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By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineChaperone proteins could be the key to treating a range of diseases, including some cancers. Drugs that inhibit the function of these proteins, which help other proteins in the body to fold, are the focus of renewed research, despite the fact that for years many considered them too unorthodox a target to risk precious research dollars on.Ten years ago, Paul Workman, director of the Cancer Therapeutics Unit at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, UK, was one of only a few people pushing to develop drugs that target a chaperone protein called heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90)....

In the US, the Department of Agriculture (the USDA) oversees and conducts an incredible amount of scientific research related to protecting and improving our agriculture, nutrition, food distribution, and our use of natural resources. The head of the USDA research division, known as the USDA Chief Scientist, is required to steer these many and varied scientific projects in the most effective direction. What scientific questions should we be asking? Which research projects are being run efficiently?...

A methane leak in Southern California has forced thousands of people from their homes. Although the gas first began spewing from a leaky underground well in October, the gas company only recently identified the source of the leak. Now, officials with the company say it could be months before the methane leak is stopped. But what exactly caused the methane leak in the first place, and how will it affect those in the surrounding areas?...

Drug lord Pablo Escobar died in 1993. But his legacy lives on. For example, more than 40 hippopotamuses roam free in Colombia, stemming from a handful that wandered away from his private zoo. It’s the largest population outside Africa. Natural history filmmaker and author Lucy Cooke mentioned what have been dubbed the “cocaine hippos” on a recent visit to New York City from her home in London. She was in town to talk about her new book The Truth about Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife....

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted vast changes in air travel protocols and in national security in general. But significant incidents in prior decades had spurred authorities to take other precautions, some incremental and some dramatic, intended to stave off specific kinds of threats. Here are the responses to five deadly security breaches before 9/11 and how those responses fared subsequently in heading off similar attacks. [Read more about how 9/11 changed the world of science in this in-depth report....

Female hormones circulating in the brain determine masculine behavior, at least in mice. Estrogen–the quintessential female hormone responsible for regulating the reproductive cycle–turns lady mice into wannabe male mice when it is allowed to penetrate the brain during development, according to new research. Neuroscientist Julie Bakker of the University of Liege in Belgium and her colleagues proved this in the course of solving one of the longstanding riddles of brain development....

Videos showing floods of milk rushing down the drain circulated on social media this month, vividly illustrating the agriculture industry’s losses during the novel coronavirus pandemic. After businesses and schools closed in response to social distancing measures, large-scale farms lost their normal customers and many had to throw out food. The breakdown of those dumped crops can create emissions that heat up the climate. When food like a tomato is dumped into a landfill or piled up as waste, anaerobic processes break down the crop and release methane....

Amidst protests and conversations on racism following several instances of police violence, scientific institutions are reevaluating their approach to dealing with anti-Black racism—extant, historical or symbolic. For example, on Wednesday, June 10, a large segment of the scientific community (and the staffs of prominent journals) participated in a strike, where the goal was to reflect on how Black people—students, trainees, staff, and faculty—are treated, and how we can make the scientific paradigm more inclusive....

Japan’s nuclear plant crisis with the radioactivity contamination from spent fuel pools is likely to put an overdue spotlight on stalemated U.S. policies for managing reactor fuel, authors of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the nuclear fuel cycle said yesterday. The report, “The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” recommends a multi-decade program of moving spent fuel that now is stored in concrete and steel casks at reactors and decommissioned nuclear plants to a few centralized federal facilities....

By Harriet McLeod CHARLESTON S.C. (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy said on Wednesday it will study the environmental risk of importing spent nuclear fuel from Germany that contains highly enriched uranium, a move believed to be the first for the United States. The department said it is considering a plan to ship the nuclear waste from Germany to the Savannah River Site, a federal facility in South Carolina. The 310-acre site already holds millions of gallons of high-level nuclear waste in tanks....

