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Drug-overdose deaths now exceed the number of people dying in car crashes in the U.S. They dwarf deaths from gunshots. And for opioids—which led to some 33,000 deaths in 2015—the numbers are continuing to rise. Preliminary data for 2016 suggests there were more than 50,000 opioid overdose deaths. The surge is renewing public focus on efforts to develop vaccines that would block the drugs’ euphoric effects and therapies that would tamp down the extreme withdrawal symptoms that can leave an addict feeling like they will die unless they get a fix....

Editor’s Note (1/29/16): The researchers involved in the study described in this story have acknowledged that they made an error, which forced them to retract their claim that much of Africa has Eurasian ancestry. For more, please read the following article: “Error Found in Study of First Ancient African Genome.” A 4,500-year-old skeleton from a cave in Ethiopia has produced Africa’s first ancient human genome. The man’s DNA suggests that Middle Eastern farmers migrated into Africa several thousand years ago, leaving traces of their Eurasian ancestry in the genomes of many modern-day Africans....

Every middle-school student learns the dogma: a species is defined as a group of organisms that interbreed and produce fertile young. When individual plants and animals can’t, we call them different species. Sometimes it’s a little confusing to imagine exactly how that might work between Great Danes and Chihuahuas, which are both Canis familiaris, but for the most part it’s a comforting way to make sense of the biological diversity around us....

Something very odd seems to be going on out beyond Pluto. Astronomers have known for more than two decades that the tiny former planet is not alone at the edge of the solar system: it is part of a vast cloud of icy objects known collectively as the Kuiper belt. But unlike most of their fellow travelers, and unlike the planets and most asteroids, which orbit between Mars and Jupiter, a small handful of Kuiper belt objects, or KBOs, have orbits that are decidedly weird....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Interior Department on Monday finalized a contentious rule to protect streams and forests from the impact of coal mining, one of the Obama administration’s last major environmental regulations that the incoming Trump administration is likely to target. The Stream Protection Rule, which the coal industry strongly opposes, updates 33-year-old regulations with stronger requirements for responsible surface coal mining. The Interior Department says the rule will protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests over the next two decades....

When trying to catch spies, it is tempting to cast a broad net despite the risk of making false accusations. Recently the U.S. Department of Justice has done just that. In an effort to crack down on what it depicts as an intellectual espionage campaign by China, it has revved up its prosecution of Asian-American citizens for scientific espionage and intellectual-property theft—from the notable case of Wen Ho Lee of Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1999 to Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this past January....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Supreme Court decision on Tuesday upholding U.S. rules that curb air pollution that floats across state lines was seen as a boost for the Environmental Protection Agency’s upcoming plan to crack down on carbon emissions from power plants. The top court backed a federal regulation requiring 28 Midwestern and Appalachian states that cause smog and soot-forming emissions to limit pollution from their smoke stacks before it wafts downwind, mostly to eastern states....

Digital Revolution Pathologists are traditionally seen as being detached from everyday clinical practice, which explains why we were so pleasantly surprised when we came across the interesting article “A Better Lens on Disease,” by Mike May. Even before the digital revolution, pathologists had developed rudimentary ways (mainly photographs) to capture histological images and submit them to one another for a second opinion. Nowadays such a procedure is adopted usefully at small hospitals in developing countries to refer unusual or difficult cases to internationally recognized European or U....

Conceptually separate the inspectors into two groups: Dagmar, Ejnar, Gudrun and Harald Nils, Bjorn, Anders and Christofferson Try every pair of the first group. That much requires six ships (and honest captains). If you find a cheating pair, then take one member of that pair and combine him on successive ships with Nils, Bjorn, Anders and Christofferson. This approach requires only (6 + 4) = 10 ships altogether to find all the cheaters....

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a tireless advocate of mindfulness meditation, sees parallels between the mind and the Pacific Ocean. Waves of emotion may roil the surface, but 30 feet down, all is peaceful. By tuning in to every breath as it travels through your body, you can dive into that basal oasis. Mindfulness, or being keenly aware of the present moment without judging what is happening, can lift moods, hone focus and improve health....

