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The single biggest factor, by far, in reducing the rate of death among children younger than five is greater education for women. In all countries worldwide, whether females increase schooling from 10 years to 11, say, or two years to three, infant mortality declines, according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Women with more education tend to have smaller families, in part because of increased employment opportunities and better knowledge about contraception; fewer children in a family improves the chances that an infant will survive....

By Yasmeen Abutaleb and Lisa Baertlein NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The White House is due to issue an ambitious plan to slow the growing and deadly problem of antibiotic resistance over the next five years, one that requires massive investments and policy changes from a broad array of U.S. government health agencies, according to a copy of the report reviewed by Reuters. The 60-page report is the first ever to tackle antibiotic resistance so broadly....

Any American who pays electricity bills has good reason to care that earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court voted in support of a federal rule to compensate customers who conserve energy during peak periods. The practice can reduce the chance for blackouts and lower electricity prices for everyone by easing loads on the power grid as well as promote energy conservation, experts say. The main legal issue was whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has the authority to regulate such programs, known as demand response....

Barry Behr is assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and director of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) laboratories at Stanford University and consulting laboratory director for Huntington Reproductive Centers. He spoke with SciAm.com associate editor Sarah Graham. An edited transcript of their conversation follows: SA: What is the process used for freezing embryos? Cell freezing has been around for decades. The major concern in cryopreservation of cells is the possible formation of ice crystals inside in the cells....

The Declaration of Independence proclaims that the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right. Indeed, happiness is a universal human yearning—people of all ages, genders, shapes, and sizes want to be happy. And humans have shown themselves to be quite adept at pursuing happiness, devoting much of their money, time, and energy to this quest. But what about our ability to actually attain happiness? Well, that’s a different story. Finding the right path to happiness can be a challenge because, as research has shown, although we think we know the keys to happiness, we are actually not very good at predicting what will bring us joy....

India appears to be pressing the reset button on its international climate change commitments. In a submission to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change last week, India declared it would not even consider scaling back more greenhouse gas emissions until after 2020 – and then would do so only in exchange for Western dollars. It’s an interpretation of the Durban Platform, reached after a hard-fought battle at the U.N. negotiations in Durban, South Africa, last year, that flies in the face of how the United States and Europe view the agreement....

Fans of the Indiana Jones trilogy have long awaited the fourth installment in the series about the part-time professor and full-time adventurer. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which premiered this week, the swashbuckling archaeologist journeys to southern Mexico to track down a mysterious artifact of the vanished Mayan Empire. Scientists have attributed the decline of this mighty civilization to solar cycles and drought, though the demise of this society that existed for thousands of years perplexes archeologists to this day....

As an editor, I’ve never been a big fan of turning nouns into verbs when perfectly good options already exist. But I’d be happy to see us use “science” that way. It’s a powerful, evidence-based process of conducting experiments, gathering data and performing analysis on the results. It’s at once a methodical set of practices and a tool that inspires hope for a brighter future by advancing discovery and innovation. That’s why our cover story, “Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2017,” has a special resonance for me....

NASA has picked the final landing site for its next Red Planet rover after years of debate and will unveil its choice on Friday (July 22) — nearly 35 years to the day after the space agency’s storied Viking 1 probe touched down on Mars, agency officials said. The landing site will be the stomping grounds for NASA’s latest Martian explorer, a car-size rover called Curiosity. Curiosity is the centerpiece of the $2....

WASHINGTON—Nearly all of the Obama administration’s science staff has departed the White House since January, and the Trump administration has moved slowly to replace them. In the meantime, however, an unofficial shadow office, stocked with Obama loyalists, is quietly at work. The network, described to STAT by officials from the previous administration who are involved, is informal yet organized, allowing for a far-reaching if largely inconspicuous effort to continue advocating for the Obama science agenda....

