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MONTEREY, California — The six Apollo moon landing sites are international cultural treasures that deserve protection, a nonprofit organization says. The group, called For All Moonkind, aims to work with space agencies around the world to draw up a protection plan, which will be submitted to the United Nations in the summer of 2018. “The goal is to present them something that’s already pre-agreed, so they can’t turn it down,” For All Moonkind co-founder Michelle Hanlon said last week at the Starship Congress 2017 conference here....

A strange dead star may be a remnant of what was essentially a miniature supernova, a new study finds. The properties of this bizarre star may help shed light on how the unusual supernova that created it formed, the study’s researchers said. The scientists investigated white dwarfs, which are superdense, Earth-size cores of dead stars that are left behind after stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. [How to Tell Star Types Apart (Infographic)] “These objects are very faint—much fainter than ordinary stars—but they are numerous in our own corner of the Milky Way,” said study lead author Stephane Vennes, an astrophysicist at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Ondrejov, Czech Republic....

To complete the charade, the spiders walk on their three rear pairs of legs and raise the fourth pair overhead, waving them around to simulate ant antennae. They even adopt ants’ characteristically fast, erratic, nonstop mode of locomotion in place of the stop-and-go movements other jumping spiders make. It is an Oscar-worthy performance and the secret of this group’s success: more than 200 species of Myrmarachne thrive in the tropical forests of Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas....

The Trump administration is committed to sending astronauts to the moon as part of a broader push to prioritize human spaceflight and firm up U.S. dominance in the final frontier, Vice President Mike Pence said. “We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but [also] to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond,” Pence said today (Oct. 5) at the first meeting of the newly reinstated National Space Council (NSC)....

The World Health Organization is urging people to continue wearing a mask and social distancing—even if they are fully vaccinated against COVID—amid the spread of a concerning new variant and high levels of community transmission in many places. While most COVID vaccines are thought to largely protect against all known variants, none is 100 percent effective. The WHO also advises vaccinated people to keep taking precautions such as staying in well-ventilated areas and avoiding crowds....

By Janelle WeaverPractice makes perfect when it comes to remembering things, but exactly how that works has long been a mystery. A study published in the September 10 issue of Science indicates that reactivating neural patterns over and over again may etch items into the memory.People find it easier to recall things if material is presented repeatedly at well-spaced intervals rather than all at once. For example, you’re more likely to remember a face that you’ve seen on multiple occasions over a few days than one that you’ve seen once in one long period....

Celebrities and professional athletes are among the few Americans with doctors and other health care workers at their beck and call. The rest of us typically are left to our own devices perhaps more often than is healthy: common ailments can go undiagnosed, chronic conditions can run amok and serious illnesses can be mistaken for common colds. But “our own devices” has gained new meaning in recent years. Medical researchers are tapping into sensors in the smartphones we carry with us just about everywhere....

According to 55 percent of 350,000 people from 70 countries who participated online in Richard Wiseman’s Laugh Lab experiment (discussed in last month’s column), this is the world’s funniest joke: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead!...

A car accident, a rough tackle, an unexpected tumble. The number of ways to bang up the brain are almost as numerous as the people who sustain these injuries. And only recently has it become clear just how damaging a seemingly minor knock can be. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no longer just a condition acknowledged in military personnel or football players and other professional athletes. Each year some 1.7 million civilians will suffer an injury that disrupts the function of their brains, qualifying it as a TBI....

For decades, Europe and the United States have led the way when it comes to high-energy particle colliders. But a proposal by China that is quietly gathering momentum has raised the possibility that the country could soon position itself at the forefront of particle physics. Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, working with international collaborators, are planning to build a ‘Higgs factory’ by 2028 — a 52-kilometer underground ring that would smash together electrons and positrons....

EPA’s move last week to ease pollution enforcement during the novel coronavirus pandemic endangers people who are susceptible to the spreading disease by exacerbating respiratory illnesses, according to public health experts. Virus hot spots like New York City have historically been exposed to high levels of air pollution from factories, cars and other sources of particulate matter. They also have higher rates of respiratory illnesses compared with other areas of the nation, said Kathy Fallon Lambert of the T....

When Quileute Nation elder Chris Morgenroth III was growing up in La Push, Wash., first-graders spent recess at the beach, where a few miles offshore, thick beds of kelp waved underwater. Today, those kelp beds are all but gone. In tiny Kipnuk, Alaska, flooding is eroding the banks of the river that lies close to 17-year-old Nelson Kanuk’s family home. Last year, he said, 10 feet disappeared, swallowing a shoreline trail....

Early-life exposure to anesthesia does not appear to lead to long-term cognitive problems, researchers announced today. New evidence from the first, randomized anesthesia trial in kids provides the strongest indication yet that exposing young children to anesthesia—at least for a brief time—will not saddle them with developmental deficits. The news comes just a couple of weeks after a medical advisory group reiterated its concerns about such exposures among children younger than four years....

Gravitational waves—the ghostly ripples in spacetime first predicted by Einstein and finally detected a century later by advanced observatories—have sparked a revolution in astrophysics, revealing the otherwise-hidden details of merging black holes and neutron stars. Now, scientists have used these waves to open another new window on the universe, providing new constraints on neutron stars’ exact shapes. The result will aid researchers in their ongoing quest to understand the inner workings of these exotic objects....

Mothers and children of a First Nations tribe living in one of Canada’s most industrialized regions are highly exposed to estrogen-blocking chemicals, according to a new study. The research is the first to confirm the Aamjiwnaang community’s fears of elevated exposure to pollutants, and it may help shed some light on why the tribe has an unusually low percentage of baby boys. The findings do not prove that chemicals are causing fewer baby boys in the community, but they provide some limited evidence suggesting a possible link....

Anti-pollution measures enacted in the United States in 1970 likely led to a rebound in rainfall over the city of Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s, new research shows. Weather stations’ measurements showed that average annual rainfall in the city’s core increased 10 percent after the Clean Air Act, which focuses on airborne pollutants that pose a risk to human health, passed in 1970. “It suddenly just changed dramatically in the ’70s....

Death is certain. Too often an accurate accounting of the events leading to it is not. When a person dies, a doctor, medical examiner or coroner must fill out a certificate listing the cause of death and the underlying factors that helped to bring it about. Too often, however, these forms are riddled with problems. When a drunk driver dies in a car accident, for example, the fact that alcohol was involved is frequently not noted....

First-of-their-kind images of the magnetic field around a black hole may explain how the black hole shoots out a jet of energy and matter more than 5,000 light-years into space. The new images come from the first black hole ever photographed, which sits at the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years away. In 2017, an international collaboration of more than 300 researchers coordinated 11 radio telescopes around the globe to observe the center of M87....

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Two of the most anticipated new heart drugs to be launched in recent years have been priced well above analyst expectations, fuelling the debate about whether modern medicines cost too much. Praluent (alirocumab) injection, made by Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Entresto (sacubitril/valsartan) from Novartis are both treatments that represent significant advances for millions of patients at risk of serious heart problems. But their positioning in the marketplace was always likely to be contentious since they offer more effective alternatives to very cheap, off-patent drugs....

An ancient crocodile’s last meal might never have come to light were it not for researchers deciding to scan the rock-embedded fossil with a beam of neutrons. The scientists had set out to see if neutrons—the building blocks of atomic nuclei, along with protons—could offer better images of fossils than x-rays and made the startling discovery that a croc in the Cretaceous period had eaten a previously unknown species of juvenile ornithopod dinosaur before it died....