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More than Government Grants Entrepreneurial ingenuity focuses on finding money and ideas to advance medical science To lift the burden of infectious diseases in poor nations, Harvard University economist Michael Kremer has advocated a kind of artificial market for vaccines. In Kremer’s scheme, a donor country or institution would commit to paying a certain sum for the development of a vaccine and would purchase it at a high price per dose....

Legislation introduced last year in Connecticut recognized Gustave Whitehead as “First in Flight.” North Carolina and Ohio briefly ceased their perennial squabbles about who had the best claim to the Wright brothers and joined to complain about Connecticut. Ohio state representative Rick Perales (R) said in October 2013 that it was wrong for one state to “distort history” whereas North Carolina state senator Bill Cook (R) said the Whitehead controversy was “more like a fairy tale told to a child....

My first day in Mexico City was tough. The smog was so thick that I gasped for breath while climbing the stairs to my hotel room. I had braced for headaches from the high altitude and thin air, but I was not prepared for how dirty that air was or for the bloodshot eyes and burning lungs. Declared the world’s most polluted metropolis by the United Nations in 1992, greater Mexico City has worked hard to clean up its act....

EPA’s greenhouse gas inventory released yesterday shows that the transportation and electricity sectors now supply about the same amount of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. In 2016, the latest year for which data is available, fossil fuel-generated power and transportation each supplied about 34 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions, according to the annual EPA report. Industry was a distant third at 15 percent. Electricity has historically been the chief source of CO2 emissions, but shifts from coal to lower-carbon fuels, especially natural gas, have shrunk its share of the total carbon dioxide pie in recent years....

The first major Europe-wide survey of honeybee colonies has revealed that some countries are losing as many as one-third of their colonies every winter, but the result is still better than some feared. Declines in bee numbers have received huge public attention in recent years, with numerous hives succumbing to ‘colony collapse disorder’. The blame has been pinned on parasites, insecticide use and changed farming practises. But detailed information on the true level of decline in bee numbers has been scarce....

“There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon,” teases the poster for the new horror sci-fi flick “Apollo 18.” The movie claims to reveal decades-old footage of astronauts on a secret mission two years after Apollo 17 — the last real expedition to the moon — flew in 1972. (Without giving away anything that isn’t in the trailer, lunar aliens apparently share some blame for our 40-year absence from the moon....

As an emergency physician, Megan Ranney is used to dealing with hard questions about injury and illness. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, she has found herself scrambling for answers. “I kept getting asked by people whether it was safe to do certain activities,” says Ranney. “‘Is it safe to go to the beach, or to an outdoor party or a restaurant?’” Millions have struggled with the same questions throughout 2020. Scientists and clinicians are still learning about the epidemiology and pathology of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and, for the public, it can be difficult to understand how to maintain some semblance of normality while minimizing the risk of infection....

When it comes to studying love, prairie voles, with their strong pair bonds, are the laboratory stars. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, have established a primate model of monogamy they believe will be more relevant for uncovering the basis of human affection. The researchers used PET scans to examine brain activity in male titis, small South American monkeys that form strong relationships with their mates. They discovered that lone, unpaired male titis had strikingly different patterns of brain activity than males in long-term, monogamous partnerships did....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Last week marked the historic announcement of the first detection of gravitational waves. A big press conference was held, and physicists around the world celebrated. The discovery was even compared to Galileo looking through a telescope for the first time. So why all the fanfare? Why are gravitational waves such a huge deal?...

As much as one third of the global population is currently infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), a disease typically concentrated in the lungs and characterized by weakness, fever, coughing and chest pain. About 9.6 million new infections occurred in 2014, the most recent year for which numbers are available. Roughly 1.5 million people died of TB that same year. The ability to easily, inexpensively and accurately diagnose TB is of utmost importance, but the most commonly used method fails, at least to some extent, on all three counts....

If you’ve spent more than about 5 minutes surfing the web, listening to the radio, or watching TV in the past few years, you will know that cognitive training—better known as “brain training”—is one of the hottest new trends in self improvement. Lumosity, which offers web-based tasks designed to improve cognitive abilities such as memory and attention, boasts 50 million subscribers and advertises on National Public Radio. Cogmed claims to be “a computer-based solution for attention problems caused by poor working memory,” and BrainHQ will help you “make the most of your unique brain....

A shortage in U.S. testing capacity has been a major bottleneck in containment efforts throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed its own test kits and distributed them nationwide. But problems with their chemical reagents and overly strict testing criteria caused major setbacks. The Food and Drug Administration later gave companies the green light to make their own assays, and testing capacity increased significantly....

Why do people seek out information about an ex’s new relationships, read negative Internet comments and do other things that will obviously be painful? Because humans have an inherent need to resolve uncertainty, according to a recent study in Psychological Science. The new research reveals that the need to know is so strong that people will seek to slake their curiosity even when it is clear the answer will hurt. In a series of four experiments, behavioral scientists at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Wisconsin School of Business tested students’ willingness to expose themselves to aversive stimuli in an effort to satisfy curiosity....

Over the course of evolution, immense megafauna have roamed the lands or swum in the seas. The growth of these creatures early in their life is typically quite rapid. It has to be. They need to grow fast or be eaten. Extensive studies on megafauna have addressed the unique challenges of supporting and moving such massive bodies. But the greatest and largely ignored obstacle to extreme growth for both terrestrial and aquatic megafauna may involve the rapid development of their nervous system....

President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been photographed shaking hands with supporters in recent weeks, has rejected social-distancing measures while heavily promoting the antimalarial drug chloroquine as a coronavirus treatment despite a lack of evidence that it is effective. Former health minister Luiz Mandetta was fired in mid-April after a disagreement over Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic. His successor, Nelson Teich, resigned on 15 May, after just a month in the job....

The 2014 chemistry Nobel prize has been given to three pioneers of biomedical imaging, whose work has enabled nanoscale features within cells to be captured in exquisite detail. Eric Betzig of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, US, Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany, and WE Moerner of Stanford University, US, will share the prize for ‘the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy’. The techniques they developed enabled extremely high resolution images to be produced using optical microscopy....

The race is on build a ‘universal’ quantum computer. Such a device could be programmed to speedily solve problems that classical computers cannot crack, potentially revolutionizing fields from pharmaceuticals to cryptography. Many of the world’s major technology firms are taking on the challenge, but Microsoft has opted for a more tortuous route than its rivals. IBM, Google and a number of academic labs have chosen relatively mature hardware, such as loops of superconducting wire, to make quantum bits (qubits)....

From the beginning of the Christian era to about 1850, the urban population of the world never exceeded 7 percent. The Industrial Revolution quickly changed that–today 75 percent of people in the U.S. and other developed countries live in cities, according to the United Nations. As the chart shows, urbanization in the developing countries (such as China and India) and the least developed countries (such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh) has long lagged behind that of the West and Japan....

Such notions defy conventional wisdom that excess adiposity kills more than 300,000 Americans a year and that the gradual fattening of nations since the 1980s presages coming epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and a host of other medical consequences. Indeed, just this past August a large study of retirees published in the New England Journal of Medicine by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institutes of Health concluded that “excess body weight during midlife, including overweight, is associated with an increased risk of death....

Sea-level rise isn’t just happening; it’s accelerating. And some areas of the United States—like Florida—are seeing “hot spots” where the ocean can creep up six times faster than average. Those are the findings of two new studies published yesterday, which have potentially troubling implications for urban planners trying to address sea-level rise. They also help explain why residents of Florida and North Carolina have seen sharp increases in coastal flooding in recent years....