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Ever since the deadly parasite responsible for malaria was discovered in the late 19th century, science and global health experts have been waging a vigorous Sisyphean battle against the disease it causes. Humans have brought an arsenal of tools—nets, rapid tests, medication—to bear against the mosquito-borne parasite, which cannily mutates to become resistant to drug treatments. We’re holding our own: Global malaria deaths declined to 409,000 in 2019, compared to 585,000 in 2010, and a number of countries have eliminated it altogether or are on the verge of doing so....

As the Arctic slipped into the half-darkness of autumn last year, it seemed to enter the Twilight Zone. In the span of a few months, all manner of strange things happened. The cap of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean started to shrink when it should have been growing. Temperatures at the North Pole soared more than 20 °C above normal at times. And polar bears prowling the shorelines of Hudson Bay had a record number of run-ins with people while waiting for the water to freeze over....

Dear EarthTalk: I heard that a number of beer brewing companies have banded together to support the Clean Water Act. Can you enlighten?—Mitch Jenkins, Cincinnati In April 2013 the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) brought together two dozen nationally respected craft beer brewers to launch the Brewers for Clean Water Campaign, which aims to leverage the economic growth of the craft brewing sector into a powerful voice for bolstering clean water protection in the United States....

Roses are red… They are also fragile and almost always flown to the U.S. from warmer climes in South America, where roughly 80 percent of our roses take root; to warm the hearts of European sweethearts, they are most often imported from Africa. They are then hauled in temperature-controlled trucks across the U.S. or the Continent and locked up overnight in cold boxes before their onward journey to the florists of the world....

By Elie Gardner of Nature magazineThe Brazilian government has announced a plan to invest 3.16 billion real (R$; US$2.02 billion) in 75,000 science and technology scholarships by the end of 2014. The initiative, which will send students abroad as part of the government’s Science Without Borders program, was announced on 26 July. The government has challenged the private sector to contribute a further 25,000 scholarships.Brazil boasts one of the world’s 10 largest economies, and ranks 13th in scientific production, according to the Institute for Scientific Information in New York....

Climate change could have much larger impacts on the economy than the U.S. government is anticipating, according to an analysis released yesterday that suggests the social cost of carbon should be six times higher. A paper by two Stanford University researchers argues that the true cost of releasing greenhouse gases is about $220 a ton because rising temperatures could badly hinder a nation’s economic growth over decades or centuries. The Obama administration estimates that the social cost of carbon is $37 a ton....

After more than a decade of spectacular growth fuelled by coal, China finds itself sitting on a bonanza of shale gas. Its reserves are the world’s largest, beating even those of the United States. But developing this vast resource won’t be easy, as a bidding last month for shale-gas leases made clear. “The resource is huge,” says Jane Nakano, a fellow of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC....

In 2004 the World Conservation Union placed three vultures—the long-billed, the slender-billed and the Oriental white-backed—on the critically endangered list. Populations of all three reached nearly 40 million in India and South Asia in the early 1990s but had fallen by more than 97 percent. The reasons for saving these vultures from extinction could be framed in familiar terms: we have an ethical obligation to save the world’s biodiversity for its own sake....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichPowerful, mysterious and brief, -ray bursts are the flash bulbs of the cosmos. The brightest bursts outshine a million galaxies, then fade within minutes or hours. Only an extraordinarily energetic and localized event could generate such a brilliant flash. Most -ray bursts (GRBs) are thought to be triggered by the collapse or merger of stars to form black holes.Until now, the short timescales and considerable variation among GRBs have made it hard to understand the physical processes at work....

The ceiling had sprung a leak directly over the toilet. Whenever the upstairs neighbors took a shower, dirty water came down in a robust pitter-patter; other times a light drizzle descended. Nature calls whenever she chooses, however, and one day I needed relief during a bathroom downpour. So I threw on my rain slicker, opened my umbrella and charged in. After that day—and until the ceiling was fixed—I kept an umbrella hanging on the towel rack....

It’s safe to say that wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers gets along better with the black bears in Minnesota than with the humans in the state’s Department of Natural Resources. Rogers, a popular bear researcher who has made numerous TV appearances, is engaged in quite a row with the department. At issue: should the department renew Rogers’ permit to study black bears? In June, the department said “no.” But trying to come between Rogers and his bears is a bit like trying to come between a mother bear and her cubs....

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that military sonar exercises actually kill marine wildlife? – John Slocum, Newport, RI Unfortunately for many whales, dolphins and other marine life, the use of underwater sonar (short for sound navigation and ranging) can lead to injury and even death. Sonar systems—first developed by the U.S. Navy to detect enemy submarines—generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels; the world’s loudest rock bands top out at only 130....

These are boom times for oil-eating microbes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident that has added some 600 million liters of hydrocarbons to those waters. And now research published online in Science on August 24 shows that an array of new and unclassified oil-eating bacteria are feasting on the newly rich resource of hydrocarbons. Microbial ecologist Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and his colleagues used two ships to collect 200 samples from 17 deep water locations between May 25 and June 2....

We did not intend to hurt anyone. Our goal had been to help our neighbors in the Houston area get out of danger. Yet in 2015 the phone started ringing, and Internet messages started piling up, saying we were making safety worse. “You are doing a disservice,” said one public official from a district on Houston’s northern edge. A meteorologist chastised us: “How come you are telling people they are at low risk for flooding when there is flooding all around them?...

A commercial sponsored by Pfizer, the drug company that manufactures the antidepressant Zoloft, asserts, “While the cause [of depression] is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance.” Using advertisements such as this one, pharmaceutical companies have widely promoted the idea that depression results from a chemical imbalance in the brain. The general idea is that a deficiency of certain neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) at synapses, or tiny gaps, between neurons interferes with the transmission of nerve impulses, causing or contributing to depression....

Your kitchen sponge is teeming with microbes. But repeated contact with food waste is not the only reason; a sponge’s unique structure plays a role, too. It could even inspire a new way to grow bacteria for research, according to a study in Nature Chemical Biology. One of the biggest challenges microbiologists face is culturing bacteria species that will not readily grow in a laboratory. Some microbes are incredibly finicky, and scientists often have no idea what conditions these organisms need....

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act in June and sent it to the Senate. The House bill, running to 1,428 pages, aspires in one breathtaking stroke to take on renewable energy, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), nuclear power, electric vehicles, carbon cap and trade, power transmission, energy efficiency and climate adaptation. It ranges from grand vision to minutiae. Yet missing from this sprawling draft is prioritization....

“We’ve known for years that chronic stress leads to increased risk of premature death, even in the absence of other things it’s connected with, such as not taking care of yourself, or high blood pressure,” Franke explains. “Stress leads to your body producing cytokines or other inflammatory agents. In chronic stress, you carry on such responses to an abnormal extent, past what the fight-or-flight response was perhaps meant to handle, wearing down the body....

Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I was well aware of the Silicon Valley hype machine, but I considered the salesmanship of private tech companies a world away from objective truths about human biology I had been taught in neuroscience classes. At the time, I saw the neuroscientist Henry Markram proclaim in a TED talk that he had figured out a way to simulate an entire human brain on supercomputers within 10 years....

On America’s high plains, crops in early summer stretch to the horizon: field after verdant field of corn, sorghum, soybeans, wheat and cotton. Framed by immense skies now blue, now scarlet-streaked, this 800-mile expanse of agriculture looks like it could go on forever. It can’t. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir that gives life to these fields, is disappearing. In some places, the groundwater is already gone. This is the breadbasket of America—the region that supplies at least one fifth of the total annual U....