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The hunt is on to find AirAsia Flight 8501, which left Surabaya, Indonesia, en route to Singapore on Sunday and lost contact with air traffic controllers somewhere over the Java Sea. Already, reports have come in of possible oil slicks on the ocean about 100 miles from the last point of contact, and possible wreckage 700 miles away, which seems like a stretch. Experts are expressing caution about even speculating on such reports, given the troubles finding evidence of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board (what happened is still unknown)....

In the November Scientific American Thomas A. Campbell, Skylar Tibbits and Banning Garrett explain how researchers are creating one-piece objects that can change form or function in an intentional, programmable fashion: “robots without the robots,” as one of the authors said. When the authors wrote their article, they had only gone as far as developing proof-of-principle programmable objects—for example, a flat, 3-D printed polymer sheet that folds into an octahedron when submerged in water....

Global temperatures will continue to rise over the next decade and will reach a critical milestone in the 2030s, two of the U.S. government’s leading climate scientists said yesterday. Climate change that made the 2010s the hottest decade in recorded history will persist unabated in the 2020s, and by 2035 will reach a critical level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the scientists said. “Notwithstanding some sort of major, major geophysical event, it would be almost certain that the [next] decade will be warmer than the previous....

July 16. August 6. August 9. September 2. The 70th anniversary of the summer of The Bomb is upon us, marking the dates of the first test detonation of “The Gadget” in the New Mexico desert, the dropping of the Little Boy bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima the explosion of the Fat Man bomb over Nagasaki, and the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. The results were unlike anything witnessed in human history....

Despite the age-old practice of giving birth, we still understand surprisingly little about how the process of labor actually gets started. We know the hormones like oxytocin that are involved and we have a clear understanding of how the cervix changes as it prepares for labor and delivery. But how does it all start? Why are some babies eager to come out ahead of schedule while others prefer to stay put until the last possible moment?...

About two years ago I arranged to meet for coffee with a woman I had corresponded with online. I arrived early and sat at a table in a conspicuous spot. After a few minutes, a woman came to my table, sat down and said with big smile, “Hi, I’m Chris!” But Chris was not the woman in the online photos. This wasn’t a question of an age discrepancy or a new hairdo....

President Bush declared a state of emergency in northern California on Saturday as firefighters scrambled to control about 1,400 raging wildfires. Lightning is blamed for setting off the fires, including a massive blaze that has destroyed around 42 square miles (110 square kilometers) of forestland, along with 16 homes, and has threatened the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, America’s oldest Buddhist monastery in the Big Sur region of California. U.S. Forest Service officials told the Associated Press that they are concerned there may be more wildfires than usual this summer, given the lower-than-average rainfall and activity so early in a season that typically peaks in late July and August....

Is hypnosis real, and can it be used to help people fight addictions or lose weight? —Suzanne Napier, Claremore, Okla. Psychologists Grant Benham of the University of Texas–Pan American and Michael R. Nash of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, reply: HYPNOSIS IS REAL, but many popular ideas about it are not. When used responsibly by medical professionals as one element in a broader treatment plan, hypnosis can help patients afflicted with various emotional and medical problems....

Democratic senators are envisioning a battle with President-elect Donald Trump over his future nominee for U.S. EPA. Several lawmakers indicated yesterday that they might oppose Trump’s choice for the agency if the nominee questions the existence of climate change, fails to see warming’s threat to minority communities or supports a broad rollback of EPA’s authority over the fossil fuel industry. “I think this is a monumental global crisis that we have with the Trump administration coming in, overtly calling climate change a hoax and surrounding himself with people who are betraying the larger consensus on climate change,” said Sen....

Dear EarthTalk: What does “carbon neutral” really mean? And is it really possible to live in such a manner without just resorting to buying carbon credits? –Vera Hoffman, Seattle, WA Carbon neutral is a term that has sprouted many definitions, and how to achieve it has spawned numerous interpretations, too. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, which made carbon neutral its 2006 “Word of the Year,” it involves “calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset....

