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On February 17 at about 7:28 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the spacecraft Dawn received a speed boost and a change of direction in the form of a gravity-assist from Mars. The craft slingshot past the planet, using it (rather than its own precious fuel) to adjust its trajectory, and will continue to the first stop in its journey, the asteroid Vesta. The Dawn mission has gone so smoothly that after almost a year and a half of travel, it required no course correction as it neared the Red Planet....

Credit: Lara Tomlin Jennifer Harding was in her fourth year as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin when the 2018 federal budget was finalized. A marine geophysicist, she had spent years training to use a National Science Foundation–funded research vessel to image subduction zones underneath the seafloor. Then she learned the NSF planned to sell the vessel, cutting off her access to new data. At 26 and in her final year of graduate school, Harding is trying to decide what to do next and expects she may have to find a job in the oil and gas industry....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How does a galaxy like our own Milky Way form? Until now there’s been a lot of inferring involved in answering that question. The basic story is that gas collects toward the center of roughly spherical “halos” of matter. The gas then cools, condenses, fragments and eventually collapses to form stars. Generations of stars build up the galaxy and with it the production of heavy elements—such as carbon, oxygen and so on—that populate our periodic table and comprise our familiar physical world....

I have loved archaeology since middle school and have spent many vacations dragging my wife and kids around the world visiting ancient ruins—from the Anasazi kivas of the American Southwest to the “lost cities” of Machu Picchu and Petra to the big-headed Moai statues towering over Easter Island. Somewhere along the way, medical school and a neurology residency derailed my affair with the subject. But even now I sometimes imagine myself as a brain archaeologist—delicately picking through preserved specimens, cataloguing biological artifacts and trying to align my findings with people’s unique histories....

Finding Zero: A Mathematician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel Palgrave Macmillan*, 2015 (($26)) Our modern lives depend on mathematics, which in turn depends on the numerals 0 through 9.** Yet the historical origins of these so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals, as well as the deeper concept of numbers themselves, are a mystery. “How did the idea of a number originate,” asks mathematician and writer Aczel, “and how did it develop and mature through history?...

The U.S. has been a major player in clean energy technologies, but China is now the leader. The top six European countries, together, are spending almost as much as the U.S. The activity “flies in the face of skepticism about the clean energy sector,” says Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Given the trend, stepping up U.S. investment could enhance the country’s competitiveness; an October 2010 report from research firm Clean Edge concluded that China-based companies “are poised to increasingly dominate as clean tech employers....

Slashing humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels will require billions of kilograms of metal: a single wind turbine can contain more than a metric ton of copper, and electric car batteries demand heaps of cobalt, nickel and manganese. Most of these metals now come from terrestrial mines—often at the cost of deforestation, water pollution and human rights abuses. But a vast trove of metals on the deep-sea floor could soon provide an alternative source....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - People over age 65 who drink diet soda daily tend to expand their waistlines by much more than peers who prefer other beverages, possibly contributing to chronic illnesses that go along with excess belly fat, according to a new study. Research in other age groups has directly associated drinking sodas that replace sugar with artificial sweeteners and increased risk of diabetes, metabolic syndrome and preterm birth, said lead author Dr....

Since IBM introduced the hard disk drive 50 years ago, the density of data storage has increased by 65 million times–with much of that rise coming in the past decade. Each data bit in the ferromagnetic layer that coats the tiny disks in computers, video game consoles and iPods has gotten ever smaller–now a mere 30 nanometers across–and closer to its neighbors. Designers have predicted for years that the miniaturization will hit a fundamental limit determined by the superparamagnetic effect: as the bit becomes more minuscule, the atomic energy holding the magnetic orientation of the bit’s atoms in place (which defines a digital state of 0 or 1) becomes so small that ambient thermal energy can destabilize it, thus corrupting the data....

