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Pink salmon are providing researchers with sobering hints to how carbon dioxide-induced acidity could affect freshwater fish species by the end of the 21st century. A study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change showed that early exposure to high levels of CO2 during the larval stage of development had significant negative effects on the fish’s size, metabolism and ability to sense threats in their environment. The study was among the first to look at how different CO2 levels could affect fish larvae in fresh water, according to the lead author, Michelle Ou, a former master’s student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver....

Edited by Dava Sobel Absent of taproot, the black spruce leans madly where permafrost slumps into thermokarst. Who wouldn’t fall down soused when the ground beneath began to melt, to buckle and sink? Who wouldn’t drink? In the boreal forests, in a landscape staggered with lurching birches, ice is a memory, while farther north, where glaciers begin to thin, ice is memory, or the keeper of memories, a kind of collective mind in which buried deep are layers of ancient volcanic ash, soot from fires primeval, banked bubbles of archaic air— stories stored, frozen, in cerulean cerebral cortex, a vortex stilled, which soon may spill....

For someone who’s not a Sherlock superfan, cognitive neuroscientist Janice Chen knows the BBC’s hit detective drama better than most. With the help of a brain scanner, she spies on what happens inside viewers’ heads when they watch the first episode of the series and then describe the plot. Chen, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, has heard all sorts of variations on an early scene, when a woman flirts with the famously aloof detective in a morgue....

Dust on earthly objects is often an indicator of antiquity. But that is not always the case for cosmic objects, some of which have quite a bit of dust despite their relative youth. Galaxies out toward the edge of the visible universe, so distant that astronomers see them as they existed less than a billion years after the big bang, seem to already harbor large quantities of interstellar dust. But just how that dust appeared in such a short time remains unsettled....

Seven years ago a group of senior retired generals broke new ground when they warned climate change poses a serious security threat. Now, those top military leaders say the U.S. and others have not done enough to prepare for the challenge. Writing in a major new report out today, the 16-man military team—including retired four-star Adm. Frank Lee “Skip” Bowman, former director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program; retired Gen. Charles “Chuck” Wald, former deputy commander of the United States European Command; and retired Gen....

Gray, white and wet, an image of the brain by itself can repulse more often than inspire. But when researchers and artists look past its outward appearance, they can reveal thrilling images of the organ that the rest of us would otherwise never see. Although many of these images resulted from lab work and research into how our nervous system functions, they easily stand alone as art—clearly, a neuroscience degree is not necessary to appreciate the brain’s intricacies....

Editor’s note (6/3/11): Technical issues have prevented actual live streaming of the event. A replay instead will be posted later when available. Stuff happens. The weather forecast says it’s sunny, but you just got drenched. You got a flu shot—but you’re sick in bed with the flu. Your best friend from Boston met your other best friend from San Francisco. Coincidentally. What are the odds? Risk, probability, chance, coincidence—they play a significant role in the way we make decisions about health, education, relationships and money....

A wide swath of the central United States is at risk of thunderstorms and possible tornadoes over the next couple of days, according to the National Weather Service. There is severe weather forecasted today (April 8) in two regions of the Midwest and Plains states: from east Indiana to West Virginia, and central and north-central Missouri. Storms are also developing in western Oklahoma, though they’re not severe yet, and meteorologists are predicting more moderate risks in north-central Oklahoma, southeast Kansas and western Missouri....

(Reuters) - Nine people were injured, one critically, when a tornado tore through a trailer park in a northwestern North Dakota county that is part of the state’s oil boom, an official said. The tornado on Monday night smashed 15 recreational vehicles that housed mainly workers who traveled to North Dakota from other states, said Jerry Samuelson, director of emergency management for McKenzie County. One person was taken to Trinity Health in Minot, North Dakota, in critical condition and eight people were treated for minor injuries at McKenzie County Memorial Hospital in Watford City and released, Samuelson said....

