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The crew of the first entirely-private orbital space mission will include the second oldest person to launch into space, the second Israeli in space, the 11th Canadian to fly into space and the first former NASA astronaut to return to the International Space Station, the company organizing the history-making flight has announced. Axiom Space on Tuesday (Jan. 26) revealed its clients for its first privately-funded and operated mission to the International Space Station (ISS)....

This week a project called the Mask Innovation Challenge announced the 10 finalists in a high-prize competition that aims to support innovators working on the masks of the future and to connect these groups with one another. “We really wanted to help support innovation in order to protect the American public from public health emergencies of the future,” says health scientist Kumiko Lippold, challenge manager of the project. “Together, we really wanted to create something that was comfortable—that you could wear for a long time and ideally not realize—and that also provided superior and exceptional protection that’s based on evidence so that people would understand what they’re wearing and why they’re wearing it and would want to wear it....

James Johnson hopes to drive a car again one day. If he does, he will do it using only his thoughts. In March 2017, Johnson broke his neck in a go-carting accident, leaving him almost completely paralysed below the shoulders. He understood his new reality better than most. For decades, he had been a carer for people with paralysis. “There was a deep depression,” he says. “I thought that when this happened to me there was nothing—nothing that I could do or give....

China has selected nine scientific experiments—including a project that will probe how DNA mutates in space—to fly on its first major space station, scheduled to be completed in 2022. The China Manned Space Agency selected the projects, which involve scientists from 17 nations, from 42 hopefuls, in a process organized with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). China’s existing space laboratory, Tiangong-2, which launched in 2016, also hosts experiments, but the new space station will be bigger and is intended to last longer....

Research Triangle Park, N.C.—The mice are pretty odd. Distributed among 2,000 cages, they represent a real hodgepodge: white, black and brown mice, some fat, some skinny, some with crooked tails, some huddling in corners while others scamper in circles. These mice from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, awaiting a new housing facility here, aren’t mutant rejects. Instead they are a valuable new resource—the most diverse mouse strains to ever hit the lab bench....

Spinal implants have suffered similar problems as those in the brain—they tend to abrade tissue, causing inflammation and ultimately rejection by the body. Now an interdisciplinary research collaboration based in Switzerland has made a stretchable implant that appears to solve this problem. Like Lieber’s new brain implant, it matches the physical qualities of the tissue where it is embedded. The “e-dura” implant is made from a silicone rubber that has the same elasticity as dura mater, the protective skin that surrounds the spinal cord and brain, explains Stéphanie Lacour, a professor at the school of engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne....

If U.S. home energy consumption were a country, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. To bring housing emissions in line with international goals to limit global warming, planners must sift through variables such as local climate, building age and size, and occupant income. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA provides a new nationwide analysis evaluating these factors. The researchers fed detailed building data from 93 million homes (gleaned from a database of U....

Jim Bridenstine shouldn’t necessarily expect smooth sailing now that he’s finally in as NASA administrator, experts say. The U.S. Senate confirmed Bridenstine yesterday (April 19), more than seven months after President Donald Trump nominated the Oklahoma congressman for NASA’s top post. The final vote was 50-49 and strictly along party lines, with all Republicans supporting Bridenstine and all Democrats, along with both independents, opposing him. (Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is sidelined by health issues and did not vote....

WORKERS WITH AUTISM It is encouraging to see more discussion, as in the article “Autism Grows Up,” by Jennifer Richler, of the issues surrounding autism in the workplace. Anyone on the spectrum over a certain age will likely not have received any support at any stage of his or her life and may not have school qualifications commensurate with his or her level of intelligence. Assistance in turning a special interest into a career, at any age and with or without a formal qualification, would definitely be useful to such persons....

The honeybee’s brain may be small, but the insect has learned to use it to recognize a flower’s color and shape as well as to waggle-dance that information back to its hive. In fact, honeybees possess the most complex symbolic language outside of our own family (primates) and they do it with a brain of only one million neurons–five orders of magnitude less than that of humans. More important, this is only four times as many neurons as possessed by fruit flies, flitting creatures that lack any form of society–at least as a bee or human would recognize it....

As far as certain death in a science fiction plot line goes, being ejected into the vacuum of space is more than a pretty sure thing. A shove out of the air lock by a mutinous lieutenant or a vicious rip in a space suit, and your average movie victim is guaranteed to die quickly and quietly, though with fewer exploding body parts than screenwriters might have you believe. In reality, however, animal experiments and human accidents have shown that people can likely survive exposure to vacuum conditions for at least a couple of minutes....

Among the indignities of aging is a creeping tendency to put on weight, as our resting metabolism slows down—by roughly 1 to 2 percent every decade. But what’s worse, at least for women, is a shift, around menopause, in where this excess flab accumulates. Instead of thickening the hips and thighs, it starts to add rolls around the belly—a pattern more typical of men—which notoriously reshapes older women from pears into apples....

ON JUNE 20, 2001, Andrea Yates, an ex-nurse from Houston with a history of severe postpartum depression, drowned all five of her children (aged six months to seven years) in a bathtub. Following a conviction in 2002 that was overturned on appeal, Yates was acquitted in 2006 as not guilty by reason of insanity. Yates’s attorneys, backed by expert testimony, contended that she thought she was being persecuted by Satan and needed to protect her children from eternal damnation by killing them....

Science values data and statistics and champions the virtues of evidence and experimentation. Those of us “viewing the world with a rational eye” (as the new descriptor for this column reads) also have another, underutilized tool at our disposal: rapier logic like that of Christopher Hitchens, a practiced logician trained in rhetoric. Hitchens—who is “leaving the party a bit earlier than I’d like” because of esophageal cancer, as he lamented to Charlie Rose in a recent PBS interview—has something deeply important to offer on how to think about unscientific claims....

Paleontologists know little about what giant, bone-crushing tyrannosaurs were like as babies. Hatchling fossils are rare and provide few hints about these foot-high carnivores’ behavior. But now miniature trackways, found in rock roughly 72 million years old, offer evidence that baby tyrannosaurs traveled in pairs. Paleontologists first found the trackways during a riverbank survey of southwestern Alberta’s St. Mary River Formation. The site is rife with tracks made by many dinosaur species—“a busy time at the beach,” as Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology researcher Donald Henderson and his colleagues describe it in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences....

Last year biologist Gloriana Chaverri and her students confirmed a hunch about trapping bats to study and release. They experimentally hung fine-corded monofilament nets in Costa Rican foliage, snagging 125 bats from 20 species. Meanwhile typical, thicker-stranded nets captured only 90 of the flying mammals from 14 species. In Royal Society Open Science, her team from the University of Costa Rica and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute explores how equipment choice can influence what scientific expeditions reveal....

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, explains. The answer lies at the back of the brain in an area called the cerebellum, which is involved in monitoring movements. Our studies at University College London have shown that the cerebellum can predict sensations when your own movement causes them but not when someone else does. When you try to tickle yourself, the cerebellum predicts the sensation and this prediction is used to cancel the response of other brain areas to the tickle....

Everyone has goals they’re striving to achieve, even during a global pandemic. Maybe you’re a scientist working around the clock to find a cure for COVID-19 (if so, thank you and good luck!). Or maybe you’re stuck working from home and pushing hard to hit 10,000 steps a day while confined to a small, urban living space. Whatever it is you’re striving to achieve, science shows you’re likely to push harder the closer you feel to the finish line....

By Mirjam Donath UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - More than half of the world’s seven billion people live in urban areas, with the top “mega cities” - with more than 10 million inhabitants - being Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, according to a United Nations report on Thursday. That proportion is expected to jump, so that more than six billion people will be city dwellers by 2045, the U....

The human race has selectively bred crops to suit our needs for thousands of years. People have consumed as many as several trillion meals containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients over the past few decades. Not a single verified case of illness has ever been attributed to the genetic alterations. But skepticism surrounding GM crops remains-especially in European nations-and is a detriment to millions who might otherwise benefit from them. The perks of GM crops greatly outweigh the health risks, which so far remain theoretical, our authors say....