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If you’re thinking about the COVID pandemic as an assault against physical health alone, you’ve got it all wrong. The statistics on illness and death are staggering—but there’s been an equally staggering toll exacted on our mental health. Nearly one third of Americans are experiencing symptoms of clinical depression or anxiety, and the Well Being Trust estimates we will suffer up to 150,000 additional deaths tied to the social isolation and economic stressors associated with COVID-19....

SHANGHAI—Driving in China can be a risky affair. When you are not stopped in the ever more frequent bumper-to-bumper traffic of this bustling port city, care must be taken to avoid drivers making turns, who assume the right of way against oncoming traffic; reversing for missed turns; or executing a U-turn in the middle of a busy road. Aggressiveness among the Volkswagen Santanas that make up the majority of the taxi fleet here is rewarded and the air is filled with the fumes from thousands of cars....

A type Ia supernova is perhaps the ultimate combination of insult and injury—a star steals material from a companion star, reaches critical mass, becomes unstable, and then unleashes a nuclear blast powerful enough to pulverize its victim. The culprit in these cases is clear: type Ia supernovae arise from the cataclysmic explosions of small, dense stars known as white dwarfs. But the victim’s identity is clouded. Traditionally, scientists believed that the victims were sunlike main-sequence stars or swollen giant stars....

Fifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually surpass this futuristic vision. By 2062, the year the animated show was set, advances in artificial intelligence, sensor networks and robotics promise to make the Jetsons’s home in Skypad Apartments, and indeed in all of Orbit City, seem quaint by comparison (although flying cars may remain out of reach—especially ones that beat parking problems by folding into a suitcase)....

Did someone say “jaws”? Forget the great white shark: a 400-million-year-old, multiton fish may have had a bite powerful enough to chop a shark–or just about anything else–clean in two. To determine its strength, researchers reconstructed the ancient creature’s jaw muscles from the grooves of a well-preserved fossil. A well-known denizen of museum displays, Dunkleosteus terrelli could have exerted up to 1,200 pounds of force with its bite, the investigators estimate....

One of Antarctica’s most iconic inhabitants, the stately king penguin, may be forced to find new places to live before the end of the century—or become the next victim of climate change. King penguins make for a striking sight on the islands around Antarctica, with their tall, black-and-white tuxedoed bodies—second only in size to the emperor penguin—and bright yellow markings on their heads and chests. But sustained high levels of greenhouse gas emissions could drive the penguin’s food sources farther and farther south over the next few decades, new research suggests, prompting the birds to follow suit....

Cosmic rays, traveling nearly at the speed of light, bombard Earth from all directions. The electrically charged particles are the most energetic component of cosmic radiation—yet no one knows where they come from. Astrophysicists speculate that high-energy cosmic rays may have emerged from supermassive black holes in faraway galaxies or possibly from decaying particles from the big bang. Whatever their origin, these rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere about once per square kilometer per century....

By Steve Scherer ROME (Reuters) - Italy’s only Ebola patient is fully recovered and was released from hospital on Friday more than a month after being flown to Rome from Sierra Leone where he worked as a doctor treating others stricken by the disease. The 50-year-old Sicilian man has been identified only by his first name, Fabrizio. He contracted the hemorrhagic virus while working for humanitarian group Emergency during the worst Ebola outbreak on record....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A populist wave that began with Brexit in June reached the United States in stunning fashion on Tuesday night. In one of the biggest upsets in American political history, Donald Trump won a truly historic victory in the U.S. presidential election. Trump’s remarkably decisive win stunned most political pundits, myself included. Throughout the campaign, Trump seemed to have a polling ceiling of about 44 percent and he consistently had the highest unfavorability rating of any major party nominee in history....

If you’ve been following the media trail on fish oil lately, you’ve probably been tempted to forgo the smelly capsules. A systematic review of 20 studies published last week in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that neither eating extra helpings of fish nor taking fish oil supplements reduces the risk of stroke, heart attack or death. In June a review of studies published on behalf of the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent, not-for-profit organization that promotes evidence-based decision-making, concluded that fish oil pills fail to prevent or treat cognitive decline....

