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Scientists are mobilizing an all-female army to help stymie schistosomiasis, a sometimes deadly parasitic disease that affects millions of people every year. Macrobrachium rosenbergii prawns “are voracious predators of parasite-carrying snails” that spread the illness, says Amir Sagi, a biologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and principal investigator of a new study on the subject. “The possibility of nonreproducing monosex [prawn] populations, which will not become invasive, opens the path for their use as biocontrol agents....

By Scott Malone KEENE N.H. (Reuters) - When the rain comes down heavy in Keene, New Hampshire, auto mechanic Tom Stevens knows what to do: Drive the cars to the top of the hill near his garage and get everything else up onto shelves before floodwater starts seeping up through the floor drains. Variations of this drill are second nature to many residents of a city that has dealt repeatedly with the Ashuelot River and Beaver Brook overflowing their banks, bringing three floods considered to be 100-year events in the past decade alone....

From Nature magazine South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey. The project is provisionally named K-DEMO (Korean Demonstration Fusion Power Plant), and its goal is to develop the design for a facility that could be completed in the 2030s in Daejeon, under the leadership of the country’s National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI)....

In early March, Scientific American put the finishing touches on a very exciting collector’s edition entitled “Quantum Universe,” due out on newsstands at the end of April (not so subtle sales pitch there). In assembling and editing the diverse articles for that issue, I came to notice a common theme in the field of quantum physics: the sense that our grasp, from an observational standpoint, of the quantum universe is tenuous and fleeting—the second you try to observe entanglement, the wave function collapses....

Every living cell, even the simplest bacterium, teems with molecular contraptions that would be the envy of any nanotechnologist. As they incessantly shake or spin or crawl around the cell, these machines cut, paste and copy genetic molecules, shuttle nutrients around or turn them into energy, build and repair cellular membranes, relay mechanical, chemical or electrical messages—the list goes on and on, and new discoveries add to it all the time....

Millions of years ago our hominin ancestors began turning stones into tools like flakes, axes and hammers, sparking what we now call the “Stone Age.” The Bronze and Iron Ages followed, in which humans pioneered new domains of hunting and warfare using progressively stronger and more effective tools. Steel—a material made from iron, carbon and other elements—went on to play the leading role in the industrial revolution that began in the 18th century, serving as the backbone for a rapidly globalizing civilization....

Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the National Football League Player’s Association—the union for NFL players—died late Wednesday evening of pancreatic cancer while vacationing in California’s Lake Tahoe. Doctors diagnosed the 63-year-old Hall of Fame offensive lineman with the disease just four days earlier. Upshaw was a guard for the Oakland Raiders from 1967 to 1981. He played in seven Pro Bowls and three Super Bowls. He served as head of the NFL player’s union for 25 years....

On August 23, just before 2 P.M. Eastern time, the entire eastern half of the North American continent rocked back and forth for a few moments. From northern Ontario down south to Georgia and inland as far as western Ohio and Tennessee, the 5.8-magnitude quake centered in Mineral, Va., had some broad reach. But much more powerful earthquakes in the U.S. West rarely make their presence felt beyond the immediate vicinity....

Birds didn’t evolve in one fell swoop from their dinosaur ancestors, suggests a newly constructed dinosaur family tree showing our feathery friends evolved very gradually, at first. The new pedigree of carnivorous dinosaur evolution is the most comprehensive one ever assembled, the researchers say. The findings show that birdlike features such as wings and feathers developed slowly over tens of millions of years. But once the bird body plan was complete, the group underwent a burst of evolution that produced thousands of species, according to the study published today (Sept....

For many Americans, Labor Day Weekend is traditionally the last one for a romp in oceans. Plastic should be on their minds. Study after study shows that we have a real plastic problem in our oceans. As Nich School alum Jim Toomey, creator of the comic strip “Sherman’s Lagoon,” discusses in this short video about his series on plastic pollution, plastic travels far and wide to do its damage. The Pacific Ocean garbage patch is a fairly well known....

Our genes are not the last word on disease risk or other traits. Myriad control switches help to arbitrate how genes get expressed in different cells and tissues, and those switches are often triggered by maternal diet, toxic exposures and many other environmental factors. To begin to understand what drives these complex epigenetic effects, scientists analyzed 150 billion bits of genomic data from more than 100 human tissues and cells—brain, heart, bone, and so forth....

As medical imaging technology has increased in sophistication and accessibility over the past decade, it is little wonder that the number of scans has also been on the rise. Conflicting reports have emerged about whether these additional tests are having a commensurate impact on diagnosis—and cure—rates. In fact, a new study shows that for life-threatening injuries, a threefold increase in the number of computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in emergency rooms has not resulted in an improvement in useful diagnosis....

The $14 billion network of levees and floodwalls that was built to protect greater New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was a seemingly invincible bulwark against flooding. But now, 11 months after the Army Corps of Engineers completed one of the largest public works projects in world history, the agency says the system will stop providing adequate protection in as little as four years because of rising sea levels and shrinking levees....

Female athletes are between two and six times more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligaments (ACLs) than their male counterparts are—a problem that provokes Tim Hewett of the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine. “I grew up in a house with six sisters—and most of them were better athletes than me,” he says. One tore her ACL playing ball, and Hewett now has a $3-million grant from the National Institutes of Health essentially to figure out why....

Harvard University psychologist Elizabeth Spelke takes these questions to the people who may be best able to answer them: babies. Spelke, whose sprawling laboratory in William James Hall teems with infants and researchers who are interested in them, has addressed some of the most intractable mysteries of human knowledge by interrogating little people who cannot yet talk, walk or even crawl. She has what she calls “an insatiable appetite” for assessing these young beings....

A dozen years and $1 billion or more—that is what it typically takes to bring a new drug from the lab to your medicine cabinet. Testing medications on patients has become a slow, arduous process. People, even those who are desperate to participate, often have to travel long distances to a study site and make the trip over and over again. For scientists, coordinating the paperwork among a large number of research centers can be extremely laborious and time-consuming....

The global warming “hiatus,” a controversy that spawned congressional hearings and thousands of skeptical blog posts before being curbed last year, is back. The “hiatus” refers to the observation that global warming has slowed in the past 15 years. The planet is still warming, but just not as quickly as some climate scientists expected it to. The debate between researchers and doubters reached a crescendo last summer, when scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration updated their temperature records and concluded that global warming has not slowed down in the 2000s (ClimateWire, June 5, 2015)....

BY MID-NOVEMBER store windows are bedecked with seasonal decorations of all kinds. The message is clear: the annual gift hunt has begun. In the ensuing weeks, increasing numbers of shoppers will seek the perfect items for loved ones, not to mention a little something for friends, colleagues and distant cousins. For many people, giving is the high point of celebrations such as Christmas and Hanukkah, even though most of us hate the purchasing and wrapping hassle....

By now it ought to be clear that the U.S. must get off oil. We can no longer afford the dangers that our dependence on petroleum poses for our national security, our economic security or our environmental security. Yet civilization is not about to stop moving, and so we must invent a new way to power the world’s transportation fleet. Cellulosic biofuels—liquid fuels made from inedible parts of plants—offer the most environmentally attractive and technologically feasible near-term alternative to oil....

Gravity signals that race through the ground at the speed of light could help seismologists get a better handle on the size of large, devastating quakes soon after they hit, a study suggests. The tiny changes in Earth’s gravitational field, created when the ground shifts, arrive at seismic-monitoring stations well before seismic waves. “The good thing we can do with these signals is have quick information on the magnitude of the quake,” says Martin Vallée, a seismologist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics....