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The novel coronavirus pandemic is now the world’s top priority. Climate change will have to be put on the back burner, for now. That was the message delivered to reporters from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, via an unprecedented online press conference he organized last week. Guterres made himself available only electronically because he is in isolation. Though Guterres still is urging countries to not lose sight of the global warming challenge and the Paris climate accord, the U....

Grabbing a live cone snail while collecting seashells could get you jabbed with a fanglike dart full of potentially fatal—and incredibly fast-acting—venom. But studying how this substance hijacks key bodily systems so efficiently may inspire lifesaving medications: cone snail venom includes insulin, a hormone that helps cells metabolize blood glucose and that many people with diabetes need to routinely inject. And there is something special about cone snail insulin, which quickly drops their prey animals’ blood sugar....

As opioid abuse tightens its grip on the U.S., a team of medical researchers is combing social media for clues to better understand this major public health problem. Using artificially intelligent software they developed to analyze tweets and related geographic information, the researchers found Twitter to be a particularly reliable data source for pinpointing where the situation is at its worst. With about 500 million messages posted to the microblogging site daily, such an approach could help alert local health officials so they can gather funding or other resources to tackle the issue....

From Nature magazine The packages that started arriving by FedEx on 12 October last year came with strict instructions: protect the information within and destroy it after review. Inside were two manuscripts showing how the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus could be made to transmit between mammals. The recipients of these packages — eight members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) — faced the unenviable task of deciding whether the research was safe to publish....

NORMAN, Oklahoma—When Greg Scott teaches people about soil health, the front row better beware. The soil scientist from Oklahoma hauls around a rain simulator that holds bins of soil you’d see on different types of farmland. When he flicked his contraption on in Norman, Oklahoma, last week at a journalist’s conference, shoes and notepads got wet. But what didn’t get very wet was the bin of dirt that mimicked tilled land, a common method of digging and stirring up the soil before planting....

GENEVA, July 31 (Reuters) - Initial results from an Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea are “exciting” and “promising” and suggest the shot could help bring an end to West Africa’s epidemic, World Health Organization director general Margaret Chan said on Friday. “If proven effective, this is going to be a game changer, and it will change the management of the current Ebola outbreak and future outbreaks,” Chan told reporters at a news conference....

The catastrophic wildfires burning in California, which killed at least one person over the weekend and injured several others, are being fueled by high temperatures, strong winds and years of withering drought influenced by climate change. The Valley Fire ignited in drought-stricken Northern California early Saturday afternoon, destroying more than 400 homes and scorching 50,000 acres—an area more than twice the size of Manhattan—within about 12 hours. “It’s a true firestorm—extremely fast moving, generating its own weather conditions, and burning literally everything in its path,” Daniel Swain, a climate earth system scientist at Stanford University, said....

Life expectancy varies dramatically in the U.S. based on race and geography–so much so that researchers have divided the country into “eight Americas” in a new study. The report, which delineates health inequalities in graphic detail, may aid in attempts to target public health measures regionally. Inequalities in life expectancy among Americans of different races and locations are well known. Hoping to bring the geographic variation of such disparities into clearer focus, researchers used census data and national death reports to calculate the death rate for each racial group in a given U....

Obesity is a national health crisis—that much we know. If current trends continue, it will soon surpass smoking in the U.S. as the biggest single factor in early death, reduced quality of life and added health care costs. A third of adults in the U.S. are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and another third are overweight, with Americans getting fatter every year. Obesity is responsible for more than 160,000 “excess” deaths a year, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association....

Belching from smokestacks, tailpipes and even forest fires, soot—or black carbon—can quickly sully any snow on which it happens to land. In the atmosphere, such aerosols can significantly cool the planet by scattering incoming radiation or helping form clouds that deflect incoming light. But on snow—even at concentrations below five parts per billion—such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming....

Imagine walking around in your backyard and suddenly discovering a vein of gold in a corner you thought you knew well. Or imagine how Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies felt when oil started bubbling up through the ground. A similar sensation of incredulous excitement swept over the solid-state physics community in the early weeks of 2001, when researchers announced that magnesium diboride (MgB2) superconducts–conducts electricity without resistance–at temperatures approaching 40 kelvins....

