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NASA is battening down the hatches ahead of Hurricane Matthew’s impending Florida landfall. The agency’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), near Cape Canaveral, Florida, is closed today (Oct. 5) and tomorrow (Oct. 6) to prep for Hurricane Matthew, which is expected to slam into the region full-force early tomorrow morning. The space center is located on Merrit Island, on Florida’s east coast. “Kennedy Space Center is now in HurrCon 1 status, meaning a hurricane is imminent....

Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin. Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin....

Living in the mountains may provide benefits beyond a picturesque view. The results of a new study indicate that mountain dwellers live longer than their lowland counterparts, perhaps because their hearts get a better work out on a day-to-day basis. Greece has one of the lowest death rates from heart disease and other causes among industrialized nations. Nikos Baibas of the University of Athens Medical School and his colleagues tracked the health of 1,150 people living in three different villages within 200 kilometers of Athens–Arahova, Zevgolatio and Aidonia–over a 15-year period....

MUSEUMS/EXHIBITIONS Trompe l’Oeil: The Art of Illusion The skill of the painter is the key to this art form. The artist produces two-dimensional images designed to trick the visual cortex into thinking it sees a three-dimensional assemblage of objects. It’s an old art form that is still popular today. This exhibition brings together the leading trompe l’oeil painters currently at work across America. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Ala. October 7–December 3 334-240-4333 www....

Science knows very little about shark evolution. This is partly because “cartilage is a funny tissue,” says John Maisey, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Shark bodies are largely made of this firm, white connective substance—which does not fossilize well. For hundreds of years scientists have only been able to guess that sharks probably had some bony fish ancestors. But now, using a CT scanner to evaluate the only known fossil of an ancient fish called Doliodus problematicus, Maisey and his colleagues may have found a crucial missing piece in the shark origin puzzle....

The Hollywood hero races his convertible down the boulevard for a date he can’t miss. It might be with a lover or a terrorist or a CIA officer, but it probably won’t involve a cigarette. A new study finds that in studio films, the most likely people to be lighting up are lower-class male villains. Karan Omidvari, a pulmonary physician at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, N.J., and his colleagues watched 447 movies released after 1990 to quantify exactly who smokes on screen—an intentional scripted act....

On April 7, particle physicists all over the world were excited and energized by the announcement of a measurement of the behavior of muons—the heavier, unstable subatomic cousins of electrons—that differed significantly from the expected value. A century from now, looking back on this moment, will historians understand this excitement? They certainly won’t see a major turning point in the history of science. No puzzle was solved, no new particle or field was discovered, no paradigm shifted in our picture of nature....

I must have been in about eighth grade when I first learned about one of the most recognizable cosmic formations that humans have ever observed. The Horsehead Nebula, a sculpted pillar of dust and gas that forms the far edge of the Orion B molecular cloud, is part of a massive stellar nursery where gravity, magnetic forces and radiation winds force matter together to birth new stars. That such a volatile, powerful place in the universe could also resemble the majestic beauty of a horse’s head had me hooked....

The jumping of a gene from one chromosome to another can likely contribute to the birth of new species, a genetic analysis of flies reveals. The result validates an underappreciated mechanism of so-called reproductive isolation, a key component of speciation. The formation of a species means that a group of organisms splits into two populations that cannot reproduce with one another. The reigning model of reproductive isolation holds that genetic differences accumulate between populations that render their hybrid offspring dead or sterile, like the mule, an infertile child of the donkey and horse....

Her finalist year: 1988 Her finalist project: A studying of brain function in rats What led to the project: Weiva Sieh’s parents—immigrants to New York City from China—made an early bet, in real estate, that their children would both be top science students. In the 1970s, years before their children would be old enough to attend, “they bought their house so we could walk to The Bronx High School of Science,” the selective school known for producing several Nobel Prize winners over the years, Sieh says....

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is tardiness. I hate it when other people are late. It’s as if they are not respecting my time. But you know what? I hate being late myself even more. In fact, I cringe at the thought. Conscientious, successful people are on time. Always. So you can imagine that nothing irks me more than being late myself. But I am late - 10 minutes, 30 minutes, sometimes even an hour....

Most people know what it’s like to feel anxious. That tension in your muscles, those butterflies in your stomach, and the drumming of your heart tells you that you’re not calm. And this is totally normal. Where would we be if genuinely dangerous situations like dark alleys at night didn’t give us the heebie-jeebies? And would we take important tasks very seriously if we didn’t get nervous in the spotlight, like when giving a wedding toast?...

Before being elected to Congress in 2008, Bill Foster, a Democrat, worked for more than 20 years as a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Now, as one of a handful of members of Congress with a Ph.D. in science, he says there is an urgent need for more scientists in politics. At least eight candidates with science backgrounds—though not necessarily doctorates—will be on the ballot for seats in the House or Senate in November....

Physician Assistants Number in 2008: 74,800 Growth rate from 2004 to 2009: 29% Average years of education: 18 Nurse Practitioners Number in 2008: 158,348 Growth rate from 2004 to 2009: 39% Average years of education: 18 Registered Nurses Number in 2008: 2,618,700 Growth rate from 2004 to 2009: 12% Average years of education: 15 As health care reform rolls out over the next five years and millions of newly insured seek treatment, the shortage of general medicine doctors will only worsen....

Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases have raised global temperatures, causing major impacts on Earth’s ecosystems and human society, as the first installment of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made unequivocally clear in August. The second installment of that report, released on February 28, makes the stark and game-changing revelation that these adverse impacts will only get worse and that there is an urgent need to adapt to those already underway....

The sun’s final rays filter through the leaves as night falls in the dense, muggy rain forest. The descending gloam over Panama’s Barro Colorado Island obscures the towering, spiky kapok trees, the palms and the shrubs until human eyes can’t see much more than the small patches of starlit sky through the canopy above. Crickets commence their chorus as the howler monkeys hush for the night. In the twilight, a nocturnal sweat bee, with bulging eyes, a metallic green head and a pale brown abdomen, emerges from her nest in a foot-long, hollowed-out stick....

Leprosy was one of the last things on dermatologist John Abide’s mind when a 78-year-old man walked in for a screening at the doctor’s Greenville, Miss., practice. Unbeknownst to the man, two large red bumps had formed on his back. Abide diligently tested samples to make sure they did not indicate tuberculosis. When the results came back positive for atypical mycobacteria, another doctor suggested sending the samples away to have them tested for leprosy....

From Hawaii’s flurry of hurricanes, to record high sea ice in Antarctica, and a heat wave that cooked the Australian Open like shrimp on a barbie, 2014 saw some wild weather. How much of that was tied to climate change is what scientists around the world tried to answer in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual attribution report, which was published Thursday. What they discovered was that the clearest impacts of warming could be found in heat-related events, from heat waves on land to unusually hot ocean waters....

Here is a picture of the nine-dot problem. The task seems simple enough: connect all nine dots with four straight lines, but, do so without lifting the pen from the paper or retracing any line. If you don’t already know the solution, give it a try – although your chances of figuring it out within a few minutes hover around 0 percent. In fact, even if I were to give you a hint like “think outside of the box,” you are unlikely to crack this deceptively (and annoyingly!...

By Shereen Lehman Men waiting to become fathers for the first time experienced hormonal changes before their babies were born, and levels of some hormones appeared linked to those of the men’s wives, according to a new study. The expectant fathers showed drops in testosterone and estradiol – a form of estrogen – but no changes in cortisol or progesterone, two hormones that are implicated in stress, say the authors. Past research has suggested that new fathers have lower levels of testosterone, but it wasn’t known when the decline begins....