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It’s good to be young. Three researchers in biology, chemistry and physics have won the inaugural Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, a new national prize rewarding promising research by scientists under 42. The $250,000 award, established by the charitable foundation of billionaire industrialist investor Leonard Blavatnik, is now the largest unrestricted cash prize awarded across a broad range of disciplines for early-career scientists. For comparison, Nobel Prizes are worth $1.2 million and are split among up to three researchers, whereas the recently created Breakthrough Prizes award $3 million to each winner....

On Sept. 15, 2018, at precisely 6:02 a.m., a Delta II rocket lifted off in a cloud of fire and smoke from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast. The payload, a NASA observation satellite known as ICESat-2, measured roughly the size of an automobile, and weighed in at 3,338 pounds. At an altitude 298 miles above the Earth, the satellite decoupled from the rocket and moved into orbit....

Kinematics, the study of motion and how things move, encompasses the concepts of position, velocity and acceleration—but as anyone who has caught up to someone in a game of tag or on the running track knows, it’s acceleration that’s the most fun element of this concept. Some of us start out slow, but acceleration can yield some surprising results when it comes to predators and prey, or basically anyone involved in a chase....

While monitoring vampire bats in Panama, researchers discovered that the bloodthirsty fliers help one another find food by screeching after locating a juicy meal, despite departing their roosts alone. FRENCH POLYNESIA Scientists reconstructed historic Polynesian settlement routes by tracking rare gene variants in DNA from hundreds of islanders. Findings suggest that the shared tradition of carving massive statues, such as the Moai at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), may have originated at the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia....

“Mission Control. Mission Control. Mir 1–Beginning our descent. Over.” “Roger that, Mir 1.” The date is August 7, 2003, and I am inside the Russian Mir 1 submersible in the Atlantic Ocean. With me are cameraman Vince Pace and pilot Anatoly Sagalevitch, and our bodies rapidly heat up the two-meter-wide sphere to 30 degrees Celsius. Fortunately, the sub quickly cools in the 30 minutes it takes to reach our destination: the “Lost City of Atlantis,” where geologic formations resemble ancient ruins....

All over the world, the oceans are changing in profound ways. They’re storing up more heat as the world warms. Marine ecosystems are shifting in response to climate change. Sea levels are rising as the world’s melting glaciers crumble into the ocean. And now, scientists have identified another transformation: The water itself has been moving faster over the past few decades. A study published yesterday in Science Advances finds that global ocean circulation has been accelerating since the 1990s....

That conservatives doubt scientific findings and theories that conflict with their political and religious beliefs is evident from even a cursory scan of right-leaning media. The denial of evolution and of global warming and the pushback against stem cell research are the most egregious examples in recent decades. It is not surprising, because we expect those on the right to let their politics trump science—tantamount to a dog-bites-man story. That liberals are just as guilty of antiscience bias comports more with accounts of humans chomping canines, and yet those on the left are just as skeptical of well-established science when findings clash with their political ideologies, such as with GMOs, nuclear power, genetic engineering and evolutionary psychology—skepticism of the last I call “cognitive creationism” for its endorsement of a blank-slate model of the mind in which natural selection operated on humans only from the neck down....

By Adam Mann Kepler, the space telescope considered most likely over the next few years to identify an Earth-like planet orbiting another star, has struck solid ground, mission scientists say.Most of the hundreds of extrasolar planets discovered to date–including the eight previously reported by Kepler–are at least as large as Neptune and are mainly gas giants. But astronomers hope that the mission will eventually yield a trove of terrestrial planets, including some orbiting their stars at a distance that would allow their surfaces to host liquid water, and possibly life....

Bowing to scientists’ near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats, after the authors refused to withdraw it. The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012, showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,” said a statement from Elsevier, which publishes the journal....

Generations of American kids have been told that if they dig down far enough they’ll get to China. Of course, this assertion is not true. For one thing, most kids dig with spoons or those cheap, red plastic shovels, which could never make it through the planet. Another reason is that kids are notoriously bad at shoring up the sides of deep holes, resulting in inevitable cave-ins once they reach a depth of six inches....

Editor’s note: We’re posting this story from our September 2006 issue because of recent FDA action on ATryn. Proteins are biotechnology’s raw crude. For much of its 30-year history, the industry has struggled to come up with a steady source of supply, squeezing the maximum out of these large-molecule commodities from cell lines isolated from hamster ovaries and the like. In the late 1990s—with the advent of a new class of protein-based drugs, monoclonal antibodies—demand sometimes outstripped supply....

If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun to reveal how the strong emotion starts to emerge in the brain. Neurobiologist Semir Zeki, of University College London’s Laboratory of Neurobiology, led a study last year that scanned the brains of 17 adults as they gazed at images of a person they professed to hate....

Rather than wait decades for another industry to grow organically and spill over to the rest of the continent, Luxembourg is positioning itself as the center of a new kind of broadcasting industry: big data. In 2016, the Ministry of the Economy announced that the country would be developing “a pan-European HPC [high-performance computing] and big-data ecosystem” that will allow data transfer across borders and the use of “a set of innovative smart software applications....

When Tim Berners-Lee sketched out what we now know as the World Wide Web, he offered it as a solution to an age-old but prosaic source of problems: documentation. In 1989 the computer scientist was working at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, just as a major project, the Large Electron Positron collider, was coming online. CERN was one of the largest Internet sites in Europe at the time, home to thousands of scientists using a variety of computer systems....

The trend of urban chicken-keeping is to blame for a growing number of salmonella outbreaks across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And bird owners exacerbate the risk by treating the chickens as they would other pets: Bringing them into the home, snuggling them, and even kissing them. A new report set out to investigate how salmonella infections from live birds had changed, and why....

Excerpted from Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, by Patricia S. Churchland. Copyright © 2013 Patricia S. Churchland. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. Diverging Paths in Human Sexual Development The basic account of a typical brain-hormone interaction for XX and XY fetuses has been outlined. But not all cases conform to the prototype. Variability is always a part of biology. For example, unusual chromosome arrangements can occur....

One in six U.S. adults reported taking a psychiatric drug, such as an antidepressant or a sedative, in 2013, a new study found. The new data comes from an analysis of the 2013 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which gathered information on the cost and use of health care in the United States. An earlier government report, from 2011, found that just over one in 10 adults reported taking prescription drugs for “problems with emotions, nerves or mental health,” the authors wrote in a research letter published today (Dec....

Interstellar travel, a timeworn staple of science fiction, can already be science fact if one has cash to spare. For just $100 million or so, a customer could actually purchase a top-of-the-line commercial rocket and ride right out of the solar system. But patience would be key. If launched tomorrow toward the nearest port of call—Proxima b, a potentially habitable Earth-mass planet recently discovered in the triple star system of Alpha Centauri about four light-years away—that rocket would take 80,000 years to arrive....

In a major scoop, TheGreenGrok reveals the surprising ending to the hit TV series — and it’s hot. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that the second half of the fifth and final season of Breaking Badbegins this Sunday.Over the past five and a half years the series has followed the moral descent of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), also known (to precious few) by his criminal moniker Heisenberg, the cooker of the best meth on the planet....

The most common injury to American troops is silent and invisible. And I don’t mean PTSD: hearing loss and tinnitus—ringing in the ear—top the list of service-related disabilities for veterans. They are an unsung consequence of prolonged exposure to roaring environments, such as the deck of an aircraft carrier, or, increasingly, to the sudden blast of a roadside bomb. One fifth of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are affected, according to a 2017 analysis....