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By Marian Turner of Nature magazineWhen a research team started analyzing the genetics of micro-organisms from their university pond, they might have expected to find a couple of new species. Instead, they discovered a group of fungi that could double the size of that biological kingdom.Thomas Richards, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Exeter, UK, and his colleagues have called the fungi the cryptomycota, or ‘hidden fungi’, because they have remained undiscovered until now, despite being present in common environments....

It is 2018, the second year of my psychiatry residency training, and I’m in the shower, unable to stop the doubts: “What if I don’t know enough for my patients?” You know more than enough. “Do I remember that exact mechanism of that specific drug?” It’s okay to not remember everything. “No, it’s not. You’ve learned for certain people it’s not.” You’re going to be okay. “Am I?” You’ve prepared enough....

Escaping predators, digestion and other animal activities—including those of humans—require oxygen. But that essential ingredient is no longer so easy for marine life to obtain, several new studies reveal. In the past decade ocean oxygen levels have taken a dive—an alarming trend that is linked to climate change, says Andreas Oschlies, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, whose team tracks ocean oxygen levels worldwide. “We were surprised by the intensity of the changes we saw, how rapidly oxygen is going down in the ocean and how large the effects on marine ecosystems are,” he says....

Global warming could be causing long-term shifts in the generation of wind energy. New research published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests that future climate change might cause wind resources to decline across the Northern Hemisphere. These losses could be tempered by increases in wind power potential south of the equator, under severe climate change scenarios. The findings don’t disqualify wind as a competitive source of renewable energy, cautioned lead study author Kristopher Karnauskas of the University of Colorado, Boulder....

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazinePrion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are able to jump species much more easily than previously thought. A study published in Science today shows that in mice, prions introduced from other species can replicate in the spleen without necessarily affecting the brain.The study reinforces the concern that thousands of people in the United Kingdom might be silent carriers of prion infection, potentially able to pass a lethal form of the disease to others through surgery or blood transfusions....

Human males living with their moms may not expect to have much luck hooking up this Valentine’s Day. But among the northern muriqui monkeys, males that spend the most time around their mothers seem to get an added boost when mating time rolls around. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, suggest that females in some species may have evolved to play a critical role in their sons’ reproductive success....

In a few days, the water-bound wind turbines off of Rhode Island’s Block Island are expected to generate electricity commercially for the first time, and New Englanders are set to become the first in U.S. history to use electric power generated from an offshore wind turbine. The Block Island Wind Project is the first commercial offshore wind farm ever built in the U.S., and the start of its operation marks the the beginning of a brand new clean energy industry in the United States....

Scientists were looking for planets forming in the large disk of dust surrounding a young star when they encountered a surprise: fast-moving, wavelike arches racing across the disk like ripples in water. The team first spotted the five structures in data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile while searching for lumps and bumps that might indicate planets forming around the young star. When the researchers looked back at images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 and 2011, they managed to spot the same features—but in new locations....

By Daniel Wallis DENVER, March 24 (Reuters) - Forests in Western U.S. states that have been ravaged by mountain pine beetles are no more likely to be consumed by wildfires than forests unaffected by the insects, a new study by scientists in Colorado has found. Warmer than usual winters in recent years have allowed the tree-killing beetles to survive the cold months and leave behind stands of dry wood that experts had feared could help fuel early season wildfires....

If environmental and economic sustainability is ultimately a matter of balancing the human race’s consumption and productivity, then the agricultural industry leans heavily on both sides of that scale. Its drain on the earth’s resources is enormous: it claims 70 percent of all freshwater taken by our species and more than 40 percent of the planet’s solid surface (nearly all the arable land), with attendant casualties in bio­diversity. Yet modern agriculture is also the only reason we can produce enough food to nourish our population of 6....

The U.K. has nearly 100 metric tons of plutonium—dubbed “the element from hell” by some—that it doesn’t know what to do with. The island nation does not need the potent powder to construct more nuclear weapons, and spends billions of British pounds to ensure that others don’t steal it for that purpose. The unstable element, which will remain radioactive for millennia, is the residue of ill-fated efforts to recycle used nuclear fuel....

Iceland is working to tip the scales toward renewable energy in a world where most computing needs are powered by coal. The familiar fuss is that fossil fuels make the most business sense for computing. Data centers – the big warehouses full of servers that process all our Googling, emailing, online banking and so forth – are situated in areas that have easy access to cheap energy. Coal and other traditional energy sources keep them running....

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era. Industry has long formed the foundation of America’s economy, from before the first Ford Model T factory to the military-industrial complex that grew out of two world wars to the robust economic growth and high-tech innovation that followed. And whereas U.S. manufacturing is experiencing a resurgence, its old foundation—built on cheap fossil fuels and plentiful electricity—is showing cracks....

Profiling is a hot-button issue—civil liberties groups maintain that making assumptions based on race, nationality or ethnicity is unacceptably discriminatory, whereas some prominent conservatives argue that the method is an effective means to combat crime and terrorism, and therefore worth the social cost. So who’s right? According to new research, it is no more effective to profile strongly—that is, subject individuals to increased scrutiny in proportion to their presumed likelihood of malfeasance—than it is to randomly flag individuals in the general population when it comes to rooting out terrorism....

By Sharon Begley and Toni Clarke NEW YORK, Feb 19 (Reuters) - U.S. health regulators have known since at least 2009 that the medical devices at the center of the “superbug” outbreak at UCLA can transmit lethal infections but have not recommended any new safety requirements, a lapse that threatens patient safety, experts in hospital-acquired infections said. The latest outbreak involving the reusable devices called duodenoscopes, which are inserted down the throat, may have exposed 179 patients at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center in Los Angeles and contributed to two deaths....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. People have been dreaming about space travel for hundreds of years, long before the arrival of the spectacular technologies behind space exploration today—mighty engines roaring fire and thunder, shiny metal shapes gliding in the vastness of the universe. We’ve only travelled into space in the last century, but humanity’s desire to reach the moon is far from recent....

Is there anything CRISPR can’t do? Scientists have wielded the gene-editing tool to make scores of genetically modified organisms, as well as to track animal development, detect diseases and control pests. Now, they have found yet another application for it: using CRISPR to create smart materials that change their form on command. The shape-shifting materials could be used to deliver drugs, and to create sentinels for almost any biological signal, researchers report in Science on 22 August1....

Not long after midnight on May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs attacked a three-story compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, raced to the main building’s top floor and killed Osama bin Laden. Few mourn the man responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of innocent people worldwide over the years. But the operation that led to his death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more. In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding....

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel. Viking, 2016 ($30) Originally hired as human “calculators” to offer mathematical assistance to the scientists at the Harvard College Observatory starting in the late 1800s, a group of intrepid women soon began interpreting the data they were meant to crunch. They painstakingly analyzed the photographic plates of the heavens collected night after night at the observatory’s telescopes....

PHILADELPHIA – When the Allies needed a weapon terrible enough to end World War II, scientists devised the atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union hurled Sputnik into space, American scientists rallied to build the world’s top space program. When Jim Freihaut goes to work each day, he doesn’t have to win a war or outfox a Communist foe. All he has to do is crack a market, a market that has stubbornly resisted the notion of energy-efficient buildings for decades....