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What is a “fictitious force”? —E. Lopez, Los Angeles California Institute of Technology theoretical physicist and 2004 Nobel laureate David Politzer replies: The forces you feel in a moving car—those that push you back into your seat when the driver steps on the gas or throw you sideways when the car makes sharp turns—are everyday examples of fictitious forces. In general, these influences arise because the natural frame of reference for a given situation is itself accelerating....

Randomized trials and dedicated placebo studies have given us a much deeper understanding of the placebo effect and all of its complex parts. Researchers have even used things like brain scans to show that there could be a physiological, not just psychological, explanation for it. While there is still much about placebos that we don’t understand, what is becoming clear is that there is more to it than simple deception. Doctors worry that a more broad acceptance of the placebo effect could be used to justify useless treatments or procedures....

By Reuters Staff BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese health authorities on Wednesday described the gender imbalance among newborns as “the most serious and prolonged” in the world, a direct ramification of the country’s strict one-child policy. The statement will add to growing calls for the government to scrap all family planning restrictions in the world’s most populous nation, which many scholars say faces a demographic crisis. Like most Asian nations, China has a traditional bias for sons....

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said he wants tonight’s presidential debate moderator to ask about climate change. But, he said, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump should be asked more than whether they believe in the science behind man-made warming. “I think it should be very simple: Basically, state a position on climate solutions,” Moniz offered as a sample debate question last night during a lecture at American University in Washington, D....

Scientists studying US climate models have identified an atmospheric circulation pattern that signals a higher risk of extreme heat spells. The pattern’s occurrence indicates only that a US heat wave is more probable than usual, but it does so 2–3 weeks in advance — a major step beyond the 10-day reach of current forecasting technology. Previous research has attempted to link US heat waves to tropical conditions such as sea surface temperatures or the strength of the Asian monsoon....

A new generation of scientific instruments has begun scouring ocean depths for temperature data, and the evidence being pinged back via satellite warns that the consequences of fossil fuel burning and deforestation are accumulating far below the planet’s surface. More than 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gas pollution since the 1970s has wound up in the oceans, and research published Monday revealed that a little more than a third of that seafaring heat has worked its way down to depths greater than 2,300 feet (700 meters)....

A thin disk of dark matter running through the Galaxy might be behind the large meteorite strikes that are thought to be responsible for some of Earth’s mass extinctions, including that of the dinosaurs, two theoretical physicists have proposed. The model is based on a hypothetical form of dark matter described by the authors and their collaborators last year, as a means to solve a separate cosmic conundrum. The existence of such a ‘dark disk’ could be tested soon by astronomical observations....

By Ken Croswell of Nature magazine Many single stars may have been born as two separate suns, which merged into one during the first million years of their life. That is the unexpected finding from a computer simulation of binary stars in a young star cluster. Double stars are common. For example, Sirius, the brightest star visible in the night sky, consists of two stars that orbit each other every 50 years....

Uncle Sam’s estimate of the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide is fundamentally flawed and “grossly understates” the potential impacts of climate change, according to an analysis released July 12 by a group of economists. The study found the true cost of those emissions to be far beyond the $21 per ton derived by the federal government. The figure, commonly known as the “social cost of carbon,” is used by federal agencies when weighing the costs and benefits of emissions-cutting regulations, such as air conditioner efficiency standards and greenhouse gas emissions limits for light trucks....

The nation’s rapid adoption of clean energy technologies, combined with sustained natural gas consumption, sagging oil prices and the widespread deployment of energy efficiency measures, helped U.S. consumers drive down energy costs to record lows in 2016. Where energy spending occurred, it was concentrated in low- or zero-carbon forms of energy that should help the United States continue the transition to a sustainable energy future, according to a benchmarking report released this morning by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance....

