André Van Mol, a family physician in Redding, Calif., said he watched as pressure to embrace transgender ideology in medicine “came up like a snowstorm seemingly out of nowhere, just in the past few years.” Endocrinologists, pediatricians, and other specialists suddenly found professional organizations supporting gender reassignment, while the federal government demanded that the U.S. healthcare system provide and pay for it.

As countries and companies around the world race to find a COVID-19 vaccine, many pro-life advocates have expressed concern about the use of tissue from aborted babies in the process. Despite pressure to capitalize on fetal tissue to bring a swifter end to the pandemic, ongoing research into the coronavirus continues to find other methods that are more ethical and just as effective.

President Donald Trump banned U.S. firms from doing business with the Chinese companies that own TikTok and WeChat in two executive orders signed on Thursday. In a letter to the House and Senate leaders explaining the move, the president said the apps have continued “to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” The orders will go into effect in 45 days.

Scientists have long known structural differences exist between the brains of males and females. But for the first time, researchers have discovered differences in the brain anatomy of men and women that appear directly linked to sex chromosomes. Though the study—published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Aug. 4—does not prove sex chromosomes cause differences in brain structure, it does suggest some differences may come hardwired at birth.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the trendy social media app in the United States. Microsoft, which is in discussions with TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to buy the social networking service’s operations in the United States and other English-speaking countries, said it would address the president’s concerns. Microsoft expects negotiations to end by mid-September and said it may bring on other U.S. investors to help purchase TikTok.

Dolphins off the coast of Western Australia are adapting to their environment much more quickly than the theory of evolution can account for. Over the past 15 years, researchers studying bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay observed the animals engaging in a new hunting technique called shelling. The dolphins learned how to chase their prey into giant empty seashells, then pick up the shell with their beak and transport it to the water’s surface.

A 4.2-magnitude earthquake near NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California didn’t stop the next NASA Mars rover from lifting off in Florida on Thursday morning. The car-sized Perseverance craft and its collection of cameras, microphones, drills, and lasers launched into space on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. The rover, which was spearheaded by the NASA lab in Pasadena, should arrive on Mars in February 2021 at the end of a 300-million-mile journey.