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In the endless winter that is Antarctica, the picture of decadence is a juicy strawberry. Research scientists at the Neumayer III polar station may soon be so lucky as to count the treat—and other fresh fruits and vegetables—as part of their diets: engineers at the German Aerospace Center are currently building them a year-round greenhouse. Called Eden ISS, the closed-system, 20-foot-long shipping container will head to Antarctica in October. The project is now in its final phase; next month Paul Zabel, the future caretaker of the greenhouse, and his colleagues will begin a trial of the garden in Bremen....

For three months, the COVID-19 pandemic did what nobody imagined possible: shut down the city that never sleeps. Businesses boarded up, public transport screeched to halt, and Times Square was quiet. Those weeks were emotionally and financially painful. But the drastic measures worked. New York was the epicenter of the pandemic. Cases peaked at almost 12,000 in a day in April, but with regulations and community buy-in, we flattened the curve....

By Janet FangShort sequences of RNA that can effectively turn off specific genes have for the first time been used to treat skin cancer in people.The technique, called RNA interference (RNAi), gained its inventors a Nobel Prize in 2006, but researchers have struggled to get it to the clinic, partly because of problems in getting the molecules to their target.Now, Mark Davis from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues have found a way to deliver particles containing such sequences to patients with the skin cancer melanoma....

When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in space, he also became an instant celebrity, a diplomatic icon of the Soviet Union around the world. Gagarin blasted off Earth 60 years ago on Monday (April 12), kicking off the era of human spaceflight. Rooted in the Cold War, human spaceflight was, at the time, inherently about the perception of power and prestige—and it remains so today, although the nuances of international relationships at play have changed just as much as the technological ones....

For the past five decades pharmaceutical drugs like levodopa have been the gold standard for treating Parkinson’s disease. These medications alleviate motor symptoms of the disease, but none of them can cure it. Patients with Parkinson’s continue to lose dopamine neurons critical to the motor control centers of the brain. Eventually the drugs become ineffective and patients’ tremors get worse. They experience a loss of balance and a debilitating stiffness takes over their legs....

Jessica Pereira, 28, taught English as a second language. Paula Krejci, 26, was a standout athlete in high school. Amy Gillespie, 27, was in jail. All three women led different lives, and each of them died unexpectedly as a complication of being pregnant: Pereira in Syracuse, N.Y., a few weeks ago; Krejci in Cleveland in 2012; and Gillespie in Pittsburgh in 2010. The tragedies are part of a worrisome trend. Deaths due to pregnancy or complications of childbirth have been slowly rising in the U....

The Drug Enforcement Administration on Tuesday announced its intention to temporarily ban the chemicals contained in kratom, a popular herbal supplement that has been widely used as a way to self-treat chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a number of other conditions. Kratom, a plant from Southeast Asia that activates some of the same receptors as opioids, can be easily purchased online and in smoke shops. Although consumers have embraced the supplement as a painkiller and in some cases as a replacement for opioids, physicians worry about users who turn to kratom to try to wean themselves off opioids without seeking professional help....

In the movie Patton, the General sees two columns of his tanks crossing paths and getting stuck in gridlock. In frustration, Patton leaves his jeep and starts directing traffic. After a few minutes, he is called back to his higher responsibilities by Omar Bradley. Bradley mockingly praises Patton’s skills as a traffic cop. The fact is, though, that he was a bad traffic cop. There are much more efficient ways to have two columns cross one another, when you are not limited to roads....

As hard as it is for scientists to develop new drugs, sometimes just getting the drug to where it needs to act is equally challenging. Nowhere is this more true than in the brain, where blood vessel walls are tightly knit, keeping most large molecules from seeping out of the bloodstream and into brain tissue. This blood-brain barrier is a formidable obstacle to delivering certain types of treatments for neurological diseases, but Manjunath N....

