In TV series Devs, a tech company has built an extremely powerful quantum computer. The show is both beautiful and captivating, says Rowan Hooper

Getting your wok scorching hot and preparing your ingredients in advance is the best way to make a tasty stir-fry, says Sam Wong

Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, we must work out how to stop the spread of poor information that has helped make a bad situation that much worse

Amid the global coronavirus outbreak, a second epidemic of preliminary, unverified and misinterpreted research has broken out. Can it be fixed?

Title: Sampling New York Subway Air for Science
Category: Health News
Created: 4/29/2013 12:35:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 4/30/2013 12:00:00 AM

Title: Don't Believe All the 'Science' on CBD Products
Category: Health News
Created: 3/16/2020 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 3/17/2020 12:00:00 AM

Since December, when cases of a then-unknown respiratory disease were first reported in Wuhan, China, APHA has working to share information and ensure that public health has the resources it needs to address COVID-19.

The ocean is our planet’s largest life-support system. It stabilizes climate; stores carbon; produces oxygen; nurtures biodiversity; directly supports human well-being through food, mineral, and energy resources; and provides cultural and recreational services. The value of the ocean economy speaks to its importance: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...

Existing research shows that distrust of the police is widespread and consequential for public safety. However, there is a shortage of interventions that demonstrably reduce negative police interactions with the communities they serve. A training program in Chicago attempted to encourage 8,480 officers to adopt procedural justice policing strategies. These...

Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates...

Subtle features of common language can imply to young children that scientists are a special and distinct kind of person—a way of thinking that can interfere with the development of children’s own engagement with science. We conducted a large field experiment (involving 45 prekindergarten schools, 130 teachers, and over 1,100...

Synesthesia is a neurologic trait in which specific inducers, such as sounds, automatically elicit additional idiosyncratic percepts, such as color (thus “colored hearing”). One explanation for this trait—and the one tested here—is that synesthesia results from unusually weak pruning of cortical synaptic hyperconnectivity during early perceptual development. We tested the...

Although pain is a prevalent nonmotor symptom in Parkinson’s disease (PD), it is undertreated, in part because of our limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Considering that the basal ganglia are implicated in pain sensation, and that their synaptic outputs are controlled by the subthalamic nucleus (STN), we hypothesized that...

One factor that contributes to the high prevalence of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is binge-like consumption of alcohol before pregnancy awareness. It is known that treatments are more effective with early recognition of FASD. Recent advances in retrospective motion correction for the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) fetal brain MRI...

Sleep pressure and sleep depth are key regulators of wake and sleep. Current methods of measuring these parameters in Drosophila melanogaster have low temporal resolution and/or require disrupting sleep. Here we report analysis tools for high-resolution, noninvasive measurement of sleep pressure and depth from movement data. Probability of initiating activity,...

Chronic pain is a highly prevalent disease with poorly understood pathophysiology. In particular, the brain mechanisms mediating the transition from acute to chronic pain remain largely unknown. Here, we identify a subcortical signature of back pain. Specifically, subacute back pain patients who are at risk for developing chronic pain exhibit...

Transcription factors (TFs) enact precise regulation of gene expression through site-specific, genome-wide binding. Common methods for TF-occupancy profiling, such as chromatin immunoprecipitation, are limited by requirement of TF-specific antibodies and provide only end-point snapshots of TF binding. Alternatively, TF-tagging techniques, in which a TF is fused to a DNA-modifying enzyme...

The initial response to an addictive substance can facilitate repeated use: That is, individuals experiencing more positive effects are more likely to use that drug again. Increasing evidence suggests that psychoactive cannabinoid use in adolescence enhances the behavioral effects of cocaine. However, despite the behavioral data, there is no neurobiological...

Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation is a common genetic abnormality in human malignancies characterized by remarkable metabolic reprogramming. Our present study demonstrated that IDH1-mutated cells showed elevated levels of reactive oxygen species and higher demands on Nrf2-guided glutathione de novo synthesis. Our findings showed that triptolide, a diterpenoid epoxide from Tripterygium...

Genetic polymorphisms in the region of the trimeric serine hydrolase high-temperature requirement 1 (HTRA1) are associated with increased risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and disease progression, but the precise biological function of HtrA1 in the eye and its contribution to disease etiologies remain undefined. In this study, we have...

As the novel coronavirus spreads, communities across the United States are struggling to offer public testing. The need is urgent. Testing got off to a delayed start in the United States as a result of technical missteps and a slow response from government officials. Now cities across the country are...

Human activities and population growth have increased the natural burden of reactive nitrogen (N) in the environment. Excessive N deposition on Earth’s surface leads to adverse feedbacks on ecosystems and humans. Similar to that of air pollution, emission control is recognized as an efficient means to control acid deposition. Control...

Aerosol–radiation interaction (ARI) plays a significant role in the accumulation of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by stabilizing the planetary boundary layer and thus deteriorating air quality during haze events. However, modification of photolysis by aerosol scattering or absorbing solar radiation (aerosol–photolysis interaction or API) alters the atmospheric oxidizing capacity, decreases...

