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Despite a weird flu season, this year’s flu shot is working relatively well to prevent influenza, particularly among children, according to a new report. In the new report, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated the flu shot’s effectiveness in more than 4,000 U.S. children and adults who visited the doctor for respiratory illness between Oct. 23, 2019, and Jan. 25, 2020. Overall, the vaccine was 45% effective, meaning it reduced the risk of a doctor’s visit for flu by 45%, the report found....

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) associate professor Peter A. Diamond, Northwestern University professor Dale T. Mortensen and Longer School of Economics and Political Science professor Christopher A. Pissarides won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday. Their work in the 1970s and 1980s sought to explain “search friction,” in particular in the employment market, where unemployed workers and employers expend time, effort and money to find and fill job openings....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In February, a genomics study appearing in Nature Ecology & Evolution drew attention to the bizarre Antarctic blackfin icefish, which swim in the brutally cold waters off the coast of the southernmost continent. The icefish of the Channichthyidae family are unusual in several ways—they lack scales and have transparent bones, for example—but what stands out most is their so-called white blood, which is unique among vertebrates....

The story follows an intrepid crew of space truckers who get caught up in the intrigue, along with Martian soldiers, interplanetary politicians, tortured private detectives and other characters who try to make sense of the changes wrought by the virus, called the “protomolecule,” which hitches a ride into the solar system Trojan horse–style on Saturn’s moon Phoebe. Scientific American recently talked to Abraham and Franck about the science behind their books, what is in store for the TV series, and the potential future colonization of our solar system....

Parents, teachers and caregivers have long sworn by the magic of storytelling to calm and soothe kids. Researchers working in pediatric intensive care units have now quantified the physiological and emotional benefits of a well-told tale. “We know that narrative has the power to transport us to another world,” says Guilherme Brockington, who studies emotions and learning at Brazil’s Federal University of ABC in São Paulo and was lead author on the new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA....

The search for the genetic roots of psychiatric illnesses and behavioral disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and ADHD has a long history, but until recently, it was one marked by frustration and skepticism. In the past few years, new techniques have begun to reveal strong evidence for the role of specific genes in some cases of these conditions but in a way few people expected. To understand what makes the new discoveries so novel, it’s necessary to appreciate how our genes can go wrong....

Situated 16,600 feet above sea level and neighboring the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, the Pyramid International Laboratory/Observatory is one of the world’s oldest and most prolific high-altitude research facilities. But it’s falling apart. The tragic period for the Pyramid began in the early 2010s, when the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) cut its funding short. As a result, a lot of ongoing research missions had to be suspended, and on-site researchers and maintenance staff had to leave....

Solutions: No. Person A might be good but might send you to a side with only one good square. Let’s say that good square is the topmost one having only one arrow pointing to it. Now, B might be good, but he sees that the second-from-the-top C circle points only to bad squares, so he sends you to the topmost C circle who is bad and sends you to one of the bad squares....

By Matt KaplanNitrogenous fertilizers and detergents have long been known to cause algal blooms that block sunlight and strangle ecosystems, but a study now reveals that overfishing of large predatory fish is also playing a key part.Britas Klemens Eriksson at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands noticed that populations of predatory fish in the Baltic Sea seemed to be declining in areas where algal blooms subsequently tended to form. Curious as to whether there was a connection, Eriksson and a team of colleagues from the Swedish Board of Fisheries in Öregrund set up an investigation....

The U.K.’s Ministry of Justice is due in March to publish a draft bill outlining libel law reform. For many in the scientific community worldwide it can’t come soon enough. Among the signatories to the campaign for reform are the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, the Society for Experimental Biology, AOL, Inc., and Nature Publishing Group. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) “Our libel laws are among the most restrictive in the world,” says Sile Lane, campaigns manager and public liaison for Sense About Science, a London-based independent charitable trust that promotes science and evidence-based public debate....

If money could buy happiness, how much would it take to bring it back after the death of a partner, child or spouse? Most of us would be loathe to assign such a value, if not offended by the question, but two economists have attached such dollar values to deaths by comparing the way that lost loved ones lower scores on happiness surveys with the way that greater incomes boost scores....

The bizarre behavior of the quantum world — with objects existing in two places simultaneously and light behaving as either waves or particles — could result from interactions between many ‘parallel’ everyday worlds, a new theory suggests. “It is a fundamental shift from previous quantum interpretations,” says Howard Wiseman, a theoretical quantum physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who together with his colleagues describes the idea in Physical Review X....

Imagine you are serving on a jury: the defendant is charged with murder, but he also suffers from a brain tumor that causes erratic behavior. Is he to be held responsible for the crime? Now imagine you are the judge: What should the defendant’s sentence be? Does the tumor count as a mitigating circumstance? The assignment of responsibility and the choice of an appropriate punishment lie at the heart of our justice system....

As Earth’s temperature steadily climbs and international action to curtail heat-trapping greenhouse gases falters, climate change poses such a dire threat that scientists are now seriously investigating geoengineering as a last-ditch attempt to cool the planet. But deliberately manipulating Earth’s climate could obviously have unintended consequences, so “it’s very important that we study it before anyone tries to use it,” says Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley....

Burrowed deep under the foothills near Palo Alto, Calif., scientists scurried through an underground laboratory, making final preparations for a series of explosions. Their plan: blow up tiny crystals of proteins that could reveal one of nature’s best-kept secrets—how plant photosynthesis turns light into chemical energy. The potential payoff: a step toward unlimited clean power. It was December 2009, and a sleep-deprived team of researchers and students at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory had been working nonstop for days to set up this experiment at the world’s most powerful x-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), which accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. During the reign of the emperor Justinian I (527-565 CE), one of the worst outbreaks of the plague took place, claiming the lives of millions of people. The plague arrived in Constantinople in 542 CE, almost a year after the disease first made its appearance in the outer provinces of the empire....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Queen of the Night (also known as the Burney Relief') is a high relief terracotta plaque of baked clay, measuring 19.4 inches (49.5 cm) high, 14.5 inches (37 cm) wide, with a thickness of 1.8 inches (4.8 cm) depicting a naked winged woman flanked by owls and standing on the backs of two lions....

Scientists use pipettes when they need to dispense well-defined volumes of liquid. Existing pipettes can deliver fluid volumes as small as an attoliter—a quintillionth, or a billionth of a billionth, of a liter. Physicists Peter W. Sutter and Eli A. Sutter of Brookhaven National Laboratory have broken that lower limit by constructing a pipette that metes out a droplet measured in a unit that is a thousandth as small—a zeptoliter (a sextillionth of a liter)....

The Pine Island Glacier, which sits on part of west Antarctica, is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise. That is because the enormous glacier, which constitutes 10 percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is thinning rapidly, allowing more and more of its land-based ice to reach the sea. How fast this rapid thinning goes on, and for how long, will determine how quickly sea levels rise in the future....

During the first week of October, I was the science-writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Being a science-writer-in-residence vastly beats being a regular old science writer, because I did not actually have to write anything. I thus got to recharge my depleted store of metaphors (my brain was a wasteland, a barren desert, a bachelor’s refrigerator), rest my tendonitis-ridden mouse arm and leave verbs unconjugated. I declined all declensions. I also visited the Center for Dairy Research—this is Wisconsin, after all—where I had my inaugural mouthful of cheese curds, the first coagulated bits that form in the cheese-making process....