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The origins of even the simplest technology are sometimes best remembered not for the ingenuity of the inventor’s imagination but rather for the endless legal disputes it engendered. In the annals of famous patent litigation, the intermittent windshield wiper holds a pride of place. The genesis of this useful but seemingly incidental feature of the modern automobile even attracted Hollywood scriptwriters in search of a latter-day David and Goliath tale that became a 2008 release called Flash of Genius....

For Blue Origin, this coming moment has been more than two decades in the making. The spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos is set to launch its first crewed mission on Tuesday (July 20), which will send the billionaire and three other people to suborbital space aboard a reusable rocket-capsule combo called New Shepard. Liftoff is set for 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas....

Celeste Labedz heard a sound like thunder roll across the ice. She was standing on Alaska’s Taku Glacier, a vast field of snow-smothered ice between towering mountains, when the icequake began: a short-lived seismic tremor caused by the glacier’s sudden movement. Immediately she scrambled for her notebook and jotted down the time. Labedz, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, would check that time against data from a fiber-optic cable she and her colleagues had just deployed to study such quakes—a promising new method that is shaking up geology and adjacent fields....

From Nature magazine Large-brained animals may be less likely to go extinct in a changing world, perhaps because they can use their greater intelligence to adapt their behaviour to new conditions, according to an analysis presented to a meeting of conservation biologists this week. The finding hints at a way to prioritize future conservation efforts for endangered species. Brain size relative to body size is fairly predictable across all mammals, says Eric Abelson, who studies biological sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California....

I trampled clumsily through the dense undergrowth, attempting in vain to go a full five minutes without getting snarled in the thorns that threatened my every move. It was my first field mission in the savannahs of the Republic of Guinea. The aim was to record and understand a group of wild chimpanzees who had never been studied before. These chimps are not lucky enough to enjoy the comforts of a protected area, but instead carve out their existence in the patches of forests between farms and villages....

Scientists have been raising growing concerns for decades over the use of toxic “forever chemicals,” so called because their strong molecular bonds can take hundreds of years to completely break down in the environment. Widely used in consumer products such as cookware and clothing, these substances are turning up everywhere from drinking water to our bloodstream. And now researchers are warning of yet another—and so far underrecognized—source of these troubling toxins: common pesticides....

The county most at risk for coastal flooding is not in Florida, North Carolina or New Jersey, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It’s not even on a coast. It’s Cowlitz County, Wash., population 102,000, about 50 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean on the Columbia River. The ranking comes from a groundbreaking analysis by FEMA that measures disaster risk in a new way. Instead of analyzing only the likelihood of a disaster and the damage it would cause, FEMA also assessed 78 socioeconomic factors such as a community’s poverty rate, racial composition and church membership, and the percentage of residents with high-speed internet....

The cosmos is mostly made of something we cannot see. That was the conclusion astronomers started to reach in the 1930s by looking at galaxy clusters, which should have blown apart unless some “dark matter” was binding them together. Scientists started taking the idea more seriously in the 1970s, when astronomers studying how fast galaxies rotated found the same thing. Soon researchers realized that dark matter was unlikely to be made up of normal matter and radiation....

Bees have been in the spotlight since the emergence about a decade ago of a mysterious bee ailment dubbed “colony collapse disorder,” now responsible for the loss of millions of U.S. hives. The crisis brought attention to the benefits bees bring to humans, but long before they received such notice, the insects were vital to our own species. Through his engaging first-person narrative, biologist Hanson tells the full story of bees: They evolved from carnivorous wasps during the time of dinosaurs, opting for the protein-rich pollen of flowers with which they coevolved....

Back in the 1960s, it seemed like just a matter of time before humanity would slip the bonds of Earth and begin a slow crawl out into the universe. Although it has taken longer than many expected, something like that moment may soon arrive. Around half a dozen governments, as well as a handful of private companies, all have moon missions planned for the near future—a situation ripe for conflict....

