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NASA has funded 22 technology concepts that could spur giant leaps in space science and exploration down the road. The potentially transformative space-tech ideas — which received money from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program—include creating a linear (as opposed to rotation-based) artificial-gravity system; bioengineering microbes to prepare Martian soil for farming; and harnessing temporary variations in objects’ masses to power interstellar spacecraft, without the need for any propellant. “The NIAC program engages researchers and innovators in the scientific and engineering communities, including agency civil servants,” Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement....

WASHINGTON—In the Obama administration’s final days, the National Cancer Institute is establishing an ambitious new program designed to allow scientists to more quickly access new drugs and compounds for novel research. One of the last achievements of Vice President Joe Biden’s cancer moonshot initiative before he leaves office, the program was unveiled Wednesday and will begin as an agreement between the institute and six drug companies. The hope is that the arrangement, in which NCI will act as an intermediary between outside researchers and drug makers, will make it easier for scientists to pursue new combination therapies for cancer, which are widely seen as one of the most promising avenues for better cancer treatment....

SCIENCE JOURNALISM In “How to Spin the Science News,” Charles Seife criticizes the practices of close-hold embargoes—in which sources for an article restrict access to particular publications and require that reporters not contact other, unapproved sources before a particular date—in science journalism. There are too many pop-science journalists who misconstrue stories. How can scientific institutions ensure that their evidence-based information makes it to the public and that journalists do not prop up a dissenting, unscientific opinion in the name of so-called balance?...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Benjamin de Bivort’s lab at Harvard University is Groundhog Day for fruit flies. In de Bivort’s version, a fly must choose to walk down a dark tunnel or a lighted one. Once it has made the choice—THWOOP!—a vacuum sucks the fly back to the starting point, where it has to decide again…and again…and again. The contraption, which tracks scores of individual flies, makes it possible to analyze how behavior varies from fly to fly....

In a televised address to Russia’s Federal Assembly in 2018, President Vladimir Putin announced an escalation of the ongoing arms race with the U.S., which had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002. Having rejected the decades-long arms-control agreement, the U.S. had developed and begun building a network of defenses to intercept long-range ballistic missiles, threatening Russia’s ability to deter attacks on its homeland. He had warned Americans that Russia would be forced to respond to these deployments, Putin told his audience, but they had refused to listen....

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte. William Morrow, 2018 ($29.99) They are film stars, the beloved fascinations of children and adults alike, and the stuff of wild imagination—both terrifying and intoxicating. But despite our cultural obsession with dinosaurs, there is much to their story that has been left untold until now. In this biography of these creatures, paleontologist Brusatte weaves together the origins of dinosaurs, their rise to global dominance and their dramatic demise....

During the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets with banners and puppets to push back against economic globalization. They were met with a violent militarized suppression. At the same time, a small group of artist-activists called the Yes Men created a parody Web site pretending to be the WTO. Cloaked in its official logos and design, they made critical claims about the organization....

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is on a quest for redemption. In March, a software error caused the agency’s Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite to break up in space, cutting short a planned three-year mission after only one month. Now JAXA is considering whether to rebuild and relaunch a copy of the spacecraft’s key instrument—a US-built X-ray spectrometer—with help from NASA. On August 5, representatives of the two space agencies will meet to discuss the possibility of resurrecting the instrument that was the heart of Hitomi’s science....

Mounting pressure from extreme weather events and lethal diseases—both exacerbated by climate change—threatens to assail U.S. Christmas tree–growing regions and slash production. To help defend these cherished trees and the farms that raise them, researchers are mapping conifer genomes and exploiting the natural characteristics of species that grow outside the U.S. to identify and breed hardier evergreens. “In agriculture, you’re not doing what you were doing 30 years ago,” says Gary Chastagner, a plant pathologist and Christmas tree expert at Washington State University....

The on-screen type appears in boldface and capital letters. “WHAT CIGARETTE DO YOU SMOKE, DOCTOR?” it asks. The answer has that certain 1950s-radio-announcer quality: “The brand named most was Camel,” an off-screen voice says as a man in a doctor’s white coat lights up a cigarette and a nurse bustles about. In a subsequent scene, he bends forward to light his patient’s smoke as they sit puffing in his office couch....

