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It’s a technology we’ve been anticipating for decades. From the Enterprise computer on the original Star Trek (1966–1969) to HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), science fiction has shown us all manner of disembodied AI helpmates who can answer our questions, carry out our orders or even provide emotional intimacy. But AI assistants aren’t yet omnipresent, and they aren’t all that smart....

By Richard Monastersky of Nature magazineVolcanic eruptions can spark squalls of lightning that are as intense as the biggest superstorms over the central United States, according to researchers who have captured the most detailed measurements of electrical discharges during a volcanic blast. The data, they say, could help to illuminate what causes volcanic lightning and point the way towards a system that can quickly detect ash plumes from remote eruptions, which can disrupt air travel....

Until very recently, if there was one silver lining to the pandemic, it was that kids seemed to escape the worst of the virus. Very few became seriously ill or even mildly sick, compared with adults. But now that hopeful aspect may be fading. The number of children hospitalized with COVID has skyrocketed in recent weeks as the Omicron variant fueled a surge of infections, raising concerns that the latest version of the coronavirus may pose a greater threat to children....

The poaching of elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers regularly makes the news, but these well-known species comprise only a tiny fraction of the global wildlife trade—both legal and illegal. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that impacts animals ranging from softshell turtles and songbirds to rattlesnakes and otters. The exact count of affected species has always been a guess at best, however, because no single organization keeps track of these data. Now researchers have produced the first such number, and it is colossal: nearly 5,600 species—about 18 percent of the planet’s known terrestrial vertebrate animals—are caught up in the trade....

An influential panel of scientists voted this week to designate a new geologic epoch—the Anthropocene—to mark the profound ways that humans have altered the planet. That decision, by the 34-member Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), marks an important step toward formally defining a new slice of the geologic record, which has generated intense debate within the scientific community over the past few years. The panel plans to submit a formal proposal for the new epoch by 2021 to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the official geological time chart....

Leave your bank. Change the world. That’s the promise the Los Angeles-based financial firm Aspiration has used to entice millions of customers over the past six years. The company’s pitch to climate-savvy consumers? They can slash their carbon footprint by taking their dollars out of banking giants—which are deeply invested in fossil energy—and opt for its services instead. Launched in 2015, Aspiration offers savings accounts, debit cards, investment options and more....

In four adjacent enclosures transplantation researcher Bruno Reichart kept four happy baboons. “They can hop around, eat, drink and they are enjoying life,” he says. “They watch TV—their favorite is the cartoon with the chipmunk.” Most importantly, he says, they were healthy and normal—which is astonishing, given the fact that the hearts beating life in their chests were anything but normal for a baboon. All four of the baboons that lived in Reichart’s lab at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich had their original hearts surgically replaced with ones from genetically engineered pigs....

By Fedja Grulovic OBRAC Serbia (Reuters) - Boats sailed through the streets of a Serbian town on Friday on a mission to rescue people trapped by rising waters as the worst floods ever recorded swept Serbia and Bosnia. Some residents of Obrenovac, 30 km (20 miles) southwest of the capital Belgrade, were stranded on the roofs of their homes, calling for help. At least four people have died in the disaster....

Just as city slickers have faster-paced lives than country folk, so too do urban birds, compared with their forest-dwelling cousins. The reason, researchers report today, is that urban noise and light have altered the city birds’ biological clocks. The finding helps to explain prior reports that urban songbirds adopt more nocturnal lifestyles—data that prompted Davide Dominoni, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, to investigate whether the birds’ activity patterns were merely behavioral responses to busy cities or were caused by an actual shift in the animals’ body clocks....

The effect of climate change on endangered species has been wildly underestimated, a new study has found. A survey of studies has determined that climate change has had a particularly dire effect on mammals and birds on the endangered species list. That includes about half of the mammals and almost a quarter of the birds on the “red list” kept by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change....

Where there is coffee, there is ‘coffee rust’. But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken — with the fungus taking the advantage. As one of the most severe outbreaks ever rages through Central America, researchers are reaching for the latest tools in an effort to combat the pest, from sequencing its genome to cross-breeding coffee plants with resistant strains. Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, coffee rust generally does not kill plants, but the Institute of Coffee of Costa Rica estimates that the latest outbreak may halve the 2013–14 harvest in the worst affected areas of the nation....

Key Concepts Chemistry Materials science Polymers Volume Absorption Introduction When we think about diapers we usually think about babies. But did you know that astronauts also have to wear diapers sometimes? Astronaut “diapers” are called maximum absorbency garments (MAGs), and astronauts wear them when they have to stay sealed in their spacesuits for long periods of time, such as during spacewalks or when their spacecraft leave orbit to reenter the atmosphere to return home....

As COVID deaths continue to spike across the U.S.—primarily among unvaccinated populations—newly developed treatments for the disease are again receiving attention. Monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies are among the most effective. In this treatment, patients are infused with high concentrations of antibodies specifically engineered to fight SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. These treatments have been particularly popular in states such as Florida, which has high numbers of unvaccinated people and has been suffering a major outbreak of the Delta variant since August....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineAs cheat sheets go, it is a long one. Every four years, a task force of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), headquartered in Paris, releases a short-hand description of the physical world: the latest, painstaking determination of the values and uncertainties of more than 300 physical constants, from the familiar speed of light, c, to the more obscure mass of the tau lepton, ....

What makes the human brain special? That question is not easy to answer—and will occupy neuroscientists for generations to come. But a few tentative responses can already be mustered. The organ is certainly bigger than expected for our body size. And it has its own specialized areas—one of which is devoted to processing language. In recent years, brain scans have started to show that the particular way neurons connect to one another is also part of the story....

The sudden hospitalization of dozens of children in Paraguay for severe breathing problems in 2013 led to an alarming discovery: an entire shipment of poor-quality medicine for treating colds was contaminated with levomethorphan, an extremely potent and potentially lethal opioid. World Health Organization (WHO) global surveillance that began that same year revealed that the active pharmaceutical ingredient had originated in India and had already caused 50 deaths in Pakistan in 2012....

Getting Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Henry Holt, 2007Gawande is a Boston-area ­surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a MacArthur Fellow. His first book, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. In this collection of 12 original and previously published essays adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine and the New Yorker, Gawande focuses on performance....

Debate rages between biologists and chemists over whether life began on land or under the sea. Rachel Brazil looks at the arguments The question ‘How did life begin?’ is closely linked to the question ‘Where did life begin?’ Most experts agree over ‘when’: 3.8–4 billion years ago. But there is still no consensus as to the environment that could have fostered this event. Since their discovery, deep sea hydrothermal vents have been suggested as the birthplace of life, particularly alkaline vents, like those found at ‘the Lost City’ field in the mid-Atlantic....

The pathway to humans on Mars lies through the atom, split. Far from Earth, whether in the void or on another world, power is life. A steady, strong flow of electricity is as crucial for operating computers and engines as it is for assuring access to corporeal necessities such as light and heat, breathable air and potable water, and preparation or even growth of food. And one of the most potent and reliable ways to get all those vital kilowatts is via nuclear fission—something aspiring astronauts realized long before anyone ever reached space (or developed nuclear weapons, for that matter)....

The next great era of astronomy truly began this morning. After nearly three decades of troubled development and $10 billion in spending, a pulse-pounding launch on Christmas Day in 2021 and a nail-biting half-year of delicate preparations in deep space, the James Webb Space Telescope has at last delivered a complete set of first full-color images. President Joe Biden himself offered a sneak preview yesterday evening from the White House, revealing what is destined to be the most iconic picture from the set....