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YICHANG, China—According to legend, one of China’s ancient emperors—Da Yu, or Yu the Great—changed the course of Chinese history by placing a mountain in front of the Yangtze River, forcing it to flow east through the Middle Kingdom (instead of south like the other great rivers that rise in the same Yunnan region of southwest China). Not to be outdone, the modern Chinese government has undertaken a massive project to control the flow of this ancient waterway, erecting Three Gorges, the world’s largest dam, to block it....

PORT WESTWARD, Ore. – This 900-acre industrial park features a horseshoe-shaped dock of timber and steel that juts out into the Columbia River, an hour’s drive north of Portland. During World War II it shipped bullets and bombs across the Pacific. Now it’s providing ammunition for a new battle: whether to export substantial amounts of coal from the western United States to Asia. “The channel runs deep here. It’s self-scouring, so you don’t have to dredge it,” explained Craig Allison, operations manager for the port, gesturing toward the dark water off the edge of the dock....

A cliff’s collapse likely caused a bright outburst of gas and dust on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2015, scientists announced today (March 21). The observations, captured by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, mark the first time that researchers have drawn a direct link between changes in a comet’s features and outbursts on that same comet. Two studies investigating changes to the comet’s surface as it approached the sun were released today in conjunction with a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas....

Cool, flashy, and hardcore looking wristbands that promise to measure your heart rate, steps, sleep, calories burned, and even stress levels can be seen on everyone these days. And yet, obesity and cardiovascular disease remain on the rise. How can that be? Many fitness researchers and coaches believe that there is a disconnect between the wearable “fitness tracker” market and how people are using them (or rather, not using them). In a nutshell, recording all that data doesn’t necessarily lead to behavior changes, which in the end is the real goal....

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - An endangered female leopard put in a cage to breed was killed by her potential mate, who a day later remained on public display at the Erie Zoo, wildlife officials said on Tuesday.The two Amur leopards, 5-year-old Edgar and 7-year-old Lina, were placed together in an enclosure at the western Pennsylvania zoo on Monday, said Erie Zoo president and CEO Scott Mitchell.Edgar attacked Lina, biting her throat....

Editor’s Note: This article will appear in the July issue of Scientific American. We are posting it early in light of a report today in the journal Science that bears on similar themes. The study, led by Nancy J. Cox of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention describes a molecular analysis of the novel influenza A (H1N1) virus infecting humans in several parts of the world. The authors confirm that the new strain is comprised of segments from swine flu strains known to circulate in Europe, Asia and North America, but that this combination has not previously been seen and appears to have been evolving independently from its parent strains for some time....

Starting Monday, consumers will be able to buy hearing aids directly off store shelves and at dramatically lower prices as a 2017 federal law finally takes effect. Where for decades it cost thousands of dollars to get a device that could be purchased only with a prescription from an audiologist or other hearing professional, now a new category of over-the-counter aids are selling for hundreds of dollars. Walmart says it will sell a hearing aid for as little as $199....

A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by 20 years among adults who experienced six or more particular types of abuse or household dysfunction as kids, while those who suffered fewer types of trauma lost fewer years of life, a large-scale epidemiological study finds. The study, published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, reports that participants who were exposed to six or more different types of adverse childhood events (ACEs), such as physical or sexual abuse, were also 54 percent more likely to die during the 10-year period of the study....

If humans could reanimate one of our ancient ancestors, we could quickly learn much more about how people once went about their lives than any study of dusty bones and artifacts would reveal. Our forebear might even teach us a few old tricks that could be used to help the living. That is in essence what researchers in Germany and Hungary were after when they re-created Harbinger3_DR, a long-extinct precursor of at least two modern human genes: they wanted to watch it operate inside living cells....

