2 Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize In Chemistry For Genome Editing Research

"The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded this year to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on "genetic scissors" that can cut DNA at a precise location, allowing scientists to make specific changes to specific genes."

"'This technology has had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, is contributing to new cancer therapies and may make the dream of curing inherited diseases come true,' the Nobel Committee said in announcing the prize."

"Already, doctors have used the technology to experimentally treat sickle cell disease, with promising results."

"While some research advances take decades for people to fully appreciate how transformative they are, that wasn't the case for this new tool, known as CRISPR-Cas9."

"'Once in a long time, an advance comes along that utterly transforms an entire field and does so very rapidly,' says Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, which has long supported Doudna's research. 'You cannot walk into a molecular biology laboratory today, working on virtually any organism, where CRISPR-Cas9 is not playing a role in the ability to understand how life works and how disease happens. It's just that powerful.'"

3 Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize In Physics For Discoveries Related To Black Holes

"Perhaps fittingly for the year 2020, the Nobel Prize in physics has recognized research on black holes."

"The prize was awarded to Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, for demonstrating that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes; and to Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles, for the discovery of a compact object at the center of the Milky Way galaxy that governs the orbits of stars, for which a black hole is the only known explanation."

"Black holes are just what the name suggests — places where the gravitational pull is so great that nothing, not even light, can escape. Their existence was first suggested shortly after Albert Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity in 1915. The theory postulates that the force of gravity is actually a warping of space-time caused by massive things like stars and planets. The theory suggested that there could exist an object so massive that it would cause space-time to collapse, trapping everything that came near it."

Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

"The past is obdurate," Stephen King wrote in his book about a man who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. "It doesn't want to be changed."

"Turns out, King might have been on to something."

"Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you went back in time and did something in the past that endangered the future. Perhaps one of the most famous pop culture examples is in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly goes back in time and accidentally stops his parents from meeting, putting his own existence in jeopardy."

"But maybe McFly wasn't in much danger after all. According a new paper from researchers at the University of Queensland, even if time travel were possible, the paradox couldn't actually exist."

"Researchers ran the numbers and determined that even if you made a change in the past, the timeline would essentially self-correct, ensuring that whatever happened to send you back in time would still happen."

In The Era Of Hygiene, 'Clean' Author Makes The Case For Showering Less

"James Hamblin is tired of being asked if he's smelly."

"Hamblin, a physician and health reporter, has been fielding the question since 2016, when the article he wrote about his decision to stop showering went viral. The piece outlines compelling reasons why one might want to spend less time sudsing up: Cosmetic products are expensive, showering uses a lot of water, and the whole process takes up valuable time."

"Perhaps most importantly, bathing disrupts our skin's microbiome: the delicate ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, mites and viruses that live on (and in) our body's largest organ. Most of these microbes are thought to be benign freeloaders; they feast on our sweat and oils without impacting our health. A small number cause harmful effects, ranging in severity from an irksome itch to a life-threatening infection. And some help us out by, for example, preventing more dangerous species from taking up residence."

"Researchers are in the early days of developing the full picture of just how substantially this diverse living envelope influences our overall health, and many of their findings suggest that the microbes on our skin are even more important than was previously understood. Skin has long been considered to be our first line of defense against pathogens, but new studies suggest that the initial protection may come from the microbes that live on its surface."

Hero Rat Wins A Top Animal Award For Sniffing Out Land Mines

"For the first time, one of Britain's highest animal honors has been awarded to a rat. The animal has detected dozens of land mines in Cambodia and is believed to have saved lives."

"Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who has been trained by the nonprofit APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed."

"Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land – an area about the size of 20 soccer fields. In the process, he has found 39 land mines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance."

"In a virtual ceremony Friday, the U.K. charity PDSA gave Magawa its gold medal for his lifesaving work."

Scientists Say A Mind-Bending Rhythm In The Brain Can Act Like Ketamine

"Out-of-body experiences are all about rhythm, a team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature."

"In mice and one person, scientists were able to reproduce the altered state often associated with ketamine by inducing certain brain cells to fire together in a slow, rhythmic fashion."

"'There was a rhythm that appeared, and it was an oscillation that appeared only when the patient was dissociating,' says Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford University."

"Dissociation is a brain state in which a person feels separated from their own thoughts, feelings and body. It is common in people who have some mental illnesses or who have experienced a traumatic event. It can also be induced by certain drugs, including ketamine and PCP (angel dust)."

"The study linking dissociation to brain rhythms represents "a big leap forward in understanding how these drugs produce this unique state," says Dr. Ken Solt, an anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Solt is the co-author of an article that accompanied the study but was not involved in the research."

