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The wildfires blazing through North Myrtle Beach, S.C., today are hardly an anomaly in a warming world. According to a landmark report that will be published tomorrow in Science, fires are not just a result of a changing climate, they’re also contributing to the overall warming trend much more than imagined, the authors report. As vegetation burns, it releases stored-up carbon into the atmosphere, speeding global warming and thereby exacerbating conditions that may generate a greater incidence of wildfires in the coming years....

Being alive is a smelly business. Our bodies constantly release by-products of the processes that go on inside us—and it is more than just a curiosity or a cause for dismay. A growing amount of research suggests that it might one day be possible to sniff someone’s breath, skin or bodily fluids to help diagnose a disease. For years researchers have investigated the idea that animals, especially dogs, might be able to tell sick people from healthy individuals by smell....

Who Zahi Hawass Vocation | Avocation Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities Research Focus Hawass brings a bigger-than-life personality to the quest to find Cleopatra’s tomb and other Egyptian treasures. Big Picture A consummate marketer and political operator as well as an archaeologist, Hawass was a controversial figure even before the revolution. One night in the weeks leading up to then President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, looters swarmed the grounds of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo (sometimes called the Cairo museum), and at least one broke into the main building by descending on wires from a skylight....

By Keith Coffman DENVER, July 21 (Reuters) - Residents of a small farming community in eastern Colorado have been warned to avoid drinking the town’s water after THC, the psychoactive agent in marijuana, was found in one of its feeder wells, authorities said on Thursday. A public works employee in Hugo, a town of about 800 people 90 miles southeast of Denver, detected the chemical and health officials believe it is “marijuana THC-related,” the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook posting....

This year, the Breakthrough Prize honored scientists who are teasing out the genetics of common diseases, a mathematician who solved long-standing topology problems, a team of 1370 physicists who overturned many physics theories when they proved that neutrinos can swap types, and two scientists who found a way to literally shine a new light on how the brain works. Below you can find a playlist of all the live video streams:...

Unusually warm ocean temperatures in the summer and fall of 2005 caused a mass die-off of Caribbean corals that is the worst ever recorded there, according to new research published yesterday in the online journal PLoS ONE. More than 80 percent of corals bleached and over 40 percent died at many sites in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico that year, the study says, arguing the 2005 event will have long-term consequences for the health of reefs....

By Andrew M. Seaman Eating a small amount of chocolate every week or so may decrease the risk of a common and serious type of irregular heart rhythm, according to a new study of people in Denmark. People who ate chocolate one to three times per month were about 10 percent less likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation than those who ate the sweet treat less than once a month, researchers found....

The most precise measurement yet of the distance to the Pleiades star cluster is reviving a dispute that has split the astronomy community largely down a trans-Atlantic divide for the past 17 years. The latest result, from a US team using a worldwide network of radio telescopes, is in good agreement with more than a dozen previous measurements to the Pleiades, made using multiple techniques. But it stands in sharp contrast to a figure from the Hipparcos satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA)....

Peter Sharpe dangled 100 feet beneath a helicopter, secured by a harness around his chest. In his hands, the research ecologist clutched a small box containing smooth oval objects sculpted from resin to resemble a bald eagle’s chalky eggs. The chopper pilot swung the craft above a wide bald eagle nest on a rock ledge high on a cliff—and Sharpe climbed in. Among the sticks and nesting material, he spotted two eggs with shells that would likely be crushed by the weight of brooding parents....

Last year, human activities released about 32 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), those greenhouse gas emissions must fall to almost zero by 2100 to avoid irreversible damage to our environment. The best way to achieve this is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels—but it also makes sense to prevent the CO2 that we do emit from reaching the atmosphere....

Editor’s Note (5/8/19): This article is being republished because Georgia’s governor signed a bill into law Tuesday that bans abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. There’s something rotten in the state of women’s health. As this article is being written in July, Republicans in Congress are engaged in a frenzied effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) put in place by the Obama administration....

For feathered dinosaurs the late Cretaceous period may have been a very itchy time. Lice—the tiny wingless insects that feed on dead skin, and sometimes blood—were just beginning to dig in about 100 million years ago, and the epoch’s small furry mammals, early birds and dino-birds would have provided ample food. The louse fossil record is relatively sparse. So far, only a 100 million-year-old book louse and a 44-million-year-old bird louse have been uncovered....

In Nebraska, along the Platte River, it’s uranium. In Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, it’s arsenic. In California, boron. And in the Texas Panhandle, lithium. Throughout the nation, metals and other elements are tainting private drinking water wells at concentrations that pose a health concern. For one element – manganese – contamination is so widespread that water wells with excessive levels are found in all but just a few states. Arsenic, too, is a national problem, scattered in every region....

More people have died from malaria than from any other disease in history. If we look at the African parasite that causes its most severe form, it is obvious why the pathogen is so deadly. Plasmodium falciparum has a multistage life cycle and highly mutable genes. It’s already widely resistant to one of the most common medications used to treat it, chloroquine, and it is starting to evolve around a newer drug, artemisinin....

Disease of Development? In “White Matter Matters,” R. Douglas Fields reports that myelination problems are implicated in schizophrenia. Certain studies have found that the long-term outcome for schizophrenia patients is better in developing countries than in developed ones. Because myelin formation continues into one’s 20s and is affected by experience, is it possible that an enriched living situation could help such patients recover some impaired myelin? Or that psychiatric drugs (less available in developing countries) blunt neuronal activity that could assist further myelination?...

Flu season is nearly upon us, and in an effort to limit contagion and spare ourselves misery, many of us will get vaccinated. The work of Jonas Salk and Thomas Francis has helped restrict the spread of the nasty bug for generations, and the influenza vaccine is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. But before the vaccine could be developed, scientists first had to identify the cause of influenza — and, importantly, recognize that it was contagious....

Natural gas plants emit a tiny fraction of the smog-causing gases and slightly more than half of the greenhouse gases emitted by their coal-burning counterparts, according to a soon-to-be published study. The assessment builds upon earlier reports that substituting natural gas for coal has sharply reduced air pollutants from power generation in the United States. “Since more and more of our electricity is coming from these cleaner power plants, emissions from the power sector are lower by 20, 30, even 40 percent for some gases since 1997,” said Joost de Gouw, lead author of the study and an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder....

Identifying genius is a dicey venture. Consider, for example, this ranking of “The Top 10 Geniuses” I stumbled across on Listverse.com a few years ago. 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....

On Aug. 26, the Dragon space capsule dropped into the Pacific Ocean somewhere off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. Onboard were payloads containing fungi that had now grown in two of the most extreme conditions known to man: outer space and the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. These fungi are radiation resistant. Thirty years ago, they survived when a routine test led to an explosion that blasted radioactive material throughout northern Ukraine....

Magdalena Fluegge is devoted to her exercise routine, and she has been training hard for months now. Every morning and afternoon, without fail, she hefts four small brown glass vessels. They contain gauze strips saturated with different fragrances. She opens each flask in turn and inhales deeply. She hopes for a scent–any scent–to register in her brain. Fluegge, who lost nearly all her ability to smell after striking the back of her head in a bicycle accident, is a volunteer in a study at the Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic at the University of Dresden Medical School in Germany....