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The Trump administration has abruptly halted work on a highly regarded program to help physicians, families, and others separate effective “evidence-based” treatments for substance abuse and behavioral health problems from worthless interventions. The program, called the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, was launched in 1997 and is run by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Its website lists 453 programs in behavioral health—aimed at everything from addiction and parenting to HIV prevention, teen depression, and suicide-hotline training—that have been shown, by rigorous outcomes measures, to be effective and not quackery....

When a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, last February, the world’s space agencies found out along with the rest of us, on Twitter and YouTube. That, former astronaut Ed Lu says, is unacceptable—and the United Nations agrees. In October the U.N. General Assembly approved a set of measures to limit the dangers of rogue asteroids. The U.N. plans to set up an International Asteroid Warning Group for member nations to share information about potentially hazardous space rocks....

As the sea creeps steadily inland in countries such as Bangladesh, and as dwindling rains put already marginal farmland out of play in Ethiopia and other places, a wave of migration triggered by a changing climate is taking shape on the horizon. But most “climate migrants” will not be heading abroad to start new lives; instead they will settle elsewhere in their home countries. A new World Bank report released this week declares that if nothing is done to curb global warming and factor migration into development planning, by mid-century this internal population shift could involve more than 140 million people in three regions examined: sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia and Latin America....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was founded by Roman emperor Constantine I in 324 CE and it acted as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire as it has later become known, for well over 1,000 years. Although the city suffered many attacks, prolonged sieges, internal rebellions, and even a period of occupation in the 13th century CE by the Fourth Crusaders, its legendary defences were the most formidable in both the ancient and medieval worlds....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The most important cash crop in Colonial America was tobacco, first cultivated by the English at their Jamestown Colony of Virginia in 1610 CE by the merchant John Rolfe (l. 1585-1622 CE). Tobacco grew in the wild prior to this time and was cultivated by the indigenous peoples as a stimulant but, after Rolfe, became the most lucrative crop in the Americas....

The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to a long-term drought that began around 2000 BC. Now paleoclimatologists propose that a similar fate was followed by the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization, at about the same time. Based on isotope data from the sediment of an ancient lake, the researchers suggest that the monsoon cycle, which is vital to the livelihood of all of South Asia, essentially stopped there for as long as two centuries....

By Reuters Staff (Reuters) - Merck & Co Inc said on Tuesday it will halt a late-stage trial of an Alzheimer’s drug after it was determined that it had no chance of working, marking the latest in a long line of crushing disappointments in efforts to find an effective treatment for the disease. The company was testing its drug, verubecestat, in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. But an independent data monitoring committee determined that there was “virtually no chance of finding a positive clinical effect” and recommended the trial be stopped for futility....

At first glance—and even after deep scrutiny—the names on a new memorial to those killed on September 11, 2001, seem randomly arrayed. The names are not arranged alphabetically nor, for the most part, are they presented in labeled groups. But the memorial’s layout is anything but random. The 2,983 names—etched across bronze panels surrounding two memorial pools of water, one north and one south—are strung together in a way that reflects thousands of complex interpersonal relationships forged before the attacks and, on at least one occasion, during the immediate aftermath....

For physicists, the two-body problem has a solution: neat equations describe the motion of two objects orbiting one another. But the career version of the two-body problem, which arises when two high-achieving partners try to find satisfying jobs, is much more complicated. Scientific American posted a survey this past Valentine’s Day to find out more about the two-body problem, and 1,594 people responded (fewer than the response to last year’s survey, but still a nice turnout)....

The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press. Rude and crass e-mails. E-mails calling him a fraud, a cheat, a scumbag and much worse. To Schmidt and other researchers purging their inboxes daily of such correspondence, the barrage is simply part of the job of being a climate scientist. But others see the messages as threats and intimidation—cyber-bullying meant to shut down debate and cow scientists into limiting their participation in the public discourse....

Roughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America. But now nanodiamonds found in the sediments from this time period point to an alternative: a massive explosion or explosions by a fragmentary comet, similar to but even larger than the Tunguska event of 1908 in Siberia....

Last week, a store manager at a Whole Foods in Tulsa, Okla., was surprised—to say the least—to find a large brown spider lurking in a bunch of bananas. The spider was initially identified as a Brazilian wandering spider, a menacing-looking creature with furry fangs and legs as long as five inches (12.5 centimeters) that is considered to be one of the world’s most venomous spiders, and one of the few that can kill humans....

Nearly four centuries ago Isaac Newton demonstrated that a glass prism could separate white light into all the colors of a rainbow. Now a Switzerland-based team of electrical engineers has built a device that can do something similar for sound—splitting noise into its constituent frequencies by physical means only. The so-called acoustic prism comprises a 40-centimeter-long hollow aluminum case with a series of 10 holes on its side. Within, flexible polymer membranes divide the case into chambers....

Does junior really have his father’s nose? A common bit of parenting folklore holds that babies tend to look more like their fathers than their mothers, a claim with a reasonable evolutionary explanation. Fathers, after all, do not share a mother’s certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest whatever resources they have in their own offspring. Human evolution, then, could have favored children that resemble their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirming paternity....

(Updates death toll, clarifies cause of explosion) MEXICO CITY, Jan 29 (Reuters) - An explosion rocked a maternity hospital west of Mexico City Thursday when a leak from a gas truck ignited, destroying a large part of the building and killing at least seven people, including three children, officials said. Several babies were found alive under the rubble, they said. Luis Felipe Puente, head of the country’s civil protection agency, confirmed the seven deaths....

The arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London Tuesday may have brought an end to the standoff between the 39-year-old Australian and European law enforcement, but the organization he leads has vowed to continue releasing sensitive documents. Just how WikiLeaks has been able to continue posting classified material from U.S. and other nations’ diplomats and officials—despite numerous cyber attacks against the Web site and the defection of key service providers—is a bit of Internet trickery commonly deployed by legitimate and criminal online organizations alike to protect themselves from traffic spikes and from being shut down....

An Austrian company announced this week that it has opened the first manufacturing plant for printing cheap, disposable light sensors onto custom surfaces such as glass and flexible plastic. So-called flexible electronics technology is most often associated with slim computer displays that bend like plastic. Nanoident Technologies, based in Linz, aims to produce sensors for applications such as rapid medical testing and fingerprint analysis. But makers of flexible displays and other emerging technologies are gearing up to begin production later this year, meaning that a number of new devices may soon come to market....

Look around my house, and you will find some weird stuff. I can justify a few pieces of my collection. The small tribe of kachina dolls and the menagerie of wooden African animals, for instance, have their aesthetic merits. My interest in pharmacology has spawned a personal museum of mortars, pestles and old medicine bottles. But then I think about other things I cannot bring myself to throw out: old squash and tennis rackets, unread magazines from the last century, and piles of T-shirts on the verge of disintegration....

Around 60,000 years ago, in a small limestone cave in what is now central France, Neandertals dug a grave and laid an elderly member of their clan to rest. That is the picture emerging from the archaeological site that yielded the famous La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neandertal skeleton in 1908, and it has important implications for understanding the behavior and cognitive capacity of our closest evolutionary relatives. Some archaeologists have long argued that a number of Neandertal sites preserve evidence of burials, a practice considered to be a key feature of modern human behavior....

The Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCARB) satellite, which is being developed, will track in real time key metrics of climate change, including the buildup of carbon dioxide over the Americas, according to NASA. It will also measure methane, a potent greenhouse gas and contributor to global warming, near the Earth’s surface. Methane leaks cost the natural gas industry up to $10 billion annually, according to NASA. GeoCARB will travel 22,236 miles above Earth and collect 10 million daily observations of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and solar-induced fluorescence, according to researchers....