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In her home overlooking Charleston, W.Va., and the Kanawha River, Robin Peck, a local foreign language teacher, pops the question: “Do you want to smell the water?” She goes into the bathroom and turns both faucet knobs wide open. “Just wait for it,” she says. Sure enough, a pungent aroma fills the bathroom: black licorice with a hint of industrial chemicals, stifling and nauseating. The odor is the result of a recent chemical contamination episode that has left hundreds of thousands of West Virginians without tap water for nearly a week, sparking a state of emergency that made international headlines....

The findings were published Tuesday in Nature Communications following analysis of data covering 530 areas. The most common tree identified in the study, a variety of palm known to scientists as Iriartea, was also found to hold the most carbon. But the other 181 species identified as the most important for carbon storage weren’t necessarily the most common species in the rainforest. They were species that shared combinations of important features, being relatively abundant, long-living and large-growing....

It wasn’t long after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Tucson, Ariz., that speculation emerged about a possible connection between the shooting and the contemporary U.S. political environment. In a news conference after the January 8 attack, which left six dead, Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik spoke out against inflammatory rhetoric and “the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths.” Across social-media sites and in the mainstream press, numerous commentators noted that Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, had appeared on a list of legislators, each marked with crosshairs on a map, that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s political action committee released in 2010....

The H1N1 pandemic, the Copenhagen climate talks, the restart of the world’s biggest experimental device—2009 sped by many scientifically relevant mile markers. The year also celebrated several important past events: It saw the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species; the 40th anniversary of the first humans on another world; and the 400th of Galileo’s report that proved not all heavenly bodies circle the Earth....

The world changes a little faster these days. As concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tick up year over year, more and more of the sun’s heat gets trapped. That heat affects the planet in a variety of ways: raising global average temperatures, melting ice, increasing downpours, lengthening droughts and more. And this global warming is already transforming some of the places humans hold most dear. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization keeps a list of what it deems world heritage sites: human-made or natural places of “outstanding universal value,” from the Palace of Versailles in France to the Sundarbans mangrove forest in Bangladesh....

Oregon endured the third-largest wildfire in its recorded history last summer. The Bootleg Fire tore through the Upper Klamath Basin, an ecologically sensitive area that is home to multiple threatened and endangered species including the northern spotted owl and two fish—the koptu and c’waam (shortnose sucker and Lost River sucker)—that are culturally vital to the area’s Klamath Tribes. The fire left behind a charred landscape more than twice the size of New York City....

Bill Gates announcing his participation in a Reddit Q&A Monday. (Credit: Twitter) “Hello Reddit - I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft founder. Ask me anything.” And so they did. Fresh from helping to choose the next CEO to run the company he co-founded nearly four decades ago, Gates descended from the mountaintop to mix it up with the new media masses with his second Reddit appearance in the last year....

China’s western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution....

CHONGQING—This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. By Harry Cliff, University of Cambridge The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs for their work that explains why subatomic particles have mass. They predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle, which was confirmed last year by experiments conducted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider....

Many athletes credit drugs with improving their performance, but some of them may want to thank their brain instead. Mounting evidence suggests that the boost from human growth hormone (HGH), an increasingly popular doping drug, might be caused by the placebo effect. In a new double-blind trial funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency, in which neither researchers nor participants knew who was receiving HGH and who was taking a placebo, the researchers asked participants to guess whether or not they were on the real drug....

28.5%—The drop in telephone calls placed to the U.S.’s 55 poison-control centers between 2009 and 2013, according to the most recent report by the American Association of Poison Control Centers. The organization says the steady decline could be the result of the falling U.S. birthrate or growing preference for text messages over phone calls. It might also suggest that more Americans are instead searching the Internet for health advice—even in emergencies....

Daylight Savings Time The extra hour of sunshine comes at a steep price Daylight savings time has marginally scientific origins: its inventor, New Zealand naturalist George Vernon Hudson, published two papers in the late 19th century arguing for a seasonal two-hour clock shift to “more fully utilize the long days of summer.” The primary appeal, though, has always been to save on energy costs, because extra daylight in the evening reduces the need for lighting....

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazineA massive extinction resulting from habitat loss is under way–but perhaps not as rapidly as is often predicted.A paper published today in Nature explains why past predictions of extinction rates–for example, a 1980 US National Research Council report predicting losses of millions of species by the year 2000–have not been realized.“We have mathematically proven why these ‘guesstimates’ are flawed,” says Fangliang He, an ecologist currently at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and a co-author of the latest study....

After completing six long rounds of chemotherapy, 75-year-old Pedro R. L. received the news he and his family had been hoping for: his chronic lymphocytic leukemia was in complete remission. But while his body was still recovering, he contracted COVID-19. He was admitted to the Quirónsalud Madrid University Hospital on January 30, 2021. Initial treatments failed, and by February 25 he had developed severe pneumonia. That’s when his doctor, Pablo Guisado, recommended they try plitidepsin, a potent antiviral compound in a phase 3 clinical trial for treating hospitalized COVID patients....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine Beetles have an impressive ability to walk underwater. It is all down to tiny bubbles trapped between hair-like structures on their feet. The insects are often observed clinging tenaciously to smooth surfaces such as leaves, hanging on even when those surfaces are vertical. Naoe Hosoda, a materials scientists at the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and Stanislav Gorb, who studies biomechanics at the University of Kiel in Germany, have now shown that beetles can even keep their footing underwater....

Hillary Clinton’s inevitable presidential campaign is now official, and the former secretary of state heads into battle with a Twitter army of 3.2 million followers and counting. The other two declared candidates, Republican senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, have 432,000 and 539,000 followers respectively. On a bar chart (see below), it looks like a huge gap but in reality, it may mean absolutely nothing. A study of Twitter use during the 2012 campaign suggested that only a tiny subset of followers were of any value....

By Alphonso Toweh and James Harding Giahyue MONROVIA (Reuters) - Liberia confirmed a third Ebola case on Thursday, nearly two months after it was declared Ebola free, and officials said they were investigating whether the disease had managed to lurk in animals before resurfacing. Dr Moses Massaquoi, case management team leader for Liberia’s Ebola task force, said the three villagers who had tested positive for the disease had shared a meal of dog meat, which is commonly eaten in Liberia....

By Barbara Liston ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - When the Atlantic hurricane season opens June 1, national forecasters will roll out a new feature: color-coded and broadcast-ready maps to graphically show the potential for flooding from storm surges. “We are not a storm surge savvy nation. Yet storm surge is responsible for over half the deaths in hurricanes. So you can see why we’re motivated to try something new,” said Jamie Rhome, storm surge specialist for the National Hurricane Center in Miami....

Watch a pigeon dodge traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian. The bird seems to be the very embodiment of unfulfilled potential—it can fly, and yet it walks. Of course, during World War II, pigeons did a fair amount of flying, carrying messages between the front and command posts. But full pigeon promise was never realized. Because the birds were denied the chance to show what they could do in the air—as pilots....