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The mass inequality of America's first Gilded Age thrived on identity-based partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we're headed down the same path.

Americans will need to take pandemic precautions well into 2021 - yes, even after a vaccine arrives.

Humans are largely omnivores, and meat has featured in the diets of most cultures. However, with the increasing population and pressure on the environment, traditional methods of meeting this fundamental food requirement are likely to fall short. Now, researchers at the University of Tokyo report innovative biofabrication of bovine muscle tissue in the laboratory that may help meet escalating future demands for dietary meat.

In the not-too-distant past, narratives were set more or less consensually by the New York-based media establishment (assisted by its Washington-based enablers). But as Martin Gurri and Bruno Maçães have shown, the narrative-setting days of elite media are now over, and we live in a world of fractured narratives proffered by Extremely Online factions that interpret reality-or jettison it entirely, in favor of constructing their own "unreality" (Maçães' phrase)-primarily through the lens of their own self-justifying and unfalsifiable narratives.

In more than 1,000 years, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as Gulf Stream System, has not been as weak as in recent decades. This is the result of a new study by scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany. The researchers compiled so-called proxy data, taken mainly from natural archives like ocean sediments or ice cores, reaching back many hundreds of years to reconstruct the flow history of the AMOC. They found consistent evidence that its slowdown in the 20th century is unprecedented in the past millennium; it is likely linked to human-caused climate change. The giant ocean circulation system is relevant for weather patterns in Europe and regional sea levels in the U.S.; its slowdown is also associated with an observed cold blob in the northern Atlantic.

In the small coastal country, an exploding industry has led to big economic promises, and a steep environmental price.

BPA is an organic compound made from fossil fuel sources. The industrial chemical has been used to make plastics and resins since the 1950s, and products made with it are cheap to make, clear, flexible and strong. BPA can be found in a variety of products, including water bottles, storage containers and sports equipment. It's also widely used in the linings of food and beverage cans and in sales receipt paper. It's one of the most commonly synthesized chemicals today with more than six million tons created in 2018 alone.

Aerosols are suspensions of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in a gas. Clouds, for example, are aerosols because they consist of water droplets dispersed in the air. Such droplets are produced in a two-step process: first, a condensation nucleus forms, and then volatile molecules condense onto this nucleus, producing a droplet. Nuclei frequently consist of molecules different to those that condense onto them. In the case of clouds, the nuclei often contain sulphuric acids and organic substances. Water vapor from the atmosphere subsequently condenses onto these nuclei.

A Purdue University-led team of scientists has evidence that tomatoes may be more sensitive to these types of diseases because they've lost the protection offered by certain soil microbes. The researchers found that wild relatives and wild-type tomatoes that associate more strongly with a positive soil fungus grew larger, resisted disease onset and fought disease much better than modern plants.

Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.

Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.

If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs-how animals and plants in a community are connected through their dietary preferences-ecologists can piece together how energy flows through an ecosystem and how stable it is to climate change and other disturbances. Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There's just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record-and researchers' ability to piece together the food webs from the past.

New high-resolution structures of the bacterial ribosome determined by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago show that a single water molecule may be the cause-and possible solution-of antibiotic resistance.

Large-scale irrigation infrastructure projects are back on the development agenda in sub-Saharan Africa after a near 30-year hiatus, despite projects having had disappointing results, with social and environmental side effects outweighing benefits. Such projects are planned in response to water scarcity pressures and are seen as a solution to intensify agricultural production, support rural economic development and enhance resilience to climate change.

Following a series of studies on termite mound physiology and morphogenesis over the past decade, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have now developed a mathematical model to help explain how termites construct their intricate mounds.