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When the mystery virus was first detected in Saudi Arabia three years ago, researchers did not know quite what to make of it. The virus causing Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, it turns out, is a cousin of the bug behind severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and has been responsible for the deaths of more than 500 people, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. Researchers on August 19, however, are reporting that a vaccine has begun to show promise against the disease—at least in monkeys, mice and camels....

World leaders moved forward this week with a global framework to stem the loss of biodiversity, but missing from the conversation was a critical potential partner—the United States. For three decades, the United States has failed to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty to tackle threats to the world’s plants, animals and ecosystems. That stance forced the United States to the sidelines this week as diplomats and delegates gathered in Kunming, China, to discuss the deal....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Hymn to Ninkasi is at once a song of praise to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, and an ancient recipe for brewing. Written down in c. 1800 BCE, the hymn is no doubt much older as evidenced by the techniques it details which scholars have determined were actually in use long before the hymn was written....

Climatologist Michael E. Mann is most famous for what he calls one of the “least interesting” aspects of his work. In the 1990s he used data from tree rings, coral growth bands and ice cores as proxies for ancient temperatures, combining them with modern thermometer readings. This annual record of temperature variations over the past millennium offered insights into natural climate cycles. As an “afterthought,” he included a graph of average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere going back to the 1400s in a 1998 paper (he later extended it to A....

Across 163 different countries, 1,000 natural and cultural historic places constitute our most precious human heritage. UNESCO calls them World Heritage Sites, and they range from the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s endangered Virunga National Park to Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra to Mount Rushmore in the U.S. We lose a little of that heritage every day. War, climate change and pollution take a toll, as do wind and rain. Already gone are the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan (dynamited by the Taliban in 2001) and Palmyra (partially destroyed by ISIS in 2015)....

Dear EarthTalk: I was wondering how toxic chlorine is, because my well water was just chlorinated yesterday, and today the smell is still strong. I have a 4-year-old daughter and I’m concerned.—Rose Smith, via e-mail According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), chlorine levels of four parts per million or below in drinking water—whether from a private well or municipal reservoir—are acceptable from a human health standpoint. Inexpensive home drinking water test kits (from $5 on up) that can detect levels of chlorine and other elements in water are widely available from online vendors....

By Nina ChestneyLONDON (Reuters) - A release of methane in the Arctic could speed the melting of sea ice and climate change with a cost to the global economy of up to $60 trillion over coming decades, according to a paper published in the journal Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the Netherlands used economic modeling to calculate the consequences of a release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane from thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea....

Charitable donations to help protect an endangered species are one thing. But would you don a piece of permanent body art to save a mammal, plant or even a fungi? Three years ago, 100 men and women in the U.K.—average people, not scientists—did just that. Each of them went under the needle to get a tattoo of a species they vowed to help protect. A traveling exhibition that lauds these inked advocates will soon come to a close, but the project may spawn broader outreach efforts....

Every once in a great while, something almost unspeakable happens to Earth. Some terrible force reaches out and tears the tree of life limb from limb. In a geological instant, countless creatures perish and entire lineages simply cease to exist. The most famous of these mass extinctions happened about 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out in the planet-wide environmental disruption that followed a mountain-sized space rock walloping Earth....

Companies have started putting antiox­i­dants in goods as different as face creams and soda, claiming that they clean out cells, prevent cancer and even stave off death. The idea is to prevent unstable oxygen molecules, which are normal by-products of metabolism, from damaging cells. But a recent study suggests that when it comes to living longer, those antioxidants may not be the answer. The antioxidant theory of aging states that some of the oxygen molecules used by the body become negatively charged, making them reactive....

Over the past four months, salmonella poisoning has left a stomach-churning trail of diarrhea and vomiting in its wake, sickening at least 410 people in 43 states across the U.S. and leaving three dead. On Friday, the Minnesota Department of Health announced a possible break in the case, revealing that the suspected culprit might be one of the fave foods of the nation’s kids and adults alike: peanut butter. Officials believed that a five-pound tub of King Nut brand creamy peanut butter in a Minnesota nursing home might contain the bacteria to blame for the outbreak....