Despite major oil finds off Brazil’s coast, new fields in North Dakota and ongoing increases in the conversion of tar sands to oil in Canada, fresh supplies of petroleum are only just enough to offset the production decline from older fields. At best, the world is now living off an oil plateau—roughly 75 million barrels of oil produced each and every day—since at least 2005, according to a new comment published in Nature on January 26....

Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, France, has an idea about the marks. He has examined many ancient carved artefacts during his career, and he thinks that the hyena bone—found in the 1970s at the site of Les Pradelles near Angoulême—stands out as unusual. Although ancient carved artefacts are often interpreted as artworks, the Les Pradelles bone seems to have been more functional, says D’Errico. He argues that it might encode numerical information....

By Steve Quinn JUNEAU Alaska (Reuters) - Alaska’s humpback whales swam a little closer on Wednesday to losing their status as an endangered species after being federally protected for more than 40 years, a U.S. agency said. Alaska in a Feb. 26 petition asked federal fisheries managers to scrap the “endangered” classification of the central north Pacific population of humpbacks under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), citing population growth and existing regulations it says protect the migratory mammals....

My son was three months old when he uttered his first laugh. That he did so at a funeral was more than ironic; it was compelling. Surrounded as we were by mourners, his tiny laugh was so powerful as to provoke his audience to go from sadness to joy—together and almost instantaneously. This observation launched my empirical investigations into the early appearance and dramatic power of that simple phenomenon: infant laughter....

In 1984 researchers working at a site called Jinniushan, near the town of Yinkou in northeastern China, found the fossilized remains of a woman who lived roughly 260,000 years ago. Though the climate may have been milder then, she still lived near the edge of human existence in a time before fire. Now a fresh analysis of the specimen confirms that human brains were growing larger during this era and indicates that she was adapted to the cold....

Risky Recycling? In “Rethinking Nuclear Fuel Recycling,” Frank N. von Hippel describes why he would like nuclear reprocessing to go away, but it won’t. Nuclear power is resurging, both globally and domestically. Continuing to discard as “waste” 99 percent of the energy in uranium ore is clearly unsustainable. The technology is spreading inexorably, increasing its potential to be subverted for weapons production. To minimize that risk, fuel processing must be done under international auspices—with ironclad guarantees that nations will have uninterrupted access to fuel if they forgo their own enrichment and reprocessing facilities....

On June 26, 2000 in the East Room of the White House I stood at the podium and announced the sequencing of the human genome, a project accomplished by the relatively small team at my company in only nine months. Seated behind me was President Clinton, and on a giant screen was U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. Francis Collins was on stage as the head of the National Institutes of Health human genome team....

Humans like being around other humans. We are extraordinarily social animals. In fact, we are so social, that simply interacting with other people has been shown to be use similar brain areas as those involved with the processing of very basic rewards such as food, suggesting that interacting with people tends to make us feel good. However, it doesn’t take much reflection to notice that the way people interact with each other has radically changed in recent years....

Editor’s Note: To see videos of worm grunters in action please scroll down and click to the next page. You don’t want to miss it. People who use vibrations to drive earthworms out of the ground to use for fishing bait may actually be mimicking the worms’ natural predator, the mole. In a worm-harvesting technique called worm grunting, people plunge a wooden stake into the earth, which they then rub with a metal stick....

For the first time ever, astronomers have found iron and titanium in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. The exoplanet, named KELT-9b, is the hottest alien world ever discovered. The planet is so scorching, it’s even hotter than most stars. This sweltering exoplanet, located about 620 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, is what astronomers call an “ultrahot Jupiter.” KELT-9b is a giant gas world like Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system....

Replacing gasoline cars with electric vehicles is a pillar of President Biden’s strategy for tackling climate change. But even if the administration sets a deadline to sunset sales of gas-powered passenger vehicles, the export of used cars abroad could stall the global reductions needed to stave off catastrophic warming. Every year, the United States ships hundreds of thousands of its oldest and dirtiest cars overseas to predominantly poor countries in a trade that is largely unregulated....