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A rain of comets is pouring down on a faraway young star, giving astronomers a new view of a process that shaped our own solar system billions of years ago. When Earth was a young planet, cometary debris battered its surface, carrying organic material that may have helped life arise on our rocky world. In recent years scientists have spotted indirect evidence for a similar process around Eta Corvi, a solar-type star some 59 light-years away that is slightly larger and three times younger than our own sun....

In May, the Brazilian city of Manaus was devastated by a large outbreak of COVID-19. Hospitals were overwhelmed and the city was digging new grave sites in the surrounding forest. But by August, something had shifted. Despite relaxing social-distancing requirements in early June, the city of 2 million people had reduced its number of excess deaths from around 120 per day to nearly zero. In September, two groups of researchers posted preprints suggesting that Manaus’s late-summer slowdown in COVID-19 cases had happened, at least in part, because a large proportion of the community’s population had already been exposed to the virus and was now immune....

To be an expectant mother, or the anxious partner of one, is to be keenly, even agonizingly aware of how chemicals affect a developing life. The basic advice is well known, and obsessively followed: Alcohol in strict moderation, and no nicotine at all. Don’t mess with mercury. Folic acid is your friend. More protein and less caffeine. Stay away from BPA, PBCs and PFA, and generally make an enemy of the unpronounceable....

Once again, NASA’s human space-flight program is looking for a destination. It happened in the early 1970s, after US astronauts had left the Moon for the last time; then in the 1990s, after the collapse of a costly vision of sending astronauts to Mars; and again in 2010, when US President Barack Obama abandoned a plan to return humans to the Moon because he did not consider it ambitious enough. He suggested visiting a near-Earth asteroid instead, but a report released on 5 December by the National Academies says that this plan, too, has misfired....

Bounding down the stairs to my health club’s locker room at lunch today, I spied a new poster that caught my attention: “Leave your stress where it belongs: in your cubicle!” Usually I roll my eyes at marketing exhortations, but this time I had to agree that the writers had a point. In an era of lean staffing and multitasking, workers are at greater risk of making themselves sick from long-term stress, as Ulrich Kraft explains in his article “Burned Out....

High levels of brominated flame retardants can alter pregnant women’s thyroid hormones, which are critical to a baby’s growth and brain development, according to a California study published Monday. The study is considered important because it is the first human research showing a link between the ubiquitous chemicals and altered levels of the hormones in pregnant women. The effects on babies are unknown, but some researchers say it may lead to smaller fetuses, and reduce childen’s intelligence and motor skills....

Jim Rogers has a new mission. The former Duke Energy Corp. CEO is well-known for helping to nudge an often-reluctant utility industry into backing federal carbon legislation 10 years ago. That bill ultimately failed, but Rogers has launched a new endeavor that could also have big implications for the climate: delivering solar power to some of the poorest people on the planet. Rural African electrification isn’t a main topic of conversation in most utility boardrooms today, just as carbon mitigation wasn’t when Rogers used his chairmanship of the Edison Electric Institute to wrangle support for cap-and-trade legislation....

World governments at a United Nations biodiversity meeting this week rejected calls for a global moratorium on gene drives, a technology that can rapidly spread modified genes through populations and could be used to engineer entire species. But environmental activists’ appeals for a freeze on gene-drive field trials, and on some lab research, are likely to resurface in the future. “I’m very relieved,” says Andrea Crisanti, a molecular parasitologist at Imperial College London, who is part of an effort that seeks to use gene drives to control malaria....

For the third year in a row, seasonal allergies have coexisted with COVID-19. And according to clinicians, it has been increasingly difficult to tell the two apart. As spring progresses and pollen counts rise, more people are starting to wonder if their stuffy nose is a sign of COVID or allergies. “It’s almost impossible to differentiate them,” says infectious disease doctor Aaron Glatt, chair of medicine at Mount Sinai South Nassau and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America....

As a young attending physician at a Connecticut medical center 35 years ago, Sharon Inouye was shocked by the disturbing changes she saw in many older patients. They would arrive at the hospital clear-headed and focused but soon became confused and disoriented—for no obvious or consistent reason. Some developed delusions and thrashing agitation; others seemed sedated and out of it. “I asked other physicians about it, and they were dismissive,” she recalls....

