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The Pacific Ocean was born from a geological spasm that started 190 million years ago, when Earth’s crust ripped apart and fresh lava welled up from below. Now, a new analysis suggests that this seafloor birth was a lot more complex than researchers had thought. The study is a rare step forward in understanding the origin of the Pacific, one of geology’s most enduring mysteries. “This is one big piece of the puzzle that we’ve now put into place,” says Lydian Boschman, a geologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands....

Of all the human ancestors represented in the fossil record, Neandertals are the best known. A significant proportion of what scientists have learned about the Neandertals is based on a set of remains that the Croatian paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger recovered between 1899 and 1905 from a rock shelter in the town of Krapina, some 60 kilometers north of Zagreb. The Krapina sample dates to between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, and includes multiple representatives of nearly every bone and tooth of the body....

Inspired by a Japanese folding fan, Merchant Square Footbridge in Paddington, London, gracefully opens above a historical canal at least once a week to allow small boats to pass. It was completed last year, and its unique design is a 2015 finalist for a prestigious award from the Institution of Structural Engineers. The organization annually honors creativity and technical advancement in projects throughout the world. In an engineering first, the bridge’s architects designed the slats of the fabricated steel span into a cascade of cantilevers....

Hominins reached Asia at least 2.1 million years ago, researchers assert in an 11 July Nature paper. Stone tools they found in central China represent the earliest known evidence of humans or their ancient relatives living outside Africa. Other scientists are convinced that the tools were made by hominins and are confident that they are as old as claimed. And although the tools’ makers are unknown, the discovery could force researchers to reconsider which hominin species first left Africa—and when....

The summer of 2021 was a glaring example of what disruptive weather will look like in a warming world. In mid-July, storms in western Germany and Belgium dropped up to eight inches of rain in two days. Floodwaters ripped buildings apart and propelled them through village streets. A week later a year’s worth of rain—more than two feet—fell in China’s Henan province in just three days. Hundreds of thousands of people fled rivers that had burst their banks....

The Internet, which seemed like science fiction a generation ago, has become a supernational reality, with more than a billion people worldwide now having access. But with growth, there has come crime, and indeed the Internet is now where pedophiles prowl and identities are stolen. Part of the blame must go to law enforcement agencies, which have been slow to adjust to the radically different conditions of the virtual world. Police accustomed to relying on physical evidence, eyewitnesses and confessions, were suddenly confronted with evidence in digital form; in place of an eyewitness was a log file, a transcript of a server’s activity....

Humans are not the only animals that endure divorce; some birds go through it as well. A recent study reveals why members of one such species, the Eurasian blue tit, sometimes break their bond. When ornithologists refer to “divorce,” they mean that both members of a breeding pair survive to the following breeding season but end up pairing with new partners rather than reuniting. Great blue herons divorce after every breeding season, and emperor penguins split up around 85 percent of the time....

One of the reasons Covid-19 has spread so swiftly around the globe is that for the first days after infection, people feel healthy. Instead of staying home in bed, they may be out and about, unknowingly passing the virus along. But in addition to these pre-symptomatic patients, the relentless silent spread of this pandemic is also facilitated by a more mysterious group of people: the so-called asymptomatics. According to various estimates, between 20 and 45 percent of the people who get Covid-19—and possibly more, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—sail through a coronavirus infection without realizing they ever had it....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Here we go again: another Facebook controversy, yet again violating our sense of privacy by letting others harvest our personal information. This flareup is a big one to be sure, leading some people to consider leaving Facebook altogether, but the company and most of its over 2 billion userswill reconcile. The vast majority will return to Facebook, just like they did the last time and the many times before that....

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.] What makes you say we are on the cusp of voice becoming the primary way we communicate with our devices? Think about 1976, when [Apple co-founder] Steve Wozniak built the first PC with a monitor and a keyboard. Fast-forward to today, and people are still using a monitor and keyboard to interact with most of their devices. Even with smartphones you either type on or touch a screen to get output....

“Too cozy” is how Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa referred to the relationship between the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies in the aftermath of the Vioxx debacle. Although the FDA admits no substantive lapse in vigilance, congressional pressure and consumer outrage are forcing officials to rethink the agency’s role and perhaps even the drug approval process itself. The furor began last September, when Merck, Vioxx’s manufacturer, withdrew the popular anti-inflammatory drug after a study revealed that long-term use doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke....

Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized COVID booster shots for all adults who have received their initial set of vaccinations. The CDC followed by strengthening their recommendation for all eligible people 18 years of age and older to get vaccinated. Most scientists knew when COVID-19 vaccines were first authorized that we would need at least one additional shot to complete the primary series, known as a prime-boost strategy. This is despite the vaccines’ outstanding initial efficacy....

Editor’s Note: For decades, bias and prejudice stalled progress for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In recent years female scientists, engineers and mathematicians have caught up to their male colleagues in many respects although gender discrepancies in the number of tenured faculty and senior scientists persist. Here researchers Stephen J. Ceci, Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn and Wendy M. Williams explore the possible reasons for a gender gap in salary where it exists....

To break up the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, BP had applied by mid-July nearly two million gallons of dispersants, both at the sea’s surface and below. Environmentalists worry that the chemicals could be as damaging as the oil. To address such concerns, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released early this summer preliminary data from its tests, but instead of quelling fears, the data have stirred up more questions....

The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrocious—right? The answer seems like a resounding “yes” if you consider some well-known and rather disconcerting information. Eyewitness misidentifications are known to have played a role in 70 percent of the 349 wrongful convictions that have been overturned based on DNA evidence (so far). Psychologists have learned a lot about why such errors happen....

Most people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between Chinook and coho salmon or even between young and old fish. But not the denizens of the Columbia River Basin (particularly in Washington State, Oregon and Idaho): they not only know their salmon, but their ability to distinguish between species is key to preserving the fast-disappearing fish. Salmon, once plentiful in the Columbia River, are now a dying breed—a situation that threatens not only their existence but the livelihood of folks inhabiting the mighty river’s shores: The commercial fishing industry employs more than 3,600 people and generates more than $100 million annually in Idaho, Oregon and Washington alone, according to a 2005 report by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in Portland, Ore....

It is one of the most iconic discoveries in all of archaeology—the treasure-filled tomb of the young Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, better known as King Tut. One hundred years ago today British archaeologist Howard Carter and an Egyptian excavation team found the boy king’s final resting place. Scholars have been studying the royal tomb and its owner ever since. From this work the broad outlines of the life and times of Tut have emerged....

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit just 80 kilometers northwest of Kathmandu on April 25, crumbling buildings and devastating much of the city. The ground shook well beyond Nepal’s borders, into Tibet and northern India, in one of the worst natural disasters to strike the Himalayas in years; thousands of people are feared dead. Here, Nature takes a look at the geological and social circumstances that combined to make the Nepal quake so deadly....

“The wrestling gyroscope has been a popular feature of the Young Men’s Christian Association gyroscope lectures in China. It consists of a strong bicycle wheel with the rim loaded with lead pipe. When spun up to high speed and set upon its edge, it will stand up with a light list to one side, and will precess slowly around on a nearly vertical axis. A member of the audience is invited to use a strong staff padded at one end with a solid rubber ball and make the wheel lie down on its side....

Not Showing His Work The failure to include a key equation may have kept Sir Fred Hoyle from getting the recognition he deserved for a paper on the formation of elements in stars. Hoyle, who died in 2001 at the age of 86, was something of a tragic scientific figure. He never accepted the big bang theory, preferring instead the idea of a steady-state cosmos; later, he embraced the view that life on Earth originated in outer space....