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Every 174 seconds the ground in Southern California trembles as Earth’s tectonic plates shudder past one another. That amounts to 495 earthquakes every day, according to a new analysis of seismic data that isolated the very weakest measurable tremors in a region famous for its seismic jitters. The new study, published this week in Science, adds nearly two million earthquakes to the catalogue of total seismic events in Southern California over the past decade....

The record for world’s smallest genome has been smashed by a bacterium that lives inside a sap-feeding insect. The microbe is missing almost half of the genes thought to be essential for its kind to persist, raising the possibility that it is becoming an organelle similar to a mitochondrion or chloroplast, according to researchers. Another insect-borne bacterium wins for second smallest genome and shows signs of being supplanted by a competing organism....

President Trump’s proposed budget chops $6 billion, about a fifth of the total budget, from the National Institutes of Health, a move that could decimate biomedical research in a number of areas and stagger academic institutions around the country that depend on NIH grant money to keep their scientific research programs afloat. Research funding at the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency would also take steep cuts under the budget blueprint, released early Thursday....

By Tom Miles GENEVA, May 10 (Reuters) - A major yellow fever outbreak in Angola and two smaller flare-ups in Uganda and Congo are largely under control but countries have been warned to be vigilant in case the disease pops up elsewhere, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday. Yellow fever is hard to spot early on and spreads quickly in towns, transmitted by the same mosquito that carries the Zika virus, which bites in the daytime and has flourished during the abnormal El Nino weather of the past year caused by the warming of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America....

Why do we dream? —Christina Zuniga, via e-mail Psychologists Gerhard Kloesch of the Medical University of Vienna and John P. Dittami of the University of Vienna explain: PUT SIMPLY, dreams are the by-products of neurological processes associated with sleep. But is that the end of the story, or does dreaming serve a purpose? Scientists have not yet discovered whether dreaming has a vital biological function, but we have many theories about where dreams originate in the brain and how we can use them in daily life....

Mushrooms can be delicious, beautiful and even, well, “magical”. But if tough times send you out to forage for food—beyond the nearest fast-food restaurant—be wary of some of nature’s more toxic temptations. Whether mistakenly—or maliciously—used, mushrooms have claimed the lives of many, including the Roman emperor, Claudius, who is rumored to have been poisoned by a mushroom dish administered by his wife. The death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, which prompted the war of Austrian Succession, may also have resulted from feasting on foul fungi....

Spring is coming earlier, and nature is scrambling to keep up, according to scientists who say climate change is to blame. The season starts an average of 10 days earlier in the United States than it did just 20 years ago. And that is scrambling the delicate balance of many ecosystems, as some species adapt to the change and others don’t. “What’s happening is that the Earth is warming,” said Jake Weltzin, director of the National Phenology Network, a federal program that tracks changes in seasonal patterns....

Of all the places on the surface of the earth, few are harder to reach than the appropriately named north pole of inaccessibility—the point on the Arctic Ocean that is farthest from land. From that place, a step in any direction across the shifting Arctic ice is one step closer to the relative safety of solid ground. The pole of inaccessibility has long been a tantalizing target for explorers. The late British adventurer Wally Herbert was said to have reached it by dogsled in 1968 while en route to the geographical North Pole, where all lines of longitude meet....

By Gustavo Palencia OROCUINA Honduras (Reuters) - A severe drought has ravaged crops in Central America and as many as 2.81 million people are struggling to feed themselves, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday, though the region’s coffee crop has been largely unscathed. The drought, which is also affecting South America, has been particularly hard on the so-called “dry corridor” of Central America, which includes southern Guatemala, northern Honduras and western El Salvador....