Late Saturday, Kilauea’s lava oozed into the Pacific Ocean for the first time since the volcano began erupting on May 4. The resulting cloud prompted the U.S. Geological Survey to issue a warning for “laze,” better known as “lava haze”—the dense white plume created when the molten rock meets water. This violent collision emits a mixture of glass shards and a corrosive substance on par with battery acid, to the peril of anyone downwind....

Last weekend, residents of Los Angeles and other areas of coastal California could be forgiven for thinking they had overslept like Rip van Winkle and woken up in the heat of September or, over the last few days, that they had suddenly been transported to humid Miami. The disorienting weather has been the result of a combination of an unusually early, record-setting heat wave, monsoon conditions over the Southwest and the mountainous local topography....

A strange quantum phenomenon predicted more than 80 years ago finally may have been observed in nature. In 1930, physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler predicted that very strong magnetic fields could change the polarity of light waves in a vacuum (where polarity refers to the orientation of the light’s electric and magnetic fields). This effect, which they dubbed “vacuum birefringence,” is not predicted by classical physics. Now, scientists using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) say they may have observed this effect in the light coming from a neutron star— a cosmic object with a very strong magnetic field....

Flexible, squishy hydrogel materials are used in a dizzying array of applications, from soft contact lenses to Jell-O. But all share a common structure: a tangled network of polymer chains soaked in water. Now researchers have developed their own version of a hydrogel cousin that is tougher and could perhaps find even more uses, including longer-lasting batteries. Meet a new ionogel. Instead of water, ionogel polymers are inundated with an ionic liquid....

To capture the carbon dioxide generated by coal plants, chemical companies like Dow Chemical Co. and energy giants like Alstom SA have been betting big on liquid solvents like amine, a corrosive derivative of ammonia that has a thirst for binding with CO2. Problem is, once the two are bound, they never want to part. In an attempt to circumvent the huge energy demands needed to separate amines from CO2, which can take up to 25 percent of the energy generated by a coal plant, scientists – many funded by the Department of Energy – are developing a new generation of porous solids that can trap CO2 and then, almost as easily, let it go....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog The consumer genetics firm 23andMe was last week awarded a US patent for a method to predict a baby’s traits based on its parents’ DNA, the company announced. 23andMe, which is based in Mountain View, California, says that the patent relates to its Family Traits Inheritance Calculator, which “offers an engaging way for you and your partner to see what kind of traits your child might inherit from you” and has been available to customers since 2009....

In late 2012 NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted what appeared to be plumes of water vapor spewing from the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Another observation last year provided more evidence this was not a fluke. It is likely that below that distant world’s ice is an ocean larger than all of Earth’s combined. This created a frenzy in the astrobiological community—brimming with all that water, could Europa also have the necessary ingredients for life?...

MULTIVERSAL CONFLUENCE “A Cosmic Crisis,” by Richard Panek, discusses possible reasons why the two methods used to measure the universe’s rate of expansion find conflicting values—a discrepancy known as the Hubble tension. I am puzzled that the article does not mention forces from outside our universe acting on it. Can’t we expect that there are other universes with mass like ours that will have gravitational, and possibly other, effects on us?...

Rachel Street felt frightened after a recent planning meeting for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The new telescope, under construction in Chile, will photograph the entire sky every three nights with enough observing power to see a golf ball at the distance of the moon. Its primary project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, will map the galaxy, inventory objects in the solar system, and explore mysterious flashes, bangs and blips throughout the universe....

Pixies – “Alec Eiffel” Best known for singing about broken faces, sliced eyeballs and waves of mutilation, Pixies frontman Black Francis could also be quite poignant, whether he was describing the last moments in the life of a fish snagged by “Jimmy’s cast” (“Brick Is Red,” which closes their lacerating classic Surfer Rosa LP) or an extra-terrestrial’s holiday ending tragically “in Army crates, and photographs in files” after it crash-lands on Earth (“Motorway to Roswell”)....