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President Trump on Wednesday said he had appointed Vice President Mike Pence to lead the federal government’s response to the novel coronavirus outbreak that has claimed more than 2,400 lives globally and spread to about three dozen countries in recent weeks, shaking global markets and alarming world leaders. Trump’s decision to elevate Pence comes after days of debate over whether the administration should appoint a coronavirus “czar.” Health secretary Alex Azar had previously led the effort, and insisted in a congressional hearing earlier Wednesday that appointing another leader was unnecessary....

One of the U.K.’s top nuclear officials said today that she was told the U.S. will okay plans to build the first nuclear power plants since the accident at Three Mile Island nearly three decades ago. Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, chair of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, said that the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission informed her that the NRC will approve three applications for new nuclear reactors that it’s currently considering....

SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M.—Early July 11, billionaire Richard Branson and five other crewmates briefly launched into space for the first fully crewed spaceflight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane. At 8:40 a.m. local time (10:40 a.m. EDT; 1440 GMT), the crew of Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 test flight mission took off from the company’s Spaceport America facility in New Mexico and flew just above the boundary of space, where the four passengers and two pilots experienced about four minutes of weightlessness....

When Lillian Fowler died in an Ohio nursing home at the age of 108, her relatives were quick to comment on how cheerful she had stayed until the very end. She had played golf into her 80s, became queen of the county fair at 104 and never stopped making friends. Her niece explains that Fowler chose to be happy no matter what her situation: “She would say, ‘You need to blossom where you are planted....

Key concepts Physics Geometry Gravity Center of mass Introduction With a little time, you can probably find the center of simple shapes such as circles and squares pretty easily. But how do you find the “middle” of an irregular shape such as a drawing of a dog or a cat? This project will show you how to do it using nothing but string and paper clips! Background How do you define the exact center of an object?...

There are two fundamental theories in biology: Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the cell theory, the observation that organismic life consists of one or more cells, the atoms of biology. Furthermore, all cells arise from previous cells by cell division, passing on their DNA source code in their genes in the process. Multicellular organisms have taken to this lifestyle with a vengeance, evolving into vast collections of highly diverse cellular communities that work together in a tightly coordinated manner across all organs in ways that escape our understanding and that make up a living being....

In 1955 amateur fossil hunter Francis Tully discovered an exceedingly odd specimen in Mazon Creek, a collecting hotspot near Chicago. Imprinted on Tully’s rock were the remains of a tubular creature with stalk eyeballs and a long mouth apparatus terminating in a feature that resembled an alligator clip. Dubbed the Tully monster, the 300-million-year-old specimen later became Illinois’s official state fossil. Despite its popularity, though, researchers have made neither heads nor tails of it—until now....

The next time an illness like SARS threatens to sicken large numbers of people around the world, airports may have a new tool to help them prevent a pandemic. Transportation officials and public health experts are pilot testing a Web site that calculates the risk that passengers coming off any given flight are carrying an emerging infectious disease. With funding from the Transportation Research Board, part of the National Research Council, a team of investigators at the University of Florida used airline traffic figures, disease risk maps and climate data to come up with its online vector-borne disease airline importation risk (VBD-AIR) tool....

Our least precious bodily fluid may just tell the tale of our collective taste for illicit drugs, if a new technique for sampling sewage for evidence of their use proves effective. Scientists have developed methods for isolating the by-products of drug use that are excreted in urine. “Sewage waters can be considered as a diluted, pooled urine sample,” explains toxicologist Roberto Fanelli of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, whose group has employed mass spectrometry to analyze wastewater in urban rivers....

In 1997 my colleague Sally Wheelwright and I conducted a study involving nearly 2,000 families in the U.K. We included about half these families because they had at least one child with autism, a developmental condition in which individuals have difficulty communicating and interacting with others and display obsessive behaviors. The other families had children with a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome, Down syndrome or language delays but not autism. We asked parents in each family a simple question: What was their job?...

