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By Adam RoseBEIJING (Reuters) - China’s battle against a persistent air pollution crisis, which all but shut down a city of 11 million this week, is being hampered by tough weather conditions, an environmental official said on Tuesday.Air quality in cities is of increasing concern to China’s stability-obsessed leaders, anxious to douse potential unrest as a more affluent urban population turns against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has besmirched much of the country’s air, water and soil....

By Dominique Patton BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s government has kicked off a media campaign in support of genetically modified crops, as it battles a wave of negative publicity over a technology it hopes will play a major role in boosting its food security. The agriculture ministry earlier this week announced it would try to educate the public on GMO via TV, newspapers and the Internet. It hopes to stifle anti-GMO sentiment that has gathered momentum in the wake of incidents such as reports that genetically-modified rice had been illegally sold at a supermarket in the center of the country....

As a growing population stresses the world’s food and water supplies, corporations and investors in wealthy countries are buying up foreign farmland and the freshwater perks that come with it. From Sudan to Indonesia, most of the land lies in poverty-stricken regions, so experts warn that this widespread purchasing could expand the gap between developed and developing countries. The “water grabbing” by corporations amounts to 454 billion cubic meters per year globally, according to a new study by environmental scientists....

When the international stem cell research race got started at the end of the 1990s, two factors put Britain in a strong position. One was the historical strength of embryology and related sciences in the UK, the other its well-established regulatory framework. Any researcher working with early human embryos owes an immense scientific debt to Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, the British pair who developed the IVF techniques that led to the birth in 1978 of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby....

After a particularly strong storm named Klaus hit southwestern France in 2009, researchers made a curious observation about the devastation: nearly all the trees whipped by winds blowing at speeds of 94 miles per hour or more had snapped, regardless of their species, height or diameter, whereas most trees hit by gusts below that threshold were left intact. Was this wind-speed threshold really the arbiter of destruction? Physicist Christophe Clanet and his colleagues at France’s École Polytechnique and ESPCI ParisTech set to find out by fracturing beechwood rods of various lengths and diameters under controlled conditions....

TEMPE, Arizona—As a species of seeming feeble, naked apes, we humans are unlikely candidates for power in a natural world where dominant adaptations can boil down to speed, agility, jaws and claws. Why we rose to rule, while our hominin relatives died out, has long been a curiosity for scientists. The study of our human nature encompasses a variety of fields ranging from anthropology, primatology, cognitive science and psychology to paleontology, archaeology, evolutionary biology and genetics....

Scattered throughout Mexico and central America are pools where water surfaces from underground networks of caves, which the ancient Maya said were gateways to the underworld. Biologists have now found that these bodies of water are home to a mysterious real-world creature as well: the first venomous crustaceans known to science. The crustacean in question, Speleonectes tulumensis, belongs to the remipedes, a group first described in 1981. Observing these pale, blind and tiny animals in their natural habitat has been hard because they live in labyrinthine cave networks that are as difficult for divers to navigate as they are dangerous....

Stephane Roy, an assistant professor of dentistry at the University of Montreal who studies regeneration, explains. Chameleons are very interesting animals that are well known for their unique ability to blend in with the surrounding environment by changing their color, but they are unable to reproduce or regenerate their body parts. That said, there are many animals that can regenerate perfectly throughout their lives. Among invertebrates the capacity to regenerate parts like legs or entire sections of the body is fairly common....

Like the firearms industry today, the automobile industry at midcentury was central to American culture and identity. Cars were big and beautiful, throbbing with power. Yet with that power came danger. By the 1960s motor vehicle accidents killed more than 50,000 people a year. The common wisdom, promulgated by carmakers since the 1920s, held that traffic fatalities were exclusively the fault of individual drivers (or, to put it another way: cars don’t kill people; drivers kill people)....

Name: Shawn Brixey Title: Arts Chair, Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington Location: Seattle When I was still a young sculptor’s apprentice, it suddenly hit me that I no longer wanted to make images and objects like my art school masters, creations that would, at most, be representations of my imagination. I thought, perhaps naively, that if I dove into physics, astronomy, cosmology and neuroscience, I could catapult over these limitations and pioneer a vastly more creative practice....