Dozens of ancient ice volcanoes once dotted the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres, a new study finds. Whereas regular volcanoes on Earth erupt with molten rock, ice volcanoes—which are also known as cryovolcanoes—spew out plumes of water-ice and other frozen molecules. Previous research has detected traces of cryovolcanism on several bodies in the outer solar system, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Pluto. However, much remains unknown about cryovulcanism, especially compared with regular volcanism....

Around 80 million years ago in what is now Brazil, a sick dinosaur limped along—but its days were numbered. Its leg bone was so diseased that it had turned spongy, and a particularly gruesome culprit may have been to blame: wormlike parasites wriggling through its bloodstream. Researchers analyzing the fossilized bone recently found strange, oblong forms in channels that once were blood vessels. The dinosaur in question was a titanosaur, a large long-necked animal....

Engineers at Stanford University may have developed a way to double or triple the efficiency of solar power, in a potential breakthrough that could drop the price of solar-generated electricity to a level more competitive with fossil fuels. Stanford’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering published a paper in the journal Nature Materials yesterday that claimed researchers there have managed to prove in laboratory tests that heat usually lost in the solar generation process can be saved by improving semiconductors....

To feed the world’s growing and more affluent population, global agriculture will have to double its food production by 2050. More farming, however, usually means more environmental harm as a result of clearing land, burning fossil fuels, consuming water for irrigation and spreading fertilizer. Agriculture already imposes a greater burden on Earth than almost any other human activity, so simply doubling current practices would ruin large areas of land as well as poisoning rivers and oceans....

NEW YORK - For the average United States’ city or ‘burb dweller, firsthand evidence of climate change is rare. Hunters and anglers see it every day. That’s one of the main messages from a coalition of hunting and fishing organizations that released a report Monday outlining the consequences of climate change for fish and wildlife in the United States. “It’s very evident that major shifts are under way,” said Richard Kearney, assistant regional director for climate change for the U....

Vaccine shortages and distribution delays are hampering efforts to curb the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. So some scientists have suggested postponing the second shots of two-dose vaccines to make more available for people to get their first doses. The original recommended interval was 21 days between doses for the Pfizer vaccine and 28 days for the Moderna shots, the two currently authorized in the U.S. Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance to say that people can wait up to 42 days between doses, though the agency still advises individuals to stick to the initial schedule....

If Senate Republicans plow ahead and confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the longtime jurist could have near-term impact on a slew of environmental cases. Among the disputes the high court has agreed to hear this fall: a case that pits villagers from India against the World Bank in a fight over a coal plant. If the villagers prevail, it could have worldwide economic and political repercussions. Several other climate-related issues have a decent shot, too, of getting a future date with the Supreme Court, including one closely watched fight—the “kids’ climate case”—that makes the far-reaching argument that the government must take action on global warming so as not to imperil future generations....

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child....

A star’s long-ago death dive into a black hole generated cosmic fireworks that are revealing more and more about the dramatic encounter. The star got too close to its galaxy’s central black hole about 290 million years ago, and collisions among its torn-apart pieces caused an eruption of optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light that was first spotted by scientists in 2014. Fresh observations of this radiation by NASA’s Swift telescope have yielded more details about where these different wavelengths were generated in the event, which is called ASASSN-14li, a new study reports....

NEW YORK—Visitors from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) walked on Mars, explored a 3D prototype and even dangled a rover over the audience’s head during an augmented reality demo and talk at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering MakerSpace event space in Brooklyn Nov. 7. Matthew Clausen, creative director of JPL’s Ops Lab, joined Marijke Jorritsma, an NYU graduate student and intern at JPL, to demonstrate the research and exploration capabilities of the Microsoft HoloLens, a headset that can project virtual images—from the surface of Mars to a repair schematic—over the real world....

Scrambling up the steep bank of a small wadi, or gully, near the western shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, I stop on a little knoll that offers a view across the vast, mostly barren desert landscape. The glittering, jade-blue lake contrasts in every way with the red-brown landscape around it. This long, narrow desert sea, nestled within Africa’s Great Rift Valley, owes its existence to the Omo River, whose winding flow delivers runoff that comes from summer monsoon rains in the Ethiopian highlands, hundreds of miles north....