This has been quite the year for climate science. Extreme weather events made headlines year-round, including exceptional heatwaves, floods, and fires driven by droughts. Two leading climate scientists, Suki Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics. World leaders finally came together in Glasgow for the COP26 meeting. There is little doubt that human-induced climate change is an imminent threat, and the pressure to act is mounting on government and industry....

Bacteria may be ancient organisms, but don’t call them primitive. Despite being unicellular, they can behave collectively—sharing nutrients with neighbors, moving in concert with others and even committing suicide for the greater good of their colony. Molecules that travel from cell to cell enable such group behavior in a signaling process called quorum sensing. Now new evidence reveals that bacteria may have another way to “talk” to one another: communication via electrical signaling—a mechanism previously thought to occur only in multicellular organisms....

Michael Merzenich, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, is ruthless as he describes how my 37-year-old brain is going to turn to mush over the years to come. “You’re going to slowly decline in operating speed,” he says. “Your brain will become noisier and noisier in its processing.” And I will have more and more trouble figuring out exactly what it was I just heard or saw. The villain: age-related cognitive decline, which Merzenich says is a combination of physical changes and something called negative brain plasticity—the cerebral equivalent of what has happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biceps....

Breathe. Breathe. I repeated these words to myself like a mantra. At 18,400 feet, my body was craving oxygen, and I had to concentrate on pulling enough air into my lungs. I was on the summit of Cerro Toco, a stratovolcano overlooking Chile’s Chajnantor Plateau, now home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, one of the world’s premier radio telescopes. Between the thin atmosphere and the barren red terrain of the mountain, it felt like I was on Mars....

Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the scientific literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be. A person might just look at a computer and feel certain that it couldn’t possibly be feeling pleasure, pain or anything at all....

By Karen Brooks (Reuters) - The coldest air of the season is set to reach into some 42 states this week as an Arctic blast drops temperatures from the Canadian border down to the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters said. Some 200 million people are expected to be affected by the cold, with only Florida, Hawaii, and the Southwest being spared, according to Accuweather.com forecasters. First to see the frigid temperatures this week will be states along the Canadian border and in the northern Rockies late Sunday and early Monday, including the coldest night in Montana since March and temperatures around 33 degrees F (18 C)below average in South Dakota, Accuweather forecasters said....

In Charles Dickens’s much beloved novella A Christmas Carol, the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge is unmoved when the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present show him how his cruelty and selfishness have harmed others. Only when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come brings Scrooge face-to-face with his own impermanence in the form of his tombstone does the old miser begin to show benevolence and compassion toward others. The coronavirus pandemic has brought all of us a lot closer to our impermanence....

Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood of Accra, Ghana, is where European gadgets go to die. Ghana imports some 237,000 tons of computers, cell phones, televisions and other electronics annually, mostly from Europe, making Agbogbloshie one of the largest e-waste dumps in Africa. It may already be the dirtiest. The site has earned the dubious distinction of joining Chernobyl and the industrial hub of Noril’sk, Russia, on the Blacksmith Institute’s list of the world’s 10 most polluted places....

During a tumultuous few weeks in the summer of 2022, the Supreme Court ignored the scientific evidence underlying safe abortion, the need to slow climate change, and the value of gun safety laws. It is alarming that the justices are now set to consider a voting rights case in the current term, given Chief Justice John Roberts’s feelings on what he calls the “sociological gobbledygook” of research into the effects of gerrymandering....

Two drugs that alter the activity of the hormone vasopressin seem to improve social communication in people with autism. The findings come from two independent clinical trials published today in Science Translational Medicine. The results are encouraging, but some experts urge caution, saying the methods used to assess the drugs were not designed for that purpose. Vasopressin is related to oxytocin, a hormone thought to govern social bonding. But vasopressin’s link to autism is far from simple: There’s evidence implicating both too little and too much of the hormone in people with the condition....