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The largest Icelandic eruption in 230 years offers a unique look into how aerosols affect the atmosphere—and an international team of researchers says it could sharpen the way scientists model climate change. The Holuhraun lava field explosion of 2014 and 2015 released enormous amounts of sulfur dioxide. SO2 is one of the most significant aerosols from industrial sources and is a key factor in cloud formation, creating the nucleus around which water vapor can condense....

For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure....

In the past decade, a group of laboratories from the School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University (SLiS of NJU) led by microRNA (miRNA) researcher Dr Chen-Yu Zhang, have focused on research in the field of extracellular miRNA (Fig. 1). The group’s original 2008 publication1 on the stable existence of serum miRNA is one of the most cited papers published by Chinese scholars in the past century and is the foundation for all serum miRNA biomarker studies....

An obscure family of chemicals – important to the metalworking industry but virtually unknown to the public – is suddenly the subject of scrutiny from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The chemicals, called short-chain chlorinated paraffins, persist in the environment, accumulate in human breast milk, can kill small aquatic creatures and travel to remote regions of the globe. Since their introduction in the 1930s, the chemicals, known as SCCPs, have received little attention from U....

A new survey of fault movement along the southern stretch of the San Andreas reveals an unprecedented view of its potential to tear open an area populated by such cities as Palm Springs, San Bernardino and Riverside. Ruling out other explanations for why this 100-mile section has remained quiet for nearly 300 years, Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, provides substantial evidence that pressure is building up on the fault, making it long overdue for a big quake....

I dentifying genius is a dicey venture. Consider, for example, this ranking of “The Top 10 Geniuses” I recently stumbled across on Listverse.com. From first to last place, here are the honorees: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Emanuel Swedenborg, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Stuart Mill, Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bobby Fischer, Galileo Galilei and Madame de Staël. What about Albert Einstein instead of Swedenborg? Some of the living might also deserve this appellation—Stephen Hawking comes to mind....

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is not only the most prolific exoplanet detector ever; it is — or was — a marvel of engineering. Its 1.4-meter mirror funnels starlight to a 95-megapixel camera, capable of discerning dips in brightness as small as 10 parts per million — clues to the mini-eclipses caused by an exoplanet crossing the star’s face. Yet on 14 May, the US$600-million craft was derailed by the failure of one of its only moving parts — a roughly $200,000 device akin to a child’s gyroscope....

Geographer Jefferson Fox thought he was on to something big when the Chinese military stripped his team’s weather monitoring equipment from a montane rubber plantation in the run-up to last year’s Olympics. How big? In the past 20 years, more than 1.2 million acres (485,000 hectares) of evergreen broadleaf and secondary forests have been cleared throughout Southeast Asia to make way for rubber plantations to fuel China’s growing appetite for automobile tires....

Albert “Skip” Rizzo of the University of Southern California began studying virtual reality (VR) as psychological treatment in 1993. Since then, dozens of studies, his included, have shown the immersion technique to be effective for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety to phobias and addiction. But a lack of practical hardware has kept VR out of reach for clinicians. The requirements for a VR headset seem simple—a high-resolution, fast-reacting screen, a field of vision that is wide enough to convince patients they are in another world and a reasonable price tag— yet such a product has proved elusive....

Kathy Wendolkowski used to make candy in her spare time. for the past year and a half, this mother of three from Gaithersburg, Md., has been spending two to three hours a day on the Web site Old Weather (www.oldweather.org). There she transcribes temperature, pressure and wind-speed records from the logbooks of HMS Foxglove, a British minesweeper that patrolled the South Pacific in the years following World War I. It was a friend, a naval historian, who told her about the site soon after its launch in October 2010, Wendolkowski says....

