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PITTSBURGH—Around suppertime on June 3 in Clearfield County, Pa., a geyser of natural gas and sludge began shooting out of a well called Punxsutawney Hunting Club 36. The toxic stew of gas, salt water, mud and chemicals went 75 feet into the air for 16 hours. Some of this mess seeped into a stream northeast of Pittsburgh. Four days later, as authorities were cleaning up the debris in Pennsylvania, an explosion burned seven workers at a gas well on the site of an abandoned coal mine outside of Moundsville, W....

By Katharine SandersonStrike one planet from the list of 400-odd found around stars in other solar systems: a proposed planet near a star some 6 parsecs from Earth may not exist after all.The finding is also a strike against a planet-seeking strategy called astrometry, which measures the side-to-side motion of a star on the sky to see whether any unseen bodies might be orbiting it. Ground-based astrometry has been used for more than a century, but none of the extrasolar planets it has detected has been verified in subsequent studies....

By Katharine SandersonAstronomers who study how planets form are scratching their heads after two studies have shown that all is not as theory would predict in the world of other-worldly worlds. The papers, both published online December 8 in Nature, concern planets outside our own Solar System. The existence of one confounds current ideas on planet formation, whereas measurements of the other’s atmosphere throw into doubt theories about atmospheric composition and its relationship to a planet’s interior....

Health care leaders have typically pointed to resource constraints as the reason for the United States health care system’s high costs and poor outcomes. Now, as the COVID pandemic has claimed over 550,000 lives and led to over 30 million cases across a country with immense resources, it is clear that health leaders have been asking the wrong questions. Given the prominent leadership failures in containing the pandemic, and politicization of the public health response, it is clear that health care organizations and leaders need to pay more attention to frontline workforce issues that have faced neglect for years....

Excerpted with permission from The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer, by John C. Mutter. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2015.(Scientific American and Palgrave Macmillan are part of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.) When everything had quieted down in New Orleans after Katrina, there were plenty of people itching to use the opportunity presented by the razing of the city to give New Orleans a makeover....

JUNE 1956 THE ANTIPROTON–“Since it was apparent that creation of the antiproton required tremendous energy, the most likely place to look for it was in cosmic rays. On a few occasions investigators found events which seemed to signal the generation of an antiproton, but there was never sufficient information to identify it with certainty. When the Bevatron at the University of California began to bombard a target made of copper with six-Bev (billion electron volts) protons, the next problem was to detect and identify any antiprotons created....

Four years after she nearly died from rabies, Jeanna Giese is being heralded as the first person known to have survived the virus without receiving a preventative vaccine. But Giese (pronounced Gee-See) says she would gladly share that honor with others if only doctors could show that the treatment used to save her could spare other victims as well. “They shouldn’t stop ’till it’s perfected,” said Giese, now 19, during a recent interview about physicians’ quest to refine the technique that may have kept her alive....

By Kevin Murphy KANSAS CITY (Reuters) - The northeastern United States braced for the second major snow storm in a week on Monday after a huge winter system dumped more than a foot (30 cm) of snow in the Chicago area, closing schools from the Midwest to New England. Chicago Public Schools, the country’s third-largest public school system, along with districts in Detroit, Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, canceled classes for Monday as the National Weather Service issued storm warnings and watches continued from western Iowa into upper New England....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Diabetes affects up to 14% of the U.S. population - an increase from nearly 10% in the early 1990s - yet over a third of cases still go undiagnosed, according to a new analysis. Screening seems to be catching more cases, accounting for the general rise over two decades, the study authors say, but mainly whites have benefited; for Hispanic and Asian people in particular, more than half of cases go undetected....

It takes many thousands of hours of hard work to get to the top—yet time alone is not enough if you lack the other attributes necessary in your discipline, according to a study published online in July in Psychological Science. In 1993 psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues argued that success was not a matter of talent but rather what they termed deliberate practice, an idea that Malcolm Gladwell popularized as the “10,000-hour rule” in his book Outliers....

