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People in many developing nations, such as Liberia and Georgia, are gaining weight at a rapid pace, faster since 2000 than they did from 1975 to 2000 (among pink icons). And although the rate of weight gain in many developed countries since 2000 is slower than it was prior (among orange icons), it has kept going up. When taken together, the two trends mean that “for much of the world, we are passing from an era of obesity into a new era of severe obesity,” says Majid Ezzati, lead scientist on a far-reaching study of 200 countries published recently in the Lancet....

Vaccines have accomplished near miracles in the fight against infectious disease. They have consigned smallpox to history and should soon do the same for polio. By the late 1990s an international campaign to immunize all the world’s children against six devastating diseases was reportedly reaching 80 percent of infants (up from about 5 percent in the mid-1970s) and was reducing the annual death toll from those infections by roughly three million....

“If you want to look for effects of climate change, Australia is the poster child in many respects,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. Australia has certainly been much in the news for extreme weather events in recent years, especially for relentless heat waves during the past two summers. And 2013 was the hottest year on record for the country, handily beating 2005, the previous record holder, by 0....

Elephants have evolved extra copies of a gene that fights tumour cells, according to two independent studies, offering an explanation for why the animals so rarely develop cancer. Why elephants do not get cancer is a famous conundrum that was posed — in a different form — by epidemiologist Richard Peto of the University of Oxford, UK, in the 1970s. Peto noted that, in general, there is little relationship between cancer rates and the body size or age of animals....

When Decio Eizirik began treating patients with type 1 diabetes in the 1980s, he was pretty sure about what was behind the disease: an immune system gone haywire. People with the illness lacked insulin, a crucial hormone, because beta cells in the pancreas—the body’s insulin factories—were being attacked and destroyed by immune system cells. “At that time, the idea was that if you could control the immune system, perhaps you could prevent diabetes,” says the endocrinologist, who now has research appointments at the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute and at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium....

In the summer of 2015 a single dead lion, Cecil, dominated the news. Trophy hunting is not without its complications, but Panthera leo faces even larger problems than wealthy hunters with big guns. Classified as threatened, lions suffer from habitat loss, depletion of prey, retaliatory killing for real or perceived losses of human life and livestock, poaching for traditional medicine, and more. In Africa these big cats have been relegated to just 17 percent of their historical range, and just one population survives elsewhere, isolated in India....

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazineThe past five years has seen a spurt in the creation of giant marine protection areas, including a 320,000 square-kilometer marine reserve announced earlier this month in Australia.“Now we have a competition for politicians to see who can have the biggest one,” said Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, at the start of the Society for Conservation Biology’s 2nd International Marine Conservation Congress in Victoria, Canada, on Saturday....

Leaving a hair at a crime scene could one day be as damning as leaving a photograph of your face. Researchers have developed a computer program that can create a crude three-dimensional (3D) model of a face from a DNA sample. Using genes to predict eye and hair color is relatively easy. But the complex structure of the face makes it more valuable as a forensic tool — and more difficult to connect to genetic variation, says anthropologist Mark Shriver of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who led the work, published today in PLOS Genetics....

A major concern over using stem cells is the risk of tumors: but now a new study shows that It takes a lot of effort to get induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to grow into tumors after they have been transplanted into a monkey. The findings will bolster the prospects of one day using such cells clinically in humans. Making iPS cells from an animal’s own skin cells and then transplanting them back into the creature also does not trigger an inflammatory response as long as the cells have first been coaxed to differentiate towards a more specialized cell type....

At the Museum of Sex in New York City, artificial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. “Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple,” he said to a chuckling crowd. When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry a robot was deluded, his face grew serious....

For the first time, a cosmic magnifying glass has allowed scientists to see the same star explosion four times, possibly offering a revealing glimpse into these explosive stellar deaths and the nature of the accelerating universe. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured four images of a supernova explosion in deep space thanks to a galaxy located between Earth and the massive star explosion. The galaxy cluster warped the fabric of space and time around it—like a bowling ball placed on a bed sheet—allowing scientists to see the supernova in four images....