At a press briefing on March 22, Donald Trump announced: “We’re at war, in a true sense we’re at war, and we are fighting an invisible enemy.” Yet viruses are not sovereign nations; they don’t have armies, navies or air forces. They might not even be alive. So perhaps war is not only an inadequate metaphor, but one that is fundamentally flawed. The bellicose terms used to make sense of COVID-19 stem from a series of profound changes in medical thinking sparked by the cholera epidemics that beset Europe during the 19th century....

A galaxy is much more than a radiant agglomeration of stars. To modern astrophysicists, galaxies are more notable for their dark sides: their hidden material that is only “seen” by its gravitational pull upon the shiny stuff it seems to vastly outweigh. So-called dark matter is as much a defining feature of galaxies as stars and gas, and is thought to provide the gravitational seeds from which galaxies assemble and grow....

A century after its conception, quantum mechanics continues to be a disturbing theory. It tells us to think of all matter as waves, and yet in all objects that surround us these matter waves are far too small to be seen. Although the quantum laws are thought to be valid for objects of all sizes–from elementary particles to the universe as a whole–we do not usually see matter waves or any other quantum behavior in our everyday world....

California will charge ahead with its plan to mandate more clean cars, as the nation’s most populous state again positions itself as a key challenger to the Trump administration. The California Air Resources Board at a Friday hearing approved its midterm review of car mandates passed in 2012, saying the standards remain appropriate. The vote means the rules stay in place through 2025. In order to sell in California, automakers must produce an increasing percentage of zero-emissions vehicles, or ZEVs, and cut tailpipe greenhouse gas and particulate emissions....

After Superstorm Sandy killed 117 people along the East Coast in 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a startling finding: The leading cause of death was drowning, and nearly half of the drownings occurred in flooded homes where mandatory evacuation orders were in place. The finding helped prompt Congress in 2017 to order NOAA researchers to study how the public receives, interprets and responds to weather alerts and to come up with better warnings....

According to the robotics community, it’s unlikely that any robot now on the market could hold your attention for more than 10 hours. (Actually, if you have a robot dog gathering dust on a closet shelf , you probably already know that.) A new study, however, indicates that this threshold is poised to be broken—at least if the humans interacting with the machines are youngsters. Researchers found that a two-foot- (61-centimeter-) tall metal man easily won over a classroom of tykes, aged 18 to 24 months, who intermittently spent time with it over a five-month period....

Dutch airline KLM has completed a fifth jet biofuel test flight—and the first with passengers other than flight crew. Using a 50–50 blend of regular jet fuel and biofuel refined from camelina oil in one of its four engines, the flight carried 42 “observers” for an hour on November 23 from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, enough to fill business class, according to chemist Jennifer Holmgren, who was on board. “The civil aviation authority in the Netherlands said we’ve seen enough of this fuel that I’m comfortable putting people on it,” says Holmgren, who works for refiner UOP, a division of Honeywell International....

It was a November midnight, year 2000, on Nancowry, one of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. One of us (Singh) waited in the pitch-black darkness, listening to the roar of waves crashing on the shore some 20 meters away, the stars brilliant in the sky above. Soon villagers appeared carrying dried-leaf torches. Chacho, a shaman, had died in July, and tonight was the culmination of the Tanoing festival commemorating her death....

In 1999 Jan M. Van Deursen and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., wanted to see whether mangled chromosomes cause cancer. So they engineered mice deficient in a protein that helps to maintain chromosomal integrity. The rodents’ coils of DNA were duly deranged. Surprisingly, though, the animals were not particularly tumor-prone. Instead they developed a strange grab bag of ills, including cataracts, dwindling muscles, rapid thinning of fat under the skin and progressive spinal curvature, that made them look like one-humped camels....

Are women scientists getting an even shake as they try to advance their careers? Research on the subject suggests maybe not. For example, a new study published in the journal Academic Medicine finds that a substantial salary gap favors male scientists to the tune of $20,000. Another study suggests evidence of bias against women’s ability to keep a steady stream of research funding, which is the lifeblood of any scientist’s career....