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The towering 234-year-old ‘Napoleon’ oak on the campus of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland has weathered storms both meteorological and political. The tree was young when Napoleon’s troops passed through town in 1800, and has grown into a majestic city landmark. But through it all, its genome has remained largely—and surprisingly—unchanged. Researchers at the university discovered this unexpected stability after sequencing the genome in different branches of the tree. Their work—posted on June 13 as a bioRxiv preprint, which has not been peer reviewed—meshes with a growing body of evidence that plants are able to shield their stem cells from mutations....

By Janelle WeaverPublished animal trials overestimate by about 30 percent the likelihood that a treatment works because negative results often go unpublished, a study suggests.This is a surprisingly strong bias, says the study’s lead author, Malcolm Macleod, a neurologist at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK. The work, published March 30 in PLoS Biology, analyses the effect of publication bias in animal models of disease....

What is the latest theory of why humans lost their body hair? —J. Yablon, Adelaide, Australia Mark Pagel, head of the evolutionary biology group at the University of Reading in England, replies: Scientists have suggested three main explanations for why humans lack fur. All revolve around the idea that it may have been advantageous for our evolving lineage to become less and less hairy during the six million years since we diverged from the common ancestor we shared with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee....

The nonlocality of our physical world follows from a combination of a theorem proved by John S. Bell in 1964 and experimental results obtained since the early 1980s. His theorem builds on the puzzle about entangled particles pointed out by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935. The EPR argument assumes that nature is local so that in particular a measurement (by, say, Alice) on one particle of a widely separated entangled pair cannot instantaneously alter the physical state of the faraway partner particle (which, say, Buzz can measure)....

After weeks of unleashing earthquakes and lava flows that have forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes, Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has finally blown its top. Because Kilauea is one of the best-monitored volcanoes in the world, scientists hope that data on the event will help them to better predict when similar volcanoes are about to erupt. “We’ll be working on this set of data for our careers,” says Michael Poland, a geophysicist at the U....

Imagine a world without fear. It might be empowering to go about your daily life uninhibited by everyday distresses. You could cross highways with confidence, take on all kinds of daredevilry and watch horror flicks without flinching. Yet consider the prospect a little more deeply, and the possibilities become darker, even deadly. Our fears, after all, can protect us. The basic aversion that a mouse has for a cat, for instance, keeps the rodent out of death’s jaws....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Iran is one of the leading cyberspace adversaries of the United States. It emerged as a cyberthreat a few years later than Russia and China and has so far demonstrated less skill. Nevertheless, it has conducted several highly damaging cyberattacks and become a major threat that will only get worse. Like Russia and China, the history of Iran’s cyberspace operations begins with its hackers....

The White House has rehired a climate scientist who was forced out by the Trump administration, and is proposing to dramatically increase the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Science is back” has become a Biden slogan. But listening to scientists is only the first step—and only a partial step, given the deep distrust many Americans have for experts. We must improve how ordinary citizens help shape science policy....

In the history of The Cheapskate, I don’t think I’ve ever written about a vacuum cleaner. Because, let’s face it, they’re boring household appliances, not cool techie gadgets. Unless, of course, it’s a self-guided, hackable robot vacuum. Like this one: Today only, and while supplies last, DealFisher has the refurbished Neato XV-12 robotic vacuum for $149.99 shipped. Regular price: hundreds more. (This is a discontinued model, but I’ve seen list prices in the $379 to $399 range....

Editor’s note: This article is the second of a three-part series by John Carey. Part 1, posted on June 28, is “Storm Warning: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change”. Extreme floods, prolonged droughts, searing heat waves, massive rainstorms and the like don’t just seem like they’ve become the new normal in the last few years—they have become more common, according to data collected by reinsurance company Munich Re (see Part 1 of this series)....

From Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, by Adam Minter. Bloomsbury Press, November 2013. A city of twenty million people generates a lot of trash. Some of it ends up in landfills, and some of it ends up being recycled. Beijing, a developing city of at least 20 million, recycles more than most, in large part because it’s home to millions of migrant laborers, many tens of thousands of whom make a living by buying and sorting the value from what their upwardly mobile neighbors throw away....

THE MOST VALUABLE AND COMPLEX component in a modern vehicle typically is also the most unreliable part of the system. Driving accidents usually have both a human cause and a human victim. To certain engineers—especially those who build robots—that is a problem with an obvious solution: replace the easily distracted, readily fatigued driver with an ever attentive, never tiring machine. The U.S. military, which has been losing soldiers to roadside bombs in Iraq for several years, is particularly keen on this idea....

Forty years ago, in December of the troubled year of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders piloted the Apollo 8 spacecraft into orbit around the moon, the first humans ever to circle any globe but our own. From that unique vantage, they sent back the iconic photograph (taken by Anders) shown below, known as “Earthrise.” It unforgettably captured the fragile beauty of our living planet as it hovered in stark contrast over the arid sterility of the lunar horizon: a precious droplet of life—perhaps the only one we could ever know—in the velvety darkness....

Felled mangrove trees may have doomed the coast of Myanmar By cutting down 50,000 acres (20,235 hectares) of mangrove trees in the 1990s, and probably more since, Myanmar may have left itself much more vulnerable to last week’s deadly Cyclone Nargis, according to Surin Pitsuwan, the secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. That shouldn’t be surprising: A study appearing in Science in 2005 found that regions buffered by coastal vegetation sustain fewer deaths and less damage when they are swamped by inundations from strong storms or tsunamis, such as the one in December 2004....

Methods for extracting frankincense, one of the aromatic gifts from the magi reputedly celebrating Christ’s birth, may be affecting the sex life of Boswellia papyrifera trees in the Horn of Africa. Dutch researchers found that trees tapped for frankincense produce fewer flowers, fruits and seeds for reproduction than untapped trees. They speculate that extracting the resin may cause the trees to direct energy toward replacing the fluid rather than to their growth and reproduction....

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken—shall we agree we know what word goes at the end of that saying? It’s also been thought impossible to, as the Yiddish expression has it, makhn gold fun drek: make gold from—sure enough, it’s that same word again. It remains true that you can’t make gold from feces. But it turns out you can extract enough gold from solid waste to possibly make the effort pay....

Lene Vestergaard Hau’s favorite time of year is midsummer’s eve, when the sky in her native Denmark turns a light metallic blue and the sun stays set for only a few hours. “It never really gets dark,” she says one May morning in her sunny office at Harvard University. “You have these long, light nights. It is just a wonderful time of year. That is the thing I really miss here....

Germany will become the first country completely accessible to fuel cell vehicles in 2015, when carmaker Daimler and the Linde technology group will build 20 new hydrogen filling stations. The result will quadruple the number of public stations available and make it possible for a fuel cell vehicle to reach any location in the country. Daimler’s plans to start mass-producing fuel cell vehicles next year were severely limited by the lack of public hydrogen filling stations in Germany....

Alain de Botton, a prominent writer and outspoken atheist, has a grand vision to nurture a truly secular society. He foresees awe-inspiring monuments dedicated to nature. Museum and hotel designs would encourage contemplative thought and self-improvement. Psychotherapists would occupy offices in accessible yet glamorous boutiques, providing easy opportunities for supportive interactions with others. Although such a radical transformation of civic life—religion for atheists, as he calls it—is unlikely to make it beyond the blueprints, de Botton is on to something....

A darker than usual, mildly fruity muffin made from wine waste could prove effective in protecting your health. Scientists at the University of Maryland have shown that the leftovers of chardonnay wine production can stop the growth of colon cancer cells in vitro as well as inhibit the growth of E. coli and other bacteria when used as a preservative. And when grape and other fruit seeds are turned into flour, they “naturally carry some fruit flavor,” says Liangli “Lucy” Yu....