At any moment, someone in the U.S. most likely is having an asthma attack. The breath-robbing disease afflicts around 25 million Americans, and every year about half of them lose control of their asthma. They may rush to the emergency room or reach for a rescue inhaler, a source of quick-acting drugs that can relax constricted airways in minutes. Predicting who is at risk of such crises is difficult, however, because the relevant statistics that would identify trends come from the patients’ own recollections days or weeks after the emergency....

Can our expectations for the future change how we remember the past? According to a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, they can—we remember unpleasant experiences more negatively if we expect to endure them again. Researchers at New York University and Carnegie Mellon University conducted seven experiments to determine how people’s expectations shape their memories. In one test, they exposed 30 students to the noise of a vacuum cleaner for 40 seconds....

Opioid addiction kills tens of thousands of people every year in the United States and the trend shows no signs of slowing. Now, public-health officials are worried about a surge in bacterial and viral infections linked to opioid misuse that threatens to compound the crisis. This surge includes an unprecedented rise in bacterial infections—including those caused by Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that’s frequently resistant to antibiotics—and a spike in new cases of HIV and hepatitis associated with injecting opioids that risks undoing decades of progress in corraling these diseases....

The Roan Plateau in western Colorado is known for its natural splendor. Deep canyons and mountain streams cut across the aspen-forested landscape. Hunters, hikers and anglers prize the Roan for its large herds of mule deer, rare plants and cutthroat trout. But there are resources below the Roan that some prize even more: fossil fuel. The plateau boasts the biggest nonleased reserve of federally owned natural gas outside of Alaska, according to David Boyd, a spokesman at the Colorado office of the U....

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Tropical storm Cristina strengthened into a category 1 hurricane on Wednesday as it moved away from Mexico’s Pacific coast, prompting authorities to warn of heavy rains in the Latin American nation. Cristina was located about 265 miles (425 kilometers) south of the port of Manzanillo with maximum sustained winds of 75 miles per hour (120 kilometers per hour) and higher gusts, the National Hurricane Center said early Wednesday....

UNITED NATIONS – Starting today, the members of the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) sit down to tackle arguably the most serious controversy since the beginning of the Kyoto Protocol system for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. The Bonn, Germany-based U.N. affiliate will examine a dozen projects that constitute two-thirds of all offset credits issued to date. The projects involve the destruction of hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23), a potent greenhouse gas that results when chemical companies produce a refrigerant and propellant called hydrochlorofluorocarbon-22 (HCFC-22)....

If you take a trip from rural Virginia into Washington, D.C., you may notice a change in atmosphere—literally. Scientists say the “urban heat island” effect, which can raise temperatures in cities by several degrees compared with their surroundings, could be a risk to human health as growing urban populations exacerbate the heating effects of climate change. According to a study published last week in Environmental Research Letters, the urban heating effect may cause extra warming in many cities, on top of the warming already caused by climate change....

The Big Apple wants to use the sun’s power to provide clean drinking water for its nine million residents without adding more of the potentially harmful chlorine it uses as a disinfectant. More specifically, New York City officials are building a water disinfection facility some 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Manhattan on a 153-acre (62-hectare) property in the Westchester County towns of Mount Pleasant and Greenburgh that will use ultraviolet (UV) light to destroy water-borne pathogens such as Escherichia coli, giardia, and cryptosporidium in reservoirs that serve city dwellers....

Warm weather brings bugs—and the pathogens they carry. West Nile virus (blue circles), transmitted by mosquitoes, has spread from only three U.S. states in 2000 to 48 states in 2012, and human cases have climbed from 21 to 5,674. Lyme disease was concentrated in the Northeast in 2000, but cases of the bacterial infection have also picked up across the country (orange). The total U.S. number has fallen from a peak of 29,959 in 2009, however, in part because people have gotten into the habit of checking themselves and their pets for ticks....