Thousands of Brazil’s newborns last year had abnormally tiny heads and potentially debilitating brain damage. In 2015 the country reported nearly 3,000 cases of the incurable condition, called microcephaly—about 20 times more than the prior year. In the nation’s northeast, where most of the cases occurred, government officials have already declared a state of emergency. Now international researchers and Brazilian authorities are rushing to tamp down the problem. The trouble is they are not sure exactly what is causing the phenomenon or how to address it....

MOROGORO, TANZANIA—Richard Costar is worth more dead than alive. Strangers call him “money” or “deal” for the cash they could make by selling his body parts to a witch doctor. On the street he has to be cautious not to travel alone, and even at the age of 22 he feels he must live at home with his uncle, for safety. Costar is one of the many thousands of Tanzanians born with albinism, in which mutations to genes that normally provide instructions for melanin production leave individuals with little or no natural pigment....

A star in a galaxy about 440 million light-years away released in a few seconds more energy than the sun will over the course of its entire lifetime, according to observations made on February 18. A high-energy jet of x-rays shot out from the doomed star’s core and was captured by the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA’s Swift satellite. The satellite relayed the information to astronomers on the ground, and within days a wide array of telescopes turned to the exploding object....

A new type of “clock” can assess chronic inflammation to predict whether someone is at risk of developing age-related disorders such as cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease. The clock measures biological age, which takes health into consideration and can be higher or lower than a person’s chronological age. The inflammatory aging clock (iAge), reported in 2021 in Nature Aging, is one of the first tools of its kind to use inflammation to assess health....

Forget the simple nickel slots of yesteryear. Today’s digital slot machines and poker screens in casinos and at online gambling sites are capable of amassing a wealth of behavioral data on individual players, and they are on the verge of altering game play on the fly. As the software becomes increasingly capable of “thinking” like the gamblers themselves, experts in the gambling research community are working to create machines that will identify and assist problem gamblers, rather than simply pushing players deeper into a financial hole....

The Northeast’s cap-and-trade program has installed its keystone. Now, the question is how long it will stay in place. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) announced last week that his administration had finalized a regulation to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program for power plants encompassing 12 Northeastern states. The move represents a massive expansion of carbon pricing in America—capping power plant emissions in one of the country’s leading electricity-generating states....

The treatment of childhood cancer is one of oncology’s success stories, with five-year survival rates that have shot up from 30% in the 1960s to 80% now — at least in high-income countries. But in a series of articles published today in The Lancet Oncology, experts from around the world warn that in recent years progress has stalled — both in the improvement of survival rates and the mitigation of long-term side effects — and that more than 90% of children who die from cancer are in low- and middle-income countries....

Located an hour’s drive from the city of Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island, Foulden Maar has become one of the world’s most significant but troubled fossil sites. This shallow-sided volcanic crater lake (called a maar) was formed in a violent explosion 23 million years ago—the start of the Miocene epoch, when the climate in this part of the world was much warmer and wetter than it is now. For at least 120,000 years, a rain forest grew around the lake....

Methane gas released as flatulence from livestock is a significant source of greenhouse gas, but entrepreneurs may have found a ready antidote to the problem: garlic. Mootral (“moo” and “neutral”), produced by Neem Biotech in Cardiff, Wales, contains a natural garlic extract—allicin—that when fed to cows and sheep limits the growth of certain methane-producing bacteria in the animals’ digestive systems. In two small trials, methane output in cows and sheep was reduced by 15 percent....

The chemicals BP is now relying on to break up the steady flow of leaking oil from deep below the Gulf of Mexico could create a new set of environmental problems. Even if the materials, called dispersants, are effective, BP has already bought up more than a third of the world’s supply. If the leak from 5,000 feet beneath the surface continues for weeks, or months, that stockpile could run out....

The second of a four-part series. Click here for part one. LEXINGTON, Mass. – Away from curious visitors’ eyes, laboratory staff at a company called 1366 Technologies here are melting purified silicon in a furnace until it reaches the consistency of red-hot lava. Then they skim off wafers of silicon, the platforms for photovoltaic solar modules. This may sound simple, but it isn’t being done in China, in Germany or anywhere else, says 1366 CEO Frank van Mierlo, one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni and technology entrepreneurs behind the startup firm....