From Nature magazine In 1986, the National Steel and Shipbuilding company yard in San Diego, California, launched two ships with very different destinies. The USNS Mercy, a converted oil tanker, set off in white livery emblazoned with red crosses: a floating hospital for use in humanitarian aid efforts around the world. The Exxon Valdez, by contrast, was never intended to do more than cart crude oil from Valdez, Alaska, to Long Beach in California....

Through internal emails, public advisories and virtual seminars, the Federal Emergency Management Agency says it wants to do better on equity, and it acknowledges that disasters and disaster recovery programs unfairly burden low-income and minority populations. The effort began last fall before the election and has accelerated under President Biden. As FEMA helps distribute coronavirus vaccines nationwide, it is prioritizing underserved populations and last month established a civil rights advisory group to “identify and eliminate inequities” in who gets inoculated....

Chances are, when patients check out of a hospital for home or another health care facility, they will end up back in the hospital within a month if they have not worked out the details and logistics for ongoing care. Too often such planning falls by the wayside, resulting in frequent hospital readmissions. For the federal government, the cost to Medicare alone totals more than $17 billion each year for return trips to the hospital, to say nothing of the difficulties for the patients themselves....

COCODRIE, La.—The tendrils of coastline here were some of the first shores to see oil after BP’s Macondo well blowout last year. On May 7, 2010—two days before the start of the annual fishing season—oil bounced off Grand Isle and flowed into Terrebonne Bay, remembers Michel Claudet, Terrebonne Parish president. In fact, oil fouled 35 percent of the U.S. Gulf Coast’s 2,625 kilometers of shoreline before the spill was done. “The people of Terrebonne are still trying to recover from the spill,” Claudet says....

By Rob Goodier NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Morphine after a tonsillectomy may exacerbate breathing problems in kids with obstructive sleep apnea, but ibuprofen appears to be just as effective without the respiratory side effects, according to findings published online January 26 in Pediatrics. “This means that (morphine) should not be given at home, where monitoring of respiratory status is far from optimal. In a hospital setting, under appropriate care, it may be used cautiously,” said study leader Dr....

India’s first Mars probe has captured its first photos, revealing an early glimpse of the surface and atmosphere of the Red Planet. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) unveiled the first photos of Mars from its Mangalyaan spacecraft via Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday and Thursday (Sept. 24-25), just a day or so after the probe made it to the Red Planet. “The view is nice up here,” ISRO officials tweeted about one of the images, which shows a heavily cratered portion of the Red Planet’s surface....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A smartphone touchscreen is an impressive piece of technology. It displays information and responds to a user’s touch. But as many people know, it’s easy to break key elements of the transparent, electrically conductive layers that make up even the sturdiest rigid touchscreen. If flexible smartphones, e-paper and a new generation of smart watches are to succeed, they can’t use existing touchscreen technology....

Medical equipment donations enable hospitals in developing countries to get their hands on expensive and much-needed technology. But there’s a growing concern that those donations do more harm than good. Hallways and closets often become cluttered with unused or broken-down equipment for which locals lack parts or training in how to make repairs. Outdated electrical systems groan under the strain of large medical devices, possibly compromising a hospital’s power. “I think there is a great risk for every medical device donation that it’s going to hurt the recipient,” says Robert Malkin, a professor of the practice of biomedical engineering at Duke University....

Since the 1930s scientists have been searching for particles that are simultaneously matter and antimatter. Now physicists have found strong evidence for one such entity inside a superconducting material. The discovery could represent the first so-called Majorana particle, and may help researchers encode information for quantum computers. Physicists think that every particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart with equal mass but opposite charge. When matter meets its antimatter equivalent, the two annihilate one another....

Mad rushes to the grocery store usually mean one of two things in the U.S. Northeast: either a holiday or a nor’easter snowstorm is approaching. With the holiday season just behind us, the sparsely stocked supermarket shelves in the region are a sign of the latter—and tonight’s storm in particular is gearing up to be historic. Nor’easters are born much like other storms. “They’re low pressure systems of the same kind that give us our precipitation in the United States throughout the year,” says Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground....