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Losing weight is not always about anticipating swimsuit season or squeezing into skinny jeans—for the clinically obese, losing weight is about fighting serious illness and reclaiming health. But the primal part of the brain that regulates appetite will not place a moratorium on hunger just because someone and their doctor acknowledge the need to lose weight. Researchers at Syracuse University are working toward a unique solution: a stick of chewing gum that suppresses appetite....

If you were in a hospital, would you want armed guards roaming the corridors? It is an increasingly relevant question for patients. Today armed guards are becoming more common in health care facilities. According to a 2014 study, 52 percent of hospitals provide handguns for security personnel, and 47 percent have Tasers available. These numbers are considerably higher compared with similar surveys from 2009 and 2011. Last year this trend drew national attention when the New York Times and This American Life reported on the 2015 shooting of Alan Pean....

In the U.S. 8% of our energy generating capacity comes from wind turbines—that’s more than any other renewable resource—and wind power has more than tripled over the past decade. More than half of that capacity comes from just five states: Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, California, and Kansas. According to the American Wind Energy Association, there are over 56,000 wind turbines across the country that provide a capacity of ~96,000 megawatts, enough to power more than 15 million homes....

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan is causing problems for at least one of its fleet of nuclear reactors—and authorities have shut down 10 of the country’s 55 units. Tokyo Electric Power confirmed that pressure had been rising inside reactor No. 1 at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. That means cooling water is not getting to the reactor core, causing a build up of steam inside the containment vessel....

Most of the cities that exist today originally grew from an important marketplace or town square. Over time, they developed multiple centers where people could go to work, shop and play—in fact, no major world city has just a single center anymore. So, what governs the transition of a city from monocentric to polycentric? Economists have suggested polycentrism is driven by business agglomeration—the idea that companies are more successful when they are clustered....

YOU HAVE TO CONCENTRATE! Who among us never heard that exhortation in grade school or from our parents? Of course, it is genuinely difficult for children to ignore distractions and dedicate themselves to a task at hand. Yet school counselors and cognitive therapists see the inability to concentrate as a widespread learning problem. Some straightforward steps can improve concentration power–for students and adults. Parents can first help children learn how to concentrate by being good role models....

Astronomers across Africa and Europe have reacted with delight to news that Africa’s first millimetre-range radio telescope is to be built. The Africa Millimetre Telescope will fill a gap in the coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of telescopes that can receive and analyse radio waves of around 1 millimetre in length — in 2019 they published the first-ever image of a black hole’s edge, known as its event horizon....

It sounds like the premise for a Jules Verne story: a football field–wide pool of silvery liquid on the moon that gathers faint light from the most ancient galaxies in the universe. Although still years from constructing such a thing, researchers say they have taken the first step toward a lunar looking glass by laying a smooth coating of silver on a small dish of so-called ionic liquid. Similar to a liquid version of table salt, ionic liquids do not evaporate, and they remain liquid at frosty temperatures such as those found on the moon....

By Mary Wisniewski CHICAGO (Reuters) - Incoming stormy weather and operational problems caused by a fire last week at a Chicago-area air traffic control facility forced the cancellation of more than 800 flights on Thursday at Chicago airports. More than 525 flights at O’Hare International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, have been canceled and delays are averaging 45 minutes, according to the city’s department of aviation. Nearly 300 flights were canceled at Chicago Midway International Airport and some flight delays were averaging 40 minutes or more....

Pictures from high above Earth’s surface, on display at a New York City press conference in June, were startling not just because of their high definition but because they added a new dimension to satellite imagery—time. The images took the form of videos that showed individual cars moving on highways. The company behind the images, start-up firm UrtheCast, had a pair of cameras installed on the Russian side of the International Space Station last year and plans to add two more to the U....

Mark Thursday (Oct. 23) on your calendar as “Solar Eclipse Day,” for if the weather cooperates, you should have no difficulty observing a partial eclipse of the sun. Nearly all of North America, except for a portion of eastern Canada and a slice of eastern New England, will experience the partial solar eclipse this week. People who live east of a line running from roughly Quebec City to Montauk Point, New York, will miss out on the solar show, since the sun will set before the dark disc of the moon begins to encroach upon it....

Emergency managers up and down the East Coast are bracing for Hurricane Sandy, a rare storm that forecasters say could bring damaging rain, winds and even snow to the mid-Atlantic and New England next week. The storm’s maximum wind speeds reached 105 mph yesterday afternoon, as it moved through the central Bahamas as a Category 2 hurricane. Experts say Sandy is likely to mix with a winter storm now moving west, producing a nasty hybrid that government forecasters have dubbed a “Frankenstorm....

The carbon cycle is essential to life on earth, but scientists still struggle to grasp its complexities. Most research to date has focused on major sources of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, such as deforestation and the use of fossil fuels. Now some scientists have begun to explore subtler factors, such as the interplay between plants and animals. A new study has come to the counterintuitive conclusion that plants might accumulate more carbon in the presence of predators and herbivores than they do in isolated locales, where they are less likely to be eaten or trampled....

The number of catastrophic wildfires in the U.S. has been steadily rising. The nation has spent more than $1 billion annually to suppress such fires in eight of the past 10 years. In 2005 a record 8.7 million acres burned, only to be succeeded by 9.9 million acres in 2006. And this year is off to a furious start. To a great extent, the increase in fires stems from a buildup of excess fuel, particularly deadwood and underbrush....

To become more inventive, new research suggests, we should start thinking about common items in terms of their component parts, decoupling their names from their uses. When we think of an object—a candle, say—we tend to think of its name, appearance and purpose all at once. We have expectations about how the candle works and what we can do with it. Psychologists call this rigid thinking “functional fixedness.” Tony McCaffrey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, developed a two-step “generic parts technique,” which trains people to overcome functional fixedness....

Funding for US science agencies will stay flat or even increase over the next several months, under a US$1-trillion spending deal announced on April 30. The plan devised by Congress, which covers the remainder of the 2017 budget year, avoids the sharp cuts to science proposed by US President Donald Trump. The biggest winner is the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose budget would rise by $2 billion compared to the 2016 level, for a total of $34 billion....

“New Planet Found” is about as exciting a headline nowadays as “Dog Bites Man,” which is to say, not very. Thanks largely to the space-based Kepler Mission, astronomers have identified about 2,000 new worlds, orbiting stars that lie tens or even hundreds of light-years from Earth, in the last two decades. Collectively, these are scientifically important, but with so many in hand no single addition to the list is likely to be much of a big deal....

Only one thing is worse than the lights not coming on when the switch is flicked—and that’s the lights going out right afterward. The fact that the problem is most often a burned-out lightbulb is testimony to the reliability of what’s sometimes called the world’s largest machine—the U.S. transmission and distribution grid for electricity. But that reliability is tenuous at best and perhaps temporary: the machine needs an update to meet increasing demands for more electricity and to deliver it reliably and safely, according to the Obama administration and others....

By Tom Käckenhoff DUESSELDORF, Germany, March 27 (Reuters) - German authorities found torn-up sick notes showing that the pilot who crashed a plane into the French Alps was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy, which he apparently hid from the airline. French prosecutors believe Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked himself alone in the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus A320 on Tuesday and deliberately steered it into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board....

The U.S. is poised to overturn its ban on accepting organs from HIV-positive donors, a move that would lead to organ transplants between infected patients. Legislation approved by the House of Representatives on November 12 seeks to end the 25-year prohibition on HIV-infected organs. It also directs the government to develop guidelines for the subsequent study of “positive-to-positive” transplants. Researchers say that such procedures could help ease the overwhelming demand for donor organs in the United States....