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Jupiter, king of the gods in Roman mythology, shrouded himself in clouds to hide his true nature. But his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer past this veil and reveal his mischievous behavior. It is fitting, then, that the NASA spacecraft now circling Jupiter the planet is named after Juno. The gas giant obscures its inner workings with opulent swirls and bands of clouds, and the Juno orbiter is tasked with probing past this barrier to search for clues about the planet’s origin and evolution....

If you are sitting at a computer right now, take a look at your keyboard. If your keyboard looks like most, the “delete” key is further away from you than the “shift” key. Go ahead and hold down the “shift” key, and don’t release it until I tell you to. This was the procedure followed by participants in a study recently published in the journal PLoS One. Participants were seated in front of a response apparatus with two buttons, one closer than the other....

The number of conservative voters who believe in climate change has almost doubled in the past two years, according to a new poll that attributes the rise in part to a lessening hostility toward the issue by Republican leaders. Forty-seven percent of conservatives now say the climate is changing, a leap of 19 points since the midterm elections of 2014, according to the survey released yesterday by Yale and George Mason universities....

In the newly released The Martian, a stranded astronaut must figure out how to survive on the Red Planet after being accidentally left behind when the rest of his crew escapes a violent dust storm. Explorer Mark Watney spends many months trying to make water, grow food and send an SOS signal back to Earth. Most of the tools he uses in the film, which opened Oct. 2, are based on existing or in-development technology....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. President Trump’s new executive order on cybersecurity for federal computer networks and key elements of the country’s infrastructure – such as the electricity grid and core communications networks – builds meaningfully on the work of the Obama administration. It focuses on matters of common and bipartisan concern, meaning it is likely to avoid the disquiet and disorganization generated by other recent executive orders....

BANGALORE, India—In the ongoing hunt for alternative fuel sources that are also cost-effective, researchers are looking into making biofuel from genetically engineered diatoms, a type of single-celled algae with shells made of glasslike silica. These microscopic plants, commonly observed as a brown skin coating submerged stones in rivers and lakes and as phytoplankton in seas and oceans, typically contain oil droplets inside their cells. The oil is a food source for the plants in lean times....

A new lithium-ion battery is one of the smallest ever made and the first battery to be created with a three-dimensional printer. Measuring less than a millimeter on each side, it fits comfortably on the head of pin and could potentially power tiny medical devices or miniature robots. 3D printers make objects from the ground up by depositing successive layers of material on top of each other. Most 3D printers manipulate plastic, which is useful for prototyping or crafting toys and knickknacks....

In 1797 Henry Cavendish, one of Great Britain’s leading scientists, built a contraption to weigh the world. At the time, Earth’s mass was unknown, as was its composition. Was it mostly solid rock? Did it vary with depth? Astronomer Edmond Halley even suggested that Earth might be hollow. Isaac Newton had compared Earth’s mass with that of other bodies in the solar system and knew, for example, that Earth was more massive than the moon....

A few years ago at a bar in Reno, graduate student John Zablocki was talking about his research on the rediscovery of lost species—those presumed to have gone extinct only to turn up again alive and well—when a stranger chimed in. “What about the Lord Howe Island stick insect?” he suggested, recalling the widely reported 2001 rediscovery of that species on an island in Australia. Recalling the celebrated line from the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, the stranger added: “Life, uh, finds a way....

Most people know they should not attach anything to their key chains that could be tied to their identity. If your house keys are lost, you certainly don’t want the finder to know where you live. But what if a thief could make a copy of your home, office or car keys using nothing more than a picture posted to the photo-sharing Web site Flickr or a social networking site such as Facebook?...

The brain contains a built-in GPS that relies on memories of past navigation experiences to simulate future ones. But how does it represent new environments in order to determine how to navigate them successfully? And what happens in the brain when we enter a new space, or use satellite navigation (SatNav) technology to help us find our way around? Research published Tuesday in Nature Communications reveals two distinct brain regions that cooperate to simulate the topology of one’s environment and plan future paths through it when one is actively navigating....

From the moment we begin to hear, our auditory system is precisely tuned, able to distinguish subtle differences between sounds. But how does it get that way? New research reveals how developing ears generate their own noise, a process that may help calibrate our auditory system. Johns Hopkins University researchers studied the auditory systems of rats, which are deaf until about 12 days of age. During this prehearing period, the scientists discovered, the rodents have bursts of activity in certain cells—called support cells—in their cochleas....

THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE has been at the forefront of analyzing the costs of climate change. Together with the University of Leeds in England, the school has started a Center for Climate Change Economics and Policy to examine issues in more detail. Co-director Andrew Gouldson assesses the likelihood of an international climate agreement and what local communities can do to adapt to change. What is your vision for the center?...

Last week, nine-year-old Hally Yust died after contracting a rare brain-eating amoeba infection while swimming near her family’s home in Kansas. The organism responsible, Naegleria fowleri, dwells in warm freshwater lakes and rivers and usually targets children and young adults. Once in the brain it causes a swelling called primary meningoencephalitis. The infection is almost universally fatal: it kills more than 97 percent of its victims within days. Although deadly, infections are exceedingly uncommon—there were only 34 reported in the U....

Small-scale gold panners in the Andean nation have responded to soaring gold prices by revving up the pace of gold mining, stripping the region of its forests. Since 2003, deforestation linked to gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, has increased sixfold in conjunction with the annual increase in gold prices – far outpacing the deforestation due to human settlement and development in the surrounding areas. Jennifer Swenson, assistant professor of the practice of geospatial analysis at Duke University and lead author of the report, said that placer mining – a method of open-pit mining – is clearing vast swaths of forests, with little chance of regeneration....

To hurtle around a corner along the fastest “racing line” without losing control, race car drivers must brake, steer and accelerate in precisely timed sequences. The process depends on the limits of friction, and they are governed by known physical laws—which means self-driving cars can learn to complete a lap at the fastest possible speed (as some have already done). But this becomes a much knottier problem when the automated driver has to share space with other cars....

Seeming to be a model of harmonious cooperation, the marmoset family unit includes offspring that stay at home past sexual maturity to help care for their younger siblings and fathers that share the duty of carrying newborns so mothers can take a break. As it turns out, all this sharing and caring may be facilitated by a fluid sense of identity among the tiny monkeys, which carry around not only one another’s infants but bits of one another as well....

If you were paying attention to social media recently, you might have come across a viral ad for EXTRA gum depicting scenes of postpandemic life: people slowly peeking out from behind closed doors, shutting their laptops before bursting maskless out of their toilet paper–filled dens into the street. The actors, all unwashed and unkempt, run gleefully to the nearest park where each proceeds to pounce on the first stranger they encounter and initiate a passionate make-out session, set to Celine Dion’s power ballad “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now....

A debate has raged for decades over whether male fertility is declining, according to some analyses of studies from recent decades. It’s an alarming possibility, and likely one reason at-home semen analysis is a growing field of research and product development. The latest study of a new at-home test kit, published today in Science Translational Medicine, found that even untrained users were able to measure sperm count and concentration as well as motility (the percentage of actively moving sperm), detecting abnormal semen with 97 percent accuracy compared with traditional lab testing....

But not everyone rejoiced. Gmail paid for all of this goodness by displaying small text ads, off to the right of each incoming message, relevant to its contents. Privacy advocates went ballistic. It didn’t seem to matter to them that a software algorithm—not a human being—was scanning your messages for keywords. The Electronic Privacy Information Center called for Gmail to be shut down, and a California state senator proposed a bill that would make it illegal to scan the contents of incoming e-mail....