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CLIMATEWIRE | A blistering heat wave in India and Pakistan last month sent temperatures soaring above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, all before the summer had even kicked off. Now scientists say climate change helped make the shocking weather possible. A new analysis finds that global warming made the heat wave at least 30 times more likely to occur. The event was about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 F, hotter than it would have been in a world without climate change....

High profile journals are retracting papers by Christopher Bielawski’s University of Texas, Austin, team amid an investigation into scientific misconduct. The moves follow Angewandte Chemie’s retraction of a 2012 paper from Bielawski’s team in January 2015. ‘A former research group member admitted to falsifying and/or fabricating data affecting this article,’ the Angewandte Chemie notice states. Notices of concern regarding papers in Science, Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) Journal of Material Chemistry, Polymer Chemistry and Chemical Science have been published in the past few months and now the first retractions of these papers has been coming into effect—one paper in Science and three in JACS....

Physicists are getting antsy. Their most highly prized tool for studying the smallest bits of nature—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator—has been shut down since the end of 2012 for $163 million worth of upgrades. But within two months it will be back with a vengeance, colliding protons at mind-numbing energies that have never been achieved in a man-made machine. Physicists hope that these energies will be enough to produce new particles or phenomena that expose secrets the universe has thus far been unwilling to give up....

February 1966 Neutrinos detected “Two miles underground in a gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, an experiment is under way to study high-energy neutrinos produced by cosmic-ray collisions in the earth’s atmosphere. On October 27, 1964—13 months after the selection of the South African site—our equipment registered the first deep-underground observation of a sister, or cosmic-ray, muon. Then on February 23, 1965, the detectors recorded a muon that had traveled in a horizontal direction—the first ‘natural’ high-energy neutrino had been observed!...

It sounds like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe tale of horror.* A man becomes agitated by strange sounds only to find that they are emanating from inside his own body—his heart, his pulse, the very movement of his eyes in their sockets. Yet superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS) is a very real affliction caused by a small hole in the bone covering part of the inner ear. Such a breach results in distortion of hearing and, often, impaired balance....

From Simons Science News (find original story here) On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly contradictory implications of recent experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe....

States along the East Coast are preparing for a rare and spectacular natural phenomenon. As spring sets in and the soil warms, the ground will erupt as billions of cicadas burst from the earth. It’s an event nearly two decades in the making. Known as Brood X, this massive swarm has been biding its time underground for the last 17 years. Brood X is part of a special group of cicadas called “periodical cicadas,” known for their singular life cycles....

The protein encoded by the tumour-suppressor gene BRCA1 may keep breast and ovarian cancer in check by preventing transcription of repetitive DNA sequences, says a study published today in Nature . This explanation brings together many disparate theories about how the gene functions and could also shed light on how other tumour suppressors work. Since the discovery in the mid-1990s that defects in BRCA1 strongly predispose women to breast and ovarian cancer, researchers have suggested numerous ways in which the protein might stop cells from becoming cancerous....

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6 of the Special Report. EAST BOSTON, Mass. – The Shore Plaza East apartments have a stunning skyline view of downtown Boston across the harbor: Waves lap at the foot of the eight-story building; sailboats carve foam trails in the water. These could be million-dollar condos. But, buffeted by winds and the threat of storm-water flooding, these apartments are subsidized housing, reserved for the poor....

THE ANCIENT DEBATE surrounding the existence of free will appears unresolvable, a metaphysical question that generates much heat yet little light. Common sense and volumes of psychological and neuroscientific research reveal, however, that we are less free than we think we are. Our genes, our upbringing and our environment influence our behaviors in ways that often escape conscious control. Understanding this influence, the advertisement industry spent approximately half a trillion dollars worldwide in 2010 to shape the buying decisions of consumers....

Humankind’s early history in Africa is coming into sharper focus with a new study of 180 genomes from a dozen ethnic groups on the continent—some of which have never before been analysed. These preliminary results suggest that more than 40,000 years ago, two of the groups—the San and the Baka Pygmy—were roughly twice the size of other ethnic groups present at the time, and that the San and Baka overlapped in central-eastern or southern Africa....

A deadly infectious disease once thought to be exclusively tropical has gained a toehold in the Pacific Northwest, and health experts suspect climate change is partially to blame. Last week the CDC issued a report warning U.S. doctors to be alert for patients showing signs of a cryptococcal infection. The infection is spread by a fungus, Cryptococcus gattii, that attacks the nasal cavity and spreads to other body sites, causing pneumonia, meningitis and other lung, brain or muscle ailments....

Ken Shen was racing against the sun. It was 3 A.M. on April 25 and Shen—an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley—was sitting at his kitchen table in his pajamas. At that precise moment the scientists behind the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft released the mission’s second batch of data. And Shen was on a mission to comb that data to find the Milky Way’s fastest-moving stars, then to verify their identities via independent observations on ground-based telescopes....

The attacks of September 11, 2001, changed everything, especially in air travel. Since that day, the U.S. government has spent billions on technology, enacted rafts of new rules and turned flying into a far more upsetting, complicated procedure than it needs to be. If it were all based on science and reason, critics might not be calling these new procedures “security theater”—an elaborate show to convince people that the authorities are doing something rather than nothing....

Most glaciers creep along at a pace that is, well, glacial. But one in northern Pakistan breaks into a gallop with astounding speed and regularity: Khurdopin glacier “surges” every two decades, moving roughly 1,500 times its normal pace. This sends ice tumbling into a nearby river, damming it to create a temporary lake that can suddenly inundate nearby villages. Now scientists in Europe have used new high-resolution satellite data to study Khurdopin before and during its most recent surge in 2017, revealing how the event developed on a near daily basis, in unprecedented detail....

One way to address the growing problem of antibiotic resistance has been to use multiple drugs. Give patients two antibiotics, the thinking goes, and even if the microbes are resistant to one of them, the other will work. But a new study suggests that drug combinations can actually speed the development of resistance. In a paper published Thursday in Science, Israeli researchers showed that when a patient develops tolerance to a single antibiotic in the combination—meaning it kills bacteria more slowly—outright resistance to the second drug becomes more likely....

Seven years after one of the largest earthquakes on record unleashed a massive tsunami and triggered a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials say they are at last getting a handle on the mammoth task of cleaning the site before it is ultimately dismantled. But the process is still expected to be a long, expensive slog, requiring as-yet untried feats of engineering—and not all the details have yet been worked out....

When Judith Klatt began studying the colorful mats of primitive microbes living in a sinkhole at the bottom of Lake Huron, she thought she might learn something about Earth’s early ecosystems. Instead Klatt, a biogeochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, wound up confronting one of geology’s greatest unsolved mysteries: How, exactly, did Earth become the only planet known to have an oxygen-rich atmosphere? Geologic clues suggest microbes may have started releasing oxygen via photosynthesis as early as three billion years ago or even before....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, many questions have been raised about Facebook’s role in the promotion of inaccurate and highly partisan information during the presidential race and whether this fake news influenced the election’s outcome. A few have downplayed Facebook’s impact, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said that it is “extremely unlikely” that fake news could have swayed the election....

Elephants do not have the greatest eyesight in the animal kingdom, but they never forget a face. Carol Buckley at The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., for instance, reports that in 1999 resident elephant Jenny became anxious and could hardly be contained when introduced to newcomer Shirley, an Asian elephant. As the animals checked one another out with their trunks, Shirley, too, became animated and the two seemingly old friends had what appeared to be an emotional reunion....