"The finding also could be a step toward finding non-drug methods to control states of consciousness, Solt says."

A Possible Sign Of Life Right Next Door To Earth, On Venus

"Scientists say they've detected a gas in the clouds of Venus that, on Earth, is produced by microbial life."

"The researchers have racked their brains trying to understand why this toxic gas, phosphine, is there in such quantities, but they can't think of any geologic or chemical explanation."

"The mystery raises the astonishing possibility that Venus, the planet that comes closest to Earth as it whizzes around the sun, might have some kind of life flourishing more than 30 miles up in its yellow, hazy clouds."

"Nothing could live on what passes for land on Venus; its smooth volcanic plains are a scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead, where the temperatures exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit. High in the clouds, however, the pressures and temperatures and acidity levels would be less intense — though still vile."

In Tuscany, Renaissance-Era Wine Windows Are Made For Social Distancing

"Over the centuries, Europe has suffered through plagues, pestilence and the Black Death."

"When Italy became the first Western country to be hit by the coronavirus pandemic, the city of Florence discovered that one of its unique architectural quirks was perfect for coronavirus-era social distancing."

"A walk through its narrow, winding streets provides a lesson in Italian Renaissance architecture. And a close look at many of the buildings reveals pint-sized windows in arched openings framed in the local sandstone, called pietra serena, 'serene stone.'"

"On Via delle Belle Donne, a German guide points out a wine window to a group of tourists. The window is topped with an inscription in stone, listing the opening hours when wine was served here in the past."

"This reporter's guide is Mary Forrest, an American who has lived in Florence for decades. The inscription "is probably dating from the 1600s," she says. She is one of three founders of an association born five years ago to promote knowledge and appreciation of wine windows — of which many Florentines, until recently, knew close to nothing."

In Rural Fukushima, 'The Border Between Monkeys And Humans Has Blurred'

"Shuichi Kanno rips tape off the top of a large cardboard box at his house in the mountains in Fukushima prefecture in Japan. He opens the box and rustles around to pull out pack after pack of long, thin Roman candle fireworks. The words "Animal Exterminating Firework" are written in Japanese on the side of each canister."

"Kanno has been battling hordes of macaque monkeys that have encroached upon his neighborhood in a rural area of Minamisoma. These fireworks are his main deterrent — not to cause the monkeys any physical harm, but to scare them away with a loud bang. That is, until they regain their confidence and come back a few days later, which they do like clockwork, Kanno says."

"'In the early morning while I'm sleeping, just when I'm about to wake up, I hear the noise,' the 79-year-old says in Japanese as he stacks the fireworks on his living room table. 'The sound of the monkeys running around on the roof, getting into the gardens, eating all my food. I have to fight them.'"

Coffee Keeps Its Mojo: Producers Overcome Pandemic Obstacles

"Coffee lovers, here's something to be grateful about. Unlike paper towels, disinfectant or yeast, coffee has never been hard to find during the pandemic."

"It has remained widely available on supermarket shelves even though COVID-19 has been particularly bad in some of the world's largest coffee growing nations. Brazil, which has recorded more cases than any nation other than the United States, is the world's top producer of coffee. India, Mexico and Colombia all rank in the top ten globally for both COVID cases and coffee production. Other major coffee exporters including Peru and Uganda have found themselves cut off by border closures and lockdowns."

"'It's natural to think that the harvesting of the coffee crops may be disrupted or perhaps badly disrupted,' says Steven Hurst, a coffee trader based in London. "But quite honestly and quite frankly, we've seen relatively little, if any, evidence of that.'"

"Hurst's company Mercanta, The Coffee Hunters, buys coffee from all over the world. He says the origin of the beans is a central part of the product he's selling. It's not just Arabica beans, it's shade-grown Arabica from Peru. Or it's coffee from a small farmer collective in Uganda."

Everything Is Unprecedented. Welcome To Your Hotter Earth

The upshot of climate change is that everyone alive is destined to experience unprecedented disasters. The most powerful hurricanes, the most intense wildfires, the most prolonged heat waves and the most frequent outbreaks of new diseases are all in our future. Records will be broken, again and again.

But the predicted destruction is still shocking when it unfolds at the same time.

This week, Americans are living through concurrent disasters. In California, more than 200,000 people were under evacuation orders because of wildfires, and millions are breathing smoky air. On the Gulf Coast, people weathered a tropical storm at the beginning of the week. Two days later, about half a million were ordered to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Laura. We're six months into a global pandemic, and the Earth is on track to have one of its hottest years on record.

Climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii says if our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer.

