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When hospitals want to make a name for themselves, they spend on reputations and technology—on the esteemed surgeon or the top-of-the-line gamma knife and the star radiologist to operate it. Such investments attract publicity as well as patients seeking the best available health care. Lately, though, some hospitals have been making an unexpected discovery. The kinds of expenditures that truly improve patient care are often not directed at the top of their pay scale, with the famous specialists, but rather at the bottom, with the anonymous janitors....

In their waterproof orange overalls, Hannah Perlkin and Emily Tucker look like commercial fishermen or storm-ready sailors. But they are biologists on their way to tide pools along a remote stretch of northern California coast. There they are searching for the cause of a mysterious and unprecedented die-off of sea stars along North America’s Pacific shores. The syndrome took marine scientists by surprise this summer, when sick and dying sea stars — also known as starfish — appeared in a host of locations between Alaska and southern California....

Cosmologists have produced an enormous map of the distribution of dark matter in our Universe, tracing the invisible substance by monitoring its gravitational effects on light. The picture, which maps clumps and voids of dark matter in a patch of sky covering around two million galaxies and showing features hundreds of millions of light years across, was presented by Chihway Chang of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich on April 13 at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, Maryland....

This past spring Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University in South Korea and his colleagues reported stem cell work in which they inserted DNA from skin cells into donated eggs. Some of the fused eggs grew to form blastocysts, an early stage of development from which the researchers harvested stem cells. The small study also highlights in a novel way how the quality of eggs declines with age. Number of egg donors: Younger than age 30: 10 Older than age 30: 8 Percent of eggs fused with DNA that developed into blastocysts from donors: Under 30: 24....

Editor’s Note: The April 2014 issue of Scientific American presents an agenda for exploring the ocean’s deepest trenches, and reports on manned and unmanned submersibles that will dive there to look for exotic creatures, evidence of how tsunamis get so large, and perhaps the origin of life on earth. Only three humans have made it to the deepest point on the planet, 10,989 meters down. Movie director and explorer James Cameron did it in 2012....

In science, it’s not enough to think something is so. Researchers must show that what we believe to be true is in fact true, proven through statistically significant and reproducible results. Questioning assumptions is, after all, what science is about. Nonetheless, some studies really take the cake in the “duh” department, discovering things that were already obvious. Here are findings from this year that should come as little surprise. Unsafe sex is more likely after drinking Drinking too much alcohol can impair decision-making....

Earth’s magnetic north and south poles have flip-flopped many times in our planet’s history—most recently, around 780,000 years ago. Geophysicists who study the magnetic field have long thought that the poles may be getting ready to switch again, and based on new data, it might happen earlier than anyone anticipated. The European Space Agency’s satellite array dubbed “Swarm” revealed that Earth’s magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century....

LONDON (Reuters) - The number of people newly diagnosed with HIV in Europe reached its highest level in 2016 since records began, showing the region’s epidemic growing “at an alarming pace”, health officials said on Tuesday. That year, 160,000 people contracted the virus that causes AIDS in the 53 countries that make up the World Health Organization’s European region, the agency said in a joint report with the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)....

As we cope with the economic recession, we’ve all had to make concessions. It’s been “good-bye” to European vacations, organic milk and magazine subscriptions. But there are those things we can’t give up without risking serious illness or death, one of which is prescription medication. In 2004 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated that at least 47 percent of Americans had a prescription filled each month. Besides ordering brand-name pills, powders and sprays from Canada, some people are trying to cut costs by turning to generic medications....

Ciclopirox is currently approved by the FDA as a topical antifungal cream.(Credit:Fougera)A common drug that dermatologists turn to treat nail fungus appears to come with a not-so-tiny side effect: eradicating HIV.In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox completely eradicate infectious HIV from cell cultures, but unlike today’s most cutting-edge antiviral treatments, the virus doesn’t bounce back when the drug is withheld. This means it may not require a lifetime of use to keep HIV at bay....

By Kevin Murphy (Reuters) - A storm front packing funnel clouds, large hail and heavy rains rolled through the Midwest and southern United States on Thursday, leaving in its path downed trees and damaged homes, according to local media reports and police. Officials in Denton, Texas were assessing the damage after an early evening storm uprooted trees and dropped golf ball to softball size hail, according to Ryan Grelle, spokesman for the city’s police department....