People often think of love and lust as polar opposites—love exalted as the binder of two souls, lust the transient devil on our shoulders, disturbing and disruptive. Now neuroscientists are discovering that lust and love work together more closely than we think. Indeed, the strongest relationships have elements of both. The bifurcated treatment of love and lust dates to antiquity. The study of love as an academic subject is nearly a century old, with the sentiment covered in introductory textbooks of social psychology....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineIt is sometimes said that Mike Malin knows Mars better than anyone else on Earth. A more verifiable statement is that Malin has seen more of Mars than anyone on Earth. His company, Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego, California, has designed cameras for every one of NASA’s Mars-orbiting missions since Viking in 1975. Later this week, Malin will see the start of his ninth mission to the red planet, when a launch window opens on November 25 for Curiosity, the $2....

More and more people who want to get away, get their hands dirty and get smarter about organic lifestyles are arranging their vacations through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (www.wwoof.org). The organization publishes online lists of organic farms and gardeners that welcome help. In a typical arrangement, visitors work half a day in exchange for room and board, which varies from a meal and a tent to individual rooms or trailers....

Norway said yesterday it will spend $12 million to expand monitoring of Himalayan glaciers and help the region’s communities adapt to climate change. The Hindu Kush-Himalayas Climate Impact Adaptation Assessment Programme will run for five years, carried out by Norway’s Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, the U.N. Environment Programme and the Katmandu, Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. “The overarching theme is people plagued by either too much or too little water in these regions,” said Bjorn Brede Hansen, deputy director-general of the Section for Environment and Sustainable Development within Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs....

NEW YORK CITY—Say what you will about speed and power—it was TaeTay’s elegant spin moves that allowed the shoebox-size robot to slam its way to victory at the robot sumo tournament here in New York City at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Each time the robot sensed the edge of the ring it would quickly pivot like a top, putting its fanged front end in position to use its opponent’s momentum against it....

When materials scientist Joseph Michael and his team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., trained their high-powered electron microscope on anthrax spore samples the FBI had sent them in February 2002, they made two crucial discoveries: The first confirmed previous findings that the Bacillus anthracis spores mailed to U.S. Senate offices and various media outlets (shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks) contained silicon, a substance used to turn anthrax-causing spores into a biological weapon....

Online video has long been a crucial recruitment and propaganda tool for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as well as al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The videos are inexpensive to make and easy to distribute via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Facing sharp criticism over the situation, these companies claimed last year to be stepping up efforts to use both human employees and artificially intelligent software to find and delete videos promoting violence....

PROFILE NAME Maryanne Wolf TITLE Director, Tufts University Center for Reading and Language Research LOCATION Medford, Mass. You and your colleagues are designing a tablet-based system to help children learn the basics of literacy. Where have you tested it so far? There are two villages in Ethiopia: Wonchi and Wolonchete. There were 20 kids in each village to begin, between four and 12 years old. They are very, very poor. In Wolonchete they walk 2....

Kyle Orwig has been itching to do an experiment that would, in his words, “piss people off.” Orwig, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is an expert on the intricate biology of sperm cells—in particular, how specialized “stem” cells located in the male testes produce sperm. Every so often, however, a genetic flaw prevents these stem cells from completing this process, thus rendering the male infertile. The experiment Orwig has in mind is to use gene-editing technology to fix this flaw in the sperm-forming stem cells and then transplant them back into infertile mice, thereby demonstrating a potential treatment for male infertility....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The mounting flowers and candles in Isla Vista mark the mourning of six university students killed in the mass shooting at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and sympathy for the other 13 who were injured. Families who have lost innocent loved ones will never be the same, and neither will Isla Vista....

This year the world awakened to the fact that the most powerful and sophisticated species on earth is tragically vulnerable to the tiniest and most basic of creatures. Infectious disease specialists have been warning about this for decades. And the threat comes not only from novel viruses, such as the one causing COVID-19, that jump from animals to humans but also from microbial monsters that we have helped to create through our cavalier use of antibiotics: treatment-resistant bacteria such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, sometimes dubbed “Iraqibacter” because so many soldiers returning from Iraq were infected with it....