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Droughts linked to climate change are going to hit vulnerable populations the hardest, especially communities in war-torn countries such as Yemen and South Sudan, according to a new study. The study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said children in developing countries will be particularly at risk. It found that increased climate shocks could slow or even reverse years of progress in lowering rates of stunting caused by poor childhood nutrition....

Walk into any grocery store, and you will likely find more than a few “probiotic” products brimming with so-called beneficial bacteria that are supposed to treat everything from constipation to obesity to depression. In addition to foods traditionally prepared with live bacterial cultures (such as yogurt and other fermented dairy products), consumers can now purchase probiotic capsules and pills, fruit juices, cereals, sausages, cookies, candy, granola bars and pet food. Indeed, the popularity of probiotics has grown so much in recent years that manufacturers have even added the microorganisms to cosmetics and mattresses....

Sometime between three million and two million years ago, perhaps on a primeval sa­vanna in Africa, our ancestors became recognizably human. For more than a million years their australopithecine predecessors—Lucy and her kind, who walked upright like us yet still possessed the stubby legs, tree-climbing hands and small brains of their ape fore­bears—­had thrived in and around the continent’s forests and woodlands. But their world was changing. Shifting climate favored the spread of open grasslands, and the early australopithecines gave rise to new lineages....

In surprising numbers, women in climate science in particular and the physical sciences in general are abandoning academic careers. The reasons are as varied as the individuals - some leave for maternity issues or other family pressures, others give up in the face of subtle gender bias within the academic world. And others feel there are better platforms than a university position to apply the science they love and to speak out to a broader audience, with greater impact....

If you ever go looking for sex advice, you’re sure to be inundated with tips on positions, techniques, and whatever the grocery store magazines say is guaranteed to drive your partner wild. But that’s not really what you need. Indeed, if you’re unsatisfied with your sex life, you’re probably not looking to recreate the grapefruit scene from Girls Trip. Instead, you need some sound advice for your most important sex organ—the one between your ears....

You’ve got a headache, so you take some acetaminophen. But, you’re not only swallowing the active ingredient—it’s just a small component of each tablet. For most medicines, up to 90% of each dose is made up of excipients: substances added to improve formulation, performance, taste, appearance, color, or even consumer appeal. Excipients are officially designated, and therefore often dismissed, as ‘inactive’ ingredients. “The first time I mentioned them to my internist a few years ago, he looked confused,” says Robert Osterberg, a pharmaceutical industry consultant, and a member of a committee working on excipient issues at USP, also known as the US Pharmacopeia....

On a Monday morning at a home for the elderly in Cologne, Germany, a nurse asked 73-year-old Mr. K. about his weekend. “Oh, my wife and I flew to Hungary, and we had a wonderful time!” he replied. The nurse paused—Mr. K.’s wife had passed away five years ago, and he had not left the home in months. Was he trying to impress her? More likely, Mr. K. was confabulating, a phenomenon in which people describe and even act on false notions they believe to be true....

Whether humans are born with certain innate abilities to understand spatial relationships in the wider world is a question that has troubled thinkers at least as far back as Aristotle. So-called nativists argue for such an innate understanding, whereas others, notably the late Benjamin Whorf, contend that spatial understandings are directed by learned language. By comparing people of different linguistic backgrounds as well as the spatial strategies of small children with the great apes, researchers have found evidence for a middle way: humans do have an innate spatial strategy, but it can be overridden by language....

Once every year, engineers measure the Leaning Tower of Pisa’s precarious tilt. Last week they announced that the tower had been self-correcting for more than a decade and had finally stopped. The surprise gain straightened the landmark by four centimeters. Although that may seem small, it is a welcome gift after centuries of worry that the building would simply topple. The news came to John Burland, an emeritus professor at Imperial College in London, by way of a 4 A....

