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National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) director Francis Collins today said he plans to step down from his position on August 1, after leading the organization for more than 15 years and overseeing work on the critical Human Genome Project (HGP). During a press conference held to announce his decision, Collins said that he is proud of his accomplishments and those of his colleagues at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) but that he wants the freedom to write books and explore other opportunities that are off-limits to federal employees....

MEXICO Cavers and scientists in the Mexican state of Oaxaca discovered that the world’s ninth-largest known cave is deeper than previously thought. With a depth of 5,118 feet, it houses dozens of species not found anywhere else. BRAZIL Archaeologists discovered a tooth from an opossum-sized creature that once inhabited what is now Brazil. The oldest known mammal found in the region to date, it lived sometime between 87 million and 70 million years ago, when Tyrannosaurus rex still roamed....

THE WOODLANDS, Texas – Life came back surprisingly quickly to the site of the impact that killed the dinosaurs, new research found. When a 6-mile (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, causing the demise of the dinosaurs as part of the largest mass extinction event in the last 100 million years, it took life on the planet at least 30,000 years to bounce back....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In the 1950s, Philip Anderson, a physicist at Bell Laboratories, discovered a strange phenomenon. In some situations where it seems as though waves should advance freely, they just stop — like a tsunami halting in the middle of the ocean. Anderson won the 1977 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of what is now called Anderson localization, a term that refers to waves that stay in some “local” region rather than propagating the way you’d expect....

The one-time front man for heavy metal band Black Sabbath has joined the likes of DNA co-discoverer James Watson and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates on the short roster of people to have their full genome sequenced and analyzed. Ozzy Osbourne let a little blood to submit to the testing in July. Cofactor Genomics, a Saint Louis–based company, sequenced Osbourne’s genome; Knome, Inc., which also helped raise money for the project, analyzed the data....

Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, had a process like Earth’s plate tectonics beneath its surface, driven by a freezing ice core that expanded and cracked the little world’s crust, researchers said. Using data from the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto and Charon in July 2015, Ross Beyer and his colleagues on the mission team investigated features on Charon’s surface to understand how they formed. They noted some similarities to what can be seen back home: Earth’s geology is powered by huge plates of crust that float on a taffy-like mantle, crashing into one another....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Earlier this year a series of papers in The Lancet reported that 85 percent of the $265 billion spent each year on medical research is wasted. This is not because of fraud, although it is true that retractions are on the rise. Instead, it is because too often absolutely nothing happens after initial results of a study are published....

Along with the sun’s light, our closest star’s heat is an ample source of renewable energy, which generators can harness in ways that overcome one of solar energy’s biggest shortcomings. Using mirrors, developers can focus the sun’s rays to produce industrial heat or generate electricity, often using materials that can store the energy, as well. In theory, it is a very simple idea and certainly is not a new one. Legend has it that Archimedes used large, polished mirrors to torch Roman ships during the Second Punic War....

A medical team surrounded Maria Mazurkevich’s hospital bed, all eyes on her as she did … nothing. Mazurkevich was 30 years old and had been admitted to New York–Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University on a blisteringly hot July day in New York City. A few days earlier, at home, she had suddenly fallen unconscious. She had suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her brain, and the bleeding area was putting tremendous pressure on critical brain regions....

A gunman’s shooting distance and angle on a target can make all the difference between a victim’s tenuous life, death or general recovery. Before the crucial quick steps that aides and surgeons took to help save U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D–Ariz.) soon after she was shot in the head on Saturday, the series of initial conditions that led to the bullet’s trajectory through the brain—from the shooter’s planning to his pacing—might have helped to spare her life and ultimately her functioning....

Your once reliable mobile phone suddenly freezes. The keypad no longer functions, and it cannot make or receive calls or text messages. You try to power off, but nothing happens. You remove the battery and reinsert it; the phone simply returns to its frozen state. Clearly, this is no ordinary glitch. Hours later you learn that yours is not an isolated problem: millions of other people also saw their phones suddenly, inexplicably, freeze....

Ozone is a bit of a shape-shifting chemical. High in the stratosphere, ozone acts as an ultraviolet-blocking shield around Earth (which is why the ozone hole is such a problem). At ground level, it’s a pollutant that can cause serious respiratory problems. And if it finds its way into the troposphere—the lowest level of the atmosphere—ozone serves as a potent greenhouse gas that warms the planet. It ends up in the troposphere through a variety of processes including human pollution....

Today the U.S. Senate held a nomination hearing for Kelvin Droegemeier, whom Pres. Donald Trump has proposed as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Trump nominated the meteorologist three weeks ago, after leaving the position vacant for 19 months. Many high-profile scientists, including John Holdren, who was Pres. Barack Obama’s senior science advisor for eight years, say Droegemeier is a terrific choice. He is vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma....

Most major American cities that have signed on to the climate fight with pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions are failing to meet their goals or haven’t even started to track local progress, according to a survey by the Brookings Institution. The report, “Pledges and Progress,” looked for climate policy and actions in the nation’s 100 most populous cities, finding that two-thirds have made commitments to address citywide emissions. President Trump’s rejection of the Paris climate accord after he took office sparked a strong response at the local level....

US President Donald Trump has announced that he is “terminating” the country’s relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO), and that the US will redirect funds intended for the agency to other global health projects. During the announcement at a news briefing 29 May, Trump reiterated accusations that the WHO is too lenient with China. Because the United States became a member of the WHO through a joint resolution in 1948, Trump may need Congressional approval to exit the agency, says Jennifer Kates, the director of global health & HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, D....

Do you ever wonder what makes some dogs so into us? Why at any moment Pluto might propel himself into Mickey’s arms, giving Mickey a full-on scrub-down with his tongue? Why some dogs want to meet everybody and anybody, whereas others would prefer you stay right where you are? A recently published study in PLOS ONE led by Anna Kis, Melinda Bence and other researchers at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest used a novel method to explore the role that oxytocin plays in dogs’ sociability toward humans....

People bypass the careful arrangements made for them by IT departments all the time: They forward corporate e-mail to private addresses on Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo!; they insert untested USB sticks into machines; and they copy files onto their own devices. Usually they do these sorts of things in order to get work done more efficiently. In running a private mail server Hillary Clinton was doing a more complex version of the sort of thing millions of other Americans do....

Women in Northern California farm towns gave birth to smaller babies if they lived within three miles of strawberry fields and other crops treated with the pesticide methyl bromide, according to researchers. “There’s been very little research on residential exposure to methyl bromide. Our study is the first to look at methyl bromide and birth outcomes,” said Kim Harley, study author and associate director of the Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health at the University of California, Berkeley....

Rabies is one of the oldest and most feared diseases. It attacks the brain, causing agitation, terror and convulsions. Victims suffer painful throat spasms when they try to drink or eat. Paralysis follows, yet people infected with rabies are intermittently alert until near death and can communicate their fear and suffering to family and caregivers. Although vaccines against the rabies virus can prevent the illness from developing, until recently doctors could hold out no hope for patients who failed to get immunized soon after being bitten by a rabid animal....

New data from a national math test show that U.S. fourth- and eighth-graders have made slight gains since 2009, but only 35 to 40 percent of the students tested showed proficiency in math. The federally run National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” periodically tests students on several subjects to gauge their progress over time. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the results of the 2011 assessments in mathematics and reading on November 1....