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Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of nuclear fission? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? The limitations on growth of nuclear power are not technical, at least for the current generation of advanced reactors....

The Black Death, a plague that first devastated Europe in the 1300s, had a silver lining. After the ravages of the disease, surviving Europeans lived longer, a new study finds. An analysis of bones in London cemeteries from before and after the plague reveals that people had a lower risk of dying at any age after the first plague outbreak compared with before. In the centuries before the Black Death, about 10 percent of people lived past age 70, said study researcher Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University of South Carolina....

Cobalt in plastic building blocks and baby bibs. Ethylene glycol in dolls. Methyl ethyl ketone in clothing. Antimony in high chairs and booster seats. Parabens in baby wipes. D4 in baby creams. An Environmental Health News analysis of thousands of reports from America’s largest companies shows that toys and other children’s products contain low levels of dozens of industrial chemicals, including some unexpected ingredients that will surprise a public concerned about exposure....

Between cross-talk and insults, climate change got more attention last night than in any other presidential debate in history. Voters might not have noticed. The bare-knuckle bar fight of a presidential debate was nearing the end when it turned to fuel economy standards and the Clean Power Plan. The candidates presented starkly different climate agendas. But their policies were buried under a night’s worth of inflammatory statements—from President Trump denouncing the election’s legitimacy and telling white supremacists to “standby,” to Democratic nominee Joe Biden snapping, “Will you shut up, man....

You might assume that listening and speaking are different processes, but more and more evidence suggests these tasks are inextricably linked. The latest piece of the puzzle comes from a study of babies with teething toys. The findings support a theory that our perception of speech is dependent on brain areas that control mouth movements. Alison Bruderer, a cognitive scientist at the University of British Columbia, gave six-month-old infants who were not yet starting to talk common teething toys that immobilized their tongue....

Brain on drugs: SciCafe American Museum of Natural History (Free admission, www.amnh.org/SciCafe It’s 7 P.M. in the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and almost time for the monthly SciCafe. Tonight’s topic: the effects that illegal drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine have on the brain. The speaker is Columbia University psychologist Carl Hart. After a short introduction, Hart hits the audience with a doozy....

Dear EarthTalk: I’m concerned about toxic ingredients in my cleaning supplies, especially now that I have young children. Where can I find safer alternatives?—Betsy, East Hartford, Conn. It is true that many household cleaners contain potentially toxic substances, so parents especially should make an effort to keep them out of the reach of children or, better yet, replace them with safer alternatives. “We use a wide array of scents, soaps, detergents, bleaching agents, softeners, scourers, polishes and specialized cleaners for bathrooms, glass, drains and ovens to keep our homes sparkling and sweet-smelling,” reports the Organic Consumers Association....

On former pineapple fields outside of Honolulu, an industrial tube has been erected, ensconced in a steel scaffold. Dwarfed by the nearby oil refinery, the modest tube represents an attempt to one day wean Hawaii from imported oil. It is the nation’s first dedicated biorefinery, employing high heat to turn plant matter into oil, followed by chemical catalysis to upgrade that oil into a usable fuel, just like the much larger refinery down the road....

A procedure increasingly used to treat obesity by reducing the size of the stomach also reprograms the intestines, making them burn sugar faster, a study in diabetic and obese rats has shown. If the results, published today in Science, hold true in humans, they could explain how gastric bypass surgery improves sugar control in people with diabetes. They could also lead to less invasive ways to produce the same effects....

From Nature magazine. Batches of the world’s first vaccine against the hepatitis E virus began rolling out of a Chinese factory last week, promising to stem a disease that every year infects about 20 million people and claims 70,000 lives. The vaccine is being hailed as a victory for an unusual public–private partnership that could set a precedent in China’s burgeoning biotechnology sector, and help to deliver other vaccines for diseases overlooked in the West....

