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Life at the bottom of the world’s income distribution is massively risky. Poor households lack basic buffers—savings accounts, health insurance, water tanks, diversified income sources, and so on—against drought, pests, disease and other hazards. Even modest shocks, such as a temporary dry spell or a routine infection, can be devastating.These risks have knock-on effects. To take one prime example, the expected economic return on the use of fertilizer is very high in Africa, yet impoverished farmers cannot obtain it on credit because of the potential for a catastrophic loss in the event of a crop failure....

SHAPING UP SCIENCE As a professor emeritus of genetics who spent many long hours writing grant proposals, I agree with “Rethink Funding,” by John P. A. Ioannidis [State of the World’s Science 2018]. The system is biased in favor of “politically savvy managers.” Yet Ioannidis does not address the overhead funds that line the coffers of universities. With state funding constantly dwindling, they rely on overhead more than ever. This is why academia favors big grant getters over innovative research....

Researchers at Stanford University have coaxed brain cells involved in vision to regrow and make functional connections—helping to upend the conventional dogma that mammalian brain cells, once damaged, can never be restored. The work was carried out in visually impaired mice but suggests that human maladies including glaucoma, Alzheimer’s disease and spinal cord injuries might be more repairable than has long been believed. Frogs, fish and chickens are known to regrow brain cells, and previous research has offered clues that it might be possible in mammals....

THE WOODLANDS, Texas—More than a decade after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to officially reclassify Pluto as a “dwarf planet,” scientists and the public are still hotly debating the decision. Some staunch supporters of Pluto’s full-fledged planethood are renewing calls for the IAU to reverse Pluto’s demotion. Their opponents insist the decision should stand. Others—perhaps a silent majority—watch with ambivalence (if not outright distaste) as their more-passionate peers loudly and publicly squabble over nomenclature....

Erbil, Iraq–High in the mountains of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Autonomous Region stands the empty shell of what would have been a world-class astronomical observatory. In 1973 President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr ordered the construction of the $160-million observatory of three telescopes. Once completed, it would have been the only major observatory in the Middle East. But positioned on a strategic mountaintop less than 50 kilometers from the border with Iran, the observatory’s radio telescope dish and optical telescope domes became targets, first in 1985 by Iranian missiles and then in 1991 by U....

Africa’s Lake Victoria is home to one of evolution’s greatest experiments. In its waters, what began as a single lineage belonging to the cichlid family of fishes has since given rise to a dazzling array of forms. Like Charles Darwin’s famous finches, which evolved a wide range of beak shapes and sizes to exploit the different foods available in the Galápagos Islands, these cichlids represent a textbook example of what biologists term an adaptive radiation—the phenomenon whereby one lineage spawns numerous species that evolve specializations to an array of ecological roles....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineScalpel or guillotine? Those are the possible fates in store for US science funding after Congress and the White House reached a deal to cut federal spending and raise the nation’s self-imposed debt limit before a 2 August deadline.The product of tumultuous negotiations, the deal largely spares science in the short term but puts a day of reckoning on the horizon: 2 January 2013. If politicians cannot agree on how to improve the government’s fiscal outlook by then through targeted cuts and other means–the scalpel option–their failure will automatically trigger the guillotine: a deep cut applied across a range of expenditures, including research....

About 40% of the world’s civilian-owned firearms are in the United States, a country that has had some 1.4 million gun deaths in the past four decades. And yet, until recently, there has been almost no federal funding for research that could inform gun policy. US gun violence is back in the spotlight after mass shootings this May in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. And after a decades-long stalemate on gun controls in the US Congress, lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill that places some restrictions on guns....

Whether or not there is an actual “war on science” under way, a million supporters of evidence-based thinking felt threatened enough to show up to the global 2017 March for Science. President Donald Trump has called global warming a “hoax,” and his administration has canceled, blocked and defunded scientific efforts to protect the environment and public health. Moreover, climate change denial is not restricted to the U.S., and dozens of countries have banned the cultivation of GMO crops, despite evidence that genetically modified foods are just as safe as traditionally bred varieties....