Okay, great: we can control Our phones with speech recognition and our television sets with gesture recognition. But those technologies don’t work in all situations for all people. So I say, forget about those crude beginnings; what we really want is thought recognition. As I found out during research for a recent NOVA episode, it mostly appears that brain-computer interface (BCI) technology has not advanced very far just yet. For example, I tried to make a toy helicopter fly by thinking “up” as I wore a $300 commercial EEG headset....

The Tampa Bay area has all the hallmarks of hurricane vulnerability: a large urban population, extensive coastal development and a network of easily flooded rivers. The only thing missing has been a hurricane. But with Hurricane Ian bringing Category 4 winds, 10 feet of storm surge and up to 25 inches of rain, experts are warning about massive and lasting damage to Florida’s second-most populous metro area. “There will be catastrophic flooding and life-threatening storm surge,” Florida Gov....

In Knowing, which opens in theaters today, Nicolas Cage plays an astrophysics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). If you can accept that, your suspension-of-disbelief levels may be sufficient for the fiction portion of this slab of science fiction. View a slide show of images from the film As for the science portion, the film gets off to a more promising start. The first time we see Professor John Koestler (Cage), he’s peering through a telescope at the rings of Saturn and talking exoplanets and the odds of extraterrestrial life with his young son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury)....

More than 3,500 years ago a catastrophic volcanic eruption struck ancient Thera, known today as the Greek island of Santorini. Ash and pumice rained across the Mediterranean, and tsunami waves rolled onto faraway shores in Crete. In the 1960s archaeologists on Santorini uncovered a Minoan settlement frozen in time, with vibrant wall frescoes decorating multistory houses, all buried by volcanic debris. The eruption was one of the most powerful volcanic explosions of the past 10,000 years and a crucial time point of the Mediterranean Bronze Age....

The cities along the Mississippi River and its tributaries in Iowa are the latest victims of heavy rains in early June, with cities farther down the river expected to face the cresting waters in coming days. The scale of devastation may match the $15 billion in damages wrought by a similar flood in 1993, when waters crested at nearly 50 feet in St. Louis. Already, thousands of residents have had to be evacuated and thousands of homes have been ruined—though a federal government program to purchase low-lying lands in the wake of the 1993 flood has mitigated some of the damage this time....

About 25 years ago astronomers kicked off what would come to be called the “exoplanet revolution” with the discovery of the first alien world orbiting another sunlike star. As the pace of discovery quickened and new data came pouring in, it became clear that the cosmos is awash in planets—big planets, small planets, planets broiled by their stars or frozen in the outskirts of their systems and, overwhelmingly, planets that in size and orbit are unlike anything we have in the solar system....

Any regular museumgoer will recognize the darkened, muted color of red vermillion pigment that immediately signals that a painting is centuries old. But the reasons for this darkening are a mystery that dates back at least 1,200 years. Now scientists have used x-ray analysis of pigments in a medieval Spanish mural to study the degradation and have proposed a new explanation that had not been considered before. Color is determined by which wavelengths of light bounce off an object....

A coal-reliant electric utility, Ameren Corp., is laying out changes U.S. EPA could make to its proposed Clean Power Plan to earn the company’s support for the proposed rule. In a white paper released today, the utility—which produces 70 percent of its power from coal-fired plants—doesn’t hold back any criticism but is overall conciliatory, asking for revisions that mirror requests from both defenders and opponents of the power plant regulations. Ameren is the first coal-dependent utility to refine its position on paper and to make a formal move toward developing consensus on the controversial rule....

A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving. The human brain constantly filters thoughts and feelings. Only a small fraction of the stimuli impressed on us by our environment ascends to the level of conscious awareness....