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A dog will do anything for a biscuit—over and over again. Most people will, too, because when sugar touches the taste buds it excites reward regions in the brain. A new study shows that people with eating disorders do not react to sweet flavors the way healthy people do, however, lending evidence to the hypothesis that brain differences predispose people toward bulimia and anorexia. A team of psychiatrists at U.C. San Diego studied 14 recovered anorexic women, 14 recovered bulimic women (who used to binge and purge) and 14 women who had never had an eating disorder, matched by age and weight....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. This weekend we could see history made. The US Triple Crown of thoroughbred horse racing hasn’t been won since 1978. This spring, the racehorse California Chrome won the first two legs of the Triple Crown. He is set to run in the final race of the series, The Belmont Stakes, on June 7....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Can my smartphone get a virus? I hear this question a lot. It seems odd that we hear all the time about computers getting viruses or malware, but it isn’t too often that you hear of a mobile phone getting a virus. But it happens. Phones are not immune to viruses....

The dust in our homes and the air we breathe harbor a complex stew of chemicals. Some, like oxygen, sustain life. Others are pollution stemming from things like car exhaust or from tiny scraps of household products. A pair of new studies adds a level of much-needed detail about exactly how widespread such toxic exposures can be. A new analysis, published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology, reaffirmed that consumer product chemicals including phthalates, phenols and flame retardants are ubiquitous components of household dust....

By Hugh BronsteinBUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - China has approved its first major shipment of genetically modified Argentine corn, Buenos Aires officials said on Tuesday, signaling an increase in competition for a market long dominated by U.S. exporters.Argentine Agriculture Minister Norberto Yauhar said Chinese health authorities cleared 60,000-tonnes of genetically modified (GMO) Argentine corn. The cargo was already headed inland to be used as hog and chicken feed.Benchmark Chicago corn futures fell briefly after Reuters reported on the shipment....

Published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change, the study reinforces earlier work and also finds that since much of the nation’s easy-to-access lowland forests have already been exploited, developers are increasingly turning to its carbon-rich wetlands. Between 2000 and 2012, the study found, Indonesia lost roughly 15 million acres of its primary forest cover. Deforestation increased by close to 118,000 acres each year during that period, exceeding rates in any other tropical country....

In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less, at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, than is typically assumed. Instead, Harris argued that a child’s peer group is far more important. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded and revised form....

It has become clear that impact sports like football and boxing can cause long-term brain damage. Now soccer is coming under scrutiny. As evidence mounts that excessively heading a soccer ball can injure a player’s brain, professional players such as Brandi Chastain, a star of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, are using this year’s tournament to call attention to the health risks facing young players. To learn about the latest science on soccer heading and brain injuries, Scientific American spoke to Robert Cantu, professor of neurosurgery at the Boston University School of Medicine and co-founder of the Sports Legacy Institute....

HARARE, May 3 (Reuters) - Zimbabwe put its wild animals up for sale on Tuesday, saying it needed buyers to step in and save the beasts from a devastating drought. Members of the public “with the capacity to acquire and manage wildlife” - and enough land to hold the animals - should get in touch to register an interest, the state Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said. There were no details on the animals on offer or their cost, but the southern African country’s 10 national parks are famed for their huge populations of elephants, lions, rhinos, leopards and buffalos....

Most children conceived via assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as superovulation are fine, although some recent studies are raising doubts about whether these fertility fixes are as safe as promised. The extensive handling of these crucial cells is a concern, and there are mixed reports on the long-term health of these hard-won children, with several studies suggesting increased risks of low birth weight, rare disorders down the line, and even death....

Since time immemorial, methane and oil have seeped from beds buried beneath the ocean sediment off the California coast. The methane bubbles up and out of the sea, adding to the store of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. The oil floats up as well and, over time, breaks down into tar that settles back into the marine sediment layer. Now new research into that tar residue seems to show that such seeps are influenced by ocean temperatures, and therefore by the very global warming they help to engender....

I’m not the first techno writer to raise the alarm about data rot, which can be described as “the tendency of computer files to become inaccessible as their storage media go to the great CompUSA in the sky.” Over the years we’ve entrusted our writing, business documents, music and art to such now defunct formats as punch cards, magnetic tape, floppy disks and Zip disks. And if you think CD-ROM and DVD-ROM will be with us much longer, you’re crazy....

Questions have been raised about the similarity to Joaquin with other recent hurricane strikes in the mid-Atlantic states. “There is going to be catastrophic flooding from North Carolina to Massachusetts, and this is going to disrupt the economy regardless of whether or not Hurricane Joaquin makes landfall,” Mike Smith, senior vice president and chief innovation executive of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions said. No matter how similar the pattern may seem, no two storms are ever exactly alike....

President Trump delivered a major speech on the environment yesterday without mentioning climate change. The 45-minute address in the East Room of the White House featured a president who dedicated much of his first term to unraveling environmental protections established by former President Obama. At his side were three Cabinet secretaries overseeing energy and environment issues; two of them are former lobbyists for the coal and oil industries. In the audience were lawmakers from energy-rich states and representatives of think tanks that question climate science....

Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions. This does not prevent them from contracting hepatitis C or other diseases that necessitate liver transplants. Surgeons have developed techniques–such as withdrawing up to 1,500 milliliters of the patient’s own blood for reinfusion during the surgery–to deal with these religious strictures. And a new study of liver transplant patients seems to show that avoiding donated transfusions might be good for both blood banks and patients with no religious objections....

Lab mice whose brains were injected with cells from schizophrenia patients became afraid of strangers, slept fitfully, felt intense anxiety, struggled to remember new things, and showed other signs of the mental disorder, scientists reported on Thursday. The latest advance in “chimeras,” animals created by transplanting cells from one species into another, demonstrated the value of the technique, scientists not involved in the study said, but is likely to draw renewed attention to a controversial field that opponents see as deeply immoral and undermining the natural order....

The mystery illness that has bedeviled U.S. beekeepers since 2006 may stem from a bee virus that apparently spread to the U.S. from Australia three years ago, according to a new study that marks the first big break in the puzzling case of the disappearing bees. Researchers performed a sophisticated genetic comparison of healthy and diseased U.S. colonies that revealed the presence of Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), an obscure but lethal bee bug, in almost all beekeeping operations affected by “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), but in only a single healthy one they examined....

By Stian ReklevWARSAW (Reuters) - The governments of Norway, Britain and the United States on Wednesday said they will allocate $280 million of their multi-billion dollar climate change finances to a new initiative aimed at halting deforestation.The announcement was made at U.N. talks in Warsaw, where more than 9,000 delegates are meeting to hammer out the foundations of a new global treaty to combat climate change.The money, part of the nations’ previously announced climate finances, will be administered by the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund and aims to fund sustainable farming and better land use....

By Jon Herskovitz(Reuters) - A permit to hunt a black rhino in Namibia sold for $350,000 at an auction in Dallas on Saturday with proceeds going to protect the endangered animals despite protests from animal rights groups that saw the sale as immoral conservation.The license allows for the killing of a single, post-breeding bull, with Namibian wildlife officials on hand for the hunt to make sure an appropriate animal is selected....

The first spacecraft ever to land on a comet has fallen silent, entering a potentially long, cold sleep after running out of power. The European Space Agency’s Philae lander completed its last transmission Friday (Nov. 14) at 7:36 p.m. EST (0036 GMT) before settling into a hibernation state as its batteries ran out. The probe had been studying the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko for 57 hours when it went to sleep, possibly for good....