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NASA’s exoplanet-hunting TESS space telescope is done with its primary mission, but its search for strange new worlds goes on. TESS (short for “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite”) wrapped up its two-year primary mission on July 4, having discovered 66 confirmed alien planets and nearly 2,100 “candidates” that scientists still need to vet, NASA officials said. TESS continues to study the heavens, however, on an extended mission that runs through September 2022....

A do-it-yourself space program is gearing up to return to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, floating above the world and the boundary between sky and stars. All manner of payloads, a majority of them contained in ping pong balls (dubbed PongSats) created by students from all over the globe, will be carried by a series of weather balloons later this month. “This mission is getting pretty huge,” said John Powell, president of JP Aerospace in Cordova, Calif....

Magic mushrooms are undergoing a transformation from illicit recreational drug to promising mental health treatment. Numerous studies have reported positive findings using psilocybin—the mushrooms’ main psychoactive compound—for treating depression as well as smoking and alcohol addiction, and for reducing anxiety in the terminally ill. Ongoing and planned studies are testing the drug for conditions that include opioid dependence, PTSD and anorexia nervosa. This scientific interest, plus growing social acceptance, is contributing to legal changes in cities across the U....

The super sticky feet of geckos allow the animals to cling easily to nearly any surface. In fact, a single toe contains enough foot hairs, known as setae, to support the animal’s entire body weight. Researchers are thus hoping to employ the gecko’s secrets to manufacture adhesives with similar properties. Now scientists can add another impressive characteristic to the list: setae are self-cleaning. Previous research had hinted at a built-in cleaning process for gecko feet, but just how the creatures kept their toes tidy remained a mystery because they neither groom their footpads nor secrete fluids....

Thawing permafrost threatens to undermine the supports holding up an elevated section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, jeopardizing the structural integrity of one of the world’s largest oil pipelines and raising the potential of an oil spill in a delicate and remote landscape where it would be extremely difficult to clean up. The slope of permafrost where an 810-foot section of pipeline is secured has started to shift as it thaws, causing several of the braces holding up the pipeline to tilt and bend, according to an analysis by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources....

WHEN THE CHRYSLER car company released a new model of its Dodge Coronet in 1967, the theme of its advertising campaign was the “White Hat Special.” Some of the ads featured cartoon cowboys riding around “keepin’ the prices low,” whereas others had the ubiquitous “Dodge Girl” in her signature white Stetson, chirping: “Only the good guys could put together a deal like this.” These ads did not need any elaboration. Madison Avenue knew that potential buyers had all been raised on film and TV Westerns and were familiar with the symbolism of white hats....

In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences than others. A few of these biases may already sound familiar: A positivity bias causes us to weigh rewards more heavily than punishments....

Two primitive meteorites collected in Antarctica appear to contain grains of silica—the stuff of quartz and sand—forged in a stellar explosion that predates the birth of the solar system. In fact, some researchers believe that it was just such an explosion, or supernova, that triggered the solar system’s formation from a cloud of dust and gas billions of years ago. Whether or not the Antarctic meteorites contain a record of that fateful cataclysm, they do contain a supernova by-product that has never before been found on Earth....

The pill works like magic, people who’ve used it say, to quell their anxiety around public speaking. For decades, doctors have written off-label prescriptions for the heart drug propranolol to help anxious musicians, poker players, and tech executives calm their racing hearts and still their trembling hands before a big performance. Now, a San Francisco startup called Kick is planning to bring the beta blocker to a mass market — a plan that’s giving some psychiatrists and psychologists anxiety of a different kind....

