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I sat down with Dr. David Grinspoon, author of the new book Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, to discusssome of the stories that shed light on NASA’s epic first mission to Pluto. Sabrina Stierwalt: You are obviously a science communicator and an author, but you are also an astrobiologist, an advisor on space exploration strategy to NASA, a chair at the Library of Congress, and you’ve written about Venus and about aliens…so what made you decide to write about the New Horizons mission to Pluto?...

MONROVIA, Liberia—Josephine Karwah stepped out of the Ebola treatment unit and cradled her pregnant belly. She had hobbled into the white tent two weeks earlier, during August of 2014, her knees burning with pain and threatening to buckle every fourth step. Josephine’s mother had died in the Ebola treatment unit. Her body had been carried away in a white body bag that nurses had prepared with her name written neatly on the side....

Zika, the mosquito-borne illness snagging headlines for its links to tiny-headed babies and autoimmune disease, has managed to sicken at least 22 patients in the mainland U.S. since 2007. None of the cases, however, were domestically acquired, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 14 Zika cases occurred before 2014, the CDC told Scientific American. Then, since 2015 “at least eight U.S. travelers have had positive Zika virus testing performed at CDC....

The Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands has won the 2018 Abel Prize—one of mathematics’ most-prestigious awards—for discovering surprising and far-ranging connections between algebra, number theory and analysis, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced on 20 March. At 81, he is still an active member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he occupies the office that was once Albert Einstein’s. The mathematician outlined what became known as the Langlands programme in 1967 and carried out parts of it himself....

For decades the delicate and complex machinery of the inner ear refused to give up its secrets. The mystery related to how our ears convert mechanical energy from sound waves and head movements into electrical signals—an essential step in the process that creates hearing and balance. The process, called transduction, occurs in other sensory systems as well. In vision, touch, taste and smell the pivotal molecules have been identified. But hearing proved more challenging....

GuitarBot couldn’t keep a tune. “It’s too high at the top, and too low at the bottom,” Michael Hearst complained as he hopped onto the platform, giving the tuning knob a hopeful quarter-turn. But when he climbed down again and hit a button on his keyboard, the mechanical bridge slid back up the track, thumbing a note before wailing off-pitch once again. Faced with this minor malfunction, Hearst was going to have to make do with GuitarBot’s other three strings if he wanted to finish recording the “The Saddleback Caterpillar,” a new song for his upcoming album, Songs for Unusual Creatures....

If you’re being shot at, you could do worse than diving into a swimming pool. As the Discovery Channel show MythBusters once demonstrated, even a few feet of water can slow a bullet to nonlethal speeds. A similar drama plays itself out in the cosmos. To particles moving faster than a certain velocity, just shy of the speed of light, the tenuous haze of microwave radiation that fills space might as well be a dense sea....

Her students call her Nüshen, which translates as ‘goddess’, and no wonder. Rice geneticist, Wang Shaokui, was promoted to full professorship on the strength of a single paper, the results of her PhD research published in Nature Genetics. That’s close enough to a superhuman feat in China’s academic system, where intense competition for tenured positions has created a rampant ‘publish or perish’ culture among the lower ranks. Wang’s 2012 paper identified a new, highly powerful, rice functional gene, OsSPL16, which can control the size, shape and quality of the grain, distinguishing itself from other known genes that control only one of these traits....

Global carbon emissions reached an all-time high in 2018, an extraordinary watermark in Earth’s history that underscores the need for faster and stronger action to address accelerating climate change, according to dozens of scientists. A report released yesterday by a consortium of researchers known as the Global Carbon Project finds that global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are likely to have increased by about 2.7 percent in 2018, after a 1....

HOUSTON – As the development of new coal-fired power plants is slowing amid growing opposition, utility executives say development of carbon capture-and-storage technologies will play a major role in the industry’s long-term viability. “We have to be able to advance that technology for future coal plants to be built,” said Nick Akins, the executive vice president for generation at utility giant American Electric Power Co. Inc., which relies heavily on coal....

Some days the refrigerator draws Hannah like a magnet. The 23-year-old pulls open the door, gropes for whatever looks interesting and gorges herself. Several times a week Hannah wolfs down mountains of food, more than 6,000 calories in a single day. Hannah is a binge eater, subject to regular eating attacks and a loss of control over food consumption. In contrast to bulimia sufferers, Hannah makes no effort to counter her caloric intake by vomiting....

