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Neutrinos are the most famously shy of particles, zipping through just about everything—your body, Earth, detectors specifically designed to catch them—with nary a peep. But compared with their heretofore hypothetical cousin the sterile neutrino, ordinary neutrinos are veritable firecrackers. Sterile neutrinos don’t even interact with ordinary matter via the weak force, the ephemeral hook that connects neutrinos to the everyday world. Recently, however, new experiments have revealed tantalizing evidence that sterile neutrinos are not only real but common....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineFrom the name, one might expect the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to have been a major force in the response to the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan. Instead, its performance was sluggish and sometimes confusing, drawing calls for the agency–an independent organization that advises the United Nations–to take a more proactive role in nuclear safety.Ministers from the countries that oversee the IAEA will meet in June at the agency’s head­quarters in Vienna to discuss lessons from the nuclear accident....

To researchers who study how living things move, the octopus is an eight-legged marvel, managing its array of undulating appendages by means of a relatively simple nervous system. Some studies have suggested that each of the octopus’s tentacles has a ‘mind’ of its own, without rigid central coordination by the animal’s brain. Now neuroscientist Guy Levy and his colleagues at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem report that the animals can rotate their bodies independently of their direction of movement, reorienting them while continuing to crawl in a straight line....

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has advised vaccine makers to update COVID booster shots to target new forms of the Omicron variant. In calling for the change, the FDA heeded the recommendations of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which voted 19–2 in favor of Omicron-adapted boosters after a public meeting on June 28. New boosters could be rolled out this fall, but that will likely be too late to prevent the current surge in cases resulting from the Omicron subvariants BA....

The revolutionary gene-editing technology poised to reshape how researchers attack and prevent disease yesterday received a lukewarm reception from patient groups. Representatives from several patient advocacy organizations gathered in Washington, D.C., at a public meeting on gene editing to discuss if they would want researchers to one day tap this technology—first in the laboratory but eventually in the clinic—in an effort to prevent or treat serious inherited maladies including muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell disease....

The deadly plot unrealized. The heart attack not had. The truth is that the successes of both national security and public health often pass by unnoticed. Failures are tallied in fatalities. But assessing the social value of programs by counting the number of people who do not die, such as people saved by detecting a bomb or by new food labeling laws, can make effectiveness tough to measure. The matter is further obscured by the nature of the threats they aim to fend off....

BEGINNING ON page 84 of this issue, scientists Alan M. Goldberg and Thomas Hartung describe recent advances in reducing, refining, and gradually replacing the use of animals in toxicology testing. Improvements in cell and tissue culture technologies, for example, allow a growing number of tests to be performed on human cells alone. Computer models, too, are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and many could one day become more accurate than trials in living animals as well as easier and less expensive....

Suspended animation might save lives or permit long-distance space travel. Yet, depriving human cells of oxygen for even a few minutes can cause severe consequences, including death if the supply of oxygen continues to be restricted. But some organisms, ranging from bacteria to hibernating mammals, can radically limit their own supply of oxygen and enter into a state of suspended animation, alive and waiting for the right conditions to reassert themselves....

Paleontologists used to wonder whether the first teeth were on the inside or the outside of prehistoric bodies. Sharks are covered in thousands of tiny denticles–toothlike nubs of dentine and collagen that make sharkskin coarse to the touch. If the denticles of some very early vertebrate had migrated into the jaw, grown larger and gained new functions, the speculation went, they could have given rise to modern choppers. But over the past decade fossil and genetic evidence has confirmed that teeth are much older than even the ancient shark lineage—indeed, older than the jaw or the denticle....