Sub-Neptunes are common among the discovered exoplanets. However, lack of knowledge on the state of matter in H2O-rich setting at high pressures and temperatures (P−T) places important limitations on our understanding of this planet type. We have conducted experiments for reactions between SiO2 and H2O as archetypal materials for rock...

Neural networks have become the method of choice in surrogate modeling because of their ability to characterize arbitrary, high-dimensional functions in a data-driven fashion. This paper advocates for the training of surrogates that are 1) consistent with the physical manifold, resulting in physically meaningful predictions, and 2) cyclically consistent with...

Active matter, both synthetic and biological, demonstrates complex spatiotemporal self-organization and the emergence of collective behavior. A coherent rotational motion, the vortex phase, is of great interest because of its ability to orchestrate well-organized motion of self-propelled particles over large distances. However, its generation without geometrical confinement has been a...

A ubiquitous structural feature in biological systems is texture in extracellular matrix that gains functions when hardened, for example, cell walls, insect scales, and diatom tests. Here, we develop patterned liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) particles by recapitulating the biophysical patterning mechanism that forms pollen grain surfaces. In pollen grains, a...

Legumes tend to be nodulated by competitive rhizobia that do not maximize nitrogen (N2) fixation, resulting in suboptimal yields. Rhizobial nodulation competitiveness and effectiveness at N2 fixation are independent traits, making their measurement extremely time-consuming with low experimental throughput. To transform the experimental assessment of rhizobial competitiveness and effectiveness, we...

The biological carbon pump (BCP) comprises wide-ranging processes that set carbon supply, consumption, and storage in the oceans’ interior. It is becoming increasingly evident that small changes in the efficiency of the BCP can significantly alter ocean carbon sequestration and, thus, atmospheric CO2 and climate, as well as the functioning...

Synaptic activity in neurons leads to the rapid activation of genes involved in mammalian behavior. ATP-dependent chromatin remodelers such as the BAF complex contribute to these responses and are generally thought to activate transcription. However, the mechanisms keeping such “early activation” genes silent have been a mystery. In the course...

Convection is buoyancy-driven flow resulting from unstable density stratification in the presence of a gravitational field. Beyond convection’s central role in myriad engineering heat transfer applications, it underlies many of nature’s dynamical designs on larger-than-human scales. For example, solar heating of Earth’s surface generates buoyancy forces that cause the winds...

At the pinnacle of the 17th century scientific revolution, René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, published his monumental Meditations on First Philosophy (1), in which he proposed a division between soul and body—mind and brain—with the former in charge of our thoughts and conscious decisions (res cogitans) and the...

In 2006, the New York City-based Vilcek Foundation created an annual prize program for foreign-born biomedical scientists who have made major contributions to their fields while living and working in the United States. The founders, themselves immigrants from Czechoslovakia, established the program to raise public awareness of the indispensable role...

Our study in PNAS (1) applies a mathematically based framework to the study of reported emotional experience evoked by music in the United States and China. Germane to theoretical debate, our methods reveal how specific emotions such as “triumph” are more primary across cultures than valence and arousal, a finding...

Cowen et al. (1) leverage modern gains in data science to describe impressive cross-cultural similarities in the perception of musical affect and do so in unprecedented detail. Their approach is innovative and fundamentally empirical. As such, it should have important applications for prediction in the field of affective computing, which...

A growing literature at the intersection of personality psychology and behavioral economics investigates the interplay between personality and decision making in social dilemmas (1, 2). Engelmann et al. (3) extend prior research in this area by investigating the role of antisocial personality in the context of a trust game with...

Engelmann et al. ask whether “personality traits [can] help us better understand economic behavior across strategic contexts” (ref. 1, p. 12781), and, as an answer to this, identify “an antisocial personality profile” (APP) (ref. 1, p. 12785). There is much to like about this investigation; in particular, it illustrates “that...

Elizabeth J. Lawrence, Marija Zanic, and Luke M. Rice

CLIP-associating proteins (CLASPs) form an evolutionarily conserved family of regulatory factors that control microtubule dynamics and the organization of microtubule networks. The importance of CLASP activity has been appreciated for some time, but until recently our understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms remained basic. Over the past few years, studies of, for example, migrating cells, neuronal development, and microtubule reorganization in plants, along with in vitro reconstitutions, have provided new insights into the cellular roles and molecular basis of CLASP activity. In this Cell Science at a Glance article and the accompanying poster, we will summarize some of these recent advances, emphasizing how they impact our current understanding of CLASP-mediated microtubule regulation.

A new movie reimagines H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man. We still can't make people invisible, but it is possible to make tiny objects completely disappear

Flying car hopefuls were meant to take off at a competition on a NASA airbase, but no team claimed the prize after a string of crashes and no-shows

In TV series Devs, a tech company has built an extremely powerful quantum computer. The show is both beautiful and captivating, says Rowan Hooper

X-37B? Sorry, I thought you said your name was X Æ A-12.

The peak of the UK coronavirus epidemic now looks likely to arrive within the next month, according to analysis by the government’s science advisers