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The robotic butlers and sentries of sci-fi fantasies already roam our planet, but you can’t have them—not yet. The fate of most would-be home robots breaks in one of two ways: Bots such as Honda’s Asimo, a bipedal assistant, exist only as demonstrations from multimillion-dollar research and development laboratories. Robots that consumers could purchase, such as the $1,600 Pepper companion robot, are unaffordable for most. Toy company WowWee aims to change all that when it delivers the first sub-$600 multifunction home-service robot....

Just as Charles Darwin was proposing his radical theory of evolution, paleontologists discovered a curious fossil specimen in modern-day Germany: Archaeopteryx. The feathered specimen, pegged by many as the first bird, helped provide further evidence for the theory of evolution and the idea that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx’s status as the first prehistoric bird has held for more than a century, but a new high-tech analysis of a rare sample of bones from a German specimen challenge that long-held presumption....

As many single people know, searching for love can be a challenge even in the best of times. But looking for it online during a global pandemic is something truly complex—and involves some tricky new dangers. Though some speculative swiping on dating apps has continued throughout quarantines and semi-lockdowns in the U.S., single people are reporting that in-person dating had basically frozen to a standstill until recent months. As cases surge again, many wonder whether it is safe to even consider meeting new people in any social context—let alone potential sexual partners....

The escalating Ebola outbreak in West Africa poses an international threat and all countries must work together to contain it, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today (8 August). The announcement comes amid a debate over the use of experimental drugs in the outbreak: a leading epidemiologist hopes the announcement will shift international focus toward relying on basic public health measures to control the disease. The WHO has formally declared the outbreak to be a “public health emergency of international concern,” director-general Margaret Chan said after a two-day meeting with experts in Geneva....

A pioneering European space telescope that discovered the first rocky extrasolar planet is on its last legs, Nature has learned. According to the French space agency CNES, the Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits (CoRoT) satellite suffered a computer failure on 2 November. While the spacecraft is still functioning, it can no longer retrieve data from its 30-centimeter telescope, which spots exoplanets by looking for transits — a dimming in brightness as the planet crosses its host star....

Key concepts Biology Biochemistry Enzymes Physiology Chemistry Introduction Have you ever wondered how all the food that you eat gets digested? It is not only the acid in your stomach that breaks down your food—many little molecules in your body, called enzymes, help with that too. Enzymes are special types of proteins that speed up chemical reactions, such as the digestion of food in your stomach. In fact, there are thousands of different enzymes in your body that work around-the-clock to keep you healthy and active....

On a day in October 2006, I sat in a dark laboratory at Yale University and zoomed into the fossilized ink of a 200-million-year-old squid relative under an electron microscope. An ocean of translucent balls, each roughly a fifth of a micron in diameter, loomed into view. To the untrained eye, they might have been unimpressive. But I was riveted. These ancient structures looked exactly like the granules of melanin pigment that color the ink of modern squid and octopuses....

Disagreements are virtually inevitable in a romantic relationship. More than 90 percent of couples argue, according to a survey by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, with nearly half quarreling at least once a month. Common topics of marital disagreement are money, sex and time spent together. None of this will surprise anyone who has been in a long-term relationship. But a new study indicates that a cognitive ability may help to explain why some couples are more successful in resolving their differences....

Even though most people around the world won’t be able to see Friday’s total solar eclipse in person, anyone with an Internet connection can watch it live online thanks to two webcasts featuring the cosmic event. The March 20 total solar eclipse — the first since November 2013 — will make the daytime sky go dark for people in the Faroe Islands and parts of the North Atlantic. Weather permitting, the online Slooh Community Observatory will broadcast live views of the solar eclipse along with expert commentary from the Faroe Islands....