People have been preserving bodies of the dead for millennia, from the bog bodies found in the peat wet­lands of northern Europe to the embalmed and wrapped mummies recovered from Egypt’s desert sands. The companion book to a traveling exhibit of the same name that opened in California in July, this vol­ume brings together evoc­ative imagery of dozens of mum­mies—human and animal—from around the globe and explains how science is revealing who these individuals were and how their remains have survived across the ages....

All tuna are not alike. The canned tuna fish in sandwiches and salads comes from either skipjack, a meter-long species that is caught in prodigious quantities around the world and served as “light meat tuna,” or albacore, another small fish that is marketed as “white meat tuna.” The yellowfin and the bigeye tuna are larger species that are also heavily fished, but neither makes for particularly wonderful sushi, and they are usually served grilled....

Every Saturday, 13-year-old Caia Farrell goes running with her classmates. When the group passes a giant, idling truck, they cross the street to get away from the exhaust fumes. But it rarely helps. “Outside my house right now, there are trucks moving back and forth to various construction sites, spewing pollution, idling on corners and polluting our air,” the Philadelphia-based seventh grader recently told EPA administrators during a public hearing. That exhaust could be hurting Farrell and her classmates more than scientists previously understood....

Were we to attend a 16th-century court banquet in France or England, the food would seem strange indeed to anyone accustomed to traditional Western cooking. Dishes might include blancmange—a thick puree of rice and chicken moistened with milk from ground almonds and then sprinkled with sugar and fried pork fat. Roast suckling pig might be accompanied by a cameline sauce, a side dish made of sour grape juice thickened with bread crumbs, ground raisins and crushed almonds and spiced with cinnamon and cloves....

When the COVID pandemic led to widespread economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020, many media outlets and pundits speculated this might lead to a baby boom. But it appears the opposite has happened: birth rates declined in many high-income countries amid the crisis, a new study shows. Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U....

The idea was born in Mexico, in the year 2000. It was pure improvisation by Paul Crutzen, one of the world’s most respected scientists. The Dutch scholar was widely known for arguing that all-out atomic war would trigger a “nuclear winter” lethal to plant and animal life across the planet, and he had won a Nobel Prize for research into another global threat: human-caused destruction of Earth’s ozone layer. In Mexico he was listening to experts discuss evidence for changes in the global environment that had occurred throughout the Holocene, a distinct epoch that geologists say began 11,700 years ago and continues today....

Many physicists are great at figuring out how the world works, but less adept at describing those workings to a nontechnical audience. Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, is an exception to that stereotype. Greene is known for his popular books, which have exposed the complex ideas of string theory and quantum physics to a wide audience. With a new four-part NOVA miniseries, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which begins airing November 2 at 9:00 P....

Less than two hundred years ago, schizophrenia emerged from a tangle of mental disorders known simply as madness. Yet its diagnosis remains shrouded in ambiguity. Only now is the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatrists’ primary guidebook, shedding the outdated, nineteenth-century descriptions that have characterized schizophrenia to this day. “There is substantial dissatisfaction with schizophrenia treated as a disease entity, it’s symptoms are like a fever—something is wrong but we don’t know what,” says William Carpenter, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland and chair of the manual’s Psychotic Disorder Workgroup....

I sat at a piano in a sun-filled modern church. The audience—other young pianists and their parents—watched as I played the first eight notes of a piece by composer Edvard Grieg. At the ninth note, I froze. I tried again: da dee dee dee, da-da dee dee. Silence. On the third try, chords tumbled from my fingers, and the piece flowed from there. That event at age 14 was scarring, and I soon stopped taking piano lessons....

Miniature human organs made by 3D printing could create a “body on a chip” that enables better drug testing. That futuristic idea has become a new bioprinting project backed by $24 million from the U.S. Department of Defense. The 2-inch “body on a chip” would represent a realistic testing ground for understanding how the human body might react to dangerous diseases, chemical warfare agents and new drugs intended to defend against biological or chemical attacks....