MADRID—More than two weeks of U.N. climate talks ended yesterday with little headway on a key issue related to the Paris climate accord—an impasse that frustrated both activists and negotiators, and one that raised fresh worries about the future of the planet. The breakdown occurred even after negotiators worked more than 40 hours past the official close of the talks to try to reach a resolution. But the long hours and sleepless nights didn’t yield agreement on the last piece of the Paris Agreement’s rulebook: guidelines for how international carbon markets would serve the 2015 climate deal....

Russia’s war in Ukraine is squeezing food supplies in countries that depend on those two nations for critical grains and cooking oils. The halt in agricultural shipments out of the Black Sea has sent the price of wheat and fertilizer soaring and prompted growing concerns of a global food crisis. In Turkey, people are scrambling to buy cooking oil in anticipation of further price hikes. Thailand faces surging costs for fertilizer and feed stock....

El Niño is back—although it probably won’t be the monster it’s been in the past. In an announcement last week, NOAA noted that while the southern half of the United States may see wetter conditions in the coming months, this year’s event is likely to be weak and probably won’t come with any significant global impacts. There’s about a 55 percent chance it will last into the spring, according to NOAA forecasters....

On my 10th birthday, I got a puppy. I was so shocked—I had wanted a dog for as long as I could remember—and so overwhelmed with happiness that I burst into tears. For the next 14 years, Happy, a beagle, charmed everyone he met. And when he passed, all of us who had known him mourned, as we would for any loved one. Two in three American households have a pet—that is, an animal kept primarily for companionship....

Key concepts Life Food Metabolism From National Science Education Standards: Life cycles of organisms Introduction Have you ever looked closely at a piece of sandwich bread—really closely? Notice all of those tiny holes? They probably got there thanks to tiny living organisms called yeast. Even though these organisms are too small to see with the naked eye (each granule is a clump of single-celled yeasts), they are indeed alive just like plants, animals, insects and humans....

When Leigh Ann Torres was in her 29th week of pregnancy, she experienced a sudden, 14-pound weight gain along with terrible swelling in her legs and feet. At a visit to her doctor in Austin, Texas, a test showed protein in her urine—a telltale sign of a rapidly progressive disorder called preeclampsia. Characterized by symptoms including persistent high blood pressure, decreased blood platelets, headaches and visual disturbances, preeclampsia can unpredictably proceed to eclampsia (from the Greek eklampsis, or “lightning bolt”), a life-threatening complication characterized by seizures and coma....

In 2017 Scientific American published an important article by Stanford University professor of medicine Marcia L. Stefanick that detailed all the ways modern medicine has failed women—namely, by basing their care on research findings gathered predominately on men and men alone. To be sure, improvements have been made to treating women in cardiovascular health, mental health care and prescription dosing, but much research on women’s health is still in early days....

Quantum technologies are the way of the future, but will that future ever arrive? Maybe so. Physicists have cleared a bit more of the path to a plausible quantum future by constructing an elementary network for exchanging and storing quantum information. The network features two all-purpose nodes that can send, receive and store quantum information, linked by a fiber-optic cable that carries it from one node to another on a single photon....

How many NASA engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? How about if they’re changing 85 lightbulbs? What if the bulbs they’re replacing are on the International Space Station (ISS)? What if it’s rather urgent, because the old bulbs are rapidly burning out? And what if the replacements are a brand-new technology, meant not only to illuminate, but also to help astronauts sleep more? Those questions are no joke to NASA, which is investing $11....

In most countries, cardboard cigarette packages display imagery or text that warns smokers of the increased risks of heart attacks, cancer and pregnancy complications that accompany lighting up. Many of these risks are associated with the inhalation of tobacco smoke through the mouth. But what is less often spotlighted is the effect smoking can have on the surface of the eyes. Tobacco smoking has been tied to age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma and cataracts—some of the leading causes of blindness and severe vision loss worldwide....