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Kepler-452b may be Earth’s close cousin, but living on the newfound world would still be an alien experience. A group of pioneers magically transported to the surface of Kepler-452b—which is the closest thing to an “Earth twin” yet discovered, researchers announced yesterday (July 23) — would instantly realize they weren’t on their home planet anymore. (And magic, or some sort of warp drive, must be invoked for such a journey, since Kepler-452b lies 1,400 light-years away....

One afternoon, after finishing his work at Trieste’s natural history museum, Colla went down with a headlamp to poke around and set some traps. For bait, he used Gorgonzola because, he said, it’s “better if it is a cheese that smells a lot.” Colla is a man of cave insects. Like many Triestinos, he’d grown up spelunking: Instead of going to the cinema, he and his tobacconist dad spidered down ropes and followed waterworn paths through limestone—a hobby that became part of Colla’s job....

As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is “the largest and most significant conference on pure and applied mathematics as well as one of the world’s oldest scientific congresses,” according to the Web site of the 2022 conference....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A majority of U.S. troops discharged from the military for misconduct during a four-year period ending in 2015 had been diagnosed with mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, a new study found. The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office will likely add to scrutiny over whether the U.S. military is doing enough to care for troops identified with mental health issues during their service, instead of simply casting them out....

NASA is still working to understand a glitch that took instruments on a venerable space observatory out of commission. On Oct. 25, the science instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope went into safe mode, according to a brief statement released that day. In a longer statement posted on Monday (Nov. 2), NASA provided additional details about the glitch and the agency’s plan to determine and address the cause to return the observatory to normal operations....

In the age of social media, it’s tempting to evaluate our relationships based on whether or not the people we know follow us online and like or share our posts. Yet evidence shows that the brain has a sophisticated social apparatus of its own that relies on map-like coordinates to track our communal connections. Research on the brain’s GPS dates back to the 1970s, but the role of so-called place cells and grid cells has become clearer in recent years....

Humans produce more than 300 million metric tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills, and up to 12 million metric tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no sustainable way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms. Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the larvae of the greater wax moth can efficiently degrade polyethylene, which accounts for 40 percent of plastics....

Researchers have discovered a protein that might prevent neurons from dying after traumatic brain injuries such as those caused by severe car accidents. Seong-Seng Tan of the Howard Florey Institute in Australia and his colleagues tested the activity of 18,000 genes in surviving neurons (right) that surrounded an injury site in the brains of mice. All but one gene—responsible for generating the protein N4WBP5—drastically reduced their protein production during the 24 hours after injury....

TRACKING MYTHS In Julien d’Huy’s “The Evolution of Myths,” the sidebar delineating a family tree of Cosmic Hunt myths brackets ancient Greek and Roman writings with the oral traditions of North American tribes such as the Ojibwa. This striking similarity then serves to support d’Huy’s claim for a link between such myths coming from settlers crossing from Siberia into the Americas 15,000 years ago. But a more direct source for the observed similarity would be the influx of European priests and missionaries throughout the Americas in the centuries after 1492....

Ever find yourself doing something without knowing exactly why? You might swat at a fly before you consciously realize it is there, or you might catch yourself scratching a bug bite you were trying to forget about. A new study published in Psychological Science could help explain why: half of the brain can be subliminally motivated while the other half is left in the dark. Researchers at INSERM in Paris first measured how hard 33 subjects could squeeze a grip with each hand....

Zach Weinersmith is a cartoonist known for his often science-themed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic, and his wife, Kelly, is a podcaster and biologist at Rice University in Texas. Together, they delved into topics ranging from space elevators to asteroid mining to programmable matter and cold fusion, parsing primary sources and interviewing experts to find the coolest and most plausible future tech. The Weinersmiths first envisioned the book as a quick rundown of 50 cool future technologies, directed at teenagers who might want to find something cool to get involved in working on....

Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing....

Editor’s Note (6/30/22): This article is being republished following the Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which limits the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case on February 28 that could limit the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to curtail heat-trapping emissions at a time when the clock is ticking on our ability to limit catastrophic climate change....

Traditionally speaking, cross-training is what you likely imagine it to be: if you are a runner, for instance, you can throw in some cycling or swimming one or two days per week between your running workouts. Or if you are a cyclist, toss in a strength day and some yoga twice per week to break up the cycling workouts. The benefits of cross-training go far beyond what you expect, and as I will explain, it can actually affect you on a genetic level....

One of the world’s iciest regions is melting away in the face of climate change, according to a major new report compiled by hundreds of experts. Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, which spans eight countries in South Asia from Afghanistan to Myanmar, could lose more than a third of their volume by the end of the century—even if world nations meet their most ambitious climate targets. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current levels, the region could lose as much as two-thirds of its ice....

By Charlotte Greenfield and Greg Stutchbury A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake pummeled central New Zealand early on Monday, killing at least two people, damaging roads and buildings and setting off hundreds of strong aftershocks. Emergency response teams flew by helicopter to the region at the epicenter of the tremor, which struck just after midnight some 91 km (57 miles) northeast of Christchurch in the South Island, amid reports of injuries and collapsed buildings....

THE GREAT RENAISSANCE SCHOLAR and artist Leonardo da Vinci left a legacy of paintings that combined beauty and aesthetic delight with unparalleled realism. He took great pride in his work but also recognized that canvas could never convey a sense of motion or of stereoscopic depth (which requires that two eyes simultaneously view slightly different pictures). He recognized clear limits to the realism he could portray. Five hundred years later the limits of depicting depth in art remain true (except of course for “Magic Eye”–style prints, which, through multiple similar elements, basically interleave two views that the brain sorts out for each eye)....

Note: The times given here are in approximate ship’s time, which began four hours ahead of Eastern daylight time. By the time Titanic struck the iceberg, it was about 40 minutes ahead of EDT. April 10 9:30 AM Welcome to our #Titanic “live” tweets! From April 10-15, we’ll tweet facts & events timed to their 1912 occurrence. Follow #Titanic_SA 9:30 AM Passengers begin boarding the #Titanic, the largest cruise ship in the world, at Southampton, England http://bit....

One of the most common and cost-effective ways to detect cervical cancer is the pap smear, in which cells are scraped from a woman’s cervix and sent to a laboratory for analysis. But this method requires equipment and medical expertise that are not always available in some low-income countries. Now scientists are making an app they hope could use artificial intelligence to identify precancerous or cancerous cells with just a photograph....

Key Concepts Material properties Forces Weight Magnetism Recycling Engineering Introduction Does your community have single-stream recycling, which allows you to mix materials into one recycling container? Have you ever wondered how those materials all get separated so they can be recycled into new things? Try this activity to find out as you build your own recycling-sorting machine! Background Recycling allows our old plastics, glass, aluminum and papers to be broken down and turned into new things....