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The modern supermarket produce aisle is full of visual illusions. The strawberries are plump and glistening; the tomatoes smooth-skinned and lustrous; the melons firm and brightly colored—yet all too often devoid of flavor. We have no one to blame for these bland beauties but ourselves. By selectively breeding crops to be as prodigious as possible and to survive weeks of shipping and storage in dark, cool conditions, we have sapped flavor, aroma and nutrition from our food....

Imagine a map that shows years of rising sea levels in a matter of seconds, and the water is surrounding your house. There might soon be an app for that. That’s the sort of visualization that the Obama administration believes can spark action toward climate adaptation in communities around the nation. To help push technologists to create these new climate tools, the White House launched a website yesterday that holds more than 100 data sets on coastal flooding....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will expand its presence in Antarctica by building a fourth research base and finding a site for a fifth, a state-run newspaper said on Thursday, as the country steps up its increasingly far-flung scientific efforts.Chinese scientists are increasingly looking beyond China for their research, including sending submersibles to explore the bottom of the ocean and last weekend landing the country’s first probe on the moon.Workers will build a summer field camp called Taishan and look for a site for another research station, the official China Daily reported....

Swinging his truck door open, the driver obligingly steps onto the cab seat and reaches for the roof. Extending himself upward, he slings a handkerchief over the exhaust stack of his late-model diesel rig. In mere moments, black fumes begrime a section of the white square with soot. “This good?” he asks, handing down the fluttering fabric. Nodding, I thank the man and retrieve the hankie. A short stroll away from his idling truck and its fellow 18-wheelers parked in this New Jersey Turnpike rest area sits their newborn brother, a Mercedes-Benz E320 Bluetec sedan....

The multibillion-dollar supplement industry spews many dubious claims, but a new study suggests that some nutritional supplements, including omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D, may boost the effectiveness of antidepressants. If so, the supplements might help relieve symptoms for the millions of people who don’t immediately respond to these drugs. The meta-analysis—published Tuesday in the American Journal of Psychiatry—reviewed the results of 40 clinical trials that evaluated the effects of taking nutritional supplements in conjunction with several major classes of antidepressants, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) and tricyclic antidepressants....

Bacterial ‘superbugs’ are getting ever more potent. Tuberculosis (TB) strains in Russia carry mutations that not only make them resistant to antibiotics but also help them to spread more effectively, according to an analysis of 1,000 genomes from different TB isolates — one of the largest whole-genome study of a single bacterial species so far. TB, which is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, exploded in Russia and other former Soviet nations in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its health system....

The lens of the eye is a uniquely transparent tissue in the human body. In the past few years, scientists have determined that this transparency–critical for focusing light–stems in large part from the unique ability of the lens to activate a self-destruct program in its cells that aborts just before completion, leaving empty but sustainable cells that transmit visible rays. A better understanding of how lens cells become and remain transparent should suggest ways to prevent lens-clouding cataracts....

Key concepts Electricity Batteries Electrochemical reaction Electric conductor Introduction Can you imagine how your life would change if batteries did not exist? If it were not for this handy way to store electrical energy, we would not be able to have all of our portable electronic devices, such as phones, tablets and laptop computers. So many other items—from remote-control cars to flashlights to hearing aids—would also need to be plugged into a wall outlet in order to function....

By Janelle WeaverBy sequencing the genomes of three patients with rare genetic disorders, and comparing them with genetic information from unaffected family members, two studies have managed to narrow down the causes of the diseases.Between them, the analyses bring the number of individuals who have had their full genomes sequenced from seven to twelve.A team led by David Galas of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Wash., sequenced the genomes of a family of four in which the two children had extremely rare genetic disorders–Miller syndrome and primary ciliary dyskinesia1....

If you want to keep your cool, you might want to pass up those greasy wings and gooey dessert. A new study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that people whose diets are higher in trans fats are more prone to aggression. Trans fats, or hydrogenated oils, have made the news in recent years because studies have strongly linked them to heart disease and cancer, and some locales have passed laws restricting their use....