Key concepts Aerodynamics Planes Forces Drag Physics Introduction Have you ever wondered what makes a paper plane fly? Some paper planes clearly fly better than others. But why is this? One factor is the kind of design used to build the plane. In this activity you’ll get to build a paper plane and change its basic design to see how this affects its flight. There’s a lot of cool science in this activity, such as how forces act on a plane so it can fly....

Climate change, in general, is a bad thing. But for sunscreen manufacturers, there’s opportunity in a warmer planet—though maybe not one that’s always environmentally friendly. Over the last several years, U.S. sunscreen sales have risen steadily, bolstered in part by skin cancer concerns. One industry estimate found that over-the-counter sun care sales had grown from roughly $1.16 billion in 2014 to nearly $1.23 billion in 2017. Other research published by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology noted a related increase in sunscreen unit sales from 2011 to 2016....

Chasing Plagues A virologist crawled through bat caves to find the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus Fast-Track Drugs With no time to make treatments from scratch, scientists are searching for existing compounds that reduce harm Frontline Trauma Stress from fighting COVID-19 poses an unprecedented threat to health care workers How the Healers Feel Interviews by Jillian Mock and Jen Schwartz The Vaccine Quest Only genetic engineering can create a protective serum in months rather than years...

Two research groups have independently produced human embryonic stem-cell lines from embryos cloned from adult cells. Their success could reinvigorate efforts to use such cells to make patient-specific replacement tissues for degenerative diseases, for example to replace pancreatic cells in patients with type 1 diabetes. But further studies will be needed before such cells can be tested as therapies. The first stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos were reported in May last year by a team led by reproductive biology specialist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Beaverton (see ‘Human stem cells created by cloning’)....

From The Year without Summer, by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. Copyright © 2013, by the authors and reprinted by permission of Saint Martin’s Press, LLC. JUST BEFORE SUNSET on April 5, 1815, a massive explosion shook the volcanic island of Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago. For two hours, a stream of lava erupted from Mount Tambora, the highest peak in the region, sending a plume of ash eighteen miles into the sky....

It is time to start anew. More than a century after neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer gave the first scientific talk describing the disease that bears his name today, we have no good treatments for this thief of minds, and we certainly have no cure. Today 40 million to 50 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. The drugs doctors have tried, aimed at a single type of lesion, have repeatedly and agonizingly fallen short....

The oral contraceptive so universally embraced it became known simply as “the pill” was a decades-long dream of family-planning advocate Margaret Sanger, although none of the men who realized her vision started out with that purpose. In the 1930s scientists began discovering the roles of steroid hormones in the body and contemplated their therapeutic potential, but extracting hormones from animals was prohibitively expensive for most medical uses. Then, in 1939, Penn State chemist Russell Marker devised a method for making steroids from plants that remains the basis of hormone production even today....

My father was just 32 years old when he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Weeks later he was in the hospital, informed that he would not be leaving. Miraculously the leukemia went into remission, and he lived another five years. Even as a child, though, I could clearly see that the man who returned from the hospital was not the same one who had left home. Before, he had been concerned mostly with work and material success; now he embraced religion and family....

SAFEGUARDING the environment ranks high on political and social surveys. Yet a yawning gap exists between good intentions and reality. Although Americans express strong support for reducing air and ground pollution, few give up their cars or recycle their AA batteries instead of throwing them in the trash. Why are people’s words and actions so contradictory? Economists who study such behavior say the only variables that really matter to most individuals are time and money: How much would a gallon of gasoline have to cost before the masses switch to mass transit?...

Barry Myers, the chief executive of weather-forecasting firm AccuWeather, is US President Donald Trump’s pick to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the White House said on October 11. Myers, an attorney by training, has led AccuWeather—based in State College, Pennsylvania—since 2007. This experience could prove useful if the US Senate confirms Myers as NOAA’s chief, given that the agency includes the US National Weather Service. But some scientists worry that Myers’ ties to AccuWeather could present conflicts of interest, and note that Myers has no direct experience with the agency’s broader research portfolio, which includes the climate, oceans and fisheries....