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In the past few months, passengers at North American airports have been warned that travel to the Caribbean might result in an unwanted souvenir. The first outbreak of chikungunya virus in the Western Hemisphere began in the French part of the Caribbean island of St Martin in December and has spread rapidly around the region, infecting more than 500,000 people. Since then, at least 480 travellers have returned to the United States with the mosquito-borne disease, raising concerns that an insect biting one of those people would spark a US chikungunya outbreak....

Nobody who was there at the time, from the most seasoned astrophysicist to the most inexperienced science reporter, is likely to forget a press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in San Antonio, Tex., in January 1996. It was there that Geoffrey W. Marcy, an observer then at San Francisco State University, announced that he and his observing partner, R. Paul Butler, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had discovered the second and third planets ever found orbiting a sunlike star....

By Laura Thompson OsuriGlobal steps to battle climate change might have faltered, but philanthropic institutions in the United States have swung into action, more than tripling their support for climate-related causes in 2008. Donations jumped from the 2007 total of $240 million to $897 million in 2008, according to a report from the Foundation Center, an organization that supports philanthropies, in New York.The funding is going to a range of activities, including efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and to prepare cities for warmer temperatures and higher sea levels....

Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be lengthening the growing season of grasses and other plants, according to a study published today in Nature. Previous studies have documented a lengthening of the growing season in many parts of the world. In the United States, the time between the last spring frost and the first autumn freeze has gone up by nearly two weeks since 1900; in Europe, a study of more than 540 plant species found that, on average, spring events such as flowering had shifted about a week earlier from 1971 to 2000, and the onset of autumn had been pushed back by about four days....

A large international group set up to test the reliability of psychology experiments has successfully reproduced the results of 10 out of 13 past experiments. The consortium also found that two effects could not be reproduced. Psychology has been buffeted in recent years by mounting concern over the reliability of its results, after repeated failures to replicate classic studies. A failure to replicate could mean that the original study was flawed, the new experiment was poorly done or the effect under scrutiny varies between settings or groups of people....

A change in the way anorexia is diagnosed may make it easier to help more teens, not just thin ones, with the illness. Previously, overweight or obese teens were more likely to fall through the cracks when they developed anorexic behaviors. Now, the release of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has broadened the disorder criteria by taking away the weight requirement. The change shifts the focus of the diagnosis from “being thin” to the behaviors of those with the illness....

Here’s one you can try at home: Fill a dish with water and drop a small amount of flour onto the surface. The flour particles disperse rapidly, like a tiny starburst, and spread out over the liquid surface. This simple procedure, described in a paper set to be published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals a physical phenomenon that is common to many small particles and liquids but that had remained a mystery to the study’s authors....

Our ears contain incredible machines to help us make sense of sound waves. Albert James Hudspeth, together with Robert Fettiplace and Christine Petit, won the 2018 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for discovering the mechanisms by which cells in our ears translate the mechanical force of changing air pressure into an electrochemical message the brain will interpret as sound. These cells even have active systems that let them tune, boost, and protect our hearing....

BOULDER—Scientists have taken the first crack at solving a fundamental climate mystery, criss-crossing the globe in a souped-up corporate jet to determine where and when greenhouse gases enter and leave the atmosphere. An understanding of how these climate-warming gases move about the globe is a critical prerequisite for any policy aimed at curbing global warming, scientists said Thursday, and information gained over the next three years will play a crucial role in sharpening future predictions and improving their accuracy....

EarthTalk® E - The Environmental Magazine Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that human overpopulation isn’t such a big issue anymore, as numbers are expected to start declining in a few decades?—Melinda Mason, Boone, Iowa Ever since Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798, positing incorrectly that humans’ proclivity for procreation would exhaust the global food supply within a matter of decades, population growth has been a hot button issue among those contemplating humankind’s future....

I was saddened to hear Leonard Nimoy died. It was even more sorrowful to find that years of smoking had caught up with him. I caught myself thinking: Spock smoked? Why would an ascetic, someone as fastidious about his health and logical about evidence-based science, ever take up smoking? And that mental jump from the actor to the character was what made Leonard Nimoy’s professional life a burden and a blessing—a hazard for many actors who play an iconic character....

This is the second of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters. Morgan Spurlock’s “really great bad idea,” as it would later be called, came to him after a gluttonous Thanksgiving meal. Jeans unbuttoned, stomach engorged with turkey—and eyeing a second helping—the 32-year-old playwright noticed on the television news that two teenage girls from New York City were suing McDonald’s for allegedly making them fat. “It was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of,” Spurlock recalls thinking....

By Anthony Esposito SANTIAGO, April 22 (Reuters) - Volcano Calbuco in southern Chile erupted for the first time in more than five decades on Wednesday, sending a thick plume of ash and smoke nearly 20 kilometers into the sky. Chile’s Onemi emergency office declared a red alert following the sudden eruption at around 1800 local time (2100 GMT), which occurred about 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) south of Santiago, the capital, near the tourist town of Puerto Varas....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The term ‘mythology’ comes from the Greek mythos (story-of-the-people) and logos (word or speech), meaning the spoken story of a people. Every civilization of the ancient world developed a belief system, which is characterized as ‘mythology’ in the present day but which, for them, was religious belief, and this was as true for ancient Persia as for any other....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Women in the Middle Ages were frequently characterized as second-class citizens by the Church and the patriarchal aristocracy. Women’s status was somewhat elevated in the High and Late Middle Ages by the cult of the Virgin Mary and courtly love poetry but, even so, women were still considered inferior to men owing to biblical narratives and the patriarchy....

An enzyme in the brain that behaves like a “continuous motor,” constantly strengthening the connections between neurons, appears to be behind long-term memory storage. The chemical, protein kinase Mζ (PKMζ), is part of a family of over 500 kinase enzymes, most of which transmit outside information into nerve cells. “Most of these motors are in an inactive state, like an engine in a car that’s parked,” says Todd Sacktor, a professor of neurology at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in New York City....

These new findings shed light on the way ancient reptiles interacted with their environments, scientists added. Crocodilians include the largest of all reptiles alive today, the saltwater crocodile, a deadly carnivore that can grow at least 23 feet (7 meters) long and weigh more than 2,200 lbs. (1,000 kilograms). These predators will eat just about anything they can, including sharks. (Although these reptiles do kill people, far more people die of bee stings each year than crocodile attacks....

The Supreme Court’s stunning decision to review the scope of EPA’s authority to limit emissions from power plants puts a damper on the Biden administration’s effort this week to trumpet the United States’ return to the international stage as a climate leader. The justices sent shock waves through the legal world when they agreed Friday to consider a consolidated challenge from Republican-led states and coal companies stemming from a federal court ruling that struck down a Trump-era regulation gutting EPA’s climate rule for power plants (E&E News PM, Oct....

By Gopal Sharma KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Flash floods and mudslides following heavy rains have killed at least 53 people in Nepal over the past three days and cut off remote communities in the mountains, the government said on Saturday. The landslides and flooding were triggered by annual monsoon rains since Wednesday, causing rain-soaked earth and rocks to crash down on homes while rivers swelled and washed away low-lying villages. Nepal’s Home Ministry said 75 people were unaccounted for and 36 others were in hospitals and medical centers....

NEW YORK—Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked off the World Science Festival—a collection of events, workshops and performances to celebrate science’s effect on the world—here today by slamming policymakers for putting politics before science. He cited instances where politicians ignored scientists’ early warnings about potentially catastrophic issues, such as the first reported link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1950s and predictions about increased atmospheric greenhouse gases. There is a “tragic lag between what we know and what we do,” Bloomberg said during his speech delivered at Columbia University....