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By Mary WisniewskiWASHINGTON, Illinois (Reuters) - Police were turning residents away from Washington, Illinois, on Monday morning, the day after a series of tornadoes pounded the Midwestern United States, killing six people across the state and flattening the city of 15,000 people.Bits of American flags and insulation from destroyed homes clung to trees that had been stripped of their remaining leaves and most of their branches by the Washington twister. Spawned by a fast-moving storm system, the tornado had winds of up to 200 miles per hour....

LONDON – The impact of human activity on the Earth is running out of control, and the amount of time in which action can be taken to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change is rapidly dwindling, a leading scientist from the Australian National University told a global scientific climate conference in London yesterday. Not only is the impact on the Earth’s environment and climate already being seen at all levels, but the damage is accelerating, professor Will Steffen told the opening day of the four-day Planet Under Pressure conference, which has gathered together some 2,800 scientists from around the globe....

The largest genome scan ever conducted to get to the bottom of autism has pinpointed two locations in the human genetic makeup that may trigger the mysterious mental condition. The Autism Genome Project, a collaboration of 120 scientists representing 19 countries and 50 institutions, compared the genomes of 1,168 families that each had at least two autism sufferers in them to try to track down the regions. The consortium reports its findings in this week’s issue of Nature Genetics....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sometimes bad things come in small packages. A microbe that spewed humongous amounts of methane into Earth’s atmosphere triggered a global catastrophe 252 million years ago that wiped out upwards of 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates. That’s the hypothesis offered on Monday by researchers aiming to solve one of science’s enduring mysteries: what happened at the end of the Permian period to cause the worst of the five mass extinctions in Earth’s history....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—More galaxies are separated by about 490 million light-years than by any other large distance, astronomers have found in the most precise measurement yet of this key cosmic length scale. Using this scale, researchers calculated astronomical distances with a record low level of 1 percent uncertainty in a measurement that helps clarify what is behind the unexplained dark energy causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate. The separation of 150 megaparsecs, or nearly 490 million light-years, is an artifact of the birth of the universe, which created tiny ripples in the density of matter that caused material in some spots to clump together into the seeds of galaxies....

Planet hunters have dramatically improved their techniques in the two decades since first discovering worlds beyond our solar system, most of which were gas-giant scorchers. Now they are searching for small, Earth-size exoplanets, such as the one said to circle Alpha Centauri B, which recently made headlines. Yet optimism about finding such planets may be premature. The problem is that stars swarm with surface activity that can mask or mimic the signs of tiny exoplanets....

Automakers are examining a variety of technologies to enhance fuel economy. But a group of undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found an overlooked source: shock absorbers. When a car’s wheel hits a hole or bump, a standard shock absorber disperses the impact energy through hydraulic fluid and moves a piston. In the M.I.T. design, the fluid is instead forced through a small turbine attached to a generator....

In a breakthrough that could eventually help tame one of the deadliest viruses known to man, researchers have laid bare the key to Ebola’s power: a lone protein that resides on its surface. The discovery paves the way for new treatments that target and destroy the designated culprit, rendering impotent a virus that, though rare, can kill up to 90 percent of the people it infects. The so-called Ebola virus glycoprotein, or “spike protein,” was first discovered a decade ago and has been a target for scientists attempting to design vaccines and therapies to prevent it from infecting cells....

Turning on a set of neurons that dampen brain activity improves social behavior in a mouse model of autism; turning off neurons that excite brain activity does the same thing. These findings, published today in Science Translational Medicine, add heft to the long-standing theory that autism stems from too much excitation in the brain1. They also hint that treatments that restore the balance between excitation and inhibition could ease social difficulties in people with autism....

A strain of E. coli resistant to two last-resort antibiotics has for the first time been reported in the United States. The strain was found in the urine of a man treated at a New Jersey hospital two years ago. It was tested in 2016 as part of a larger analysis of bacteria from the hospital. For hard-to-treat bacteria infections, the antibiotics colistin and carbapenem are considered the big guns—a last line of defense when nothing else is working....