Losing weight is not always about anticipating swimsuit season or squeezing into skinny jeans—for the obese, losing weight is about fighting serious illness and reclaiming health. Yet the primal part of the brain that regulates appetite will not place a moratorium on hunger just because someone has acknowledged the need to lose weight. Researchers at Syracuse University are working toward a unique solution: chewing gum that suppresses appetite. There are many appetite-suppressing drugs on the market, but a large number are based on drugs similar to amphetamines that carry the risk of high blood pressure and heart failure....

Now, Pompeii is again getting the Hollywood treatment. Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson (best known for Resident Evil and Alien versus Predator), the new film, Pompeii, cannot be classified as a documentary. Mount Vesuvius is more a backdrop than a centerpiece. Still, Anderson and the film’s promoters maintain that the team went to unusual lengths to accurately portray the history and science of the city as well as the eruption....

At 6 feet, 3 inches tall, Brett Muccino is a big man with a powerful frame, so he finds it hard to imagine how he could have flown through the narrow windshield of his old Ford Ranger. “It was a little, tiny thing,” he recalls. The devastating 1986 car crash crunched vertebrae in his neck and lower back. It also launched a 34-year battle with chronic pain and a love-hate relationship with the opioids he relied on to manage it....

It should follow, then, that any time you can offer real magical powers for sale, the public will buy it. That’s exactly what’s been going on in consumer technology. Remember Arthur C. Clarke’s most famous line? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Well, I’ve got a corollary: “Any sufficiently magical product will be a ginormous hit.” Anything invisible and wireless, anything that we control with our hands or our voices, anything we can operate over impossible distances—those are the hits because they most resemble magic....

The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers Adam Lankford Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 ($27) The dust had not yet settled after the 9/11 attacks when people began debating whether to call the hijackers cowards. Addressing the nation, President George W. Bush assigned cowardice to the 19 terrorists, articulating a worldview that equates courage with good. Others, including journalists Bill Maher and Susan Sontag, argued that the hijackers could not be cowards, no matter how despicable their methods, because it takes guts to die for a cause....

This spring I was stranded in Europe for a week, a minor victim of Mother Nature, as most airports on the continent were closed after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. This remote natural event did not result in a huge human death toll but still caused hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue for almost all the world’s major airlines. More important, it disrupted millions of people’s lives....

People who prefer to get the nasal spray version of the flu vaccine, as opposed to the flu shot, will be out of luck next season: Health officials say the nasal spray should not be used this coming fall and winter. The decision was based on new data showing that the nasal spray was not very effective at preventing flu from 2013 to 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....

In November 2006 former KGB operative Alexander Litvinenko died in a London hospital in what had all the hallmarks of a cold war–style assassination. Despite the intrigue surrounding Litvinenko’s death, the poison that killed him, a rare radioactive isotope called polonium 210, is far more widespread than many of us realize: people worldwide smoke almost six trillion cigarettes a year, and each one delivers a small amount of polonium 210 to the lungs....

The early years of railroad growth saw railroads built between fledgling towns and across wilderness to transport people and goods. In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad across the U.S. was completed, and in the next 50 years trains crisscrossed the country on newly built tracks. The railways’ speed of travel and volume of traffic far exceeded horse-drawn carts, canal traffic and the earliest motor vehicles. Between 1869 and 1916 several kinds of rail networks were built: The longest ones connected far-flung parts of the country; regional ones knitted together populated cities....

Field biologists have a strange affinity for spending countless hours in the hot sun scrutinizing tiny things. You might see a bee buzzing on a flower and think, “Oh, a bee.” A biologist, though, will want to know: Is it a nonnative, domesticated honeybee? Or is it one of 4,000 bee species native to the U.S.—maybe an ultragreen sweat bee, a metallic-sheened creature that drinks human perspiration? Or perhaps a cuckoo bee, such as Bombus suckleyi, a type of bumblebee that sports yellow hair on its fourth abdominal segment, as opposed to the rare B....