In 1939 Nazi Germany debuted the “lightning war,” or blitzkrieg, in Poland. This deadly military offensive involved mounting a burst of firepower-heavy attacks to cause confusion and break through an enemy’s lines unexpectedly. Nearly 80 years later Russian physicists have found they can model this surprise tactic with a scientific law: the kinetic theory of gases. The parallels are obvious enough, with some creative thought. Both armies and gases have densities—troops per square kilometer or atoms per cubic meter....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the story with LED light bulbs that are reputed to be even more energy-efficient than compact fluorescents? – Toby Eskridge, Little Rock, AR Perhaps the ultimate “alternative to the alternative,” the LED (light-emitting diode) light bulb may well dethrone the compact fluorescent (CFL) as king of the green lighting choices. But it has a way to go yet in terms of both affordability and brightness. LEDs have been used widely for decades in other applications—forming the numbers on digital clocks, lighting up watches and cell phones and, when used in clusters, illuminating traffic lights and forming the images on large outdoor television screens....

By Stian Reklev and Susanna TwidaleWARSAW (Reuters) - Almost 200 countries on Saturday kept alive hopes for a global deal in 2015 to fight climate change after overcoming disputes on greenhouse gas emissions cuts and aid for poor nations at a meeting widely criticised as lacking urgency.Governments agreed that a new deal in 2015 would consist of a patchwork of national offers to curb emissions, and would blur a 20-year-old distinction between the obligations of rich and poor nations....

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As he contemplates dealing with crumbling shores, melting ice and other changes in the rapidly changing Arctic, Admiral Robert Papp looks back at the rough and tumble New York City of the 1970s for inspiration. Papp, who became the first ever U.S. special representative for the Arctic in July, said he only needs to remember the first time he visited New York Harbor in 1970 for encouragement on tackling complicated issues....

By Maria Caspani NEW YORK, April 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More than 143 million people in 48 neighboring states across the United States are at risk from earthquakes, experts said on Wednesday. As many as 28 million people are likely to experience strong tremors in their lifetime and the value of building losses from earthquakes is estimated at $4.5 billion per year in the long term, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS), California Geological Survey and the U....

It’s well known that women live longer than men do, but this wasn’t always the case: A new study finds that differences between men and women’s life expectancies began to emerge in the late 1800s. For the study, researchers analyzed information from people born between 1800 and 1935 in 13 developed countries. They found that over this time period, death rates decreased among both men and women. But starting in 1880, death rates decreased much faster among women, leading to differences in mortality rates between the sexes....

To humans, ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a menace: we cannot see it, yet it is all around us, increasing our risks of melanoma, cataracts and other ills. It is especially harmful in the upper latitudes, where a thinning ozone layer has become less and less effective at blocking the sun’s UV rays, and ice and snow reflect them back up at us. All these facts have caused biologists to wonder: How have Arctic mammals adapted to handle acute UV exposure—not only tolerating the intense light conditions at the poles, but even using it as an evolutionary advantage?...

Editor’s Note (1/19/18): This is an updated version of an article published December 14, 2017. The last year has been a political whirlwind, to put it mildly. Donald Trump’s presidency has triggered tectonic shifts in numerous areas of government, and science and health care have been no exceptions. Just after the election Scientific American predicted Trump’s tenure would have widespread effects on environmental policy, climate and energy, health care, space, technology and education....

An Arizona utility said last week it plans to install more energy storage in the next six years than had been built in all of the United States prior to 2018. But whether the new batteries in the desert will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is an open question. The announcement by Arizona Public Service Co. represents a breakthrough moment for the storage industry. While utility-scale storage announcements have been building in size and frequency, none of them matches the 850 megawatts proposed by the Phoenix-based company....

Until September 2011, Janos Zempleni’s main focus was working out how the bodies of mammals use chemical compounds such as vitamins. But new research published online at the time changed that. Zempleni, a molecular nutritionist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, like many others in the field, was struck by the findings of an astonishing study published in Cell Research suggesting that food could provide something other than nutrients—information from ingested plants could switch mammalian genes on and off1....

Populations of a male cricket on different Hawaiian islands have lost their ability to chirp as a result of separate, but simultaneous, evolutionary adaptations to their wings. The changes, which allow the insects to avoid attracting a parasitic fly, occurred independently over just 20 generations and are visible to the human eye, a study reveals. The findings could help to shed light on the earliest stages of convergent evolution — when separate groups or populations independently evolve similar adaptations in response to natural selection....