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The GOES-R satellite was one of the most eagerly anticipated satellites in recent memory. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched it in November 2016 with the promise to revolutionize weather forecasting in the U.S. After years of construction, a harrowing rocket launch and delicate maneuvering to put it in position 22,300 miles above the earth, the most advanced satellite NOAA has ever put in orbit has sent back its first pictures....

The world saw headlines about one of the largest icebergs ever calved a few weeks ago. But a smaller one on the other end of the globe might have bigger consequences. The chunk of ice, which broke free in the Arctic last week, is more worrisome to climate scientists who are watching one of Earth’s largest glaciers shed pieces in a way that stands to raise sea levels. Compared with the Delaware-sized iceberg that split off of West Antarctica earlier this month, this one is almost paltry — the size of three Manhattans or so....

Tropical Storm Henri struck Rhode Island yesterday afternoon with 60-mph winds, making it the first named storm to hit the state in 30 years. That was a rare occurrence in the Northeast, where most hurricane-force storms weaken over cooler waters or get pushed into the Atlantic by easterly winds. Those that do strike Northern states are almost never major storms by the time they hit. Henri brought heavy rainfall and power outages from New York and New Jersey through New England....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineIn 2008, the world’s media was captivated by a study apparently showing that cows like to align themselves with magnetic fields. But attempts to replicate this finding have left two groups of researchers at loggerheads, highlighting the problems faced by scientists working to replicate unusual findings based on new methods of data analysis.Magneto-reception has been detected in animals from turtles to birds. Three years ago, Hynek Burda, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and his colleagues added cattle to the magnetic family with a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the agency’s biggest-ever science project is coming together at last. In a gymnasium-sized cleanroom dominated by a laser-guided robotic arm on mustard-yellow scaffolding, bunny-suited technicians have completed the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope, a $9 billion orbital observatory planned to lift off in 2018, being built by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian Space Agencies. Gripped by the robotic arm and guided by technicians, the last of the mirror’s 18 lightweight hexagons of gold-coated beryllium has been installed, marking the most tangible milestone yet in the observatory’s multi-decadal path to launch....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - For primary school children in China, spending an extra 45 minutes per day outside in a school activity class may reduce the risk of myopia, according to a new study. In some parts of China, 90% of high school graduates have nearsightedness, and rates are lower but increasing in Europe and the Middle East, the authors write. “There were some studies suggesting the protective effect of outdoor time in the development of myopia, but most of this evidence is from cross-sectional studies (survey) data that suggest ‘association’ instead of causality,” said lead author Dr....

Just before noon today, Stockholm time, three real visionaries struck scientific gold: the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The researchers had developed ways of imaging complex proteins at the atomic level, adopting electron microscopes to see how the molecules create antibiotic resistance, convert light into energy for photosynthesis and how the Zika virus functions. “For developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Chemistry Prize to Jacques Dubochet of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joachim Frank of Columbia University in New York City, and Richard Henderson of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England....

To health care workers in the COVID era, holidays mean death, and we knew Omicron was coming before it had a name. The wave caused by this variant has barely begun, rapidly gathering steam, and we are exhausted, attempting to pull from reserves badly drained by earlier surges. Back in August, the beds of my hospital in Tennessee filled with COVID patients in varying stages of respiratory distress. Some wore a plastic mask that covered their mouth and nose, hooked up to a machine that delivered forceful breaths into the patient’s open mouth....

Illah Nourbakhsh is a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which has one of the world’s most prestigious robotics programs, and his research is funded by the likes of Google, Intel and Microsoft. But in the end, he says, he does it for the kids. “[Robots] are really interesting to a diverse group of people,” says Nourbakhsh, whose research has revealed that when kids are given programming tasks that involve robots, girls are no less interested than boys, and everyone is more likely to stick with the curriculum....

Exercise may soon do more for you than tighten up your sagging muscles. Advances in biomechanical engineering could use energy generated while walking, hiking or running to power any device requiring portable power, including night-vision goggles and other battery-operated devices used by soldiers as well as robotic prosthetic limbs, cell phones and computers in remote locations where no other energy sources are available. A team of researchers at the Simon Fraser University (S....