Gurugram, India— A highway leading from Gurugram—a technology and business hub south of the Indian capital New Delhi—cuts through swaths of empty plots, land that once contained fertile green fields, but which is now mostly barren and dotted with cranes towering over unfinished buildings. A real estate boom fuelled by India’s rapid economic growth in recent years has transformed thousands of hectares of arable land in the region into plots for glass-and-steel high-rises....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Logistical challenges to large-scale sea shipments within the Arctic Circle mean such trade will not be a near-term rival to existing routes, a senior Canadian official said on Tuesday. Insurance companies are beginning to weigh the hazards of sea traffic across waterways in northern Canada and investors are mulling the potential using Arctic trade routes, said Canadian Transportation Minister Lisa Raitt. “It is not imminent but it is possible,” she said in Washington....

If it’s hot outside, you’re more likely to believe in climate change. The public perception of climate change is shaped by the weather that people experience, according to a study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. People who live in areas where high temperature records are broken are more likely to believe in global warming than those who do not. In areas that experienced record lows, people were less inclined to believe in the mainstream climate science that shows human activity is warming the Earth....

The U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board has not met in at least six months, and some of its members say it’s being sidelined to avoid getting in the way of agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s anti-regulatory agenda. Agency officials say the lapse isn’t intentional and that it’s just the result of delayed paperwork. That has prevented the group from meeting because there weren’t enough members to make a quorum. The board, which typically has about 45 members, is tasked by Congress to evaluate the science used by EPA to craft policy....

Outside Kay-Yut Chen’s economics laboratory at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., the November air is unseasonably warm, even for California, and splashes of yellow and green leaves shimmer against the clear blue sky. But inside, in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room, the 12 visitors participating in today’s experiment sit patiently at their randomly assigned computers. When I point to the incongruity, Chen doesn’t miss a beat: “That shows one thing–the assumption that people like money is correct....

“Drive 200 yards, then turn right,” says the car’s computer voice. You relax in the driver’s seat, follow the directions and reach your destination without error. It’s certainly nice to have the Global Positioning System (GPS) to direct you to within a few yards of your goal. Yet if the satellite service’s digital maps become even slightly outdated, you can become lost. then you have to rely on the ancient human skill of navigating in three-dimensional space....

“According to one contention, magnesium will eventually replace iron as the world’s basic constructional raw material. Hence, it might be feasible to call the next age of man the ‘magnesium age.’ The element appears to be the only ‘basic’ material of which the supply is inexhaustible: one cubic mile of sea water contains 9.2 billion pounds of metal in the form of magnesium chloride. It is the lightest of the structural metals, and magnesium’s so-called ‘fire hazard’ is only a factor when handling fine powders or the molten metal....

Patients with Parkinson’s disease may be the first group to benefit from gene therapy, the much hyped technique that has yet to result in a single reliable treatment despite nearly two decades of experimentation. Now researchers report that a gene-bearing virus injected directly into the brain was able to improve patients’ motor function without causing any adverse side effects. In the 1990s gene therapy was hailed as an impending revolution in medicine because of its potential to attack disease at its genetic roots....

“That never happened; you must be imagining it.” “Everyone agrees with me—you’re overreacting.” “Wow, what’s it like to be insane?” If these sound like a familiar refrain, you may have been the target of “gaslighting,” a term blowing up like, well, a lighter thrown into a puddle of gas. A form of emotional abuse, gaslighting is dominating the headlines, is all over Twitter, and has been thrown around by everyone from pundits to columnists to late-night comics....

Wisdom teeth may have shrunk during human evolution as part of changes that started with human tool use, according to a new study. The research behind this finding could lead to a new way of figuring out how closely related fossil species are to modern humans, scientists added. Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human family tree, other species once lived on Earth. However, deducing the relationships between modern humans and these extinct hominins—humans and related species dating back to the split from the chimpanzee lineage—is difficult because fossils of ancient hominins are rare....

President Obama promised to eliminate 34 tons of plutonium from the U.S. nuclear weapons program as part of this week’s nuclear security summit. But how does one actually get rid of bomb-making material that has a half-life of more than 20,000 years? One way is to burn it in nuclear reactors. Already, roughly half of the electricity generated from nuclear power plants in the U.S. comes from the fissile materials out of Russian warheads, albeit highly enriched uranium, the other fissile material used in bombs....