In recent years neuroscientists have begun to get a picture of what is happening in a baby’s brain during the process of learning language that takes the child from a gurgling newborn to a wonderfully engaging youngster. At birth, the infant brain can perceive the full set of 800 or so sounds, called phonemes, that can be strung together to form all the words in every language of the world. During the second half of the first year, research shows that a door opens in the child’s brain....

Not only are government researchers barred from their own labs during the government shutdown, but they cannot travel anywhere else, either. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who were in San Francisco, Calif., attending a meeting on cytokines found their trips unexpectedly cut short when the government began shutting down at midnight on October 1. As soon as the news broke, NIH officials told the travelling researchers to come back immediately “by any means necessary....

Today’s supercomputers run hot, thanks to power-hungry microprocessors that enable sophisticated scientific research and complex financial transactions to be performed in the blink of an eye. As these microprocessors have become smaller and more powerful over time, they are generating even more heat, a problem that data centers generally address expensively with air conditioning and chilled-liquid cooling systems. Whereas datacenters have for decades used cold liquids to transfer heat away from central processing units (CPUs), a team of IBM researchers in Switzerland is experimenting with a micro network of copper tubes that run through smaller, clustered computer servers and whisk away heat with the help of warm water....

Peter R. Backus, observing programs manager at the SETI Institute, explains. SETI scientists do not look for patterns but rather a lack of patterns in a signal. Although this may seem puzzling, its really a matter of physics. The first challenge facing any SETI project is detecting a signal against the background of cosmic and terrestrial noise. A signal containing a great deal of information will be spread across the spectrum more than a very simple signal containing little information would be....

The boreal forest seems to like the higher levels of carbon dioxide that result from fossil-fuel burning. All that carbon appears to be enabling growth rates not seen in human history for the northernmost forest, according to a new study. “Boreal forests are more active than 50 years ago,” says geochemist Heather Graven of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, lead author of the new analysis, published online August 8 in Science....

High-level EPA staff is quitting, ethics controversies are dogging the administrator and investigators are scrutinizing employees’ behavior. But deregulatory work is chugging along at EPA, including efforts to finally get rid of President Obama’s signature climate change policy. EPA is planning to finalize a repeal of the Clean Power Plan—Obama’s rule to cut power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions—and is considering proposing a replacement rule. Observers say the timing and the specifics of EPA’s next steps will determine how strong the agency is heading into the court battles guaranteed to come....

In the late 1990s Dirk G. Soenksen imagined a new future for pathology. At the time, pathologists often sat on telephone books to get a good view through their microscopes, yet Soenksen’s children viewed high-resolution monitors when merely playing Nintendo. “Why can’t microscopists look at computer monitors, too?” he wondered. That question sent Soenksen on an extended journey, beginning in his garage. After 18 months of intense laboring, he emerged as the head of a newly created digital-pathology company called Aperio, which he now runs in Vista, Calif....

MIAMI — There’s only one building in Florida that can withstand the biggest and baddest of all hurricanes — the Category 5, with winds of at least 165 mph (266 kph) — and it’s a concrete bunker along an unglamorous stretch of road in South Florida called the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The NHC never closes. Here, weather forecasters work around the clock, 365 days a year, tracking threatening storms in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans....

There is a chance that seasonal flu shots would confer some protection against the avian flu virus H5N1, which has raised fears of a deadly global outbreak. Researchers vaccinated mice against a common form of the flu and found that although the animals got sick they were less likely to die when infected with the related H5N1. The vaccine caused the mice to create antibodies against neuraminidase, a flu protein that lets newly born virus particles escape from infected cells....

The naturally caffeinated, earthy beverage is part of an early morning ritual fundamental to the Kichwa culture. The villagers, who call themselves Runa—which translates to “fully alive”—believe drinking guayusa both awakens the body and provides time for reflection of dreams experienced the night before. “Now guayusa is helping us economically,” farmer Silverio Mamallacta says in a video posted on the website of Runa LLC, a company named after the villagers and the only one selling the tea....