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By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - There isn’t enough evidence yet to say for sure whether toddlers and preschoolers need screening for autism even when they don’t have symptoms of the developmental disorder, new U.S. guidelines conclude. Even though many pediatricians already do routine autism screenings of children between 18 and 30 months old, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a government-backed panel of independent physicians, concluded it’s impossible to know if this helps or hurts....

Dan Nocera is a salesman who doesn’t need the sale. For his entire career, he’s pursued a simple question: Just how do plants take sunlight, combine it with water and get energy out of it? After 25 years of study, he’s begun to mimic the process in a small, cheap gadget. It runs on just a bottle of water a day. He regularly stumps for the technology at energy conferences, where audiences bubble with curiosity at its many merits....

NASA’s first spacecraft dedicated to studying carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has been cleared to blast off Tuesday (July 1), and you can watch the launch live in a webcast. The space agency’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite (OCO-2) passed its launch readiness review Sunday (June 29), meaning the craft is set to lift off Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT; 2:56 a.m. local time) atop a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket....

By telling the story of COVID-19 in real time, data visualization has taken on new importance in our daily lives. Early in the pandemic, we watched circles multiply and swell on a map as the virus spread around the globe. We saw lines on time-series charts turn nearly vertical during surges in cases. These numbers and their pictorial signifiers have been critical for informing our behaviors over the past two years, but they hardly capture the full significance of the crisis and its many snowball effects....

In a first, federal environment officials today scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process. The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to water resources. In the 121-page draft report released today, EPA officials said that the contamination near the town of Pavillion, Wyo....

FRANKFURT, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Germany’s offshore wind capacity more than doubled last year as investors warm up to the technology, helping Europe’s largest economy in its ambitious push into renewable power. At the end of 2014, total installed offshore wind capacity stood at 2.35 gigawatts (GW), compared with 915 megawatts (MW) at the end of 2013, German engineering association VDMA said on Thursday. Of the 2.35 GW, about 1.05 GW were connected to the power grid, VDMA said, highlighting the need to speed up network connections to reach Germany’s goal of having 6....

Dear EarthTalk: I ride my bike to work along busy urban streets. Should I be worried about inhaling pollutants from vehicle emissions and other sources? —J. Kaufman, San Francisco The short answer is, yes, probably. Cars, trucks and buses emit considerable amounts of airborne pollution as they make their ways along city streets and highways. The fine particles, nitrogen dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) spewing out of tailpipes have been linked to a wide range of human health problems, from headaches to respiratory illness to cancer....

Seeding the Sky The most widely used weather-modification technique is probably cloud seeding, which involves priming clouds with particles of silver iodide. (The compound is what’s inside the wing-mounted flares shown here.) Once those silver iodide particles make their way into a ripe cloud, they collide with drops of supercooled water and form ice; the ice then falls to the ground, melting along the way. Despite its dubious reputation, new science suggests that under the right circumstances, cloud seeding does indeed work....

In the wake of skyrocketing insurance claims due to natural disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, blizzards and the like—insurers have been imposing steep rate hikes and, in some cases, fleeing high-risk areas, leaving consumers out in the cold. It’s gotten so out of hand, consumer advocates say, that insurers now are even crying climate change as a factor in raising premiums or dumping clients. As the crisis mounts, hard hit states such as Florida and Louisiana are increasingly stepping up as insurance companies check out, providing coverage for residents dropped by their insurers....

By Rick LovettThe cold and shadowy fringe of the solar system known as the Kuiper belt is generating increasing debate among scientists as data accumulates on the growing population of objects discovered there. Now, two new studies of Kuiper belt objects presented October 5 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, Calif., may reveal a crucial hole a prevailing model of the solar system’s early history....

