, but doped, it can become a semiconductor with exceptional properties. It could be used for detecting ultraviolet light, ultraviolet light-emitting diodes and optics, and high-power microwave electronics....

ELVIS PRESLEY’S mere presence caused teenage girls to scream and faint by the dozens. Charismatic leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., have been known to inspire entire nations, whereas so-called toxic individuals make life hell for anyone who comes close. There is no shortage of examples of people who have an undeniable influence on everyone around them, but the common wisdom has been that such individuals are rare....

White House senior adviser Brian Deese is in Beijing this week laying the groundwork for President Obama’s visit to China next month. Deese’s agenda includes meetings with Executive Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli and Xie Zhenhua, special representative for climate change, according to the White House. The discussions will center on key international environmental agreements, namely the details of implementing the Paris Agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, as well as developing a market to cut emissions from air travel (see related story)....

By Amy MaxmenBy watching countless hours of hermaphroditic worm sex, Lukas Schärer and his wife Dita Vizoso, evolutionary biologists at the University of Basel in Switzerland and their colleagues, have discovered evidence for a theory that has eluded testing for nearly a century: sex shapes sperm. Their findings, including videos of the mating worms, are published today in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.Sperm are the most diverse of animal cells, variously adorned with tails, hairs, hooks, bristles and more....

JULY 1959 WOLFGANG PAULI— “It is well known that theoretical physicists are quite inept in handling experimental apparatus; in fact, the standing of a theoretical physicist is said to be measurable in terms of his ability to break delicate devices merely by touching them. By this standard Wolfgang Pauli was a very good theoretical physicist; apparatus would fall, break, shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory. Pauli’s exclusion principle, on the other hand, acquired its importance because it helped to clarify the internal structure of the atom, according to Niels Bohr’s model of the atom....

Black people continue to be a group with one of the highest risks of COVID infection in the U.S. But from city to city, this disparity has emerged at different times in the pandemic and has taken on different forms. Take Allegheny County, Pa., where Pittsburgh is located. Early in the pandemic, the overall number of infections and hospitalizations, including racial differences, were modest—until they weren’t. Hospitalizations of Black people eventually rose and stayed high, even as the racial disparity in infection rates between Black and white populations across the U....

On November 17, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon infamously declared on television “I am not a crook” when questioned about his role in what would later be called the Watergate scandal. Diligent work by investigative reporters soon after revealed the falsity in his words. In this issue’s cover feature, Theodor Schaarschmidt tells the story of another politician—a high-ranking policy official in Europe—who came down with a strange problem: on some occasions of telling a lie, he would pass out and convulse on the floor, truly perplexing his neurologist....

A machine-learning study that analysed hundreds of thousands of earthquakes beat the standard method at predicting the location of aftershocks. Scientists say that the work provides a fresh way of exploring how changes in ground stress, such as those that occur during a big earthquake, trigger the quakes that follow. It could also help researchers to develop new methods for assessing seismic risk. “We’ve really just scratched the surface of what machine learning may be able to do for aftershock forecasting,” says Phoebe DeVries, a seismologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts....

By Geoff Brumfiel"Wonderful, beautiful and unique" is how Gordon Kane describes supersymmetry theory. Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has spent about 30 years working on supersymmetry, a theory that he and many others believe solves a host of problems with our understanding of the subatomic world.Yet there is growing anxiety that the theory, however elegant it might be, is wrong. Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer proton smasher that straddles the French-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, have shown no sign of the “super particles” that the theory predicts....

Sleep less, weigh more? Compared with people who sleep eight hours, five-hour snoozers produce 15 percent more gherlin, a hunger hormone, and 15 percent less leptin, an appetite suppressor. PLoS Medicine, December 7, 2004 Anatomy shaper: the driving force behind the evolution of the Homo species from Australopithecus may have been the ability to run long distances, for hunting or scavenging across Africa’s vast savannas. Nature, November 18, 2004 Detecting neutrinos typically means looking for faint flashes that occur when the ghostly particles collide with atoms in water....

They say it’s Sweden’s silly season, a time when journalists are desperately seeking a new spin on a century-old story: the Nobel Prizes. Last week, as luminaries gathered for Nobel Week in Stockholm, Radio Sweden reported a potential scandal surrounding the Physiology or Medicine prize. Allegations were swirling, the state-owned station said, that London-based drug manufacturer AstraZeneca, PLC, had, in essence, paid off members of the Nobel voting committee to help secure a win for Harald zur Hausen for his discovery that the human papilloma virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer....

Georgia’s public health commissioner, an OB-GYN and two-time Republican candidate for Congress, has been named the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald will replace Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as CDC director for eight years before stepping down in January. Fitzgerald has practiced medicine for about three decades in Carrollton, a city west of Atlanta. But she does not appear to have a record of having conducted scientific research, a major function of the agency she has been nominated to lead....

The average person is only vaguely aware of whether he or she is wasting energy at home. And most people do not automatically make sacrifices for the common good. Both behaviors can change with a few creative social nudges, aided by clever technology, which build on three lessons that social scientists say are key to changing what people do. First, make the monetary cost of choices visible. Second, enlist social norms; if people are doing worse than their neighbors, let them know about it....

Neuroscientists and physicians have embarked on what they hope will be a revolution in treatments to prevent brain damage in newborn babies. As many as 800,000 babies die each year when blood and oxygen stop flowing to the brain around the time of birth. And thousands develop brain damage that causes long-lasting mental or physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy. Physicians have few tools to prevent this, but they are optimistic that clinical trials now under way will change things....