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By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists from the United States, China and Britain will come together to discuss the future of human gene editing, which holds great promise for treating diseases but also has the potential to create “designer babies.” The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society said on Monday they would join the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in co-hosting an international summit on the topic in Washington on Dec....

Just six months ago residents of the eastern U.S. were shoveling themselves out of the snowiest winter ever—weather that prompted mockery of global warming among some people. Now, scientists have a new explanation for why such anomalous snowstorms can coexist with global warming: The storms were kicked up by the convergence of two natural, large-scale weather patterns. In order to better understand possible triggers of last year’s media-dubbed “snowmaggedon,” a team of scientists from Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory analyzed more than 50 years of snow data as well as measurements of atmospheric pressure and sea-surface temperatures....

As evidence of widespread vitamin D deficiency grows, some scientists are wondering whether the sunshine vitamin—once only considered important in bone health—may actually play a role in one of neurology’s most vexing conditions: autism. The idea, although not yet tested or widely held, comes out of preliminary studies in Sweden and Minnesota. Last summer, Swedish researchers published a study in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology that found the prevalence of autism and related disorders was three to four times higher among Somali immigrants than non-Somalis in Stockholm....

On October 7, the 2013 Nobel laureates will be announced. The selection process is highly secretive, and there’s plenty of speculation that surrounds them, much of it good natured but not very accurate in predicting the winners. In that spirit, we surveyed dozens of scientists in the fields of physics, chemistry, and physiology, asking who they think could win this year’s Nobel Prize. Physics For the physics prize, almost all of our respondents predicted that it will honor the discovery of the Higgs boson, announced tentatively in July 2012 and with greater confidence in March 2013....

Over the past year, the successful development of highly effective vaccines to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection has moved forward at a rapid pace—but the use of treatments for patients sickened by the virus has lagged. A number of barriers have stood in the way of using the drugs known as monoclonal antibodies, including logistical challenges and the emergence of new viral variants that are resistant to some of these antibodies. Although they are not a cure for COVID, monoclonals can serve as an effective therapeutic option that can prevent a patient with mild or moderate disease from becoming sicker and ending up in the hospital....

The best science transforms our conception of the universe and our place in it and helps us to understand and cope with changes beyond our control. Relativity, natural selection, germ theory, heliocentrism and other explanations of natural phenomena have remade our intellectual and cultural landscapes. The same holds true for inventions as diverse as the Internet, formal logic, agriculture and the wheel. What dramatic new events are in store for humanity?...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. These toys wirelessly connect with online databases to recognize voices and images, identifying children’s queries, commands and requests and responding to them. They’re often billed as improving children’s quality of play, providing children with new experiences of collaborative play, and developing children’s literacy, numeric and social skills. Online devices raise privacy concerns for all their users, but children are particularly vulnerable and have special legal protections....

When you go from bed to bathroom on a dark night, a quick flick of the lights will leave a lingering impression on your mind’s eye. For decades evidence suggested that such visual working memories—which, even in daylight, connect the dots to create a complete scene as the eyes dart around rapidly—fade gradually over the span of several seconds. But a clever new study reported in the journal Psychological Science finds that such memories actually stay sharp until they are suddenly lost....

There is always a race against the clock to tackle influenza outbreaks, both the seasonal global waves of disease and the occasional pandemic. “Somewhere in the world right now, influenza is causing a horrible problem and killing lots of people,” says Rick Bright, director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Better responses to flu outbreaks demand not just more-effective flu vaccines, but quicker ways to produce them....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Women who take antidepressants during pregnancy may be more likely to have children with autism, a Canadian study suggests. The overall risk is low – less than 1 percent of the nearly 150,000 babies in the study were diagnosed with autism by age six or seven. But children of women who took antidepressants during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy were 87 percent more likely to develop autism than kids born to women who didn’t take the drugs, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics....

The number of deadly heroin overdoses in the United States more than quadrupled from 2010 to 2015, a federal agency said on Friday, as the price of the drug dropped and its potency increased. There were 12,989 overdose deaths involving heroin in 2015, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, compared with 3,036 such fatalities five years earlier. In 2010, heroin was involved in 8 percent of U.S. drug overdose deaths, a study by the Atlanta-based center said....

When it comes to linking power politics, religion and climate change, the Rev. Sally Bingham does not hold back. Hanging prominently in the office of her organization, Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), in San Francisco, is a photo of her being arrested at a 2001 protest against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Kneeling in prayer, she and 21 other demonstrators blocked the doorway to the Department of Energy. In the photo, Bingham stares straight at the camera as a police officer handcuffs her....

By Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Europe’s reluctance to buy hormone meat or genetically modified food from the United States has exposed an “enormous gulf” that threatens the world’s biggest trade pact, industry and labour groups told EU and U.S. negotiators on Wednesday. Eight months into talks to create a transatlantic pact encompassing almost half the world’s economy, divisions remain over opening up to each others goods, rules governing the names of foods and genetically modified food....

Thoughts of food seem to consume us, weighing heavily on our minds. We hungrily scan the headlines, seeking ways to battle excess pounds. We devour diet advice, to little avail. Despite our good intentions, obesity rates keep climbing. Why is it so hard to stop overeating? “When our stomach begins to growl, too often it drowns out any good advice coming from our brain,” writes psychiatrist Oliver Grimm in his article “Addicted to Food?...

The car-tire-size opah is striking enough thanks to its rotund, silver body. But now, researchers have discovered something surprising about this deep-sea dweller: It’s got warm blood. That makes the opah (Lampris guttatus) the first warm-blooded fish every discovered. Most fish are exotherms, meaning they require heat from the environment to stay toasty. The opah, as an endotherm, keeps its own temperature elevated even as it dives to chilly depths of 1,300 feet (396 meters) in temperate and tropical oceans around the world....

Hard to believe, but a grain of sand—or rather millions of them traveling at high velocity—can have a devastating effect on aircraft and industrial gas-turbine engines. The granules eat into the zirconium dioxide ceramic thermal-barrier coatings that insulate and protect engine components from extremely high temperatures. In an effort to protect these coatings and ensure that turbine engines continue to operate properly, a team of Ohio State University engineers is testing a new formulation of zirconium dioxide, more commonly known as zirconia....

On December 2021, Lesha Porche, an illustrator and graphic artist based in Florida, stumbled on an illusion that would become an online viral phenomenon and leave many perceptual experts scratching their heads. Porche’s illustration work often entails drawing maps for tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons & Dragons. This time, she set out to produce a courtyard for the players, and initially noticed nothing amiss. Porche decided on a repeating pattern of tiles edged in grass....

Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors. Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish? And if entire populations are forced to relocate – as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction – what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?...

When food writer Lisë Stern needs fresh vegetables to roast with a chicken, she bicycles to the green market near her Cambridge, Mass., home where local farmers sell organically grown produce. Once back in her kitchen, she prepares the meal using knives, bowls, utensils, a cutting board and a roasting pan dedicated solely to cooking with meat, and serves it to her two teenage sons (her 11-year-old daughter is a vegetarian) on glass plates never touched by milk, cheese or other dairy foods....

A Lamborghini Murciélago zips by as we cruise through central New Jersey on Route 78 West. My fellow motorists watch the sleek, $350,000 roadster until it slips out of sight but pay no mind to our tidy, four-door sedan. The only clues that our car is at all unusual are its exterior badges, its ultraquiet operation and a faint but persistent compressor whine. In reality, however, our 2008 Honda FCX Clarity is a potentially revolutionary vehicle: hydrogen fills its gas tank and powers its fuel cell....