Science News

Editor's Note: Vienna, Austria-based science writer Chelsea Wald is taking part in a two-week Marine Biological Laboratory journalism fellowship at Toolik Field Station , an environmental research station inside the Arctic circle. To see the current conditions in Toolik, check out the Webcam . [More]

By Alla Katsnelson

A combination gene therapy that endows human stem cells with three ways to resist HIV has passed its first safety test in humans. [More]

HIV infects an estimated 430,000 infants and children worldwide each year. Although many of those cases are contracted from an HIV-positive mother during pregnancy or birth, some 40 percent of infected children get the disease through breast-feeding . But because of health risks associated with formula feeding--especially in resource-poor regions--the World Health Organization still recommends breast-feeding for mothers with HIV/AIDS in the developing world. Left untreated, however, about half of HIV-infected infants die before the age of two. [More]

NEW YORK CITY--Here is how climate change could shut down a city: On the morning of August 8, 2007, a thunderstorm paralyzed the largest rail transit system in the U.S.--New York City's subway--during morning rush hour. Flash floods deposited more than 7,000 kilograms of dirt and debris on tracks that stretch more than 1,350 kilometers and carry 1.5 billion passengers annually. A December 1992 storm had a similar impact, including flooding portions of Lower Manhattan and the East River Drive. [More]

Editor's Note: A team of researchers led by John Kessler , Texas A&M College of Geosciences chief scientist and assistant oceanography professor, has traveled to the Deepwater Horizon disaster area to study the methane leaking into the Gulf of Mexico (along with tens thousands of barrels of crude oil) daily at the site of the damaged Macondo 252 well. Kessler, along with David Valentine (an assistant professor of marine sediment geochemistry, biogeochemistry and geomicrobiology at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and the rest of his colleagues are hoping to come away with a rough estimate of the spill's size by the time his team returns home on June 20, followed by more accurate estimates as they complete their analysis of the information collected. Other objectives of the expedition onboard the RV Cape Hatteras include trying to determine how the methane might be removed from the water (whether eaten by waterborne microorganisms or released into the atmosphere) and how methane concentrations will change over time. Valentine filed the following dispatch. It's the team's third blog post for Scientific American.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 [More]

The Kepler spacecraft , launched in 2009 to scour distant stellar systems for Earth-like planets, has yet to attain that lofty goal, but it is now returning a flood of data about all manner of planets outside the solar system. On June 15, the Kepler team released information on possible planets identified in the first month or so of the spacecraft's three-plus-year mission--a massive set of more than 300 candidates that promises to significantly augment the known catalogue of extrasolar planets. The data were published online at the preprint repository arXiv.org and will be submitted to The Astrophysical Journal . [More]

Take a good look at the intense power of the oil spill .

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said yesterday that he welcomes "vigorous debate" on climate science.

"We who are on the side of the consensus must remind ourselves that the evolution of knowledge thrives on debate," Rajendra Pachauri said in an essay published on the website of the BBC .

How safe was your last meal? If you dined out, you took a significant risk.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates 76 million Americans acquire foodborne illnesses annually. In the U.S., 3,334 incidences of outbreaks from 1998 to 2002 were reported in restaurants or delicatessens according to a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report . And recent research by food safety specialist Ben Chapman of North Carolina State University found that meals prepared in commercial kitchens have been involved in up to 70 percent of food poisoning outbreaks.