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Nonsmokers under age 40 diagnosed with lung cancer, represent about 1% of all cases. With such small numbers, most doctors assumed there was little hope. When oncologists Barbara Gitlitz at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Geoffrey Oxnard at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute examined this little studied group, they found a very different story. About 80% of the patients showed genetic mutations that were targetable with known treatments. The finding has given hope where little existed and points to a potentially powerful new technique to examine any number of cancer sub-populations....

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, the most prolific exoplanet hunter of all time, has bounced back from a mysterious glitch and may be able to resume operations soon. Mission managers succeeded in getting Kepler out of “emergency mode” (EM) Sunday (April 10), and the space telescope is in a stable state with its antenna pointed toward Earth, allowing communications to resume. “Once data is on the ground, the team will thoroughly assess all onboard systems to ensure the spacecraft is healthy enough to return to science mode and begin the K2 mission’s microlensing observing campaign, called Campaign 9,” Kepler mission manager Charlie Sobeck, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement....

Psychologist Paula Niedenthal was rereading The Little House on the Prairie series five years ago when a question came to mind: On the U.S.’s plains in the 1800s, how did the mix of cultures affect how people expressed their emotions? From demonstrative Italians to reticent Swedes, a variety of immigrant groups had to communicate during farming and trading. She wondered whether the long history of migration in the nation has influenced the way we show our feelings....

When Laurie Flynn’s 17-year-old daughter Shannon attempted suicide, it came without warning. “I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles until the attempt that there was nothing wrong with her. I had no clue,” Flynn recalls. The story is disturbingly familiar to many parents. Suicide is currently the third leading killer of teenagers, after accidents and homicide. Each year roughly one in 10 teens ages 15 to 19 attempt suicide at least once, with more than 600,000 injuring themselves badly enough after their attempts to require medical attention....

It’s not just global air temperatures that are heating up. Ocean heat waves are happening more frequently and lasting longer, too—a potential major threat to coral reefs and other marine organisms, according to new research. A study published yesterday in Nature Communications suggests that there’s been a 54 percent increase in the number of annual “marine heatwave days” since the 1920s—that is, the total number of days each year that a marine heat wave is occurring somewhere around the world....

An upcoming overhaul of the federal government’s flood insurance program will financially benefit many of the nation’s lowest-income communities by cutting premiums for a large share of their residents, an E&E News analysis of government data shows. But the restructuring will be costly for some affluent coastal communities as the National Flood Insurance Program starts charging higher rates for houses that are expensive to replace or are vulnerable to rising sea levels and intensifying storm surge....

Children who have previously been exposed to dengue virus appear to be protected from getting sick when infected with Zika virus, according to a study published January 22 in PLOS Medicine. The study’s scientific team, led by Aubree Gordon of the University of Michigan and Eva Harris of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed the large 2016 Zika epidemic in Nicaragua, while focusing on a pediatric cohort with a well-characterized history of exposure to the dengue virus....

Quantum entanglement, whereby two or more objects are linked by an unseen connection, has some famously spooky effects. As quantum researcher Anton Zeilinger has said, entanglement can be thought of as a pair of dice that always land on the same number. One of the most intriguing applications of this entanglement is quantum teleportation, in which the quantum state of a particle or atom is transferred to its entangled partner, even if they are separated physically....

What’s the difference between you and a rat? The list is unsurprisingly long but now, we can cross a universal human experience — feelings of regret — off of it. A new study shows for the first time that rats regret bad decisions and learn from them. In addition to existentialist suggestions of a rat’s regret — and what that takes away from, or adds to, being “human” — the study is highly relevant to basic brain research....

FIGHTING EBOLA Helen Branswell’s “Ebola War” provides excellent coverage of the many unknowns regarding the Ebola virus, as well as the unprecedented speed with which the two most promising vaccines are being tested. Yet although vaccines, and greatly improved health care infrastructure, are essential to Ebola prevention and containment, little mention was made of another critical dimension: the early, active and sustained engagement of affected communities and their leaders and networks....

