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Prions are the misshapen proteins that replicate by inducing normal proteins to misfold and aggregate in the brain, leading to rare diseases such as mad cow and kuru. In recent years, scientists have discovered that similar processes of protein misfolding are at work in many neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now, a study in Nature reveals the first evidence for human-to-human transmission of the misfolded proteins that underlie the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease....

HONG KONG—China posted its slowest growth in a quarter-century in 2015, official data showed Tuesday, confirming a loss of momentum in the world’s second-largest economy that stands to worry economists worldwide. But some see a silver lining to China’s cooling economy. The country’s carbon dioxide emissions likely fell 3 percent last year thanks to its shrinking manufacturing production, declining coal consumption and booming renewable energy installation, Greenpeace said in a newly published analysis....

By Geoff MarshFathers eating a fatty diet can pass on health problems to their female offspring, according to a study in rats published in Nature.The father’s condition seems to be inherited without changes to the DNA code itself. Instead, there are ’epigenetic’ chemical tweaks to the genes, altering how they are expressed in the offspring.“We think this is one of the first findings in mammals where a nutritional effect in a father has been passed on to his offspring,” says lead author Margaret Morris, a researcher in obesity and diabetes at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia....

This winter in the San Francisco Bay Area, many children will sit in classrooms and play on the jungle gyms at recess and then go home to attentive parents who work hard to give them every advantage in life. Parents in this part of the country are better educated and wealthier than the average American and can give their children more opportunity. But the Bay Area is also a hotbed of the growing movement to abstain from vaccinations for fear that the shots cause autism and other disorders....

We go straight to the source and get Bluetooth executive director Michael Foley to wirelessly transmit an answer to this query. Bluetooth technology is a short-range wireless communications technology to replace the cables connecting electronic devices, allowing a person to have a phone conversation via a headset, use a wireless mouse and synchronize information from a mobile phone to a PC, all using the same core system. The Bluetooth RF transceiver (or physical layer) operates in the unlicensed ISM band centered at 2....

The old joke goes that the only thing worse than finding a worm in an apple is finding half a worm. Planetary scientists had a similar feeling on March 29, 1974, when the Mariner 10 space probe flew by Mercury and gave humanity its first good look at this tiny inferno of a world. It discovered, among other features, one of the largest impact basins in the solar system, later named Caloris....

After several tense days of unfurling and clicking its various parts into place, the biggest and most sophisticated space telescope ever launched is now complete. On 8 January, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope slowly swung the last 3 of its 18 hexagonal mirror segments into position, locking them together into one 6.5-metre-wide, gold-coated cosmic eye. The move capped an essentially flawless two weeks of engineering manoeuvres—the most complex astronomical deployments ever attempted in space—since the telescope’s Christmas Day launch....

Helicopter-mounted lasers that can dazzle and defend against heat-seeking missiles are now under development, researchers reveal. The military often relies heavily on helicopters in areas such as Afghanistan, where rough terrain can make it hard for airplanes to land and for troops and vehicles to travel on the ground. However, as the Soviet Union discovered in the 1980s during their war there, copters are easy targets for enemies with shoulder-launched missiles, “and now, unfortunately, the U....

Are you a dog person or a cat person? For some people the answer to this question is obvious, but those from multi-pet homes may struggle to choose between Sparky and Whiskers. And for the fervent ferret keepers out there, the query may even seem irrelevant. Although the cat/dog dichotomy does not fit everyone, scientists and pet industry professionals continue to ask about pet preferences in the hopes of teasing out whether pet choice indicates anything fundamental about a person’s personality or lifestyle....

On a recent visit to Crystal Ice Cave in Idaho, climate and cave researchers had to wade through frigid, knee-deep water to reach the ice formations that give the cave its name. Cavers are good-humored about the hardships of underground exploration, but this water was chilling for more than one reason: it was carrying away some of the very clues they had come to study. Ice is an invaluable source of information about the earth’s past....

New research, published Feb. 17 in the journal Physiological Entomology, suggests that the palm-sized Joro spider, which swarmed North Georgia by the millions last September, has a special resilience to the cold. This has led scientists to suggest that the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) bright-yellow-striped spiders — whose hatchlings disperse by fashioning web parachutes to fly as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) — could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard. “People should try to learn to live with them,” lead author Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia, said in a statement....

Aging is a process we humans tend to fight every step of the way. The results of a mouse study underscore the potential of antioxidants as a weapon in that battle: animals genetically modified to produce more antioxidant enzymes lived longer than control animals did. They also exhibited fewer age-related health problems overall. The free radical theory of aging posits that substances with unpaired electrons attack the body’s molecules and cause the functional decline of organs over time....

At a recent math conference, Rouslan Krechetnikov watched his colleagues gingerly carry cups of coffee. Why, he wondered, did the coffee sometimes spill and sometimes not? A research project was born. Although the problem of why coffee spills might seem trivial, it actually brings together a variety of fundamental scientific issues. These include fluid mechanics, the stability of fluid surfaces, interactions between fluids and structures, and the complex biology of walking, explains Krechetnikov, a fluid dynamicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara....

Planets are, by and large, at the mercy of their stars. Not only do stars provide a ready energy source of radiated light and heat, but the mass and gravitational pull of stars flat-out dwarfs the summed masses and pulls of any orbiting companions. In our solar system, which has more planets—regardless of where one stands on the Pluto debate—than any other planetary system we know of so far, the sun still makes up more than 99....

Just sprinkle on and harvest light — that is the procedure with nanoscale cubes of silver that could be used to make efficient solar panels, heat detectors and specialist cameras. The cubes are scattered randomly on a piece of polymer-coated metal to form a device that absorbs nearly all the light that hits it. Unlike other light absorbers, it is relatively simple and cheap to make, and could be produced on a large scale for industrial and even domestic applications....

April marks the 30th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the explosion and fire at a reactor at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. It forced more than 300,000 people to flee and created a zone tens of kilometers wide where radiation levels remain hazardous to this day. A severe reactor accident is unlikely in the U.S. and other countries with safer facilities. But we face another danger that is in many ways more threatening than a meltdown: the steady accumulation of radioactive waste....

A strange bacterium found in California’s Mono Lake cannot replace the phosphorus in its DNA with arsenic, according to researchers who have been trying to reproduce the results of a controversial report published in Science in 2010. A group of scientists, led by microbiologist Rosie Redfield at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, have posted data on Redfield’s blog that, she says, present a “clear refutation” of key findings from the paper....

A group of former Silicon Valley insiders recently issued a stark warning to the app-and update-obsessed public: Social media, the Web, mobile apps and other technologies developed to “monetize our attention” are “now eroding the pillars of our society,” according to the Center for Humane Technology. The new organization’s goal is to push tech companies to create products that benefit society, rather than simply manipulating people’s behavior for profit. Led by a former Google “design ethicist” as well as former managers at Mozilla (maker of the Firefox Web browser) and chipmaker Nvidia, the center faces several challenges....

For a glimpse into what automobiles will be like 20 years from now, contributing editor Stuart F. Brown conducted a group interview with executives at General Motors, Tesla Motors and Toyota and also spoke separately with a program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute. The interviewees, whose comments have been edited for length, foresee increased communication among cars and a combination of vehicle types. Some, like Tesla’s current sports cars, will draw their energy from a battery pack....

Viagra does not affect the desire for sex in men, it just helps with the hydraulics. The drug boosts blood flow to the genitals so men can get and sustain an erection. Yet the female libido drug that passed muster at a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel this week will not live up to the “female Viagra” hype it’s been getting. The new drug, Flibanserin, is designed to alter women’s brain chemistry over time to help increase sex drive....