Even before a baby is born a microbial ecosystem takes up residence in the placenta, creating a microbiome that may help shape the newborn’s immune system and perhaps exert influence over premature births. The revelation, based on the genetic profile of hundreds of placentas, provides the most definitive answer to date that the life-sustaining organ, which nourishes the fetus and helps remove waste, is far from sterile. Although the composition of human microbiota has become increasingly clear with genetic-sequencing technology, little is known about what shapes humans’ early microbial communities and exactly when an infant is first exposed to and colonized by those microorganisms....

Miriam Meisler, a professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, explains. Francois Jacob and Jacque Monod, working out of an attic laboratory in Paris, first explored the mechanisms for turning genes on and off 50 years ago. They studied gene regulation in bacteria and discovered that sugars in the food supply turn on the genes required for their own digestion. In addition, when bacteria are transferred from a medium containing the sugar lactose to a medium without lactose, the bacteria turn off their lactose-metabolizing genes....

On Sunday afternoon, August 24, President Trump announced an emergency use authorization (EUA) for what he described as a “powerful therapy” against COVID-19. Known as convalescent plasma, or CP, it’s donated by survivors of the disease, on the theory that the antibodies it carries can protect others from COVID’s worst ravages. And a few weeks ago, the Mayo Clinic released a preliminary report saying CP showed promise in doing just that—but nevertheless, the New York Times reported that the FDA was not ready to approve the treatment, even on an emergency basis....

Leonardo DiCaprio used his Oscar acceptance speech last night to declare that climate change “is real” and to blast what he called the “politics of greed.” DiCaprio won the Academy Award for best actor for his role in “The Revenant” as a 19th-century frontiersman who is left for dead after being mauled by a bear. He said making “The Revenant” was “about man’s relationship with the natural world” and noted that the world in 2015 marked its hottest year on record....

After two years of breakneck research, scientists have amassed a collection of therapies to treat people with COVID-19. But now, researchers fear that development of new treatments could falter as the clinical trials needed to test them become increasingly difficult. Vaccinations in many places have led to a decline in severe disease, shrinking the pool of potential study participants. Hesitance to enroll in trials is rising, and the existence of potent treatments is making statistical analysis more difficult, too....

Workers of the world, unite!: You have nothing to lose but your—pustules Karl Marx may have erred in predicting the “withering away” of the state under communism, but he got one thing right: “The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day,” he wrote in an 1867 letter to his longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels, referring to painful boils on his rump and nether regions. In a paper slated for the January British Journal of Dermatology, dermatology professor Sam Shuster of the University of East Anglia concludes from Marx’s correspondences that the radical 19th-century political theorist suffered from hidradenitis suppurativa, a blockage and chronic inflammation of the sweat glands in the armpits and groin that can cause painful boillike lumps, swelling and scarring....

Key concepts Physics Center of mass Gravity Area Introduction What makes an object stay balanced? Look around you. Most of the objects in the room are probably balanced—and not on the verge of tipping over. If someone hands you an object and asks you to put it down, you probably intuitively know how to place it so it won’t fall over. But what’s the science behind how an object balances? Why do certain objects only balance on some sides and not others?...

Last July, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, the last unvisited world of the classical solar system. As the largest known member of the Kuiper belt, Pluto is also the gateway to a new frontier, a scarcely studied collection of primordial icy bodies far from the sun that constitutes the “third zone” of the solar system after the realms of the inner rocky planets and the outer gas giants. Like most first glimpses of new frontiers, Pluto held so many surprises for New Horizons that the past eight months have seen a steady stream of discoveries coming from the mission, as the spacecraft’s small radio transmitter beams its gathered data back home....

The increasing deployment of gun-toting robots by the U.S. military and other armed forces around the world could end up endangering civilian lives and giving terrorists new ideas, warns a U.K. robotics professor. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has outlined plans to ramp up the use of remotely controlled robotic vehicles on land, undersea and in the air. The goal is to field increasingly autonomous robots—without a human controller—to dispose of explosives, stand guard and spot targets to attack....