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Personal oral hygiene notwithstanding, your mouth is teeming with hundreds of species of microorganisms. Until now, researchers have had a tough time sorting out all these small species—and how they interact. A new multicolor fluorescent-labeling technology is allowing microbiologists to peer into the human mouth’s microscopic jungle and discover new dynamics among several key groups. The findings were presented last December at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting in Denver....

Things are looking up again in low Earth orbit. Between 180 and 2,000 kilometers, this region of space has hosted a majority of human spaceflights and includes the International Space Station (ISS). Despite the failure last month of a SpaceX cargo rocket bound for the station, NASA continues its commitment to commercial space missions. As such, the agency announced the four astronauts chosen to fly on the first manned U.S. flights....

Scientists report that they have quashed the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in so-called “humanized mice” infected with the virus. They did so using a technique called RNA interference, or RNAi, to clamp down on three genes found in infected cells, blocking the wily virus from moving to other cells. RNAi works by flooding a cell with short segments of RNA—the intermediate blueprint for building proteins from a gene’s DNA....

Organisations representing chemical-using industries across the UK and Europe are united in expressing their disappointment at the result of the referendum, along with their determination to work with companies and governments to negotiate the best possible terms under the situation. ‘While business craves certainty, it is also used to operating in challenging and changing circumstances,’ said Steve Elliott, chief executive of the UK Chemical Industries Association. ‘I am confident that an important and resilient industry such as ours can prosper in this new situation....

Joe Biden will soon be president of the United States, and scientists the world over are breathing a collective sigh of relief. But concerns remain: nearly half the country voted for President Donald Trump, whose actions have repeatedly undermined science and scientific institutions. Biden will have his work cut out for him in January as he takes the helm of a politically polarized nation. “Our long national nightmare is over,” says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School, quoting president Gerald Ford’s famous 1974 remarks about his predecessor Richard Nixon’s scandal-ridden term....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Fitness tracking app Strava recently kicked off a privacy and security storm after it was revealed that its software had potentially exposed the location of secret military bases, courtesy of a data visualisation tool called a “heatmap”. The heatmap was created to depict the activities of Strava users across the globe. But while it’s a great idea in general (and quite a nice heatmap), a closer inspection of the user data generated by the tool highlights some worrying developments....

By Luc Cohen NEW YORK, Jan 25 (Reuters) - A swath of the U.S. East Coast from Philadelphia to New York City to Maine braced for a potentially historic blizzard on Monday expected to dump as much as 3 feet (90 cm) of snow and snarl transportation for tens of millions of people. The National Weather Service (NWS) on Sunday issued a blizzard warning for the northern section of the East Coast from Monday afternoon until Tuesday, placing states from New Jersey to Indiana under winter storm watches and advisories....

WASHINGTON—Democrats rode a wave of health care messaging into a majority of the House of Representatives, projections showed Tuesday, propelled by vows to protect Americans with pre-existing health conditions and dramatically lower prescription drug costs. Some of the winning Democrats highlighted their own health struggles. Others lambasted their Republican opponents for taking money from drug companies and health insurers. The GOP’s steadfast effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act dominated congressional campaigns around the country, and on Election Day, exit polls showed health care was the top concern for voters....

By Zeeya Merali of Nature magazine"The times," sang Bob Dylan, “they are a-changin’.” His words could become literal truth in January, when the World Radiocommunication Conference of the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, Switzerland, will vote on whether to redefine Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and pull our clock time out of synchronization with the Sun’s location in the sky.At issue is whether to abolish the ’leap second’–the extra second added every year or so to keep UTC in step with Earth’s slightly unpredictable orbit....

Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking. Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory. “The greatest challenge for robots today is figuring out how to adapt to new situations,” he says....