A new NASA satellite is poised to launch early Friday (Oct. 28) to continue the agency’s string of Earth-watching missions, but the new spacecraft has a twist — it’s the first probe ever built to track fast weather systems and long-term climate change, researchers say. The National polar-orbiting operational environmental satellite system Preparatory Project—or NPP for short—is slated to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 5:48 a....

When someone with a high fever walks into a rural African clinic, diagnosis could be murky. The symptoms could be those of dengue, Ebola, West Nile disease, malaria or flu, and blood work results from distant labs, if available, often takes days. Now a handful of researchers are separately working on inexpensive, paper-based diagnostic tests that accurately pinpoint the cause of a disease in minutes and could speed up treatment and prevent its spread....

Most discarded plastic beverage bottles can be recycled—those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow. Yet the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new containers. Now researchers have devised a way to manufacture plastic bottles that would increase their recycling life span. The problem with bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic is that the manufacturing process often needs metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts. These catalysts linger in the recycled material and weaken it over time, making it impractical to reuse for a third generation....

Very little inspires curiosity like the prospect of exploring alien worlds. A crewed mission to Mars will one day surely captivate the world, just as people walking on the Moon did 50 years ago. But we do not need to leave Earth to go where few have before. The ocean is an unexplored world right on our doorstep. “Think of how much of our planet is blue,” Sylvia Earle, explorer in residence at the US National Geographic Society in Washington DC, said to attendees of the 69th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany in July....

In January storage tanks owned by Freedom Industries spilled 10,000 gallons of industrial chemicals into the Elk River in West Virginia. The toxic liquids washed a short distance downstream into the region’s largest drinking-water treatment plant. About 500 residents checked into local hospitals; 300,000 people could not use tap water for weeks on end; and businesses closed, leaving employees without a paycheck. Similar stories abound. In February failed pipes at a Duke Energy dump sent tens of thousands of tons of hazardous coal ash into the Dan River in Eden, N....

Planetary scientists studying Mars have a slightly embarrassing secret: They don’t really know how old most of the planet’s surface is. They do have decent estimates, mostly based on counting craters pockmarking the Martian crust—more craters equate to a greater age. Yet the only way to pin down an age with something approaching absolute certainty is to closely analyze rock samples, and none of the rovers and landers set down on the Red Planet has carried the necessary equipment....

Ramped up in power after a two-year upgrade, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator is once again doing science. Following its official restart on June 3, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, can smash protons together faster and with higher energies than during its first run, which ended in February 2013. Our graphical guide illuminates the discoveries that could lie ahead in the next run of the LHC....

A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction by Michael J. Ryan. Princeton University Press, 2018 ($29.95) If a female túngara frog doesn’t fancy the call of a singing male, she moves on to another suitor or may give him a body slam. A male bowerbird builds large huts from sticks and decorates them, sometimes even using berry juice as wall paint. Humans buy showy cars, bathe in perfume and pour money into elaborate beauty routines....

By Victoria Cavaliere SEATTLE (Reuters) - The wildfire season in Washington state has been one of the most destructive on record, charring 550 square miles of wilderness and destroying hundreds of homes and structures, the state Department of Natural Resources said on Thursday. The assessment came as Washington Governor Jay Inslee renewed a request for the federal government to offer assistance to more than 300 people who lost their homes during July’s record-setting Carlton Complex blaze near the Cascade Mountains....

Scientific relations between Russia and the West have reached their lowest ebb since the cold war, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and NASA both cut ties with Russia last week. On 1 April, NATO suspended all civilian and military cooperation with Russia. This affects scientific collaboration under the organization’s Science for Peace and Security Programme, which underpins counterterrorism and disaster-relief work, including work on technology that can detect hidden bombs at crowded public-transport locations....

Boat trips to watch whales and dolphins may increasingly be putting the survival of marine mammals at risk, conservationists have warned. Research published this year shows that the jaunts can affect cetacean behavior and stress levels in addition to causing deaths from collisions. But some animals are affected more than others and the long-term effects remain unclear, scientists at the International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC) in Glasgow, UK, heard last week....