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I just turned 40, and no matter how well I take care of myself, I’m going to be seeing doctors more often as I continue to age. First, there are the sundry screenings one starts to require in middle age, mammograms and colonoscopies and the like. Plus, the risk of common ills such as hypertension and high cholesterol (both of which run in my family) starts to inch up. But being a good patient can be hard, as I found out last year during an extended but—I realize now—fully preventable dental ordeal....

By appropriating a genetic mechanism used by the common flour beetle—a pest that can stowaway in cereal boxes bound for kitchen cabinets and pantries—Caltech researchers helped a transgenic fruit fly take over a population. The work, if replicated in malaria-resistant mosquitoes, could help battle the debilitating parasitic disease that kills between 700,000 and 2.7 million people annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The scientists, led by biologist Bruce Hay, developed a set of “selfish” genes for the Drosophila fruit fly....

By Elie DolginThe HIV-like virus that infects monkeys is at least 100,000 if not millions of years old, scientists reported this week at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. The vast age of the monkey virus, which does not cause illness in most of its hosts, suggests that it may take a long time for HIV to become equally benign in humans.“Don’t expect human evolution to unfold in a timeframe that will do anything good for us,” Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told meeting attendees....

In Chicago last month, thousands of gay men gathered for the first time in three years for the annual International Mr. Leather conference, a four-day-long affair where men from all over the world gathered to strut their stuff in leather gear, have lots of sex, and compete to be named International Mr. Leather. IML is like the Miss America pageant, except those working the runway are clad in harnesses. (This year, the honor went to Gael Leung Chong Wo of Belgium....

Some evening when Saturn is high in the sky and the night is clear and dark, take a look through a backyard telescope. When you have had your fill of the planet’s awe and beauty, search online for images that NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has returned over the past 13 years in its travels around this ringed wonder. It will likely hit you hard: how far we have traveled, how proficient we have become as interplanetary explorers and how extraordinary an accomplishment it has been to come so intimately to know a world as distant as Saturn....

On December 7, 2010, the cruise ship Clelia II had begun the final crossing of its weeklong Antarctic cruise. What remained of the journey was the notoriously dangerous Drake Passage between Antarctica and South America. And that day the ship was hit by a massive wave that shattered one of its bridge windows and damaged the Clelia’snavigational equipment. Its 88 passengers were primarily American retirees, many of whom had paid more than $9,000 for their Antarctic adventure, and whose daylong stranding in the rough waters of the Drake Passage was the most dangerous thing that happened on their adventure in the Southern Ocean....

The Paris climate talks are a little more than two months away and most of the world’s big carbon emitters have submitted their climate pledges. That’s the good news. The bad news is that despite many countries pledging to cut carbon emissions in the coming decades, the current commitments may not be enough to limit warming to the world’s agreed upon goal of 2°C (3.6°F). The pledges have been rolling in all year....

For most of the past 30 years, computer vision technologies have struggled to help humans with visual tasks, even those as mundane as accurately recognizing faces in photographs. Recently, though, breakthroughs in deep learning, an emerging field of artificial intelligence, have finally enabled computers to interpret many kinds of images as successfully as, or better than, people do. Companies are already selling products that exploit the technology, which is likely to take over or assist in a wide range of tasks that people now perform, from driving trucks to reading scans for diagnosing medical disorders....

It might sound like the opening to a trippy fairy tale, but there are now 71 known species of bioluminescent mushrooms that glow night and day amidst the leaf litter of tropical jungles across the globe. Seven new species of these fungi are described in an early online report from the journal Mycologia’s March/April 2010 issue, four new to science and three previously described—sans the shimmer. This news was published online today....

Molecular biologists have sequenced the genome of an invasive species of crayfish that can reproduce without mating and is spreading rapidly across Madagascar. The marbled crayfish (Procambarus virginalis) was first spotted in aquariums in Germany in the 1990s. Now, DNA sequencing suggests that the species is probably the product of two distantly related members of a different crayfish species, a team reported on February 5 in Nature Ecology and Evolution. The marbled crayfish has already been banned in the European Union and some parts of the United States because of the threat it poses to freshwater ecosystems....

