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The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign-up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. Atmospheric chemist Jose L. Jimenez at the University of Colorado-Boulder has created a fairly simple, downloadable spreadsheet tool that allows you to estimate the risk of airborne SARS-CoV-2 infection in various spaces — including a classroom, campus, subway, bus, demonstration, and outdoors....

The Obama administration solidified its plans today to kill the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository while seeking new increases for science and renewable-energy programs in a proposed $26.4 billion Energy Department budget for fiscal 2010. The total proposal is essentially flat compared to current DoE funding. But that does not include nearly $40 billion showered on the department from the stimulus law for alternative-energy and efficiency initiatives. The White House’s budget summaries cite $38....

It’s well known that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, a swirl of stars in an extended, many-armed disk. But the structure of the galaxy is far from two-dimensional. Above and below those familiar spiral arms is a lesser-known feature, a spherical swarm of stars that makes up a halo around the disk. For decades the presence of the halo has prodded astronomers to ask big questions about its nature: How is it structured?...

When Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina last fall, floodwaters swamped vast stretches of farmland and graphically demonstrated a threat this part of the country is particularly vulnerable to: massive volumes of animal waste overflowing into waterways. North Carolina has one of the world’s largest concentrations of industrial pig farms, with more than 2,000 operations involving a total of about 10 million hogs. Most store manure in open-air pits called “lagoons,” and when these overflow they can contaminate waterways with pathogens, pharmaceuticals and nutrients that pose serious pollution and health risks....

The childhood insult “Four eyes!” may one day apply to most of us. By 2050, according to a new report from the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Australia, almost half the world will be nearsighted and require some form of corrective lens, up from a quarter of the global population in 2000. Conventional wisdom puts the blame for the rise in myopia on reading and staring at computer screens, but little evidence supports that hypothesis....

In the middle of a snow-draped forest in Alaska, a long four-hour drive east from Anchorage, sits a cleared 30-acre field where 180 silver poles sprout from the ground and reach 22 meters into the air. During four nights this week the poles—actually interconnected radio antennae—will spring to life after three years of dormancy, and heat the highest wisps of our atmosphere directly above. The antennas belong to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a former U....

Marine scientists are raising the alarm about a proposal to drop tonnes of iron into the Pacific Ocean to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, the base of the food web. The non-profit group behind the plan says that it wants to revive Chilean fisheries. It also has ties to a controversial 2012 project in Canada that was accused of violating an international moratorium on commercial ocean fertilization. The Oceaneos Marine Research Foundation of Vancouver, Canada, says that it is seeking permits from the Chilean government to release up to 10 tonnes of iron particles 130 kilometres off the coast of Coquimbo as early as 2018....

Estrella Lasry was readying her presentation on three years worth of malaria data in west Africa when she received an e-mail disinviting her to a major tropical medicine conference taking place in Louisiana next week. The reason: she was currently in Liberia. The tropical medicine advisor with Doctors Without Borders had been working in that west African country on a malaria project—distributing drugs to reduce the death rate among children under five years of age—when she was notified that the State of Louisiana wanted to limit “unnecessary exposure of Ebola to the general public” and would be requesting all individuals who had traveled to Ebola-affected countries voluntarily quarantine themselves for 21 days following their relevant travel history, regardless of their symptoms....

Diseases caused by mosquitoes, ticks and fleas have tripled in the United States within the last 15 years, according to an alarming new report. The study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that cases of vector-borne diseases—those spread by the parasites—jumped from 27,388 in 2004 to 96,075 in 2016. The findings come at a time of growing concern about the potential influence of climate change on the spread of infectious disease....

By Adam MannA showdown over the course of Solar System exploration has ended with a qualified victory for Mars. NASA’s planetary-science decadal survey, which sets mission priorities for 2013-22, firmly favors a mission to Mars over a rival one to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa (see Nature 466, 168-169; 2010). But the decision marks the beginning of a much bigger battle: to secure the budget to lift the multibillion-dollar project off the survey’s pages and into the heavens....