As U.S. EPA finalizes its unprecedented rule aimed at reducing the national power sector’s carbon footprint, the agency is also focusing its aim on another greenhouse gas emitter: airlines. EPA is expected to take a significant step toward regulating the aviation industry’s carbon footprint as soon as this week, by issuing what’s called an endangerment finding. The analysis—“a determination of whether emissions cause or contribute to air pollution which may … endanger public health,” as EPA describes it—would set the stage for an eventual new regulation limiting airplanes’ emissions....

From Nature magazine Fruit bats in Guatemala are hosting a novel subtype of influenza A virus, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The virus — designated H17 — appears to have diverged from known influenza viruses long ago, shedding light on their evolution. Therefore, it seems to pose no immediate threat to humans. However, it is similar enough to other subtypes that genetic exchange with them could pose a risk....

Cycling, a sport that rivals or surpasses baseball in credibility issues when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, is taking a new scientific tack in a bid to polish its tarnished image. The sport’s international governing body, the International Cycling Union (UCI), has been murmuring to the press that doping charges are forthcoming—and soon—courtesy of a newly instituted anti-doping measure known as the biological passport. The passport is an electronic record of an individual athlete’s biological attributes, developed over time from multiple sample collections....

Some experts call the genocide in Darfur the world’s first conflict caused by climate change. After all, the crisis was sparked, at least in part, by a decline in rainfall over the past 30 years just as the region’s population doubled, pitting wandering pastoralists against settled farmers for newly scarce resources, such as arable land. “Is Darfur the first climate change war?” asked economist and Scientific American columnist Jeffrey Sachs at an event at Columbia University in 2007....

During America’s most popular TV event, the Superbowl, one much-anticipated advertisement featuring supermodel Adriana Lima painted a pretty sad state of affairs with regards to love. In an ad for Kia cars, a married couple sleeps side by side and we are given a glimpse into their dreams. While the woman dreams of being swept away by a long-haired hunk on a horse, her husband is speeding down a racetrack in a car while Lima and a horde of bikini-clad women cheer him on....

THINK about what it takes to learn biology. Not textbook biology, the kind you learn in high school with microscopes and dissecting kits. Rather the kind you learn on your own, as a young child encountering the vast and diverse world of living things. How does the human mind link together organisms as varied as hippos and lichen and mosquitoes and rhododendrons? And how do we assemble this diversity into meaningful categories?...

In the early hours of 9 September, 1984, a stranger entered Mrs M’s California home through an open living-room window. Finding Mrs M asleep, he tried to rape her, but fled when other people in the house awoke. Mrs M described her assailant to the police: he was black, weighing about 170 pounds and 5'7” to 5'9” tall, with small braids and a blue baseball cap. Officers cruising her neighborhood spotted someone roughly matching that description standing beside his car a block away from the house....

So I admit I looked for my name online, an egosurfing trip to see how well upstart search engine Bing compared with reigning champ Google. That’s when I discovered my evil twin. Apparently an Internet bot stole my identity and used it to set up a blog and post spam under my name—with entries, at times, supposedly postmarked from the future. Quick, where’s Philip K. Dick when you need him?...

Emergency-response robots have long suffered from having a range of mobility and dexterity comparable to a one-year-old child and a level of autonomy generally limited to completing a single task at a time. Nowhere was this more painfully obvious than in Japan four years ago, after a small squadron of robots was sent to assist workers at the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The machines spent a good deal of time on the sidelines, leaving humans to do the most hazardous work....

The stars, the planets and you and I could just as easily be made of antimatter as matter, but we are not. Something happened early in the universe’s history to give matter the upper hand, leaving a world of things built from atoms and little trace of the antimatter that was once as plentiful but is rare today. A new theory published February 11 in Physical Review Letters suggests the recently discovered Higgs boson particle may be responsible—more particularly, the Higgs field that is associated with the particle....