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The novel coronavirus has upended our world over the past several months, forcing people to learn how to work in entirely new ways. For scientists in particular, Isaac Newton has repeatedly been held up as a model of epidemic-induced productivity because he spent his 1666 “year of miracles” avoiding the plague in the English countryside and developing his ideas on gravity, optics and calculus. But isolation and quiet contemplation make up only one model of science during plague times and one that few of us can emulate....

Editor’s Note: Each year, the Bickel & Brewer/NYU International Public Policy Forum directs a policy position at high schools worldwide for debate, pro or con. This year, organizers issued a climate-related challenge: “Resolved: Adaptation should be the most urgent response to climate change.” 213 teams from 34 states and 29 countries responded, each writing 2,800-word essays making the case for their position. The following are two essays that survived the first round—one from Bozeman, Mont....

The kinds of bacteria that can cause food poisoning lurk all around us. These germs can be especially easy to pick up when traveling internationally as well as in places, such as children’s day cares, which are hard to keep clean. The infections usually clear up on their own but sometimes require hospitalizations and hefty doses of antibiotics to expunge. Unfortunately, the bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to treatment. The latest bad news came in April when the U....

Greenland is in the midst of one of its strongest melting events on record, as a major heat wave—the same one that scorched much of Europe last month—grips the Arctic. Ice sheet experts have been keeping careful watch as the event unfolds, taking note of its extraordinary progress. Throughout July, Greenland lost an estimated total of 197 billion metric tons of ice, researcher Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute tweeted early Wednesday morning....

The world is on track for dangerous climate change, having nearly lost room for further pollution in the mix of gases that make up the atmosphere. Despite a rise in clean, renewable energy supplies in certain countries, and a partial shift from coal to natural gas in others, global greenhouse gas pollution continues to rise—and at an increasing pace in the most recent years. “Economic and population growth are drivers for emissions and they have outpaced the improvements of energy efficiency,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and co-chair of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)....

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane....

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Middle East’s protracted conflicts have caused a region-wide health crisis that goes beyond war wounds to heightened resistance to antibiotics and a collapse in vaccination drives, leading to a resurgence of diseases tamed in peacetime. Health threats are so varied that one of the Middle East’s main teaching hospitals, the American University of Beirut Medical Centre, has introduced a conflict-medicine programme to equip students to cope in an environment afflicted by chaos....

When I first met Julia, she was the most anxious, depressed child I had ever seen. Twelve years old, she had stopped going to school and seldom left her apartment. Her eyes were big with fright. When she spoke, it was in a very soft, crackly whisper, and she would stammer, as if struggling to find words. Julia was terrified that anyone who might see her would know instantly that something was wrong with her....

These services are gaining traction as a growing number of city dwellers expect immediate or scheduled delivery for just about everything. Between 2016 and 2017 online retail sales in the U.S. increased by 16 percent. Meal-kit companies are proliferating and grocery stores are making an increasing percentage of their sales online. On the final leg of all these deliveries, called the last mile, humans on bicycles, motorized scooters or large delivery trucks typically ferry packages....

The human family tree just got a little more luxuriant and a lot more interesting. Scientists say fossils discovered in a cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines represent a previously unknown branch of humanity, a species they call Homo luzonensis. The remains reveal a tiny variety of human with a number of startlingly primitive traits that lived as recently as 50,000 to 67,000 years ago, overlapping in time with our own species, Homo sapiens, as well as other hominins (members of the human family) including the Neandertals, Denisovans and Homo floresiensis....

Privacy is hard to come by these days, particularly on the Internet, where every time you Google something your desires are recorded for posterity—or at any rate, for advertisers. Internet search companies say they protect their clients’ privacy by encrypting personal information and by using numbers instead of names to give their users anonymity. The problem is that anonymization is not always effective. AOL user number 4417749 found this out the hard way in 2006 when AOL decided to publish online a list of 20 million Web searches, including hers and those of 657,000 other users....

The drug known on the streets as crystal meth could increase the risk of stroke and major tears in neck arteries, neurologists report. With help from his colleagues, neurologist Wengui Yu, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, examined two women, ages 29 and 36, both of whom used methamphetamine and then suddenly experienced weakness and difficulty in speaking. Brain scans revealed both women had suffered severe strokes from tears in the inner lining of one of the major arteries in the neck, an injury known as carotid artery dissection....

It is one of the most evocative ancient corpses ever discovered: a 46-year-old man with an arrow wound in his left shoulder, whose body and belongings came to rest in a high mountain pass some 5,000 years ago. Ever since hikers first spotted the remains of Ötzi the Iceman, as he is known, emerging from the melting ice in the Ötztal Alps near the Austrian-Italian border in 1991, scientists have been working to determine how he died and what he was doing in such a remote spot....

By Geoff Brumfiel The magnitude-9.0 earthquake rocked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station at 2:46 p.m. on 11 March, but the real emergency began an hour later. A wall of water swept across the site, washing away power lines and the fuel tanks for the emergency backup generators designed to take over if grid power failed. Inside the control room of the unit 1 reactor, the lights went out and the 1970s-vintage analogue gauges drifted to zero....

Many Americans root for their hometowns, whether they do so by supporting a sports team, participating in local government or just bragging about their origins and environs. Even those who have lukewarm feelings about where they live would agree on one thing: not all cities are created equal. As part of its “Cities” special issue, Scientific American has gathered lists ranking metropolises across the U.S. on aspects of green living, pollution, health and technology....

I turned this column in very late. I just couldn’t get started writing it. Low energy. You know how it is. Fortunately, my editor can take no action against me, because my lateness, I was delighted to discover, was in fact brought about by a disease: I clearly suffer from “motivational deficiency disorder.” The British Medical Journal, the praises of which were sung in this space in March, reported on this novel malaise in its April 1 issue....

As the U.S. continues to grapple with the novel coronavirus pandemic, another infectious respiratory disease is already looming: influenza. Flu season typically begins around November in the northern hemisphere, and the combined burden of the illness and COVID-19 could overwhelm hospitals and testing sites. The good news is that a safe and effective flu vaccine is already available to everyone aged six months and older. “The answer to the question ‘Why should you get a flu vaccine?...

What we think of as the Internet–e-mail, the Web, instant messaging–is in reality a set of applications that run over the network the way a word processor runs on a computer. The bits those applications transfer are carried by the physical infrastructure provided by telephone companies such as Verizon and AT&T, cable outfits such as Comcast, and even electric utility firms. Now those same Internet access providers want to charge the largest content providers for premium access—in essence, an extra fee for the use of a digital “fast lane” to reach customers....

SAN DIEGO—Parts of San Diego County resembled an inferno yesterday as nine fires roared along the edges of suburbs and through the countryside. In the afternoon, thick, black smoke spiraled into the air above San Marcos, 40 miles northeast of San Diego International Airport, while firefighters battled a spate of new flare-ups in the chaparral-covered hillsides below. The fires have forced tens of thousands to evacuate, including personnel from the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton....

The bacteria that inhabit our guts have become key players for neuroscientists. A growing body of research links them to a wide array of mental and neurological disorders—from anxiety and depression to schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Now a study in mice published this week in Nature Medicine suggests that striking the right microbial balance could cause changes in the immune system that significantly reduce brain damage after a stroke—the second leading cause of both death and disability for people around the globe....