Researchers are pinpointing the genes that lie behind the varied beaks of Darwin’s finches – the iconic birds whose facial variations have become a classic example of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Last year, researchers identified a gene that helps to determine the shape of the birds’ beaks. Today in Science, they report a different gene that controls beak size. Shifts in this gene underlay an evolutionary change that researchers watched in 2004–05, during a drought that ravaged the Galapagos Islands, where the finches live....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Arthropods first appear in the fossil record some 530 million years ago. These joint-legged animals are the most species-rich and diverse animal group on Earth. The familiar creatures are virtually ubiquitous: horseshoe crabs, scorpions, spiders, ticks, millipedes and centipedes, crabs, lobsters, pill bugs, butterflies, ants, mosquitos, beetles, and the list goes on....

“Move it away! We don’t want it!” a farmer shouted at a crowded meeting in Carnarvon, a small town in the semi-arid, sparsely populated Northern Cape, one of South Africa’s poorer provinces. He was talking about what will be the largest radio telescope in the world, the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a portion of which is due to be built nearby. Representatives from SKA South Africa, an organization of scientists, engineers and technocrats, were attending the meeting of farmers in May, in an attempt to respond to rising criticism of the project from local people....

In the 2011 blockbuster thriller Contagion, a virus infects and kills 26 million people around the world. But even those who evade the virus are infected with something else: crippling fear. To contain the outbreak, the military imposes a quarantine. People stay indoors, refusing to interact with anyone outside their families. Touching anyone or anything becomes a risk, because the virus lingers everywhere. Ants do things differently. When a deadly fungus infects an ant colony, the healthy insects do not necessarily ostracize their sick nest mates....

New research results show the controversial plastics additive bisphenol A, or BPA, is commonly found in a wide range of canned foods, including some marked “BPA free” or organic. “The findings are noteworthy because they indicate the extent of potential exposure,” said Urvashi Rangan at Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports and released the results yesterday. The survey examined 19 packaged foods and found the highest BPA levels in soups and green beans....

SOCIAL ROOTS OF VIOLENCE Your coverage of the psychobiological roots of violence in “The Violent Brain,” by Daniel Strueber, Monika Lueck and Gerhard Roth, was interesting and compelling. Although their report seems to be accurate, I find problematic the article’s near exclusion of a discussion of social factors involved in violence. Certainly psychobiology can help explain the behaviors of some chronic violent offenders. Yet these extreme cases are rare; it is far more common to find offenders who commit violence as a result of weak bonds to society, goal frustration or other social problems....

WASHINGTON — NASA’s 2015 budget would remain essentially flat at $17.5 billion under a White House spending proposal unveiled today (March 4) that would hold the line on the agency’s biggest space programs while laying the groundwork for major new astrophysics and planetary science missions. However, a large airborne infrared telescope known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) would be grounded unless NASA’s partner on the project, the German Aerospace Center, steps up its contribution, a senior agency official said ahead of the budget rollout....

Was Mars ever a living world? Billions of years ago, before it became a freeze-dried desert, the Red Planet was much more Earth-like, with liquid water and clement temperatures at its surface. Perhaps it harbored life, too. But most signs of any ancient Martians would by now be little more than traces of organic compounds and faint fossil forms hidden in the planet’s rusted rocks. Scientists today use robots to survey that barren landscape, remotely guiding their search for life through a combination of satellite pictures and on-the-ground snapshots from the rovers and landers themselves....

A special inspection of U.S. nuclear plants after the Fukushima disaster in Japan revealed problems with emergency equipment and disaster procedures that are far more pervasive than publicly described by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a review of inspection reports by ProPublica shows. While the deficiencies don’t pose an immediate risk and are relatively easy to fix, critics say they could complicate the response to a major disaster and point to a weakness in NRC oversight....

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation’s drinking water. In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water. EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to be used as dumping grounds....

SMELL-O-VISION The cover illustration for the story “Dating in a Digital World,” by Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis and Susan Sprecher, places the two people in perfect position for the function of the vomeronasal organ. This tiny structure hides about one centimeter inside the nose in each nostril along the middle wall, where it can sample each inhalation for pheromones. Mating involves exchanging pheromones, which provide information used by the brain outside of conscious thought....