Warming in the North Atlantic Ocean has decreased winter sea ice and increased the death rate for baby harp seals over the past three decades, according to a new study. Winter sea ice cover in harp seal breeding grounds has decreased up to 6 percent per decade since 1979, when satellite observations of sea ice began, found the research, published yesterday in the journal PLoS Biology. That’s made it tougher for harp seals to breed and rear their young to adulthood, said the lead author, Duke University marine ecologist Daniel Johnston....

In a milestone for African astronomy, engineers have converted an old telecommunications dish in Ghana into the continent’s first functioning radio telescope outside South Africa. The telescope, in Kuntunse near Accra, is the first of an array of such instruments expected to be built across Africa over the next five years, and forms part of long-term plans to develop the skills of astronomers on the continent. It made its first observations this year and will be formally opened later in 2017....

A mystery lurks inside the corpses of dead stars. Neutron stars, formed when certain types of stars die in supernova explosions, are the densest form of matter in the universe; black holes are the only thing denser, but they have so fully escaped the bounds of normal physics that they are not matter anymore. The atoms in neutron stars have been squeezed so tightly by gravity that they have broken down, the protons and electrons inside them smushing together to create neutrons, leaving objects the size of small cities that contain masses larger than the sun....

To say the 2016 Greenland melt season is off to the races is an understatement. Warm, wet conditions rapidly kicked off the melt season this weekend, more than a month-and-a-half ahead of schedule. It has easily set a record for earliest melt season onset, and marks the first time it’s begun in April. Little to no melt through winter is the norm as sub-zero temperatures keep Greenland’s massive ice sheet, well, on ice....

This month, my Scientific American column took a look at the prospects for Google Glass, Google’s futuristic, eye-mounted, pseudo-smartphone thing. Frankly, Glass’s greatest vulnerability isn’t that it may fail technologically, it’s that it may fail socially. How comfortable will you be when you’re conversing with someone who may or may not be filming you? At least one business has already banned Google Glass, in an effort to avoid making all the non-Glass customers uncomfortable....

Happy birthday, caesium clock. Now move over. As the atomic clock used to define time itself turns 60, tests are set to begin on a new generation of clocks that are designed to give the caesium version a run for its money. Such timekeepers would enable a variety of experiments, including testing whether the fundamental constants of nature really are constant over time, and, eventually, a more precise official definition of the second....

Cystic fibrosis (CF) was once considered untreatable. But over 20 years, Paul Negulescu and a team of scientists at Vertex in San Diego have taken steps to unravel and help treat the disease, in which a genetic defect causes a build-up of mucus in the lungs and digestive system. Those milestones led to Negulescu receiving the 2018 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize this month. He discusses his ongoing journey toward a CF cure....

The so-called “warrior gene” may give its carriers better judgment when confronted with financial risk rather than make them prone to impulsive decisions. Research published December 8 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B is a step towards a more nuanced understanding of how variants of the gene MAOA–which specifies an enzyme, monoamine oxidase-A, that breaks down neurotransmitters such as serotonin–affect financial decisions. The gene variant MAOA-L is associated with lower production of the enzyme and has been repeatedly linked to risky behavior....

Biologists have long thought that when large mammals, such as elephants and gazelles, are driven to extinction, small critters will inherit the earth. As those critters (think rodents) multiply, so will the number of disease-carrying fleas. Scientists have now experimentally confirmed this scenario, which is troubling because it could lead to a rise in human infection by diseases that can be transferred between animals and people. The research started 20 years ago, when biologists working at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya embarked on a large-scale experiment to understand the importance of diversity....

The detection of a possible sign of life in Venus’ clouds is just the beginning. On Monday (Sept. 14), researchers announced that they’d spotted the fingerprint of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere, at an altitude where temperatures and pressures are similar to those here on Earth at sea level. On our planet, phosphine is produced only by microbes and by human industrial activity, as far as we can tell. So, finding the gas on another world, in an environment that astrobiologists had already flagged as potentially habitable, is exciting news indeed....