Next year, when two nuclear reactors near Syracuse, N.Y., are shut down for normal refueling operations, technicians will enter their cavernous containment structures looking for signs of aging in the thick steel walls surrounding shrouds of concrete. Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, which runs the Ginna and Nine Mile Point 1 reactors, volunteered for the inspections at the Department of Energy’s request. It is a new phase in a government and industry investigation into the possibilities of running the nation’s 104 nuclear plants for as long as 80 years – twice their expected lifespans when they were originally licensed....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Robotic movement can be awkward. For us humans, a healthy brain handles all the minute details of bodily motion without demanding conscious attention. Not so for brainless robots—in fact, calculating robotic movement is its own scientific subfield. My colleagues here at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design have figured out how to apply an algorithm originally designed to help robots move to an entirely different problem: drug discovery....

Doctors around the world have written a surprising number of prescriptions for testosterone treatment in recent years. Nearly 3 percent of American men aged 40 and older are thought to have received such scripts in 2011—three times the percentage in 2001. (If confirmed, the 2011 ratio could mean that perhaps two million older men in the U.S. have been given prescriptions for testosterone.) Originally intended for men who have difficulty producing sex hormones because of damage or disease in their testes or other parts of the endocrine system, testosterone replacement therapy has become increasingly popular with middle-aged and older men who do not have clear deficits but who nonetheless hope to lessen some of the symptoms of aging, including fatigue, muscle wasting and lack of sex drive....

SOCIAL EXHAUSTION In “The Social Cure,” Jolanda Jetten, Catherine Haslam, S. Alexander Haslam and Nyla R. Branscombe state: “Membership in lots of groups—at home, work, the gym—makes us healthier and more resilient.” But we are not all the same. For extroverts that formula makes sense, but for introverts it does not. Unlike extroverts, who are energized by social mingling, introverts typically find the experience at the least uncomfortable and, more often than not, downright exhausting....

Consumer genetic tests can sometimes result in a terrible surprise appearing in the same report that divulges whether one has a cilantro aversion or wet or dry earwax. Test takers may receive the devastating news that they have a version of a gene—apolipoprotein E epsilon 4 (APOE e4)—that greatly increases their chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease. The shock can be so great that some will seek solace in a support group to help them adjust to the possibility that they could run into cognitive problems beginning in their 50s or 60s....

It’s been a banner year for neutrinos. Last month two physicists won the Nobel Prize for determining that the elusive fundamental particles can switch between three types, or flavors. Now the same finding has netted its discoverers the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics—a $3-million award launched three years ago by billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner. There is one key difference between the two honors, though: the Breakthrough Prize will be split among 1,370 physicists....

By Katherine Bourzac of Nature magazineBits of data travelling the internet have a tough commute – they bounce back and forth between optical signal lines for efficient transmission and electrical signal lines for processing. All-optical routers would be more energy efficient, but their development has been hindered by a lack of optical memory devices. Now, researchers have developed just such a device, paving the way towards a faster, more energy-efficient internet....

In 1985 Australian microbiologist Barry Marshall gobbled a petri dish full of Helicobacter pylori to prove to the world that the bacteria, rather than stress and spicy foods, were the primary cause of stomach ulcers. Two decades later his recklessness was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with his colleague J. Robin Warren. In light of a new study, published in this week’s issue of Nature, it is odd that it took so long to finger H....

Former Texas governor Rick Perry says that he will defend scientists at the US Department of Energy (DOE) if confirmed as its next leader. Perry, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, also says that he would base decisions on “sound science”. And he disavowed a questionnaire from the Trump transition team that sought the names of DOE employees who had worked on climate policy. “I am going to protect all of the science, whether it’s related to the climate or other aspects of what we’re going to be doing,” Perry told a Senate committee during a 19 January hearing on his nomination....

Quantum physics can fly in the face of human intuition—even that of a physicist such as Mario Krenn at the University of Vienna. This counterintuitive quality makes it difficult for researchers to design experiments to explore the field. Now, to avoid intuitive pitfalls, Krenn and his colleagues have devised a computer program to automatically design new quantum experiments that they would not have thought of themselves. The way that all known particles behave can be explained with quantum physics....