The gene-editing method CRISPR has transformed biology, giving scientists the ability to modify genes to treat or prevent genetic diseases by correcting dangerous mutations and to create a host of new genetically modified plants and animals. But the technique, which involves using an enzyme called a nuclease that acts as molecular scissors to “cut” DNA, can cause unintended effects. Making such double-stranded breaks in DNA can result in unwanted genetic material being inserted or deleted, which can have consequences including activating genes that cause cancer....

You have probably seen the television commercial in which a cell phone technician travels to remote places and asks on his phone, “Can you hear me now?” Imagine this technician traveling to the center of our Milky Way galaxy, wherein lurks a massive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), weighing as much as 4.5 million suns. As the technician approached within 10 million kilometers of the black hole, we would hear his cadence slow down and his voice deepen and fade, eventually turning to a monotone whisper with diminishing reception....

Researchers have developed a new component that could heal the Achilles’ heel of lithium-sulfur batteries. Compared to the common lithium-ion battery, lithium-sulfur batteries have important advantages: They use cheaper materials and weigh less. A lithium-sulfur cell can have almost double the energy of a lithium-ion cell for the same mass, yielding an edge where energy density is critical, like in portable electronics or in cars. Improving energy density and cutting costs in energy storage are important steps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation and energy production....

Invented in 1952 by the late Donald Glaser, then at the University of Michigan, a device called a bubble chamber allows scientists to trace the paths of high-energy, charged particles rocketing through a superheated liquid. Ionizing particles leave trails made of expanding bubbles, and the shape of these trails provides clues about the identity of the particles and how they decay. For example, lightweight electrons and positrons lose energy quickly, creating spirals....

Indigenous communities and archaeologists fear thousands of historic Aboriginal sites and artefacts have been damaged—or destroyed—by fires that have ravaged Australia. These places are essential for understanding the movement of people in Australia and hold huge value for Indigenous groups. Since September, conflagrations have razed more than 10-million hectares of vegetation, mostly in the eastern states of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria—one of the largest events on record. Much of the area destroyed was in national parks and other forests, where tens of thousands of important Indigenous sites are found, including many that have not been officially recorded, says Tiina Manne, an archaeologist at the University of Queensland in the Gold Coast and the president of the Australian Archaeological Association (AAA), which represents the interests of the country’s archaeologists....

Every parent needs a break from time to time—a few minutes to prepare dinner, do the laundry or quickly check e-mail. That’s when the television suddenly becomes the best invention ever—an instant free babysitter that enthralls even the youngest infants and might, fingers crossed, even teach them a thing or two. But a new policy statement published today by the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that not only do children under age two probably learn nothing from the television, but that watching too much can actually delay language development and cause attentional problems....

Underneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean, scientists in 2015 watched a slow and surprising dance of death in unprecedented detail. Andrew D. Mullen, a graduate student who works with oceanographer Jules Jaffe at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was peering at a dying coral reef near the island of Maui in Hawaii. The reef had just been “bleached”—symbiotic algae that live in each tiny coral polyp got too hot, and the coral had expelled them....

Neuroscientists understand much about how the human brain is organized into systems specialized for recognizing faces or scenes or for other specific cognitive functions. The questions that remain relate to how such capabilities arise. Are these networks—and the regions comprising them—already specialized at birth? Or do they develop these sensitivities over time? And how might structure influence the development of function? “This is an age-old philosophical question of how knowledge is organized,” says psychologist Daniel Dilks of Emory University....

Concrete, after water, is the world’s most used material. Because it already surrounds us in the built environment, researchers have been exploring the idea of using concrete to store electricity—essentially making buildings that act as giant batteries. The idea is gaining ground as many places come to increasingly rely on renewable energy from the wind and sun. Rechargeable batteries are necessary when winds die down or darkness falls, but they are often made of toxic substances that are far from environmentally friendly....

A 2,000-year-old math theorem, along with Sudoku, may soon help researchers untangle DNA at blazing speeds. Hunting for a particular genetic mutation in hundreds of thousands of specimens can be an expensive and time-consuming process. In the past several years, faster multiplex DNA sequencing machines have sped up the acquisition of data, but researchers have still been hobbled by having to label each sample with a unique molecular identifier (or bar code) for analysis....