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Winner of the 2022 Catalyst for Care Award — Sparrow’s Nest of the Hudson Valley After helping a friend navigate her stage-4 cancer diagnosis, Krista Jones wanted to ease the burden for other families dealing with cancer. In 2012, Krista created Sparrow’s Nest of the Hudson Valley, which provides weekly deliveries of homemade meals to families facing cancer in five counties of the Hudson Valley area of New York State. The charity began in a commercial kitchen added to Krista’s home, feeding 16 people every week....

As young scientists work their way through graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships, the pressures of writing grant proposals and establishing a research laboratory take priority over teaching. When these students and postdocs eventually get faculty positions, however, few of them have experience in designing and teaching their own courses, and yet they are expected to teach right away. This would not pass muster at a high school. Why should it be acceptable at a university?...

In a field in Vancouver, across the road from a row of tidy white townhomes, roughly 500 bushy Sitka spruce trees climbed toward the sun. On a spring day in 2013 the trees, triangle-shaped with tightly packed, deep-green needles, were crammed shoulder to shoulder—or, in some cases, shoulder to waist. Although the spruces were all planted at the same time, seven years earlier, their height varied like primary schoolchildren assembled for a group photograph....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Without fanfare, astronomers have redefined one of the most important distances in the Solar System. The astronomical unit (au) — the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun — has been transformed from a confusing calculation into a single number. The new standard, adopted in August by unanimous vote at the International Astronomical Union’s meeting in Beijing, China, is now 149,597,870,700 meters — no more, no less....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Over many years of fixing computers for clients and family members, I have seen all kinds of the ways that people manage to wreck their computers. So today we are going to go over 5 of the easiest ways to destroy your precious computer and how to avoid these common mistakes....

Earlier this year doctors reported that they had cured, for the first time, a child born to an HIV-infected mother after a swiftly administered course of drugs. If the advance holds up to further scrutiny (some wonder if the child was perhaps never infected or is not actually cured), it may be at least partly because the immaturity of a newborn’s immune system enables it to cope better with HIV, says Joseph M....

In March of this year, the world mourned the passing of legendary physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. His vast contributions to the field don’t need to be rehashed here, but his work advanced the understanding of the origins of the universe, the nature of black holes and the very makeup of the cosmos. Though severely physically disabled at the end of his life from ALS, Hawking and his collaborators Thomas Hertog and James Hartle were still knee-deep in developing an alternative theory of the universe—that the universe is approximately uniform on the largest scales....

About five years ago, a team of Stanford University scientists set out to determine how the developing brain establishes its final set of synapses, connections through which cells of the nervous system communicate with one another and with nonneural cells. But when they tried to pinpoint the genes involved, something unexpected happened: they stumbled on C1q, a gene for a protein important in the body’s immune system. “We were like ‘Wait a minute—this an immune system molecule....

Just over three years ago, engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis took the winners of his Progressive Auto XPRIZE competition on a victory lap through New York City. There was cause for celebration—three teams had each met the competition’s main criteria of building an automobile capable of traveling at least 100 miles per gallon (or the electric equivalent, measured as MPGe). The biggest winner, however, was the XPRIZE itself. Following up on its triumphant 2004 Ansari XPRIZE for spacecraft development, the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation had once again laid out a bold challenge and successfully stimulated remarkable results....

THE LITANY OF DIRECT HEALTH IMPACTS associated with climate change is becoming well known. A rapidly warming world brings more heat-related deaths, more disease spread through contaminated food and water and by insects, and more injuries from more extreme storms. The most vulnerable individuals are the elderly, the very young and the medically infirm. And the most vulnerable people live in the poorest nations, which are least responsible for causing climate change and least able to cope with the consequences....

The cholera epidemic in Haiti has cast a stark light on deep development holes and disagreements about whether a short-term patch—in the form of a cholera vaccine—can help in the long-term fight for better health. A developing nation, Haiti has long struggled to maintain modern public-health projects. Even before the January 12, 2010 earthquake the country was already falling behind. In 1990 more than a quarter of the population had access to sanitary facilities, but by 2008 only 17 percent of Haitians did....

Henry Ford’s vision was to build a motor car for the multitudes. His answer came in 1908 with the debut of the Model T at $850. But to make the car even cheaper and more accessible, Ford launched another innovation about five years later: the moving assembly line. Piecing the car together in multiple stages along a conveyer belt meant the average assembly time dropped, productivity increased, Model T sales shot up and their cost came down below $300....

One of the chief astrophysicists behind the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, among the most startling revelations in the history of cosmology, delights in the confusion about the observation. In fact, he wonders if the acceleration will end up being the most important feature in the ultimate explanation. “It might be something unexpected that looks like acceleration,” says Saul Perlmutter, leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), which first announced the astonishing fact in 1998....

Six years ago more than four million barrels of oil were discharged into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform explosion. Approximately one third of the oil ended up at the bottom of the gulf where shipwrecks lie. New findings now show that the microbial life has since thrived due to the spill and could threaten 500 years of history resting on the seafloor. Presenting their findings at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans last week, scientists shared results of an experiment that exposed metal disks to oil spill-like conditions, which showed that bacteria flourished and sped up metal corrosion in the presence of oil, potentially jeopardizing several hundred historic ships and their delicate ecosystems in the region impacted by the oil spill....

LIVONIA, Mich.—With climate legislation seemingly dead in Congress, many clean-energy advocates are going back to the drawing board. But the electric-car industry, which is relying on other federal incentives to get ahead, remains upbeat. Industry officials have met just outside Detroit for the past two days to discuss the state of the growing industry: whether the United States can build enough batteries, at a low enough price, to compete globally. Michigan has enjoyed much of the early investment, initiating battery-manufacturing plants and starting to set up the supply chain for electric cars....

A single gene from bacteria has been donated to fungi on at least 15 occasions. The discovery shows that an evolutionary shortcut once thought to be restricted to bacteria is surprisingly common in more complex, eukaryotic life. Bacteria frequently trade genes back and forth with their neighbors, gaining abilities and traits that enable them to adapt quickly to new environments. More complex organisms, by contrast, generally have to make do with the slow process of gene duplication and mutation....

Klaus Kayser has been publishing electronic journals for so long he can remember mailing them to subscribers on floppy disks. His 19 years of experience have made him keenly aware of the problem of scientific fraud. In his view, he takes extraordinary measures to protect the journal he currently edits, Diagnostic Pathology. For instance, to prevent authors from trying to pass off microscope images from the Internet as their own, he requires them to send along the original glass slides....

With a deep breath, Sandro Dahlke releases a white weather balloon nearly as tall as himself from our ship’s deck and toward the Arctic sky. The helium-filled orb shoots upward while the radiosonde—an instrument package attached to the balloon’s tail that will monitor the weather—whips wildly in the wind. We are far north in the Arctic Ocean, onboard the German icebreaker Polarstern, and the wind immediately sweeps the balloon toward the starboard side as it rises—a worrying prospect for Dahlke....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). It used to be that to find new forms of life, all you had to do was take a walk in the woods. Now it’s not so simple. The most conspicuous organisms have long since been cataloged and fixed on the tree of life, and the ones that remain undiscovered don’t give themselves up easily. You could spend all day by the same watering hole with the best scientific instruments and come up with nothing....

For what must have felt like an interminable six months back in 2007, Sabine Begall spent her evenings at her computer, staring at photographs of grazing cattle. She would download a satellite image of a cattle range from Google Earth, tag the cows one by one, then pull up the next image. With the help of her collaborators, Begall, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, ultimately found that the unassuming ruminants were on to something....