An industrial add-on to geothermal power plants near the Salton Sea in California could one day produce the lithium that is required for electric car batteries. Already, Simbol Materials, the company behind the process, has begun purifying lithium from conventional mining operations in Argentina, Chile and elsewhere for the global battery market at a demonstration facility in Brawley, Calif. “We developed the technology and the process to take the brines coming out of geothermal power plants’ post–power production and harvest lithium, manganese, zinc and, maybe in the future, some other materials, and we convert those into usable compounds,” says Simbol CEO Luka Erceg....

Rdiger Paschotta, a physicist and CEO of RP Photonics Consulting in Switzerland, offers this answer. There are many different types of mirrors, and each behaves somewhat differently. The most common type is a silver mirror, consisting of a thin layer of silver on the bottom side of a glass slide. Additional layers of copper or other materials may be deposited on the back side of the silver layer, but these layers are not relevant for the optical properties....

Most people would probably prefer if traces of dairy cows’ vaccinations don’t show up in their milk, but one research team is looking into deliberately adding antibodies to milk as a way to help malnourished children in developing countries. Seven years ago Alan Cross, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, published the results of a successful phase I clinical trial of a vaccine against sepsis he had developed....

Below Venus’s toxic clouds of sulfuric acid is an apocalyptic world, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead and pressures that could crush heavy machinery. But it might not always have been so. In 2016 Michael Way of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and his colleagues applied the first three-dimensional climate model to early Venus. They found it could once have been so temperate that liquid water pooled in vast oceans—the key to life as we know it....

From Nature magazine The growth of new nerves in and around prostate cancers spurs tumours to grow and invade other tissues, studies in mice have shown. The results, published today in Science, could steer researchers towards novel approaches to treating cancer. Although it is not yet clear whether the mechanism occurs in humans — or in cancers affecting other organs — an analysis of samples from 43 patients with prostate cancer found that nerve density was high in patients who fared poorly in the clinic....

The DNA-editing system CRISPR-Cas9 is revolutionizing how scientists approach genetic problems and diseases. Most researchers use a particular version of the Cas9 protein, derived from the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, to alter DNA. But other microbes carry their own versions, which cut genes at different locations and could help researchers design more precise and flexible therapies. For a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers analyzed dozens of Cas9 varieties, uncovering broad diversity in how these “molecular scissors” recognize and snip DNA....

How important is reading fiction in socializing school children? Researchers at The New School in New York City have found evidence that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling. Emanuele Castano, a social psychologist, along with PhD candidate David Kidd conducted five studies in which they divided a varying number of participants (ranging from 86 to 356) and gave them different reading assignments: excerpts from genre (or popular) fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction or nothing....

By Laila Kearney SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Northern California preservationists are fighting to keep a rare albino redwood, one of just 10 trees of its kind known to exist, from being chopped down to make way for a new commuter rail system, arborists and city officials said on Wednesday. The albino chimera coast redwood, standing 52 feet high in a commercial district of Cotati, a town in California’s wine country, also is the tallest and widest specimen of its type, said Tom Stapleton, a certified arborist who is leading a group of researchers and community members pushing to save the tree....

Any computer gamer old enough to remember floppy disks probably paid at least a fleeting visit to SimCity, the legendary franchise that let players build – and destroy – the metropolises of their imaginations. After passing through half a dozen incarnations in the two decades since its debut, the game is back, and its creator, Maxis Studios, says that this time, it’s putting more than bricks and mortar into the mix....

In the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, narrator Ben Stein poses as a “rebel” willing to stand up to the scientific establishment in defense of freedom and honest, open discussion of controversial ideas like intelligent design (ID). But Expelled has some problems of its own with honest, open presentations of the facts about evolution, ID—and with its own agenda. Here are a few examples—add your own with a comment, and we may add it to another draft of this story....