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By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A large Los Angeles public hospital has notified scores of patients they were possibly exposed to a drug-resistant bacterial “superbug” during endoscopy procedures that infected seven patients and may have contributed to two deaths. The 179 patients who may have been infected by the carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) are being offered home testing kits that would be analyzed by the University of California, Los Angeles, hospital system, UCLA officials said....

Does humanity have a future beyond Earth? “I think it’s a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth. There’s nowhere else in the solar system that’s as comfortable as even the top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the world’s problems here. Nevertheless, I’d guess that by the next century, there will be groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter perhaps elsewhere in the solar system....

In principle, paying for something should be easy. Everybody—the buyer and the seller—wants the transaction to go through. But as I noted in my Scientific American column this month, America’s effort to streamline—and secure—payments by letting us pay for things with our cell phones keeps getting mired in squabbling across industries: the phone makers, the banks, the cell phone carriers and the retailers. Everyone wants to control the way we pay....

Renewable energy subsidies are one of the few climate policies that lawmakers have consistently agreed on. Now, they’re about to end. The production tax credit for wind power will expire at the end of this year. Investment tax credits for residential solar energy will be zeroed out in 2022, and commercial solar credits will hit a floor of 10% that year. Two researchers at Columbia University have an idea of what should take their place: expanded tax incentives for clean electricity generation that stress function over the technology-specific brand of subsidies favored today....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida is capping the number of sea cucumbers that fisherman can pull from state waters after booming Asian demand led to four times as many being harvested in 2013 compared to previous years. The leathery, cylindrical creatures scour ocean floors across the globe feeding on decaying organic matter. Named for their similarity to the vegetable, the marine animals are prized in China, sought for everything from an aphrodisiac to a cure for joint pain....

Her finalist year: 1984 Her finalist project: Studying the effect of vacuum treatments on fiberglass resin composites What led to the project: Although many girls spend their teen years obsessed with movie stars or rock bands, Carmela Amato-Wierda had a different love: materials science. Her high school chemistry teacher, Victor Brandalise, at Mount Saint Joseph Academy in Brighton, Mass., introduced her to the concept of studying the properties of materials (like metals, alloys and plastics), and helped arrange for her to work in a lab at the University of Massachusetts Lowell....

It was a birth announcement like no other. In a promotional video posted on YouTube on Sunday, Chinese researcher He Jiankui revealed new details about the two babies he claims to have genetically modified as embryos using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. In the video, He said that the twin girls—named Lulu and Nana—were born a few weeks ago after a normal pregnancy. They are now at home with their mother, a woman named Grace, and their father, Mark, a man who is HIV-positive and did not want to pass his infection to his offspring, He said....

ALAMEDA, Calif.—The first time Devine Simpson had an asthma attack, she said she couldn’t stop coughing. It was so bad, it woke her up in the middle of the night. “I felt like I was going to throw up,” she said. Devine was diagnosed at age 3, and for many years, her asthma seemed out of control, said her mother, Tracie Simpson. About two years ago, Simpson began bringing Devine, who is now in fifth grade, to the Breathmobile, a mobile 33-foot recreational vehicle that is outfitted as an asthma clinic....

As China and the United States threaten to corner the market on quantum technologies, Europe is slowly waking up to the opportunity with investment of its own. A year ago, the European Commission announced that it would create a €1-billion (US$1.1-billion) research effort in the field, and it should start to invite grant applications later this year. But scientists coordinating the project say that they are already concerned because industry partners seem reluctant to invest....

Hundreds of protestors have blocked construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Thirteen astronomical observatories that call the mountain home have evacuated workers and curtailed their operations. Work on the TMT was set to resume on July 15 after a four-year delay caused by legal challenges and protests. Hawaii’s state supreme court ruled in October that the TMT’s construction permit was valid. But last weekend, opponents of the telescope began gathering at a site at the base of the access road that leads up Mauna Kea....

Excerpted with permission from Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe, by Jim Davies. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2014. (Scientific American and Palgrave Macmillan are part of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.) We know that parts of our minds think scary stories are important because our minds find them important enough to dream about. If scary stories are important, then we are compelled to experience them....

Is there anything more powerful in human society than a steady gaze? I once, for instance, completely flustered and enraged a careless driver who nearly ran over my then toddler and stroller-riding infant daughters and me as she rolled into a gas station simply by calmly staring at her. I didn’t say a word or make a gesture. “What are you looking at?!” she yelled. It’s no wonder, actually: humans are so visually oriented and so social as a species, it would be surprising if we did not respond to the looks of others....

Medicine has a long history of erroneous beliefs about biological differences between races. Today this ideology continues in diagnostic algorithms and practice guidelines that are adjusted based on patients’ race—and often lead to further inequities in the health care of nonwhite patients. Now students are working to change these practices, with some successful results. This summer the University of Washington School of Medicine announced that its medical centers would no longer use race in a measure of kidney function called the estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR....

DUBAI (Reuters) - A major earthquake struck the western Iranian city of Abdanan on Monday, leaving 60 people injured, state news agency IRNA said. IRNA said the quake was magnitude 6.1 while the US Geological Survey (USGS) put it at 6.3. Water, electricity, and telephone lines in Abdanan, located in the province of Ilam, have been cut, said IRNA. State television footage showed destroyed houses, buildings and cars in the city....

Make the first cut with a width of 1/5, the second cut perpendicularly with a width of 1/4. Repeat the process with ever wider widths (4/15 and 3/8) to keep the same area until the last cut halves the remaining piece. This gives a total perimeter of 10 1/6 or about 10.17. The best design for five pieces using cuts that are parallel to the edges of the original square is shown in this figure:...

A torrent of energetic particles appears to be spewing from the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, coming from the gigantic black hole that lies at its heart, according to a new study. Such jets are common throughout the universe, and most supermassive black holes are thought to produce them. When matter falls into these behemoths, some material also is accelerated away, usually in two straight beams that fly out along the black hole’s spin axis....

As the world continues to battle the coronavirus, it is also fighting a different sort of epidemic: misinformation. This “infodemic” is just as harmful as COVID-19 itself, leading people to downplay the severity of the disease and ignore public health advice in favor of unproved treatments or “cures.” A recent survey by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup found that four in five Americans say the online spread of misinformation is the biggest problem facing the media....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichA high-profile graphene researcher has written to the Nobel prize committee for physics, objecting to errors in its explanation of this year’s prize. The award was given to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of Manchester University, UK, for their work on graphene, a two-dimensional carbon structure that has huge potential in the field of electronics.Due to the Nobels’ prominence, it is not unheard of for disgruntled researchers to criticize a prize committee’s decision....

Physicist Markus Aspelmeyer vividly remembers the day, nearly a decade ago, that a visitor to his lab declared the gravitational pull of his office chair too weak to measure. Measurable or not, this force certainly ought to exist. Ever since the work of Isaac Newton in 1687, physicists have understood gravity to be universal: every object exerts a gravitational force proportional to its mass on everything around it. The visitor’s comment was intended to bring an increasingly fanciful conversation back down to Earth, but Aspelmeyer, a professor at the University of Vienna, took it as a challenge....

The center of any galaxy is a hazardous home. There, supernovae explosions shower nearby planets with x-rays, gamma rays and ultraviolet photons that obliterate any ozone layer present. Gamma-ray bursts hurtle even more damaging shock waves, blasting any biosphere into oblivion. Even encounters with nearby stars knock planets around, driving them out of their habitable zones. “We don’t expect life to be easy within the inner kiloparsec of the Milky Way,” says Abraham Loeb from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....