“This idea might seem obvious, but mathematics is about establishing concepts with absolute certainty,” write Toby S. Cubitt, David Pérez-García and Michael Wolf in this issue’s cover story, “The Unsolvable Problem.” In their feature, they describe a mathematical odyssey to demonstrate the “undecidability”—that is, the unsolvable nature—of a certain problem in quantum physics. The journey takes them on a three-year “grand adventure,” from a small town deep in the Austrian Alps into a world of complicated mathematics....

Within the next three years, the U.S. military will test the feasibility of sending a quadruped robot out into the field as a trusty pack mule to carry supplies for its troops, wherever they go. If the testing goes well for Boston Dynamics’s Legged Squad Support System (LS3), company founder Marc Raibert will have come a long way from the one-legged hopping robots he pioneered in the 1980s. Actually Raibert has already come a long way, to the point where the U....

LONDON – Around 20 percent of the snow cover in North America’s greatest mountain range has been lost because of warmer springs in the last three decades. Scientists from the American Geophysical Union and the U.S. Geological Survey report that they had established a pattern of snowfall in the northern and southern Rockies: when the snowpack was large in the northern Rockies, it might be correspondingly meager in the southern mountains and vice versa....

A recent Scientific American feature explores how the catastrophic 1918 influenza pandemic seemed to quickly slip from public discourse. The event killed more than 50 million people worldwide, yet it takes up comparatively little space in society’s “collective memory.” The article considers, by analogy, how the current COVID-19 pandemic might be remembered by future generations. Scientific American accompanied the feature with a call for letters telling the stories of families affected by the 1918 crisis....

As our P-3 flying research laboratory ­skim­med above the icy surface of the Wed­dell Sea, I was glued to the floor. Lying flat on my stomach, I peered through the hatch on the bottom of the plane as seals, penguins and icebergs zoomed in and out of view. From 500 feet up everything appeared in miniature except the giant ice shelves—seemingly endless expanses of ice, as thick as the length of several football fields, that float in the Southern Ocean, fringing the ice sheets that virtually cover the Antarctic landmass....

Food security may be less of an issue for urban dwellers than previously thought. Take the case of 70-year-old Andy Hoi-Csiu Chan. He tends bamboo, peonies, watermelon, eggplants and other vegetables in his Chicago backyard. Chan, an immigrant from China who teaches traditional brush painting at his Chinatown studio, started his garden about 12 years ago. “I love to see that they grow,” he said. “Many, many friends to come to my house and I cook for them....

The same organization that publishes Nature, a prestigious journal that commonly reports major space discoveries, has launched a new journal devoted to microgravity research (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Called npj Microgravity, the new open-access journal is available online and is now looking for submissions. The journal is being published as a collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, with the support of NASA, according to a statement on the new journal’s website....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the status of wetlands in North America? Years ago I remember that wetlands loss, due to development and sprawl, was accelerating fast, but I haven’t heard much on the topic of late. – John Mossbarger, La Jolla, CA Wetlands serve as primary habitat for thousands of wildlife species—from ducks to beavers to insects—and form an important ecosystem link between land and water. They also play a key role in maintaining water quality, as they filter out agricultural nutrients and absorb sediments so that municipal water supplies don’t have to....

There’s no debating it: Puppies are adorable. But is there an age when they reach “peak” cuteness? A new study may have an answer. The study, which aimed to determine the “optimal age” of puppy cuteness, found that puppies are most appealing to humans at around 6 to 8 weeks of age. That’s around the time when puppies are weaned from their mothers, leading the researchers to hypothesize that puppies reach peak cuteness right when they need human care the most....

Picture two birthday parties: one for 4 year olds, and one for 14 year olds. The former conjures kids bellowing “Happy Birthday” and putting their left feet in during the “Hokey Pokey”; the second conjures slump-shouldered teens huddled in corners furtively glancing at each other—even as loud music blares in the background. Why the difference? Our research suggests that the process of kids losing the joy of singing and dancing is intricately linked to a crucial development in their understanding of other people....