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Clostridium difficile, a deadly bacterium spread by physical contact with objects or infected people, thrives in hospitals, causing 453,000 cases a year and 29,000 deaths in the United States, according to a 2015 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Traditional methods such as monitoring hygiene and warning signs often fail to stop the disease. But what if it were possible to systematically target those most vulnerable to C-diff? Erica Shenoy, an infectious-disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Jenna Wiens, a computer scientist and assistant professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, did just that when they created an algorithm to predict a patient’s risk of developing a C-diff infection, or CDI....

When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second....

John Guiney, chief of the Meteorological Services Division at NOAA’s National Weather Service, Eastern Region, offers this answer. The proposition that waves always break in odd-numbered groups may be more anecdotal than fact. Perhaps the best way to approach this question is to provide some information on ocean waves and the processes that lead to their growth, travel and demise as breaking waves along the coast. Wind produces all the waves in the world’s oceans....

In 2015, the picture of a white-and- gold dress (or was it black-and-blue?) divided humankind in two irreconcilable factions while revolutionizing scientists’ understanding of color perception. It was a brand-new category of illusion, in which different people perceived the same image in diametrically opposing ways. The two sections were locked in their respective perceptions. Try as they might, neither blue/black nor white/gold adherents could make themselves see the garment as the other side did....

By Daniel Kelley PHILADELPHIA, May 12 (Reuters) - An Amtrak passenger train with more than 200 passengers on board derailed in north Philadelphia on Tuesday night, killing at least five people and injuring scores of others, several of them critically, authorities said. Authorities said they had no idea what caused the train wreck at about 9:30 p.m. local time that left some rail cars mangled, ripped open and strewn upside down and on their sides in the city’s Port Richmond neighborhood along the Delaware River....

When British mathematician Alan Turing conceived the notion of a universal programmable computing machine, the word “computer” typically referred not to an object but to a human being. It was 1936, and people with the job of computer, in modern terms, crunched numbers. Turing’s design for a machine that could do such work instead–one capable of computing any computable problem–set the stage for theoretical study of computation and remains a foundation for all of computer science....

China is poised to launch the world’s first satellite designed to do quantum experiments. A fleet of quantum-enabled craft is likely to follow. First up could be more Chinese satellites, which will together create a super-secure communications network, potentially linking people anywhere in the world. But groups from Canada, Japan, Italy and Singapore also have plans for quantum space experiments. “Definitely, I think there will be a race,” says Chaoyang Lu, a physicist at the -University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, who works with the team behind the Chinese satellite....

In trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon, it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines. For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics. But over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues....

On May 29 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dedicated the National Ignition Facility, the world’s biggest laser system. It will direct laser beams from all directions onto a pencil-eraser-size pellet of frozen hydrogen (housed in a tube called a hohlraum), heating it to millions of degrees and inducing fusion. The laser beams must travel some distance to pick up energy from amplifiers and hit its tiny target; the lab likens the accuracy to a pitcher at AT&T Park in San Francisco throwing a strike at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles....

The number of major Atlantic storms has increased over the past 100 years, in concert with the rise in ocean temperatures. Contradicting some past conclusions, a study in Nature Geoscience predicts that as the world heats up, the number of hurricanes will decrease, although the storms will produce more rain. Rather than being driven by warmer waters per se, the 20th-century rise may have stemmed from temperature differences between the tropical Atlantic and other basins, which have not warmed as quickly....

Clearing The Air In maintaining clean rooms, engineers try to keep out particles 0.5 micron and larger. A key device is the high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, which traps at least 99.97 percent of particulates 0.3 micron wide. (It does even better with bigger particulates.) Other measures, however, must be included, because additional particulates are constantly being created—walking, for instance, generates about five million of them per minute. For ultralow penetration air (ULPA) filters, the target is 0....

For a few hours yesterday, climate science was not the target of attacks in Congress. Researchers, diplomats and policy experts warned about the dangers of ignoring clear research showing that humans are warming the planet at an alarming rate in an unofficial hearing hosted by Democratic lawmakers. The discussion was an alternative to the recent hearings in the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, run by Chairman Lamar Smith, the conservative Texas Republican who has accused federal climate scientists of engaging in a global conspiracy....

Biofuel researchers have developed a mechanism that may increase yields for products like diesel, ethanol and even medicines. Growing bacteria, algae and plants on large scales is challenging enough; getting them to do things they don’t normally do, like make fuel, is even harder. Scientists have to select and tweak molecular pathways to make cells produce enough useful products to be economically viable. But these modified pathways are fragile, vulnerable to changes in the organism’s environment....

When Hurricane Isaac swept ashore as a Category 1 storm, its destructive power seemingly took some by surprise. As images of submerged houses and news of dramatic rooftop rescues made the rounds, the Web was abuzz with expressions of disbelief that a mere “Cat 1” storm could be the culprit for the catastrophe unfolding before people’s eyes. “Man that’s just too much water to be a Category 1 or tropical storm,” wrote @KeepNUpWithMike, reflecting the sentiments of many Twitter users....

Long left in the dust by their peers in climate research, a small group of soil scientists is spearheading an effort to apply rigorous computer analysis to the ground beneath our feet. Their goal: to produce a digital soil map of the entire world. It is a daunting task. In many parts of the world, such as Africa and South Asia, knowledge of soil is sketchy at best, relying on fading paper maps....

Solutions: We can express the entire trajectory in terms of A and B. It will depend on the car speed b, the spinning speed s of the disks and the distances d, e and r. See: http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/papers/eddyfig1.doc Assuming angle A from the start point, we want to calculate a distance to the edge of the disk. Because the disk moves slowly compared to the car, we could tentatively approximate the distance from the start point to the edge of the disk to be d/cos(A)....

Technologies that rely on ‘quantum-weirdness’ phenomena, such as electrons being in two places at the same time, are inherently delicate: the smallest disruption can make such uncertain states ‘collapse’ into well-defined outcomes. Now, however, physicists have shown that quantum effects do not always succumb entirely to disruptions — at least not those from electromagnetic noise. Their technique, called quantum illumination, could enable schemes based on quantum effects to work in much noisier environments than they can now....

DARK ENERGY “Seeing in the Dark,” by Joshua Frieman, discusses the effort to confirm whether the accelerated expansion of the universe is because of dark energy. Is it possible to test the hypothesis that our known universe is part of a much larger, more massive universe that might account for the accelerated expansion? Jack W. Hakala via e-mail Frieman points out that a difficulty with one of the four candidates for dark energy, the quantum-mechanical contribution to the vacuum energy, is that its quantity is not yet determined, because calculations give about 10120 times more than what currently appears to exist....

WOMEN’S SPACE “One Small Step Back in Time,” by Clara Moskowitz, includes a picture of the firing room for Apollo 11’s launch in 1969. I found, amid a sea of crew cuts, white shirts and dark ties, NASA engineer JoAnn Morgan seated at her console. Against the far wall, I could make out three other women. I, and undoubtedly other readers, would like to know more about the women in the control room that day—who they were and why they were there....

Biofuel production is often touted as a boon to rural development, but a University of Iowa engineering professor is worried about the effect of corn ethanol plants on his and other states’ water supplies. At a biofuels energy symposium hosted by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies last week in Washington, D.C., professor Jerald Schnoor said corn ethanol production facilities require large quantities of high-purity water during the fermentation process....