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Scientists studying what they thought was a ‘fat gene’ seem to have been looking in the wrong place, according to research published today in Nature. It suggests instead that the real culprit is another gene that the suspected obesity gene interacts with. In 2007, several genome studies identified mutations in a gene called FTO that were strongly associated with an increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans. Subsequent studies in mice showed a link between the gene and body mass....

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics will be split among three researchers who laid the groundwork in the 1960s for today’s digital-media and telecommunications infrastructure. The Nobel Foundation announced the prizewinners in a news conference this morning from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Half the prize will be awarded to Charles Kao, formerly of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England (now Nortel), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong....

As I write this, it’s been nearly one year since our editorial team decided to start working from home out of concern for the novel coronavirus sweeping the country. To say that we’re living in a so-called new normal is a gross misnomer. The realities of social isolation, virtual remote learning, rolling lockdowns, and nearly half a million dead in the U.S. are as far from normal as one could imagine....

By Maryn McKenna of Nature magazineOver the years, Robert Daum has learned to respect his adversary. In 1995, he and his co-workers at the University of Chicago children’s hospital in Illinois were investigating infections that had affected two dozen children in their emergency department. Three children had fast-moving pneumonia. A fourth had an abscess the size of his fist buried in the muscle of one buttock. In a fifth, the bacterium had infiltrated the bones of one foot....

I suspect that among the readers of this column, few are unfamiliar with Sudoku. The same cannot be said about Sudokill, a game invented for a graduate class I teach. Sukokill is a two-person game in which players try to force each other to violate the Sudoku rules. Here’s a quick refresher on Sudoku. The goal is to fill a nine-by-nine grid with digits between 1 and 9. Each digit should appear exactly once in each row, once in each column and once in each nonoverlapping three-by-three box starting from the upper left corner....

For recreational drug users looking for an opioidlike high without the legal problems of heroin, fentanyl, and oxycodone, the Southeast Asian plant called kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) has provided an attractive alternative. But, acting on anecdotal reports of people becoming dependent on kratom, six states, including Vermont and Indiana, have banned the sale and use of the herb. A new study provides some data to support those states’ concerns (J. Am. Chem....

Jellyfish are returning to prominence in the world’s oceans, thanks to a combination of overfishing, climate change and even “dead zones”. A case in point is in the Benguela Current, an upwelling in the South Atlantic off the coast of Namibia and South Africa. Sardines thrived here, feeding on the rich blooms of plankton fertilized by nutrients carried along by rising deep ocean waters. The sardines, in turn, were consumed by everything from seabirds and sea lions to predatory fish like the mackerel....

The first eyes probably appeared long before the Cambrian explosion that occurred from 541 million to 530 million years ago. Some of the earliest renditions might have been a simple pit eye, a kind of pit of tissue lined with light receptors, or what scientists call an eyespot, a simple region that detects light. Over time, new anatomy appeared. Lenses and corneas, which bend and focus light, developed, with the latter taking on special importance for organisms living on land....

Graphene, hailed as one of the thinnest, strongest and most conductive materials ever found, seems to have bagged one more amazing property. Experiments suggest that it can be used to create ultrashort laser pulses of any color, owing to an ability to absorb light over a broad range of wavelengths. The discovery could help researchers to build small, cheap and highly versatile ultrashort-pulse lasers, with potential applications ranging from micro-machinery to medicine....

How do you power a spacecraft in deep space? NASA’s Voyager 1, which was launched three decades ago and is now about 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) from Earth, is using inertia from its blast off as well as the gravitational fields of the planets it has passed to speed toward the edge of the solar system at 10.6 miles (17.1 kilometers) per second. Unfortunately, it has taken Voyager 1 so long to get to its current location that by 2025 the space probe will have consumed all of the power provided by its radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs (which convert heat from decaying radioactive materials such as plutonium into electricity), and will no longer have enough energy to run its scientific instruments or send messages back to NASA as it crosses into interstellar space....

On June 9, with only a few hours’ notice, NASA held a press conference to announce a study it was commissioning on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The acronym is a rebranding of what are more popularly known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, a topic usually associated with purported extraterrestrial visitations and government conspiracy theories. The question on the public’s mind was why one of the U.S.’s premier scientific agencies was getting involved in something often considered to be at the farthest fringes of respectability....

JUNE 1958 BOVINE RESOURCES— “Cattle stand first among the animals serving man. They are outnumbered, it is true, by sheep, and they are outranked in man’s esteem by the horse and the dog, but no other domestic animal renders such a variety of important services to human well-being. To the American or European consumer cattle represent beef, veal, milk, butter, cheese and leather; they yield in addition hormones and vitamin extracts, bone meal for feed and fertilizer, and high-protein concentrates for livestock feeding....

Most people think of bacteria as unseen disease carriers and simply want to wash their hands of them. But Stockholm-based industrial designer Jan Klingler is putting them in the spotlight with his colorful lamps. “Every living being and place has its own unique and personal microbiological fingerprint,” Klingler says. By capturing such signatures, he aims to bottle memories. Customers who order one of Klingler’s lamps—which will be for sale soon—will get a kit with a sterile swab they can brush on a loved one, pet or object....

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male. Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports....

Simply breathing on money could soon reveal if it’s the real deal or counterfeit thanks to a beetle-inspired ink that reversibly changes color in response to humidity. The photonic crystal ink developed by Chinese researchers can produce unique color changing patterns on surfaces with an inkjet printer system, which would be extremely hard for fraudsters to reproduce. The work also shows promise for other applications including displays and wearable sensors. The ability of photonic crystals to control the flow of light makes them a suitable material for diverse applications including optical communications, biosensors and solar cells....

“Let’s not talk about that right now,” curtly replies Seth Factor, Guatemala director of the environmental advocacy group Trópico Verde. Bands of armed outlaws are a common threat in the western third of the Maya Biosphere Reserve—“the Wild West,” as one scientist here has called it. Fieldwork in this steaming-hot forest has always been challenging; scientists must brave venomous snakes, flesh-burrowing botflies and repeated bouts of malaria. But in the past decade the risks have escalated as criminal activity has invaded the reserve’s western region....

We all know that exercise is a good thing—for body and for mind. Decades of data have established it as one of the best ways to lower the risk of heart disease and stave off other ailments of aging, including dementia. But even after many years of covering health as a reporter and editor, I was genuinely surprised to learn about the depth of the evidence showing how powerful exercise can be in battling major depression....

Myrtle the Matchmaker is widely known for her professional skills in the town of Harmony. Besides her personal charm, she has an uncanny sense for which pairs of people, especially shy people, will come to love one another and for how to make those people think it was their idea. Her technique is simple: if she knows Bob and Alice are well suited to one another but haven’t been introduced, she might ask Bill and Mary to invite them to Bill and Mary’s upcoming wedding....

The volcano that buried Pompeii in A.D. 79 still rumbles deep down. Last erupting in 1944, Mount Vesuvius poses an ever-present threat to the Italian populations around Naples. Whether the volcano will erupt in Pompeiian proportions again is a question that preoccupies scientists monitoring it, as they hope to predict when Vesuvius will blow and provide adequate warning time. One way to gauge the magnitude of an impending volcanic eruption is to determine the size of its “throat”—the internal tube through which magma travels upward to the surface....

Ebola has pummeled healthcare systems in west Africa and laid bare health infrastructure issues that may not have otherwise been so readily apparent. It has also prompted aid organizations and governments to do some soul-searching about what should be done to prepare for the future. Ebola expert Daniel Bausch, a professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, has been consulting with groups including the World Health Organization to ramp up its Ebola response....