As drivers await the arrival of General Motors’s much-anticipated Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car later this year, GM unveiled an electric vehicle of an entirely different stripe on Wednesday at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The company’s Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V) is a mini electric vehicle built for two, unless you are using it to go shopping, in which case you might have room for yourself and a bag of groceries....

In 1959 Ancel and Margaret Keys offered the following—familiar and still useful—precepts regarding nutrition and activity: Do not get fat; if you are fat, reduce. Restrict saturated fats: fats in beef, pork, lamb, sausages, margarine and solid shortenings; fats in dairy products. Prefer vegetable oils to solid fats but keep total fats under 30 percent of your diet calories. Favor fresh vegetables, fruits and nonfat milk products. Avoid heavy use of salt and refined sugar....

Toxic chemicals are accumulating in the ecosystems of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, researchers warn in the first comprehensive study to assess levels of certain organic pollutants in that part of the world. “The rigor and quality of the work are impressive,” says Surendra Singh, an ecologist at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun. “It’s the first study to quantify the accumulation of [persistent organic pollutants] in ecosystems in the region....

Russia’s dream to dominate the Arctic will soon get a boost with a nuclear-powered icebreaker designed to navigate both shallow rivers and the freezing depths of the northern seas. In August, Rosatomflot, Russia’s atomic fleet, inked a deal to begin construction of a massive new vessel that can blast through ice around three meters thick at a price of about $1.2 billion. Powered by two RITM-200 compact pressurized water reactors generating 60 megawatts, the new model will have liquid ballasts, allowing it to alter its draft (the depth of the loaded vessel in the water) between 8....

(Reuters) - Theme park operator SeaWorld Entertainment Inc said it would build bigger enclosures for its killer whales amid raging controversy over its killer whale shows. The company’s shares were up 3 percent in early trading. SeaWorld pledged $10 million for killer whale research and is embarking on a multi-million dollar partnership focused on ocean health, it said. Protests against orca shows at SeaWorld’s amusement parks intensified particularly after a 2013 film, “Blackfish,” documented the killing of a trainer at the company’s Orlando, Florida park in 2010 by the whales....

Dichlorvos, or DDVP, is a household pesticide related to World War II-era nerve agents. In May the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its continued sale, despite considerable evidence suggesting it is carcinogenic and harmful to the brain and nervous system, especially in children. On several occasions, the agency has come close to banning the pesticide–used in no-pest strips as well as in agriculture–but has always backed away. Environmentalists and labor unions charge that the latest decision was the product of backroom deals with industry and political interference–just as they did 25 years ago, when the EPA first considered a ban on DDVP and other similar pesticides....

In 1894 John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh—who later went on to garner the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics—penned an appreciation in Scientific American about the work of John Tyndall, an Irish physics professor, mathematician, geologist, atmospheric scientist, public lecturer and mountaineer. “The most important work,” Strutt wrote, “that we owe to Tyndall in connection with heat is the investigation of the absorption by gaseous bodies of invisible radiation.” Tyndall’s work showed the power of gases such as water vapor and “carbonic acid”—today known as carbon dioxide—to absorb heat and later speculated on such gases’ effect on climate....

Could it be? Could playing video games, long blamed by parents for turning their teens into fat, lazy bums, be good for something? Studies have linked nonstop video gaming to such ills as carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow, not to mention the current obesity epidemic plaguing this nation’s young.On the positive side, some research has shown that playing video games can improve eye-hand coordination and visual attention—the ability to search for a target in a jungle of objects, to monitor several items at once, and to keep track of a steady stream of objects zipping swiftly by....

Lengthy waiting lists for rooms for Alzheimer’s patients are forcing caregivers to put their loved ones in less specialized facilities—which often levy additional fees for every extra service required to keep those vulnerable residents safe. Does the patient need a daily prompt to take her medication? Tack $25 on to the monthly bill. Does he need to be reminded to go to lunch and dinner? That’ll be another $75 a month....