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MURCHISON SHIRE, Western Australia—The pilot of the eight-passenger Cessna turboprop lines up the nose of his plane with a red-dirt landing strip ahead, a band of cleared Earth not all that different from the flat, sparsely vegetated terrain below. He eases the plane down to an altitude of 90 meters, then levels off, buzzing the airstrip for a visual inspection. At the remote Boolardy pastoral station here in Western Australia, about 600 kilometers north of Perth, any manner of debris might have blown onto the landing strip since it was last used....

Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales Spiegel & Grau, 2016 ($27) The terrible evil of slavery still haunts the world. A seven-year exploration of modern slavery—from forced labor to pay off debts to outright bondage—finds it inextricably interwoven with some of the worst environmental destruction on the planet. Activist and writer Bales’s powerful book shows how slavery is involved in harvesting shrimp and gathering the wood in the tables it is served on and even in the mining that enables manufacture of the world’s favorite gadget: the cell phone....

Higher concentrations of bisphenol A—a common ingredient in plastics found in products ranging from polyester to water bottles—have been linked to heart disease, according to a new follow-up study. A similar study was performed by the same team in 2008 using older data from a survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Our analysis of the [earlier data] was rightly treated with caution; it was the first ever report of these links,” says epidemiologist Richard Melzer of the Peninsula Medical School in England, an author of both studies, the latest one published Tuesday in PLoS ONE....

Climate change is likely to be worse than many computer models have projected, according to a new analysis. The work, published yesterday in Science, finds evidence that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than some earlier studies had suggested. If the new results are correct, that means warming will come on faster, and be more intense, than many current predictions. Moreover, the impacts of that warming, including sea level rise, drought, floods and other extreme weather, could hit earlier and harder than many models project, said study co-author John Fasullo, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research....

In the 1987 film Wall Street, Michael Douglas’s character, the high-rolling corporate raider Gordon Gekko, explains why America has lost its standing atop the industrial world: “The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated.” He elaborates: The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right....

“Experts are always getting it wrong” is now a familiar trope. As a historian of science, I disagree: I think history shows that scientific experts mostly get things right. But examples where experts have gone wrong offer the opportunity to better understand the limits of expertise. A case in point is the Global Health Security Index (GHSI), the result of a project led by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security....

Malaria struck an estimated 228 million people worldwide in 2018. Yet questions remain about how the mosquito-borne malaria parasite, Plasmodium, infects humans—and how antimalarial-drug-resistance genes spread. Different strains of the parasite can exchange genes with one another when they reproduce sexually inside an individual mosquito, and the resulting mixed strains infect humans through the mosquito’s bite. A new study paints a detailed picture of how Plasmodium trades genes, and it finds that all the genetic diversity within an actively infected human host—up to 17 parasite strains—can come from just one bite....

Commercial honeybees are tough. They get trucked cross-country to pollinate vast crops, often while fed unnatural diets such as sugar water and soy flour. Their hives are treated with chemicals to deter parasites, and they’re exposed to pesticides and fungicides in the fields where they work and feed. “I can feed you a diet of Hershey bars, keep you up all night, truck you around, and spray Raid in your face, and I guarantee you’ll get sick,” says Jerry Hayes, Florida’s assistant chief of apiary inspection....

When it comes to growing intestines, the first inch is the hardest—especially in a petri dish. Scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have met that benchmark: they recently reported in Nature Medicine that they had grown a piece of gut—nerves, muscles and all—from a single line of human stem cells. In the future such tissue could be used for studying disease and more. In 2011 researchers at the same center announced that they had grown intestinal tissue—but it was missing nerve cells and so was unable to contract in the undulating motion that pushes food along a colon....

Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there’s more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth’s polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals—and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. A warming global climate may favor species that don’t intimately depend on ice that floats on the sea to hunt or are more versatile in what they can eat as well as those able to thrive in higher temperatures....

Join us below at 3 pm Eastern on Tuesday (June 5) for a live 30-minute online chat with SA Editor George Musser, who will discuss the transit of Venus occurring later that evening. We invite you to post chat questions in advance in the comments below. On June 5 in the Americas and June 6 in the rest of the world, people will be able to see one of the rarest predictable events in astronomy: a solar transit of the planet Venus....

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft may double its pleasure during its next deep-space flyby 16 months from now. On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons is scheduled to have a close encounter with a body called 2014 MU69, which lies 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the distant, frigid Kuiper Belt. (The probe famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, returning the first-ever up-close images of that mysterious world. This second flyby is the key component of New Horizons’ extended mission....

As the main driver of climate change, the connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming is clear. But evidence shows they may be connected in another way—the physical footprint of oil and gas development on the landscape may not only contribute to global warming, it may also affect an ecosystem’s ability to withstand it. New research shows that an area larger than the land area of Maryland—more than 11,500 square miles—was completely stripped of trees, grasses and shrubs to make way for more than 50,000 new oil and gas wells that were developed each year between 2000 and 2012....

“Trivelpiece had been granted 15 minutes to win the president’s support for the largest and most costly atom smasher ever conceived. A green light, the advocates said, would guarantee American dominance at the forefront of high-energy physics for decades to come. Without his backing for the project, the nation’s historic leadership in unraveling the nature of matter was sure to fade as other countries pushed on. “The Superconducting Supercolli­­der sounded like the kind of diabolical weapon a comic-book super-villain might build in his (or her) lair to hold the world to ransom....

As World Water Week celebrates its 21st anniversary in Stockholm this week, New York City is two months away from opening the world’s largest ultraviolet (UV) drinking-water disinfection plant. When the lights go on, the facility’s 56 massive UV units will neutralize waterborne pathogens in all the drinking water coming from the city’s major sources—the Delaware County and Catskill watersheds. The facility will process up to nine billion liters daily, adding a second layer of sanitation to the chlorine treatment that has been applied for years....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. “Polina came to our bedroom awakened by the sound of explosions. I didn’t know and still don’t know what to tell her. Her eyes today are full of fear and terror; eyes of all of us.” Alina, a family friend who is a marketer and mother of two children from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv—which is under seige by Russian forces—shared this reflection on her Instagram story....

Tom Price, the Georgia congressman tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is set to become the most powerful person in health policy. Price has made his name in Washington for his strong opposition to the Affordable Care Act—and implementing whatever congressional Republicans pass to repeal and replace the law would be a big part of his job. But his work will touch many other parts of health care and medical science....

A new study shows that overuse of a drug used to prevent and treat malaria may be contributing to growing antibiotic resistance. Researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE that Escherichia coli bacteria resistant to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin were detected in the digestive tracts of villagers from remote rainforest communities in Guyana who had been given the drug chloroquine to prevent and treat malaria, a potentially fatal disease spread by mosquitoes....

THE NOTION that men have shorter fuses than women has acquired the status of a psychological shibboleth. More than 30 years ago Stanford University psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin concluded in an influential book that sex differences were minimal in most psychological traits but considerable when it comes to aggression. This opinion has endured ever since. Were Maccoby and Jacklin right? Recent research bears out the broad brushstrokes of their claim but reveals that women can be equally, if less dangerously, belligerent....

Nutrition Diva fan Gregory writes, “I have read that iodine deficiency is becoming more and more common. Is this true and, if so, what is the best way to get iodine?” According to the World Health Organization, iodine is the most common nutrient deficiency—affecting 2 billion people around the world. It’s really a shame, because iodine is cheap and the costs of iodine deficiency (both in financial and human terms) are large....