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We all know we should exercise. But few realize that being physically active is the single most important thing that most of us can do to improve or maintain our health. Regular movement not only lowers the risk of developing or dying from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, it also prevents certain cancers, improves mood, builds bones, strengthens muscles, expands lung capacity, reduces the risk of falls and fractures, and helps to keep excess weight in check....

Last year the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began leasing a caninelike robot—a Spot model from Boston Dynamics that the department nicknamed Digidog. Officers deployed the robot in just a few cases, including a hostage situation in the Bronx and an incident at a public housing building in Manhattan. As word spread (along with photographs and videos), a backlash from the public—and eventually elected officials—quickly gained momentum. Some objected to the robot’s expense....

Haiti is still rebuilding from the massive earthquake that struck 11 years ago, as well as dealing with the fallout of its president’s assassination in July. So the island nation was ill-prepared for the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that hit its western region on August 14. At the time of publication, the official death toll hovers around 2,000, although for the first few critical days after the quake, media reports listed a death toll in the hundreds....

Two satellites that were accidentally launched into the wrong orbit will be repurposed to make the most stringent test to date of a prediction made by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity—that clocks run more slowly the closer they are to heavy objects. The satellites, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), were mislaunched last year by a Russian Soyuz rocket that put them into elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. This left them unfit for their intended use as part of a European global-navigation system called Galileo....

The Pacific Coast could see several feet of sea-level rise by the end of this century, and one of its most unique and valuable ecosystems—its salt marshes—may all but disappear in the process. By the year 2110, all the existing marshland in California and Oregon could be underwater, according to new research in the journal Science Advances. And more than two-thirds of all the wetlands in Washington state could meet the same fate....

Scientists investigating a seismic fault off the U.S. West Coast have an unlikely new ally in their quest to create images of the Earth’s crust deep beneath the ocean: Fin whales. Fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) are 20- to 25-meter-long (60 to 85 foot) behemoths whose songs can be heard up to 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away, booming through the seas as loudly as a ship’s engine does. New research, published in February in Science, finds these calls’ sound waves can help create images of the seafloor subsurface down to 2....

Most of us learned in high school chemistry class that chemical bonds can only form when electrons are shared or given away from one atom’s outer shell to another’s. But this may not be strictly true. A chemist has calculated that under very high pressure not just the outer electrons but the inner ones, too, could form bonds. Inside atoms, electrons are organized into energy levels, called shells, which can be thought of as buckets of increasing size that can each hold only a fixed number of electrons....

Editor’s Note (12/22/20): This story has been updated to reflect new records set through the November 30 end of the hurricane season. This year has been a standout year for all the wrong reasons, including its devastating natural disasters. Wildfires have ravaged the western U.S., and tropical cyclones have popped up left and right, with several causing significant damage to coastal areas. Though they are called natural disasters, the toll they take comes in part from human actions....

GUELPH, Ontario—Outside of Emma Allen-Vercoe’s office is a bulletin board pinned with her team’s scientific papers since 2013. It’s the academic’s answer to a military uniform grown heavy with medals. But all of that research has come with a side effect: an impressive intimacy with the smells of human digestion. “This is what we formally call the poopy lab,” she said one morning at the end of January. “Every donor that we use has a distinct aroma, because they have a different profile of microbes in the gut, so it’s like a fine wine—just not quite so fine....

Sooner or later, humans will set foot on the moon again—perhaps by the middle of this decade if NASA’s Artemis program proceeds as planned. And beyond that, public or private crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s or 2040s no longer seem solely confined to science fiction. But what will astronauts be wearing when they take those steps on other worlds? Procuring giant rockets and futuristic spacecraft for Artemis has been the most well-publicized hurdle for NASA to overcome, but its efforts to design new spacesuits for the moon have proved equally challenging....

It can be hard to find a sexual partner when you are glued to a rock. Barnacles famously get around this problem by having penises longer than their bodies, so that they can seek out relatively distant mates. But now it seems that some adopt another strategy, entrusting their precious bodily fluids to the currents. Some of these crustaceans live alone, with no neighbors near enough to have sex with. In the case of the gooseneck-barnacle species Pollicipes polymerus, this presented a mystery: although some barnacles are thought to self-fertilize, scientists have never been able to witness reproduction of solitary P....

Sally Isberg has a special place in her heart for a 15-foot reptile that can tear a person limb from limb. As the chief scientist at Australia’s largest saltwater crocodile farm, the geneticist can gaze out the window at pens full of saltwater crocs that will one day be turned into designer handbags. This week, Isberg and her collaborators published a genetic linkage map of this type of crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, the first such map for a reptile and an important milestone in a genetically guided breeding program that promises to improve the handbag business....

By most standards, space is exceedingly empty, containing on average just one proton per four cubic meters of volume. In this cosmic ocean, so incomprehensibly desolate and vast, entire galaxies are akin to scattered spots of sea foam—not to mention the stars, planets and other lesser objects that fade to insignificance against the void. For random clumps of matter adrift in the deep to somehow find each other seems to border on the miraculous....

Macbeth extolled “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,” in Shakespeare’s great tragic play of the same name. Soothing rest is not all that shut-eye provides, however. As sleep and cognition researchers Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen explain in their feature article in this issue, the brain is very busy during a night’s slumber. It is processing and sorting all the things we learned during the day, making valuable memories more resilient and tossing away irrelevant details....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON, June 10 (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said greenhouse gases from aircraft endanger human health, taking the first step toward regulating emissions from the domestic aviation industry. The EPA’s endangerment finding kicks off a process to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation industry, the latest sector to be regulated under the Clean Air Act after cars, trucks and large stationary sources like power plants....

With global warming looming, Mother Nature could sure use a backup plan—a secure place to store copies of her crops and other plants. Now, thanks to the government of Norway, she has one. Dug into a permafrost mountain, the massive Svalbard Global Seed Vault began collecting seeds in February. So far it has 268,000 unique samples, with a capacity for 4.3 million more. Although about 1,400 seed banks exist worldwide, this one, in Norway’s Svalbard islands, dwarfs them all and aims to safeguard duplicates of the seeds....

A faraway star in the southern sky is flickering in an odd manner that suggests a bizarre cloud of material—or something even stranger—is in orbit around it. Discovered by astronomers using a telescope in Chile, the star is reminiscent of two other enigmatic astrophysical objects, one thought to harbor a planet with rings 200 times larger than those of Saturn, the other most famous for the remote possibility it is encircled by “alien megastructures....

Key concepts Taste Acidity Sugar Science of cooking Introduction Cooking is a fun and rewarding activity. It allows you to be a cook and scientist at the same time, experimenting with endless taste combinations! The five tastes humans can experience are: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory). But have you ever experienced some combinations that were delicious and others that were downright yucky? How do cooks come up with delicious recipes?...

I ran a marathon, once upon a time. (If you could call what I did “running.” It took me nearly five hours—you do the math.) Still, I did it: laced up my New Balances, pounded the pavement through five months of training, and then went ahead and finished the whole 26.2. Some folks, including my podiatrist (bunions), didn’t think I could do it. But as sports psychologists I talked to told me, physical feats are often more about mind than matter....

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but something has come between you and your doctor. It’s there at every office visit, stealing the doc’s attention and punctuating conversations with awkward silences and the light clicking of a keyboard. Yes, it’s the computer, an omnipresent participant in the modern medical exam. Electronic health records (EHRs)—and the computers that support them—crept onto the scene about 25 years ago, but they took off after getting a $19-billion boost in 2009 as part of the federal economic stimulus package....