Aspiring bank robbers, take heed. New statistical analyses of confidential bank data suggest that mountains of riches aren’t in your future, but that a jail cell is. “The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish,” wrote the authors of a new article about the economics of British bank robberies in Significance, a quarterly statistics journal published by the American Statistical Association and Royal Statistical Society. “[I]t is so low that it is not worth the banks’ while to spend as little as £4,500 [$7,000] per cashier at every branch on rising screens to deter [bank robberies]....

By Environment Correspondent Alister DoyleOSLO (Reuters) - Scientists have produced hydrogen by accelerating a natural process found in rocks deep below the Earth’s surface, a short-cut that may herald the wider use of what is a clean fuel, a study showed on Sunday.Used in rockets and in battery-like fuel cells, hydrogen is being widely researched as a non-polluting fuel, but its use is so far hampered by high costs. A few hydrogen vehicles are already on the roads, such as the Honda FXC Clarity and Mercedes-Benz F-Cell, and more are planned....

From Nature magazine. US President Barack Obama waded directly into scientific politics yesterday when he announced a series of measures addressing gun violence in the wake of the 14 December shooting in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 people dead — 20 of them children. Of the 23 actions he took under presidential authority on 16 January, Obama chose to highlight just a few in remarks he delivered at the White House....

There can be only one top-dog collider in physics, one ring-shaped machine to rule them all. Since late 2009, when the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, started up outside Geneva and quickly became the most powerful collider in history, particle physicists’ eyes have been wandering steadily toward Europe and away from the U.S., where the Tevatron in Illinois had long held sway as the world’s best. The shift in power was neatly expressed in a pair of recent and apparently unrelated announcements from the laboratories that operate the two accelerators....

Ketamine—a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K—delivers rapid relief to chronically depressed patients, and researchers may now have discovered why. In fact, the latest evidence reinforces the idea that the psychedelic drug could be the first new drug in decades to lift the fog of depression. “We were trying to figure out what ketamine was doing to produce this rapid response,” which can take as little as two hours to begin to act, says neuroscientist Ron Duman of the Yale University School of Medicine....

About a third of the women who take Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) find that the antidepressants dull sexual desire and pleasure. The side effects lead some patients to stop taking the drug. Alternatives to SSRIs, such as those that modulate the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine instead of serotonin, may avoid the sexual problems. But the few studies done on these drugs, chief among them bupropion (Wellbutrin), have generated conflicting results–some found they boosted sexual interest, whereas others found they lowered it....

More than three decades after laws were put on the books to fight gender discrimination in academic settings, the prevalence of sexual harassment in science-focused fields remains pervasive and largely unchanged, said a major national report released Tuesday. Women in some science careers—ones in which trainees may find themselves effectively hidden away in laboratories, patient rooms or field sites—are particularly vulnerable to harassment because of that isolation, according to the report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine....

Modern antipsychotic drugs are increasingly prescribed to children and adolescents diagnosed with a broad variety of ailments. The drugs help to alleviate symptoms in some disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but in others their effectiveness is questionable. Yet off-label prescribing is on the rise, especially in children receiving public assistance and Medicaid. Psychotic disorders typically arise in adulthood and affect only a small proportion of children and adolescents. Off-label prescriptions, however, most often target aggressive and disruptive behaviors associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)....

In March undergraduate students in Johns Hopkins University’s Build a Genome course announced they had made a yeast chromosome from scratch—and history, too. It is the first time anyone has synthesized the chromosome of a complex organism, a landmark achievement in the field of synthetic biology. It is also a triumph for the movement known as DIY biology. The target was chromosome 3, which controls the yeast’s sexual reproduction and has 316,617 base pairs of the DNA alphabet—A for adenine, G for guanine, C for cytosine and T for thymine....

Since the 1970s, the highlands of East Africa have witnessed a surge in malaria outbreaks. Because the mosquitoes that carry the disease do not thrive in cooler climes some researchers have suggested a link between this rise and climate change. A 2002 study found no such connection, but a new analysis of the data–including five more years of records–seems to show that a modest increase in temperature could lead to a population boom in mosquitoes and, therefore, malaria....