When did you choose to become straight? Say what? By demographic distribution (about 95 percent of the population identifies as heterosexual), the majority of you reading this column are straight. You no more chose this sexual orientation than gays or lesbians choose theirs. Yet a new study published in the fall issue of the nonpeer-reviewed journal The New Atlantis by Johns Hopkins University’s Lawrence S. Mayer and Paul R. McHugh on “Sexuality and Gender” claims that “our scientific knowledge in this area remains unsettled,” that there is no “scientific evidence for the view that sexual orientation is a fixed and innate biological property,” and that no one is “born that way....

Dear EarthTalk: What exactly is solar desalination and how can it help an increasingly thirsty world? — Maryann Dell’Amore, Howard, MN Solar desalination is a technique used to remove salt from water via a specially designed still that uses solar energy to boil seawater and capture the resulting steam, which is in turn cooled and condensed into pristine freshwater. Salt and other impurities are left behind in the still. Less than one percent of the world’s desalination is powered by renewable energy sources today, but that could all change soon if companies like California-based WaterFX have anything to say about it....

Reading about death and suicidality can be distressing. Please read this in a moment where you feel safest and ready to do so. Pediatricians, child psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers and pediatric emergency teams know something that many people who care for children don’t: we are much busier during the school year. I’m a full-time emergency psychiatrist who works at a major children’s hospital, and often when children come in for a mental health crisis, one of the main stressors they discuss is school....

China has made it to Mars. The nation’s first fully homegrown Mars mission, Tianwen-1, arrived in orbit around the Red Planet today (Feb. 10), according to Chinese media reports. The milestone makes China the sixth entity to get a probe to Mars, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, India and the United Arab Emirates, whose Hope orbiter made it to the Red Planet just yesterday (Feb....

ANTIOQUIA, Colombia – Five hours by truck and mule from the nearest town, a rumbling generator cuts through the silent night to power large spotlights as botanists crouch and kneel on large blue tarps spread across a cow pasture. It’s nearly midnight, and the team works urgently to describe every detail of the dozens of colorful orchids, ferns and other exotic plants they have collected that day in Las Orquídeas National Park, one of the single most biologically diverse places on the planet....

Unlike any other empirical object in Nature, the mind’s presence is immediately apparent to itself, but opaque to all external observers. —George Makari, Soul Machine, 2015 My life, as well as this column, is dedicated to understanding the conscious mind and how it relates to the brain. This presupposes that you, the reader, and I have a precise sense of what is referred to by such seemingly innocent terms as “consciousness” and “mind....

City-slickers: Have you ever worried that, at any moment, you could be struck dead by a penny flung off the roof of a nearby skyscraper? You can rest easy — on that score, at least. In fact, it’s extremely difficult to turn a penny into a lethal weapon, and hurling it over the barricades at the top of the Empire State Building won’t get the job done. Even from that height, a penny is too small and flat, and cushioned by too much air, to become a torpedo....

Girdled by Garbage Discarded rockets, exploded satellites, paint flecks and even human waste contribute to the earth’s orbital litter. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network tracks all man-made objects down to baseball-size fragments (10 centimeters wide). They pose a risk of serious collision with future space missions. According to a NASA analysis, even if humans stopped launching satellites now, debris will increase after 2055. That is when the formation of new pieces, resulting when larger ones break up, will exceed the rate of destruction by reentry burn-up....

Forget bug repellent—some deer in Minnesota rely on a team of bats to eat up the swarms of biting flies that typically plague them. Researchers observed this previously unknown symbiotic relationship between white-tailed deer and an unidentified bat species, in camera-trap footage and in person, at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. “These bats appear to be attracted by all the flies around the deer,” says study leader Meredith Palmer, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota....

In the late 1990s, two teams of astronomers stunned the scientific community with the finding that the universe is accelerating in its expansion, somehow overpowering the constant pull of gravity that should be slowing it down. The culprit pressing the cosmic accelerator goes by the name “dark energy,” which is an appropriately enigmatic moniker for something that remains so poorly understood. “We have an amazingly simple picture of the universe,” says Princeton University astrophysicist Michael Strauss....