Groundwater supplies around the world are scanter than previously thought and are depleting fast in many places, according to a set of two studies published yesterday online in Water Resources Research. Groundwater is the primary water source for about 2 billion people worldwide. But estimates of supplies are based on rough estimates of withdrawals and deposits, and as such, are all over the map. “It is absolutely insane that we do not know how much water we have in the world’s major aquifers, and that the range of estimates is so great that the numbers are effectively meaningless,” said study co-author Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Irvine....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich Is plagiarism a sin if the duplicated material is one’s own? Self-plagiarism may seem a smaller infraction than stealing another author’s work, but the practice is under increasing scrutiny, as the eruption two weeks ago of a long-standing controversy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, makes clear.Colleagues of Reginald Smith, an emeritus professor of mechanical and materials engin¬eering at Queen’s, say that up to 20 of Smith’s papers contain material copied without acknowledgment from previous publications....

The foundation of massive, flashy and dazzling coral reefs may be a group of fish almost too small to see. New research suggests a group of fish species called cryptobenthics are the fuel that feeds coral reef ecosystems. Most cryptobenthic fish weigh just a fraction of a gram each—but they make up more than half of all fish flesh consumed on reefs each year, says study leader Simon Brandl, a postdoctoral researcher in marine ecology at Simon Fraser University....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - The case of Pauline Cafferkey, the first person known to have recovered from Ebola and then suffer an apparently life-threatening relapse, is taking scientists into uncharted territory. The Scottish nurse’s critically ill situation, described as “staggering” by one British virologist, signals just how complex and formidable a foe the Ebola virus may turn out to be now that scientists have the chance to study its survivors....

The test tubes didn’t look much like planet Earth. There were four of them stuck into a white, 3-D printed frame, each one home to a spindly plant sprouting from a dab of lab-made jelly. It was to a garden what Soylent is to confit de canard with fingerling potatoes and mesclun greens. But once inserted into an aluminum metal box, propelled out of our atmosphere, and plugged into the International Space Station, this arrangement was supposed to mimic everything about our world—except for one important detail....

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today. “We may not need any, ever,” Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum. The FERC chairman’s comments go beyond those of other Obama administration officials, who have strongly endorsed greater efficiency and renewables deployment but also say nuclear and fossil energies will continue playing a major role....

Married mothers who also hold jobs, despite having to juggle career and home, enjoy better health than their underemployed or childless peers. Data from a long-term study launched in the U.K. in 1946 shows that such working moms are the least likely to be obese by middle age and the most likely to report generally good health. And this result cannot be explained simply because the healthiest women take on the most....

A parade of world leaders from heads of state to corporate chiefs urged action on climate change at the largest summit on the issue ever organized. “The time for doubt has passed,” said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his opening remarks at the event held Monday at the United Nations. “National action must be at the center of our response to climate change—with industrialized countries taking the lead.” Not all the world’s industrialized countries saw it that way, even those who agree global warming is a threat that needs to be stopped....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The hippopotamus is among the world’s largest creatures on land. Only elephants and some species of rhino are larger. Hippos also are very aggressive. Legendarily ill-tempered and entirely unafraid of humans, they are responsible for the majority of wildlife deaths in Africa. These are some of the facts no doubt borne in mind during the work performed by a team of veterinary researchers who have developed a method for the delicate operation of castrating a hippo....

Not long ago cancer medicine in the U.S. passed a hopeful milestone: for the first time, the incidence rates for both new cases and deaths in men and women declined, according to an annual report issued in late November from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and other leading organizations. Between 1999 and 2005 diagnosis rates dropped annually by about 0.8 percent. Although deaths from some specific conditions have gone up, overall mortality from cancer is on the decline for both men and women of almost all ethnic groups, as it has been since the early 1990s, in large part because of a shrinking toll from malignancies of the lung, prostate, breast and colon....