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At 22, Mark Rievaj had one major love: speed skating. Day and night he spent at the Calgary track, vying for a coveted position on Canada’s national team. He was having the best season of his amateur career when he noticed a small fissure on his anus. “I was losing blood, not much, but a little bit every day,” Rievaj recalls. For months, his doctors struggled to make a diagnosis as Rievaj’s iron levels – and energy – plummeted and his skating performance faltered....

Say you have high blood pressure. There’s a new blockbuster drug on the market, and your doctor lets you know about a new clinical trial you can join that is testing the new treatment against an old tried-and-true one. What’s not to like? You’re going to be taking, under the care of experts, one of two U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved medications. What you might not know—even after you sign up for the trial and have inked the informed-consent form—is that scattered reports are starting to suggest that the new medication might occasionally cause severe side effects....

For centuries, the Dutch have built higher and higher dikes to keep waters at bay in a country where 55 percent of housing is located in areas prone to flooding. But climate change has convinced them this approach will no longer work, so the country is embarking on a mammoth task of moving dozens of dikes back to make room for swelling rivers. Now the oldest city in the Netherlands is being hailed for its plans to move the country’s biggest river, building more efficient flood defenses and at the same time creating more sustainable urban living space....

A new approach to high-speed photography could help capture the clearest-ever footage of light pulses, explosions or neurons firing in the brain, according to a team of ultrafast camera developers. The technique involves shooting 100 billion frames per second in a single exposure without an external light source. That means, for example, there would be no need to set off multiple explosions just to gather enough data to create a video reconstructing exactly how chemicals react to create the blast....

Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish coated with electrodes have been taught to play a version of the classic computer game Pong. In doing so, the cells join a growing pantheon of Pong players, including pigs taught to manipulate joysticks with their snouts and monkeys wired to control the game with their minds. (Google’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms mastered Pong many years ago and have moved on to more-sophisticated computer games such as StarCraft II....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the prognosis for Hawaii’s coral reefs in the face of global warming, invasive algae and other environmental threats?—Bill Weston, San Francisco Despite sweeping protections put in place near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency for large swaths of marine ecosystems around the Hawaiian Islands, things are not looking good for Hawaii’s coral reefs. Poisonous runoff, rising ocean levels, increasingly acidic waters and overfishing are taking their toll on the reefs and the marine life they support....

CLIMATEWIRE | Climate liability lawsuits from state and local governments against fossil fuel companies could be headed to the Supreme Court for a second time. Suncor Energy Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp. yesterday petitioned the justices to review a lower court decision that delivered a procedural victory to Colorado governments suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages (Climatewire, Feb. 9). The February finding by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the case should be heard by a state judge — rather than a federal bench, as industry wants — was the first in a string of legal losses for oil and gas companies after the Supreme Court said last year that appellate judges could consider a larger set of arguments in favor of federal jurisdiction....

More and more synthetic versions of key parts of the human cell, including chromosomes, have been developed by scientists in the past decade or so. Now researchers are aiming even higher, developing the first working artificial prototype of an “organ” of a human cell—the Golgi apparatus, which helps modify biomolecules and package them for delivery around the cell. The Golgi apparatus is an organelle, akin to a miniature organ in a cell, made up of a network of sacs piled together like a stack of pancakes....

The mirror, a perfect hexagon of gunmetal gray, stands vertically on a low platform. It is about two inches thick and more than four feet wide, a precisely carved slab of beryllium that gleams in the low light of this optics laboratory near San Francisco Bay. My guide, chief engineer Jay Daniel, watches my footing as I step gingerly in front of the mirror to see my reflection. “It’s like your bathroom mirror,” Daniel says, chuckling....

With the launch of a Polar Vortex Twitter account, videos of boiling water freezing going viral, and the Weather Channel reporting on the “shattering” of cold records, anyone tracking the recent cold snap across the eastern and middle parts of the United States could be forgiven for thinking this sort of cold was unprecedented. In fact, it’s not. “This is not anything that I would deem to be unusual or extraordinary,” said Mark Wysocki, the New York state climatologist....

The world’s food system was under strain even before Russia invaded Ukraine. Now—compounded by the war’s effect on trade and a corresponding spike in global fuel prices—it faces two dangerous and intertwined crises. In the short term, Russia’s war on Ukraine increases the risk of extreme hunger for millions more people. The danger is particularly acute for low-income countries that depend on food imports. And countries such as Ethiopia and Yemen already are dealing with hunger fueled by conflict....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. offshore oil and gas drillers need to take a more systematic approach to safety in all aspects of their operations to prevent another catastrophe like last year’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a scientific panel said on Wednesday. The National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council said in a report that it was a lack of comprehensive safety management that led to the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers....

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By Gayatri Suroyo and Adriana Nina Kusuma SURABAYA, Indonesia/JAKARTA, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Indonesian rescuers searching for an AirAsia plane carrying 162 people pulled bodies and wreckage from the sea off the coast of Borneo on Tuesday, prompting relatives of those on board watching TV footage to break down in tears. Indonesia AirAsia’s Flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, lost contact with air traffic control early on Sunday during bad weather on a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore....

Girls born to mothers with high levels of BPA in their system during the first trimester of pregnancy weigh less at birth than babies with lower exposure, according to a new study. The study adds to evidence that fetal exposure to the ubiquitous chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) may contribute to fetal developmental problems. Low birth weights are linked to a host of health problems later in life, such as obesity, diabetes, infertility and heart disease....

Think of California smog, and you might picture brown haze over a crowded freeway. But farmland in the Golden State emits about the same amount of certain pollution-forming gases as on-road vehicles, a new study shows. That’s much more than researchers had previously estimated, bumping up estimates of the total production of these gases in the state by as much as 51 percent. Farms in California’s Central Valley, which produce most of the fruits and vegetables in the U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the wake of an explosion in London on September 15, President Trump called for cutting off extremists’ access to the internet. Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner.The internet is their main recruitment tool which we must cut off & use better! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017...

Black holes one billion times the sun’s mass or more lie at the heart of many galaxies, driving their spin and development. Common today, some 14 billion years after the big bang, such supermassive black holes were rare in the early universe—or at least they were supposed to be. Evidence of supermassive black holes existing when the universe was less than one billion years old has stumped scientists, because current theories of stellar evolution suggest that such giants should take much longer to grow....

The image of a retiree complaining about the local kids is so ubiquitous it has become a cliché—everyone knows that each generation loves to be appalled by the behavior of those born later. Now research confirms this observation and suggests that by thinking about youngsters getting in trouble, older people are actively boosting their self-esteem. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State University and her colleague Matthias Hastall of Zeppelin University in Germany asked people between the ages of 50 and 65 to read articles in a magazine under the guise of becoming familiar with the publication....

Mammal species do not seem to last very long in the grand scheme of things, persisting for an average of 2.5 million years, according to the fossil record. By studying the fossilized teeth of rodents over a span of 22 million years, Jan van Dam of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues confirmed this cycle of rodent species rise and fall. But they also found that it closely matched variations in Earth’s orbit–and may have definitively linked the two....