Named after a laundry detergent and originally proposed to clean up a problem with particle physics, axions are curious critters. Axions produced during the big bang could be lurking all around us, contributing to the dark matter that constitutes 22 percent of the universe. Other axions, freshly formed inside the sun, could be streaming through us. And according to a paper published in March, laboratory-made axions might have been detected for the first time by an experiment in Italy known as PVLAS (polarization of the vacuum with a laser)....

In this space back in February 2012, I addressed the issue of hunters being shot by their dogs. These rare cases of canine culpability inevitably result from a stray paw, or a stray’s paw, happening onto the trigger of an unsecured firearm. The dogs may be wearing one, but the police don’t get a collar, because the incidents are accidents. Well, they’re probably accidents—some dogs can be cagey. (Okay, I admit that writing those shameless sentences really hit the Spot....

Superstorm Sandy was a dramatic preview of what cities on the Eastern Seaboard might expect as climate change intensifies, but 12 small, indigenous communities on Alaska’s coast provide the most extreme example of how global warming can wreak havoc. Flooding, building collapses due to erosion and severe water pollution are only some of the many problems that have troubled these villages. But according to Alaskan human rights attorney Robin Bronen, the situation is worsened by the lack of government framework to help communities so battered by climate change that they must relocate entirely....

Someday in the coming years, if astronomers finally succeed in locating a virtual Earth twin outside the solar system—a tiny dot of a world at a temperate, life-enabling distance from a sunlike star—the achievement will hardly be cause for resting on observational laurels. Instead another race will begin: to characterize the planet and its atmosphere and to determine if the world is truly habitable or, tantalizingly, if it is already inhabited by some extraterrestrial life-form....

When I started teaching college in 1964, the required reading for my general studies science course included two articles by two prominent physicists published in Scientific American eight years previously. George Gamow, a principal architect of the big bang theory, made the case for a universe that began billions of years ago as an explosion from an infinitely dense and infinitely small seed of energy. Fred Hoyle, stalwart champion of the steady state theory, took the stand for an infinite universe with no beginning and no end, in which matter is continuously created in the space between the galaxies....

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. Vaccine (and masking) lessons can be drawn from the reported SARS-CoV-2 infections among three members of Congress who sheltered in a crowded room among unmasked colleagues during the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, writes Ben Guarino at The Washington Post (1/13/21). All 3 representatives had received just one of their two-dose shots against the virus — one member received it on Dec....

Researchers at IBM have created an elusive molecule by knocking around atoms using a needle-like microscope tip. The flat, triangular fragment of a mesh of carbon atoms, called triangulene1, is too unstable to be made by conventional chemical synthesis, and could find use in electronics. This isn’t the first time that atomic manipulation has been used to create unstable molecules that couldn’t be made conventionally — but this one is especially desirable....

Steve Desch can see the future of exoplanet research, and it’s not pretty. Imagine, he says, that astronomers use NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to scour the atmosphere of an Earth-mass world for signs of life. Then imagine that they chase hints of atmospheric oxygen for years—before realizing that those were false positives produced by geological activity instead of living things. Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and other planet hunters met from November 13-17 in Laramie, Wyoming, to plot better ways to scout for life beyond Earth....

What’s causing so many galaxies in the universe to die before their time? A new study sheds some light on this galactic murder mystery. A galaxy is said to “die” when it stops forming new stars. These form from thick clouds of gas that become extremely cold, causing the clouds to condense and collapse into solid, compact objects. Most attempts to explain galactic death focus how that cold gas is lost or used up inside a galaxy....

Dear EarthTalk: How have polar bear populations in the Arctic been faring since the U.S. put them on its endangered species list in 2008, and what efforts are underway to protect them? — Melissa Underhill, Bangor, ME Biologists estimate that as many as 25,000 polar bears roam the far north these days, with two-thirds of them in Canada and most of the remainder in Alaska and northern Russia. Environmentalists cheered in May 2008 when the U....

April 1968 Origin of the Continents “As recently as five years ago the hypothesis that the continents had drifted apart was regarded with considerable skepticism, particularly among American investigators. Since then, as a result of a variety of new findings, the hypothesis has gained so much support that its critics may now be said to be on the defensive. The slow acceptance of what is actually a very old idea provides a good example of the intensive scrutiny to which scientific theories are subjected, particularly in the earth sciences, where the evidence is often conflicting and where experimental demonstrations are usually not possible....