Despite concerted global efforts to reduce carbon emissions through the expansion of clean and renewable energy resources, fossil fuels continued to dominate the global energy sector in 2012, according to new figures released yesterday by the Worldwatch Institute. Coal, natural gas and oil accounted for 87 percent of the world’s primary energy consumption last year, the group reported in a new “Vital Signs Online” report. “The relative weight of these energy sources keeps shifting, although only slightly,” states the report by researchers Milena Gonzalez and Matt Lucky, members of the Worldwatch Institute’s climate and energy team....

Over the past 60 years women and girls in developing countries have made enormous progress. Plenty of data illuminates this trend. Take life expectancy at birth: it went from 54 years in 1960 to 72 years in 2008. During the same period, we experienced the world’s fastest ever decline in fertility. These changes reflect gains for women on many fronts, including education, employment, access to reproductive health care and decision-making power, and it all happened much faster than it did in today’s rich countries....

Imitation is thought to be the sincerest form of flattery—even when the mimic and model are unaware of the mimicry. Now, new evidence from a study of capuchin monkeys shows a possible evolutionary benefit to being a clueless copycat (or copy-capuchin, in this case). “We’ve known for awhile that we humans imitate each other all the time, unintentionally and unconsciously,” says Annika Paukner, a comparative behaviorist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and lead author of the study published online today in the journal Science....

CLIMATEWIRE | As extreme weather wracks much of the globe, large majorities of Americans believe that in many cases, climate change is to blame. Roughly three-quarters of respondents to a recent poll said global warming is affecting weather-related issues in the United States, including extreme heat, wildfires, drought and rising sea levels, according to a report released yesterday by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication....

A rare deadly lightning storm Sunday over Southern California’s Venice Beach raises questions about whether the drought-ravaged state faces new weather risks due to its changing climate. The famed Los Angeles seaside community rarely sees lightning storms, but beachgoers rushed for cover when a thunderstorm struck at about 2:30 p.m. Four direct lightning strikes were reported, and bathers reported feeling their hair standing on end. A 20-year-old Los Angeles man was pulled from the water unconscious and later pronounced dead....

Much of Yellowstone National Park is a giant collapsed volcano, or a caldera. In an enormous eruption roughly 640,000 years ago, this volcano spit out around 240 cubic miles of rock, dirt, magma and other material. Around 70,000 years ago its last eruption filled in that gaping hole with flows of lava. The area has enjoyed an uneasy peace since then, the land alternately rising and falling with the passing decades....

Stacey Gayle used to love music. Listening to it and performing it was a big part of her life. She had stacks of CDs in her car, went to concerts of artists like Sean Paul, and would go to parties where hot songs would blare. She was also an active member of the choir at her church: Solid Rock Church of the Nazarene. Then she started having seizures. The first one happened while she slept in her bedroom in Rosedale, Queens in New York City on the night of March 3, 2005....

In this week’s Nature, researchers describe restoring certain structural and functional properties to pigs’ brains, even four hours after the animals had been killed. They used an artificial perfusion system called BrainEx. Electrophysiological monitoring did not detect any kind of neural activity thought to signal consciousness, such as any evidence of signalling between brain regions (see ‘Between life and death’). Nonetheless, the study challenges the long-held assumption that large mammalian brains are irreversibly damaged a few minutes after blood stops circulating....

By Hannah HoagShorter growing season linked to warmer winters on ’the roof of the world’.In many regions, climate change has advanced the timing of spring events, such as flowering or the unfolding of leaves. But the meadows and steppes of the Tibetan Plateau are bucking that trend – plants are starting to bloom later in spring, making the growing season shorter. This change could threaten the livelihood of the thousands of nomads who survive by raising cattle on the plateau....

The End: The Human Experience of Death by Bianca Nogrady Random House Australia, 2014 (($19.95)) Although everyone dies, no one alive fully knows what the experience is like. Nogrady, a journalist, describes what science says about the goings-on in the mind and body at death and investigates phenomena that lack good explanations, such as seeing a light at the end of a tunnel. She also examines the politics of death, such as the debate over euthanasia, as well as personal accounts of people who have had near-death experiences or have watched a loved one die....