Traditional long sword dancing is an art form that produces stable patterns of interwoven segments. These structures, sometimes called “popsicle stick bombs,” are surprisingly rich mathematically and raise subtle difficulties for those attempting to analyze their stability. Dancers look for sequences of movements that will produce a desired configuration, an algorithmic question that is particularly challenging if the arms and swords are required to maintain a simple closed loop during the dance....

More than 20 U.S. states that use a combination of drugs to carry out lethal injections will find it harder to conduct executions due to Pfizer’s ban on sales of its chemicals, but the move will have little impact on the handful that rely on a single drug. The pharmaceutical giant’s move last week cuts off the last major U.S. source for drugs in the deadly mixes, and it adds to the difficulties of states that were already struggling to procure chemicals for lethal injections....

The microscopic plants that form the foundation of the ocean’s food web are declining, reports a study published July 29 in Nature. The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world’s oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land. But their numbers have dwindled since the dawn of the 20th century, with unknown consequences for ocean ecosystems and the planet’s carbon cycle....

General Fusion Technology: Magnetized target fusion. In General Fusion’s design, liquid metal (lithium and lead) spins inside a spherical tank, leaving a cylindrical cavity at its core. Puffs of deuterium and tritium (heavy isotopes of hydrogen) injected at each end meet at the center of this vortex cavity where magnetic fields trap them for a few hundred microseconds. About 200 pneumatic pistons slam the tank from all directions, sending an acoustic shock wave through the molten metal....

Psychiatric problems can trigger sleep issues, and now research suggests the reverse is true—that is, a lack of shut-eye can cause psychological disturbances. Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, and his collaborators studied 26 volunteers, 14 of whom spent 35 hours without getting a wink. All the subjects then saw photographs that went from benign (wicker baskets) to increasingly disturbing (tarantulas and burn victims). Brain scans revealed that when the sleep-deprived participants viewed more gruesome images, their amygdala showed 60 percent more activity relative to the normal population’s response....

Nearly 40 percent of all fatal traffic accidents in the U.S. involve drinking, resulting in annual death toll of 17,000, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Yet, according to a recent survey by the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, 17 percent of drivers age 21 and over admit to getting behind the wheel after consuming alcohol or using illegal drugs at least once a year. A surefire way to prevent at least some of such accidents?...

Hanging on Kimberly Repp’s office wall in Hillsboro, Ore., is a sign in Latin: “Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae,” meaning “This is a place where the dead delight in helping the living.” For medical examiners, it is a mission. Their job is to investigate deaths and learn from them, for the benefit of us all. Repp, however, is not a medical examiner; she is a microbiologist. She is also an epidemiologist for Oregon’s Washington County, where she had been accustomed to studying infectious diseases such as flu or norovirus outbreaks among the living....

When alcohol is involved, people are more inclined to view sexual aggression as morally ambiguous. New research, however, suggests that men who harass women in bars and clubs aren’t misinterpreting women’s signals because they are drunk. Rather, they may be singling out women who appear intoxicated as easy targets. In a study of sexual aggression in bars researchers have found that the invasiveness and persistence of unwanted come-ons is not correlated with how much the perpetrator has had to drink, but is instead related to how drunk the person on the receiving end seems to be....

If you’ve ever thought about digging a hole to China, a new Japanese ship might be your best bet. Workers have just put the finishing touches on an ocean drilling vessel that is designed to bore to unprecedented depths and attain a long-held goal: penetrating the earth’s rocky crust to the mantle. The poorly understood mantle accounts for about two thirds of the planet’s mass and is key in the unseen convection processes linked with tectonic plate motion....

My two-year-old tested positive for COVID last month. My mind-numbing and costly project to keep him uninfected prior to his vaccinations had proven an abject failure. I was angry—and surprised. During the time he was likely infected, he had only been around vaccinated people when indoors. Although we know the absolute risk of serious illness in young children is low, there are many other causes for concern as a result of unvaccinated infection: multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C, long COVID, silent organ or brain damage, psychiatric or chronic disease later in life, and damage to smell....