"There is not a single ending that is good," he says. "There's not going to be a happy ending to this movie."

Fallen Boulder Reveals 313 Million-Year-Old Fossil Footprints At Grand Canyon

"A geologist has discovered a pair of fossil footprints that researchers say are the oldest of their kind in the Grand Canyon, dating back 313 million years."

"Researchers said the fossils show two animals passing at different times along the slope of a sand dune."

"Allan Krill, a visiting professor from Norway, was hiking along a trail with a group of students in 2016 when he came across a fallen boulder containing the markings, according to a National Park Service news release."

"The boulder, dropped there in a cliff collapse, held tracks that intrigued Krill who then sent a set of photos to his colleague, Stephen Rowland, a paleontologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas."

"After extensive research, Rowland called the discovery 'by far the oldest vertebrate tracks in Grand Canyon.'"

"'More significantly,' he added, 'they are among the oldest tracks on Earth of shelled-egg-laying animals, such as reptiles, and the earliest evidence of vertebrate animals walking in sand dunes.'"

Transparent Public Toilets Unveiled In Tokyo Parks — But They Also Offer Privacy

"The idea of using a public bathroom with see-through walls may sound like the stuff of nightmares. But a famous Japanese architect is hoping to change that view, using vibrant colors and new technology to make restrooms in Tokyo parks more inviting."

"'There are two things we worry about when entering a public restroom, especially those located at a park,' according to architect Shigeru Ban's firm. 'The first is cleanliness, and the second is whether anyone is inside.'"

"Transparent walls can address both of those worries, Ban believes, by showing people what awaits them inside. After users enter the restroom and lock the door, the powder room's walls turn a powdery pastel shade — and are no longer see-through."

"'Using a new technology, we made the outer walls with glass that becomes opaque when the lock is closed, so that a person can check inside before entering,' the Nippon Foundation says."

The group is behind the Tokyo Toilet project, enlisting world-famous architects to create toilets "like you've never seen."

Everyone Needs A Buddy. Even Sharks 

"Sharks are often maligned as Hollywood monsters, the lone wolves lurking in the deep, hunting for prey. (Cue Jaws theme song)."

"But that caricature of sharks is increasingly out of step with what scientists are learning about the animals. Instead, they say, some species of sharks are social creatures who return day after day to a group of the same fellow sharks."

"'They form these spatially structured social groups where they hang out with the same individuals over multiple years,' says Yannis Papastamatiou, who runs the Predator Ecology and Conservation Lab at Florida International University."

"Papastamatiou's team studied gray reef sharks populating the waters off Palmyra Atoll, a sunken island ringed by coral reefs, in the central Pacific Ocean between the Hawaiian Islands and Fiji. They attached small location transmitters to 41 sharks, which allowed them to track the animals' movements around the reef. They also outfitted two sharks with small video cameras on their fins, to get what Papastamatiou calls a shark's-eye view of their daily lives."

"After tracking the sharks for four years, the researchers found that the same groupings of sharks — ranging from a couple up to as many as 20 — frequently returned to the same parts of the reef over and over again. They also found that some of the groups stuck together for the duration of the study — longer than previous studies have observed."

Good Thinking: How Rodin Ensured The Financial Future Of His Paris Museum

"Museums around the world are struggling because of the coronavirus: New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is projecting $100 million in losses this year, and even France's publicly funded Louvre has lost 40 million euros following a four-month closure."

"Musée Rodin in the southwest corner of Paris has a unique economic model to keep it running ... and it involves selling some of the artwork."

"The 19th-century sculptor's most famous bronze statue, The Thinker, sits amid pink and white roses in a spacious hedge lined garden, with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. If you recall seeing The Thinker elsewhere, you're right. Thanks to Rodin's economic ingenuity, this statue and many of his others also can be found in galleries around the world."

"When he died in 1917, Rodin left his estate to the museum, including the original plaster molds of more than 100 sculptures. "Rodin gave the economical system so that the museum could live," museum communications director Clémence Goldberger explains."

"The museum still uses these molds to recast new bronze sculptures and sell them — and with a projected loss of 3 million euros this year, the molds have never proved more valuable."

"Just don't go calling what they produce copies."

"'Legally they are originals,' says Didier Rykner, an art historian and founder of the website La Tribune de L'Art. 'But you know, they are originals from Rodin and they were made one year ago — so what is original and what is not?'"

"Rykner acknowledges the existential questions that arise from this practice, but says you can't blame the museum for utilizing a system the artist himself put in place."

Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks After Midnight. NASA Says It's 'One Of The Best'

"If you're tired of binge-watching TV during the pandemic, Mother Nature has an alternative. All you have to do is go outside between about 2 a.m. Wednesday and dawn local time, lie on your back and look up at the sky. The meteors and fireballs of the Perseid meteor shower should be streaking."

"NASA says it's "one of the best" meteor shows of the year. That's because of the sheer number of meteors — 50 to 100 meteors to catch per hour as well as their fireballs — larger, brighter explosions of light and color that last longer than an average meteor streak."

"The popularity of the Perseids also has to do with the season. Summer temperatures make for pleasant viewing conditions: The American Meteor Society says there are stronger meteor showers, but those appear in the Northern Hemisphere during the colder parts of the year.)"

"The brightness of the moon, which rises around midnight, will reduce the number of visible meteors to 15 to 20 an hour, although that's still a meteor every 3 minutes or so."

Now Is The Time To Start Biking Life Kit

"Like many others, I've spent much of these last few months cooped up in my apartment. But lately, I've been trying something new to combat the COVID-19 Blues: When the world is too much, I hop on my bike. Out in the road, the breeze on my face makes the air feel crisper. Lush tree canopies arch over the street in front of me. I can hear the whirring of my wheels on the pavement. I feel apart from everything. I feel safe and relaxed."

"I'm not the only one. In March, when the pandemic began to dominate public consciousness in the U.S., bike sales were 50% higher than the year before. It makes sense: Experts say the risk of coronavirus infection is lower outside than it is inside, and it's fairly easy to maintain social distance on a bike. Plus, regular exercise is good for your mental and physical health. If you ever had an inkling that biking might be for you, now seems like a good time to try it out.

Cutting-Edge Research Shows How Hair Dulls Razor Blades

"A steel razor blade can get dull surprisingly quickly when cutting something as soft as hair, and now researchers have gotten their first up-close look at how a close shave actually damages an everyday disposable razor."

"This leading-edge research, described in the journal Science, used a scanning electron microscope to peer at a razor as it sliced through strands of hair."

"It found that, under the right conditions, a hair can produce tiny chips in the blade. That was unexpected, says Cemal Cem Tasan, a professor of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

"'We know that blades fail after a number of uses. And, you know, you sort of take it for granted, you feel that it is normal,' Tasan says. But given that the steel used for razors is extremely hard, he points out, it's not clear why this should be so."

"'For me, personally, it was both a scientific curiosity, of 'What's going on?' and also aiming to solve an important engineering problem,' Tasan says."

"He worked with two collaborators in his lab, graduate student Gianluca Roscioli and researcher Seyedeh Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, to study methodically what happened to razor blades as they were used to shave again and again."

Food Is Growing More Plentiful, So Why Do People Keep Warning Of Shortages?

"There's a common warning about our planet's future: the risk of food shortages."

"'We've got a growing world and a hungry world. We need to make sure we do our part in helping feed that hungry world,' said Kip Tom, a farmer from Indiana who's currently the U.S. ambassador to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, as he closed a panel discussion in 2018."

"'That is totally the mantra,"' says Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University. 'I'll bet I've been to 50 talks in the last five, 10 years where the beginning is, 'We have to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This is a crisis situation.' The word 'crisis' gets used regularly.'"

"But, in fact, the long-term trend, for more than a century, has been toward ever more abundant food, and declining prices."

"To be sure, every once in a while, it really does seem like a crisis. It certainly did in 2008. Tom Hertel, a economist at Purdue University, remembers it well. "This was right in the thick of the biofuel-driven madness," Hertel says, when government policies drove a surge in demand for corn to make ethanol. Rice and wheat prices were spiking for other reasons."

Not Flying This Summer? Many Americans Are Hitting The Road — In RVs

"Amy Holditch isn't the kind of woman to let fear dictate her life."

"'No, she's not,' says her mom, 73-year-old Sandra Gillis. 'She pretty much gets her mind on something, then it's probably going to happen.'"

"So when the coronavirus cancelled her family trip to Hawaii, she didn't postpone the trip with her mom and 12-year-old son for another year."

"I just kind of jumped off the cliff and did it."

"She found a recreational vehicle, or RV, to rent even though she had never driven anything larger than an SUV — not even a van or U-Haul. And she set about mapping a route from Madison, Ala. to Cape Cod, Mass."

"The summer vacation, an annual rite for so many, is not an easy thing to give up, even during a pandemic."

"Families long-accustomed to getting out of their houses each summer yearn to get away, but not if it means being exposed to the coronavirus in an airplane, restaurant, or even the elevator in a hotel. Cruises are definitely out, but cruising the highway in what is essentially a land boat?"