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China is investigating how to build ultra-large spacecraft that are up to 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) long. But how feasible is the idea, and what would be the use of such a massive spacecraft? The project is part of a wider call for research proposals from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, a funding agency managed by the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology. A research outline posted on the foundation’s website described such enormous spaceships as “major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe, and long-term living in orbit....

Fred Isberner is a retired healthcare professor in Carbondale, Illinois. But on 21 August, the 69-year-old will be collecting data about the Sun’s superheated outer atmosphere during a total solar eclipse. Isberner is one of thousands of people across the United States who plan to gather data during the event. Their combined efforts will be one of the largest, one-off citizen-science efforts yet. “It absolutely has the potential to be the biggest,” says Scott McIntosh, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado....

When researcher Xinghu Qin ventured through rangeland near Inner Mongolia’s Hunshandake Desert, he spotted some puzzling behavior between two little beetles mating shamelessly in the open: one was constantly licking the other’s tail. “What on earth were they doing?” wondered Qin, then a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. They were Mongolian desert beetles, or Platyope mongolica, which mostly hide underneath desert grasses and sands but occasionally emerge to mate....

Key concepts Physics Engineering Earthquakes Introduction Earthquakes can cause serious damage to buildings and be dangerous to people. But some of the world’s most populous cities are in earthquake-prone regions. How can engineers keep the millions of people in those cities safe? Find out how you can use science to save lives in this fun activity! Background Earth’s tectonic plates are continuously moving. Usually this movement is very slow—so slow that we can barely notice it....

Over their lifetimes, women are twice as likely to suffer clinical depression than men. Low or imbalanced hormone levels can prompt depression in either sex, and insufficient estrogen in women has long been suspected. Now a comprehensive review of 30 years of research indicates that the trouble may not be low estrogen levels per se but sharp variations in those levels. Estrogen balances often change significantly during puberty and menopause, as well as during a woman’s monthly reproductive cycle....

The U.S. government’s hush-hush Zuma satellite may have run into some serious problems during or shortly after its Sunday (Jan. 7) launch, according to media reports. Zuma lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Sunday evening—a launch that also featured a successful landing back on Earth by the booster’s first stage. Everything seemed OK at the time. But on Monday (Jan. 8), rumors began percolating within the spaceflight community that something had happened to Zuma, Ars Technica reported....

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazine Raleigh, North Carolina—With domed heads and thick, bony skull protuberances, pachycephalosaurids are well known by seven-year-olds and paleontologists alike. The dinosaurs are thought to have used their thick domes to headbutt each other, perhaps as part of courtship behavior. But whereas children recreating these vicious displays simply ram plastic models of the animals together in a straight line, a study now suggests that pachycephalosaurs may have bashed one another in a number of different ways....

This month, bags of sliced apples will hit grocery-store shelves in the midwestern United States for the first time. Shoppers who purchase the apples can leave the slices out for snacking, because of a feat of genetic engineering that prevents their flesh from browning when exposed to air. The ‘Arctic apple’ is one of the first foods to be given a trait intended to please consumers rather than farmers, and it joins a small number of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be sold as a whole product, not an ingredient....

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander this week unveiled a Republican alternative to the Green New Deal that puts the spotlight on federal clean energy research. The plan comes as other conservatives on Capitol Hill have been talking up innovation as a solution to climate change—and as a counteroffer to the much-hyped Green New Deal. Yet the focus on federal research makes perfect sense for Alexander, a moderate and a longtime proponent of a Department of Energy national laboratory in his home state....

The “disease of kings” has now reached the masses. In the past half century the prevalence of gout in the general U.S. population has more than doubled. Once thought of only for the privileged few who had the means to overindulge in food and drink, gout now afflicts more than eight million American adults. And research suggests that the rates of this form of localized arthritis are still on the rise....

The Kenyan village of Sauri, near Lake Victoria, is lucky. As the first so-called Millennium Village, it will benefit from roughly $110 per capita in aid annually through at least 2014. That aid is intended to help with problems ranging from disease to a lack of schooling, but it is in the area of agriculture that the village has already seen the most dramatic gains. Working with local farmers, researchers have boosted yields of maize from 1....

Day after day, week after week, the United States faces a barrage of climate extremes: wildfires in California. Drought on the Great Plains. Flooding in Florida. Yet assembling those puzzle pieces into a clear picture often can be difficult. It’s a problem the Interior Department and NOAA aim to address with a new website that provides data on real-time extreme event conditions as well as risk profiles at the national, state and local levels....

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has some rocks stuck in its throat. Perseverance drilled and collected its sixth Red Planet rock sample late last month, but the car-sized rover hasn’t been able to seal up the titanium tube containing the material yet. “I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge. Seems some pebble-sized debris is obstructing my robotic arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage. More images and data to come....

Meet the New Secretary of Energy Nominee: Ernie Moniz Moniz is an “all of the above” physicist when it comes to energy policy Top Air Pollution Official Finally Confirmed New EPA nominee Gina McCarthy faced a monthlong holdup before her confirmation in 2009 as the agency’s top air official Science Policy Issues That Matter Most Scientific American editors lay out the most pressing issues for Obama’s second term New U.S. Secretary of State Argues Climate Change a Top Priority Sen....

If somebody yells, “Snake!” are you more likely to jump back in fright or say, “Ooh, where?” Fear of snakes (ophidiophobia) is one of the most common phobias. Plenty of species are venomous, and in some religious traditions snakes are the embodiment of evil. It’s no wonder they’re unpopular. But advocates using social media are helping people identify and learn to live with snakes and even become fascinated with them. Author Emily Willingham introduces a cast of funny and charming converts who have gone from “Eek!...

Acacia trees are the iconic shrub of the East African savanna. Their thorny thickets house a host of creatures and provide sustenance to the local charismatic megafauna, from elephants to zebras. In light of this continual foraging, the plants have struck a mutually beneficial bargain with several species of ants. The insect armies swarm intrusive browsers in exchange for housing and food. But according to new research in Science, it appears that without such browsing—a state of affairs the acacia might be thought to long for—the trees suffer....

On Tuesday morning, the CRISPR patent dispute reaches a much-awaited milestone: the case’s first and only oral arguments, slated to last less than an hour for a patent potentially worth billions of dollars. The hearing is open to the public, and it’s sure to attract the attendance of dozens of lawyers, company executives (Novartis has confirmed it’ll be represented), publicists, reporters, and even some genome-editing groupies. The nasty dispute pits the University of California against the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT for rights to key patents on CRISPR genome-editing....

WHAT IS THE BEST approach to solving a problem? From kindergarten on, most children are taught that there is one optimal answer to any question. And that they should work logically, step by step, to reach that prize. In many cases, this tactic works. But in other situations, the newest concepts, wisest insights and most creative solutions arise only when people abandon established approaches and habitual ways of thinking. When a tire designer learns, from studying the feet of frogs, how to get the best traction on a wet road, he discovers a strategy that the mere application of logic never would have provided....

In Robert Plomin’s line of work, patience is essential. Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, wants to understand the nature of intelligence. As part of his research, he has been watching thousands of children grow up. Plomin asks the children questions such as “What do water and milk have in common?” and “In what direction does the sun set?” At first he and his colleagues quizzed the children in person or over the telephone....

Two methods for creating embryonic stem cells just got a big boost. In one development, three teams of scientists report they have turned back the clock on mouse skin cells, changing them into embryolike cells by introducing a cocktail of four genes. “You can now basically reverse development in a culture dish,” says Marius Wernig of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, a member of one of the teams....