Testosterone rules the physiology of men, not just by regulating sex drive, aggression, muscle mass and bone strength but also by influencing the risks of obesity, prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease. So when the levels of this hormone begin to decline with age, some significant health problems could arise. Some advocates have touted testosterone supplementation as a fountain of youth, a magic elixir that can cure almost any ailment afflicting men of any age....

1967 Nuclear Power “By the year 2030 the electric power requirement will be 10 times the present capacity. Because of the expected decline in fossil-fuel resources, and in the absence of any other large source of energy at reasonable cost, fission power would be counted on to supply about 85 percent of this need. To fill such a demand with fission plants of the present type, however, would call for quantities of uranium ore that would soon deplete reserves....

On March 3 the cover story of the New York Daily News trumpeted a simple imperative to “Design Your Baby.” The screaming headline related to a service that would try to allow parents to choose their baby’s hair, eye and skin color. A day later the Fertility Institutes reconsidered. The organization made an “internal, self regulatory decision” to scrap the project because of “public perception” and the “apparent negative societal impacts involved,” it noted in a statement....

From Nature magazine A genetic study of thousands of specimens of sharks and rays has uncovered scores of potential new species and is fuelling biologists’ debates over the organisation of the family tree of these animals. The work also raises the possibility that some species are even more endangered than previously thought. Sharks and rays are key predators in marine ecosystems, but the life cycles and population numbers of many species remain poorly understood....

A decade ago Hurricane Katrina terrorized the Gulf Coast. What began as a tropical depression over the Bahamas quickly spun up into an unstoppable beast of wind and water that laid waste to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. New Orleans and its surrounding communities endured hours of surging water that quickly toppled inadequate defenses and flooded the region under more than three meters of water in some places. More than 1,800 people died during the storm and its aftermath, which left an estimated 600,000 families homeless....

New Zealanders living in the nation’s second-largest city, Christchurch (population approximately 377,000) on the South Island’s Canterbury Plains were hit hard Tuesday by magnitude 6.3 earthquake, an aftershock from September’s magnitude 7.1 tremor. Prior to these two seismic events, Canterbury Plains likely had not experienced an earthquake in thousands of years. In fact, scientists did not even know there was a geologic fault there until it ruptured last year. The latest Christchurch tremors were not as strong as the original earthquake, but they have caused considerably more damage and claimed dozens of lives....

By late summer 2010 an alarming number of children in California had developed pertussis, or whooping cough—five times as many as in the first half of 2009. David Witt, a physician and infectious disease specialist who works at Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center, cared for some of those sick children. His practice lies in the heart of Marin County, the famously counterculture spit of land north of San Francisco. At first, he assumed that the outbreak was a consequence of parents refusing vaccinations for their children....

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have touched 400 parts per million for the first time in at least 800,000 years. The jagged saw-toothed line of the Keelings’ father-and-son measurements climbed above that milestone briefly this month before the budding growth of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring began sucking CO2 back out of the sky. But human greenhouse gas pollution looks set to continue to rise—and photosynthetic plants on land or at sea can only do so much....

Mothers with high levels of the pesticide DDT in their blood during pregnancy are more likely to bear children who develop autism, according to a study of blood samples from more than one million pregnant women in Finland. The World Health Organization estimates that globally, one in 160 children has autism. Any case of autism is likely due to a number of factors, including genetics and other environmental exposures. Although the authors stress that the findings do not prove that autism is caused by DDT—whose use has been banned in many countries for decades over concerns about its effects on wildlife—it is the first such association using a direct measure of exposure to the pesticide....

By David StanwayBEIJING (Reuters) - China will launch two new pilot carbon trading schemes this week in Beijing and Shanghai as it strives to cut soaring rates of greenhouse gas, reduce choking smog and determine the best system for a nationwide roll-out.China, the world’s biggest source of climate-changing carbon emissions, is under domestic pressure from its population to counter air pollution and has pledged to cut the 2005 rate of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP growth by 40-45 percent by 2020....