Its original owner is no longer alive, but this heart may soon beat again. Harald Ott and researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital are engineering the organ to be used for a transplant. They stripped the heart down to a scaffold of structural proteins so that they can repopulate it with new stem cells that are compatible with a transplant patient’s immune system. If it works, the technique would boost the supply of transplantable hearts, in part by allowing human cells to be grown on cardiac scaffolds sourced from pigs and other animals....

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexicon—Hurricane Patricia, one of the most powerful storms on record, struck Mexico’s Pacific coast on Friday with destructive winds that tore down trees, moved cars and forced thousands of people to flee homes and beachfront resorts. With winds of 160 miles per hour (266 km per hour), the Category 5 hurricane had western Mexico on high alert, with the popular resort of Puerto Vallarta and others on the coast opening emergency shelters as hotels were closed....

Plants have always been important to the development of remedies and therapeutics, but that value has, at times, waxed and waned. For eons, plants were, of course, the primary treatment for most illnesses. Then, in the 1800s, advances in industrial chemistry and manufacture helped spawn the modern pharmaceutical industry, pushing plant-derived medicines out of favor. In the 1950s, traditional Chinese doctors, who had never given up the use of plants and herbs, began to integrate more advanced phytotherapies into their practices....

For more than a decade, Paul Ridker kept the reviewer comments of one of his first grant proposals taped to the wall of his office. The comments were scathing, calling his ideas “naive” and worse; to Ridker, the document represented the difficulty of clearing the blockages caused by scientific conventional wisdom. “This was against all dogma at the time,” Ridker, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, says of his proposal to search for links between inflammation and cardiovascular disease....

The most accurate thermometer in the known universe looks nothing like a thermometer. It is a copper vessel the size of a large cantaloupe, filled with ultrapure argon gas and studded with microphones and microwave antennas. The purpose of the gadget, which sits on the campus of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England, is not simply to measure temperature, however. Rather the device and others like it may allow scientists to completely overhaul the concept of temperature and recast it in terms of fundamental physics....

DENVER — A small roadside quarry west of Denver, site of some of the infamous “Bone Wars” of the 19th century, has revealed a new treasure: the snout of the long-necked dinosaur Apatosaurus ajax. The specimen, nicknamed Kevin, is the first Apatosaurus ajax muzzle ever found, and the discovery is likely to help paleontologists understand how A. ajax is related to other Apatosaurus kin, said Matthew Mossbrucker, the director of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Morrison, Colo....

The color of a candidate’s skin failed to sway voters to depress the lever for either Obama or McCain in the 2008 election, immediate analyses of that contest seemed to suggest. Some pundits hailed it as the first postracial election. But a closer look after the election has revealed a much more nuanced picture of that historic faceoff. It turns out that as many as a fifth of the voters cared about race more than other considerations like gender, endorsements by a local newspaper or a candidate’s political party....

A decade ago biologists and nonbiologists alike gushed with optimism about the medical promise of the $3-billion Human Genome Project. In announcing the first rough draft of the human “book of life” at a White House ceremony in the summer of 2000, President Bill Clinton predicted that the genome project would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.” A year earlier Francis S. Collins, then head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and perhaps the project’s most tireless enthusiast, painted a grand vision of the “personalized medicine” likely to emerge from the project by the year 2010: genetic tests indicating a person’s risk for heart disease, cancer and other common maladies would be available, soon to be followed by preventives and therapies tailored to the individual....

A year of death and destruction wreaked mostly by humans ended with nature flexing her own muscles, to terrifying effect. A section of the earth’s crust hundreds of kilometers long tore off its moorings, slamming into the seawater above. The resulting tsunami traveled at 700 kilometers per hour to rear up like a hydra onto shores, sweeping away some 225,000 lives and millions of livelihoods across 12 nations. Now, as broken-hearted survivors turn to piecing together the remnants, scientists are scrutinizing the oceanic and island terrain to determine how the crust has changed and to gauge what further horrors the earth may have in store....

Mow Down Emissions Battery-powered push mowers have been on a roll in 2008. Cut the grass, then plug your mower into a standard wall outlet to recharge it. The emissions savings can be substantial: according to the Environmental Protection Agency, running a typical two-stroke, gasoline-powered push mower for an hour creates as much pollution as driving a typical sedan for four hours. The area of lawn an electric machine can mow on one charge depends on the height and thickness of the grass, of course....