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The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

Perhaps the most intimate relationship each of us will ever have is not with any fellow member of our own human species. Instead—as you have no doubt already guessed from the subject and title of this special issue—it is between our bodies and our food. In fact, when our editorial team first discussed pursuing this edition’s theme several months ago, we all became intrigued by the intricate reciprocal interactions between us and our chow....

Modern Britons are a cosmopolitan bunch. Peoples from across the globe now make the island home, bringing with them, theoretically, a diverse array of genes. But comparing the genetic material of more than 1,000 contemporary Englishmen with that of 48 of their ancient peers reveals that the ancients had even more diverse genetic codes. Molecular ecologist Rus Hoelzel of Durham University in England and his European colleagues compared the genetic make up of six English ancestors from the Roman period, 25 from early in the Saxon conquest and 17 from the late Saxon period with the mitochondrial DNA sequences of more than 6,000 modern Europeans and Middle Easterners....

In revolutionary France in the early 1790s, physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed that a surefire execution mechanism be used to carry out the death penalty for the state. Historians believe that Guillotin suggested the use of the instantaneous decapitation device that would later bear his name as a humane form of capital punishment. The guillotine was thought to bring quick mortality more reliably than the standard methods of prerevolutionary France—beheading by sword or ax, which sometimes involved repeated blows, or hanging by a noose, which could take several minutes or even longer....

LONDON – Diarrhea, killer of 1.5 million children annually, is likely to become more prevalent in many developing countries as the climate changes, a report says. But the authors found an unexpected twist in the way the climate is likely to affect the disease. Kathleen Alexander, an associate professor of wildlife at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment, says climate drives a large part of diarrhea and related disease, increasing the threat which a changing climate poses to vulnerable communities....

Since the revelations of staggeringly high lead levels in the drinking water of Flint, Mich., and more recently reported spikes around the country, people have understandably voiced alarm at the threat such exposure poses to children. On his Web site, filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore charged Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder with poisoning kids and told readers: “You cannot reverse the irreversible brain damage inflicted on every single child in Flint....

The controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) should be built atop the sacred Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea as planned—but one-quarter of the 13 telescopes already there need to be taken down by the time the TMT starts operating in the mid-2020s, Hawaii’s governor David Ige said on May 26. Ige’s long-awaited statement aims to break the impasse between the TMT project, which halted construction in early April after protests broke out, and Native Hawaiians, who see the telescope—bigger than any on Mauna Kea so far—as the latest violation of an important cultural site....

We take it for granted that our hair dryers won’t send us to the emergency room and our toothbrushes won’t make us go numb. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about sex toys. It’s entirely possible that someone’s favorite cyclotron vibrator can shell-shock nerves, penis rings might lead to a grievous case of penile gangrene or those little vibrating beads could slip upstream and become tragicomically lost in bodily cavities while still in the “on” position....

It’s been a slow start for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) pilot program to fast-track the evaluation of patent applications for so-called green technology, with the agency approving about one third of the requests it has received. Only 316 of the 925 applications filed under the agency’s Green Technology Pilot Program launched in December have qualified to jump to the front of the patent-examination line. This has led to mixed reviews from tech companies and even the patent office itself....

The starry glow of the night sky brings news from the distant edges of the cosmos, as light fills astronomers’ telescopes with the bizarre and wondrous processes in the universe. But light cannot tell the whole story—often it reveals only an object’s superficial glow. To better understand the cores of powerful astrophysical objects, scientists are studying individual particles that can tell a firsthand tale of the extreme events that launch them outward at tremendous speed....

OSLO (Reuters) - Most coral reefs in the Caribbean could vanish in the next two decades, hit by the loss of fish and sea urchins that eat a slime of coral-smothering algae, a U.N.-backed study said on Wednesday. The review, the most comprehensive to date of Caribbean reefs that are vital tourist attractions for many island nations, said climate change had played only a minor role in the reefs’ demise, despite past speculation it was a main cause....

After months of planning and weeks of apprehension, grid operators in Europe managed to avoid blackouts and huge power fluctuations from a nearly complete solar eclipse Friday morning. Analysts say these were real risks, especially in countries with large solar installations like Germany and Italy. Those countries passed through Friday’s event without incident, but with their transmission service operators (TSOs) each taking a different course of action to keep their power systems in balance between electricity supplies and demand....

When ‘Oumuamua, a mysterious interstellar object, swept through our solar system last October, it elicited breathless news stories all asking the obvious question—is it a spaceship? There were no signs it was—although many people seemed to hope otherwise. Throughout history most strange new cosmic phenomena have made us wonder: Could this be it, the moment we first face alien life? The expectation isn’t necessarily outlandish—many scientists can and do make elaborate, evidence-based arguments that we will eventually discover life beyond the bounds of our planet....

The smoke from burning marijuana leaves contains several known carcinogens and the tar it creates contains 50 percent more of some of the chemicals linked to lung cancer than tobacco smoke. A marijuana cigarette also deposits four times as much of that tar as an equivalent tobacco one. Scientists were therefore surprised to learn that a study of more than 2,000 people found no increase in the risk of developing lung cancer for marijuana smokers....

Apart from Darwin and Bates, though, most biologists were slow to recognize the significance of nature’s impersonators. But now, a century and a half later, mimicry is fast becoming a model system for studying evolution. It is ideally suited to this task because both the selection pressure (predation) and the traits under selection are clear. Indeed, mimicry demonstrates the process of evolution in its most stripped-down form. Discovery of new types of mimicry has also helped fuel fresh interest in the phenomenon among biologists....

Pres. Barack Obama made clear in his speech January 17 that he has no plans to cut back on the intelligence community’s efforts to gather and analyze large amounts of electronic communications, called signals intelligence. Changes will instead come in how the government oversees those efforts and where that information is stored. The president was less clear about the extent to which input solicited from Congress, privacy advocates and corporations will factor into future policies governing intelligence work....

By Environment Correspondent Alister DoyleOSLO (Reuters) - Poland could halve its demand for coal by 2030 with a shift to renewable energies that would end its image as a laggard in European Union efforts to slow climate change, a study showed on Friday.The report, by researchers in Germany and Poland, renewable energy groups and environmental group Greenpeace, included a foreword by ex-Polish Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki who called it a “feasible, realistic scenario”....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineA prominent paper that claimed to reveal the genetic factors that help people live to 100 or older has been retracted, a year after it was first released.The study, published in Science, reported 150 genetic variations that could be used to predict whether a person was genetically inclined to see their 100th birthday. The results were based on a search through the genomes of more than 1,000 centenarians....

Many theories about the origins of life on Earth posit that prebiotic compounds may have arrived from outer space on asteroids or comets. But a new study suggests that extreme chemical reactions fired up by meteorite impacts may have jump-started life in the early oceans, rather than delivering its building blocks preformed. Meteorites striking the primordial oceans, the paper’s authors say, could have supplied significant amounts of carbon, critical to life, and created a sort of chemical pressure cooker by the force of their impacts to synthesize the foundations of biological molecules....

A reform bill approved earlier this week by Russia’s lower parliamentary chamber, the State Duma, has thrown the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) into turmoil. Physicist Vladimir Fortov (pictured), recently elected president of the academy, speaks to Nature about the delicately poised situation, which is likely to see the RAS come under the control of a federal agency that reports directly to President Vladimir Putin (see ‘Vote seals fate of Russian Academy of Sciences’)....