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Among other things, the pandemic of 2020 has emphatically reinforced the need for both patients and their doctors to get reliable medical results quickly. The advent of rapid antigen testing for COVID-19, for example, is changing the way we think about how we approach the disease and prevent its spread. But what if we could think bigger? What if one of the most useful diagnostic tools in health care could be wheeled to your hospital room bedside, rather than requiring you to be physically moved to another wing—or even another building entirely—in order to make use of it?...

Antarctic ice shelves have lost nearly 4 trillion metric tons of ice since the mid-1990s, scientists say. Ocean water is melting them from the bottom up, causing them to lose mass faster than they can refreeze. That’s according to a new study analyzing satellite data from 1994 to 2018. The results were published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience. That spells bad news for the hundreds of glaciers spread out along the Antarctic coastline....

Obesity has its obvious manifestations; it’s a disease that is difficult to conceal. And now, doctors say they can even smell it on your breath. Doctors from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles say certain gas-emitting microbes living in the human gut might determine one’s propensity for packing on too many pounds; and the presence of methane and hydrogen on one’s breath from these microbes is closely related to excess body weight and body fat....

By Nicola JonesIf you’re thinking about sprucing up your driveway with a fresh coat of black sealant, consider this: some homes with black parking lots have been found to have surprisingly large doses of carcinogens in their household dust.Some of the sticky, black sealants used to coat asphalt are made of coal tar, which contains polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), some of which are known or suspected carcinogens. Barbara Mahler of the U....

As an ice sheet melts, it leaves a unique signature behind. Complex geological processes distribute the meltwater in a distinct pattern, or ‘fingerprint’, that causes seas to rise unevenly around the world. Now, for the first time, researchers have observed what these sea-level fingerprints look like on a global scale. “No one has put it together for a complete global picture like this before,” says James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University in Palisades, New York....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineThe recent finding that women in seven sub-Saharan Africa countries are nearly twice as likely to acquire HIV if they use a popular, long-acting injectable contraceptive, has incensed AIDS researchers. They say that fifteen years of literature has pointed to this increased susceptibility, but that the unwelcome news has been ignored.The results of a study of 3,790 couples also found that uninfected men were nearly twice as likely to acquire HIV from a female partner using the contraceptive, whose active ingredient is progesterone....

In the July issue of Scientific American, anthropologist Barbara King of The College of William & Mary makes the case that animals ranging from ducks to dolphins may grieve when a relative or close companion dies. In so doing she departs from a long-standing tradition among animal behaviorists of assiduously avoiding projecting human emotions onto other animals. Not all animal responses to death qualify as mourning, however. King is careful to establish criteria for grief, noting that “researchers may strongly suspect grief only when certain conditions are met: First, two (or more) animals choose to spend time together beyond survival-oriented behaviors such as foraging or mating....

By Geoff BrumfielThe world’s most expensive science experiment is on the hunt for savings. ITER, a fusion test reactor under construction near Cadarache, France, is looking to trim around €500 million (US$688 million) from its massive construction budget – which informal estimates place as high as €15 billion (US$21 billion).At a council meeting next week, Osamu Motojima, the project’s director-general, is planning to ask for approval of more than 20 cost-saving measures....

Much of what you thought you knew about dinosaurs turns out to be wrong. That’s the take-home message from Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries, which opened Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Recent finds and technologies have revolutionized scientists’ understanding of dinosaur biology, behavior and even extinction. In one especially well executed display, an animatronic T. rex moves surprisingly sluggishly, minding what researchers now believe was the animal’s speed limit of 11 to 16 kilometers an hour–a striking contrast to the car-chasing pace of Jurassic Park’s monster....

DISTANT STARSHADE In “How to Find Another Earth” [Advances], Lee Billings reports on NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and a “starshade” that the agency is considering using to help it image other Earths. Billings describes the two as tens of thousands of kilometers apart. Their desired relative positions are a matter of calculations that, by now, may be almost routine. But maintaining the precise relative positions of objects so far apart must be a daunting requirement....