By Naomi Lubick of Nature magazine The South Platte River system begins in pristine Rocky Mountain streams and flows east through the Coloradan plateau dotted with cattle ranches, sheep pastures, dairy farms — and human wastewater-treatment plants. In the first quantitative survey of a whole landscape, researchers have mapped how human activities affect the concentrations of antibiotic-resistance genes in the watershed. Amy Pruden of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and her colleagues tracked two integrons — genetic elements that can be traded by microbes or persist on their own in the environment — called sul1 and tet(W), which confer resistance to sulphonamide and tetracycline antibiotics, respectively....

From Nature magazine A series of achievements have stoked excitement about the potential of regenerative medicine, which aims to tackle diseases by replacing or regenerating damaged cells, tissues and organs. A paper in Nature today reports another step towards this goal: the generation of working thyroid cells from stem cells. Sabine Costagliola, a molecular embryologist at the Free University of Brussels, and her team study the development of the thyroid gland, which regulates how the body uses energy and affects sensitivity to other hormones....

The sea horse’s signature “S” shape holds a secret weapon: It is an adaptation for the ambush hunting style favored by these tiny, carnivorous fish, according to new research that looked at the biomechanical properties of the sea horse’s curvaceous neck region. Sea horses evolved from long, narrow swimmers similar to pipefishes. Anchored by their prehensile tails, they hover in sculptural stillness near coral reefs and sea grass beds until a tiny shrimp or larval fish swims by....

Hurricane season officially kicks off June 1, and forecasters expect the Atlantic Ocean will spawn a near-average number of hurricanes in 2016. “Near-normal may sound relaxed and encouraging, but we could be in for more activity than we’ve seen in recent years,” warned Kathryn Sullivan, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Officials with NOAA issued the forecast at a news conference Friday (May 27) in Suitland, Maryland. NOAA has released a hurricane forecast each year since 2000....

Scientists scrambling to understand current climate and pollution trends are peering centuries into the past, long before the dawn of the industrial age. Late this past summer researchers and engineers from France, Italy and Russia extracted three ice cores from France’s Col du Dôme Glacier in a race to preserve valuable information about climate change before rising temperatures wash it away. There is ample reason for concern. According to NASA’s September 2016 climate data, the previous 10 months have been the hottest on record for each of those months out of the last 136 years—since modern weather recording started....

MONROVIA (Reuters) - Liberia, once the epicenter of West Africa’s deadly Ebola epidemic, has just five remaining confirmed cases of the disease, a senior health official said on Friday, highlighting the country’s success in halting new infections. The worst Ebola outbreak on record has killed more than 8,600 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Earlier this year at the height of the outbreak in Liberia, hospitals without beds for new patients were forced to turn away victims and bodies were left in the streets....

Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Landby James McClintock Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 (($26))Before scientists began exploring Antarctica in earnest at the dawn of the 20th century, many had assumed the continent was inhospitable to life. Yet as McClintock, who has made 13 trips to the region as a marine ecologist, notes, it is teeming with such colorful creatures as orange sea butterflies, red and yellow starfish, giant marine worms and 12-inch-diameter sea spiders, not to mention their better-known neighbors: penguins, seals and whales....

Netflix, which has long had a love-hate relationship with the cable industry, could finally be looking to get cozier with US pay-TV providers. According to a report in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Netflix is in talks with Comcast, Suddenlink Communications, and other service providers to offer its online video service as an app on their set-top boxes. Related posts Next in Netflix’s originals queue: A thriller from ‘Damages’ team Nokia to lump free year of Netflix with some Lumia sales Get a refurbished Roku 2 HD for $34....

Second of a two-part series. To see the first part, click here. Solar energy is surging in the United States, but the biggest boost isn’t coming from better hardware. Instead, innovative business models and cutting red tape are the seeds that need to be planted for the solar energy sector to bloom. The technology behind solar power continues to ramp up in performance and drop in price. As it does so, the soft costs—permitting, financing, installation—are making up a bigger portion of the price tag for new projects....