High temperatures shattered daily records in California this week as the state prepares for a potentially catastrophic wildfire season fueled by a prolonged drought. The mercury climbed to 109 degrees Fahrenheit Monday in Redding, obliterating the previous record of 103 F for the same day in 2016. It also set an all-time high for the month of May, beating a record of 108 F set in 1984. “It’s definitely early [in the year] for this, and it’s also been another dry winter,” said Scott Carroll, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Eureka....

Fishermen in the village of Maruata, which is located on the Mexican Pacific coast 18 degrees north of the equator, have no electricity. But for the past 16 years they have been able to store their fish on ice: Seven ice makers, powered by nothing but the scorching sun, churn out a half ton of ice every day. There’s a global scramble to drive down emissions of carbon dioxide: the electricity to power just refrigerators in the U....

Like a musician tuning a guitar, adults subconsciously listen to their own voice to tune the pitch, volume and pronunciation of their speech. Young children just learning how to talk, however, do not, a new study suggests. The result offers clues about how kids learn language—­and how parents can help. Past studies have shown that adults use aural feedback to tweak their pronunc­iation. Ewen MacDonald, a professor at the Center for Applied Hearing Research at the Technical University of Denmark, decided to see if toddlers could do this as well....

On our drive home from a family vacation in the mountains, my husband and I anticipated some challenges with our five small children, including boredom, irritability, and repetitions of that age-old question, “Are we there yet?”. We did not, however, anticipate the torrent of vomit that spewed from my daughter when she erupted with motion sickness. The contents of her stomach streamed over every person and filled every crevice in our tightly-packed minivan, and no amount of wiping, scrubbing, or “airing out” could rid our vehicle of the stench....

To survive hostile environments, an organism often has to acquire new traits. But the rules of evolution appear to restrict how many such characteristics it can optimize at once. In a new study, researchers say they found that some bacteria make a genetic trade-off: the microbes involved were able to develop only one of two new traits and selected the one that best helped them thrive in a given setting. The results could provide a model for studying how infectious microbes become resistant to antibiotics....

When a scientific result seems to show something genuinely new, subsequent experiments are supposed to either confirm it—triggering a textbook rewrite—or show it to be a measurement anomaly or experimental blunder. But some findings seem to remain forever stuck in the middle ground between light and shadow. Even efforts to replicate these results—normally science’s equivalent of Valyrian steel—have little effect. Welcome to the realm of undead physics. Ahead of Halloween, Nature guides you through some findings in physics, astronomy and cosmology that researchers have repeatedly left for dead—only to find that they keep coming back....

Last week Pres. Donald Trump issued an executive order to pull the nation back from climate change action. One target was methane emission regulations set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management under the Obama administration. The rules require the oil and gas industry to control methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, at its operations. Trump’s order directs agencies to reconsider those rules, and possibly rewrite or get rid of them altogether....

Federal investigators are asking several key questions as they continue their probe into Saturday’s Asiana Airlines crash landing at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) that killed two passengers and injured dozens. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is hoping that its interviews Tuesday with the four pilots of Flight 214 will shed some light on the aircraft’s erratic approach and the cockpit’s last-minute attempt to abort the landing before the Boeing 777’s landing gear and tail struck a seawall at the end of the runway....

Editor’s note: Legged robots have the ability to follow troops on long journeys across extremely difficult terrain. In our series on legged robotics, Scientific American Online explores the challenges such technology poses as well as two DARPA projects—BigDog and LittleDog—that have shown great promise. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has for years explored the possibility of using legged robots to carry troop supplies where wheeled robots dare not tread (particularly through narrow mountain passes or up across uneven terrain)....

Charles J. Limb could have been a professional jazz saxophonist. He grew up in a musical family and showed early signs of talent. He idolized John Coltrane and, as a student at Harvard University, directed a jazz band. Although he ultimately went to medical school, he chose his specialty (otolaryngology) in part because of his musical interest. As a hearing specialist and surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he performs cochlear implants in patients to restore hearing and enable the deaf to appreciate music....