Narwhal tusks record decades of environmental information and clearly show a changing Arctic, researchers reported in Current Biology. Every year the spiraling tusks grow another layer, incorporating variants of carbon and nitrogen called isotopes and some of the mercury a narwhal consumes. The researchers bought 10 tusks from Inuit subsistence hunters in northwestern Greenland and found that the objects contained nearly 50 years’ worth of information. Having access to such a long stretch of data “was just an amazing step forward in our understanding of the factors that affect things like diet and mercury [levels],” says lead author and McGill University marine biologist Jean-Pierre Desforges....

A client sits before me, seeking help untangling his relationship problems. As a psychotherapist, I strive to be warm, nonjudgmental and encouraging. I am a bit unsettled, then, when in the midst of describing his painful experiences, he says, “I’m sorry for being so negative.” A crucial goal of therapy is to learn to acknowledge and express a full range of emotions, and here was a client apologizing for doing just that....

Symmetry is easily recognizable in art, architecture, even anatomy. But the concept of symmetry in physics is hard to wrap one’s head around. Yet it is here that symmetry has played one of its most important roles, unlocking the secrets of the forces in nature and of the fundamental particles that inhabit our universe. “The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry,” says theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University....

By Sue Britt and Kevin Murphy VALLEY PARK, Mo/KANSAS CITY, Mo, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Swollen rivers in the U.S. Midwest and other regions brought flood warnings for over 12 million people on Wednesday as scores of buildings were submerged after days of intense rain in which 24 people have died. Two rivers west of St. Louis crested at historic levels, flooding local towns, disabling sewer plants and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents....

Many of the monkeys living on Cayo Santiago, an island off Puerto Rico, are likely to have survived Hurricane Maria, which pummeled the island on 20 September. But the storm’s aftermath has left the island’s more than 1,500 rhesus macaques—including some used for autism research—in jeopardy. Maria’s 155-mile-per-hour winds leveled a field station, stripped trees of their leaves and destroyed feeding corrals and rainwater collection systems. Without a working water system and the shade provided by trees, the animals could perish in the hot sun....

A light winter snow fell on Barrow, Alaska, this week as scientists reported that the ice cover off Barrow’s Arctic shores had declined to its second-lowest level in satellite history, tied with 2007. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado reported yesterday that 1.6 million square miles of ice covered the Arctic Ocean on Saturday. As a result, Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas contain unusually large patches of ice-free waters....

If you had opened the front door of Lee Shuer’s apartment in the early 2000s, you would have encountered a narrow hallway made even narrower by all kinds of random stuff: unnervingly tall stacks of books and papers, cardboard boxes full of assorted knickknacks, and two hot pink salon hair dryer chairs with glass domes suspended from their arched necks. Sidling down the hallway to the right, you would have reached Shuer’s bedroom....

Even casually savvy computer users these days know to beware of security threats on the Internet. They know that the online universe is acrawl with computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other malicious bits of code, and if they are prudent, they have equipped their computers with up-to-date anti-virus and firewall software for repelling these invaders. They are leery of unsolicited e-mail attachments, and careful about the web sites they visit....

November 30 is the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, an informal holiday established in 2011 by a U.K.-based coalition of artists, scientists and activists. The point of the day is political: to draw public attention to human-caused extinctions, in hopes of preventing more. But for many participants the day is also personal, an attempt to grasp the enormity of extinction. Every year brings more species to memorialize, and this year is no exception....

Because humans are large and warm, we can rarely see quantum mechanics in action. To do so, physicists use lasers to cool atoms to just a trillionth of a degree above absolute zero. This slows the atoms’ movement enough to watch them follow quantum physics rules. But cooling molecules made of more than one atom has proved more difficult: somehow these ultracold molecules tend to sneakily heat up again, so researchers can no longer keep track of them—a phenomenon physicists call “ultracold molecule loss....

An outbreak of stomach flu believed to be caused by norovirus has prompted a temporary shutdown of Babson College, a small business college and graduate school in Babson Park, Mass. School officials announced that classes, meetings, athletic events and all other activities would be canceled until Wednesday, when the school is expected to have the outbreak under control. Dennis Hanno, Babson’s undergraduate dean, says that 131 students have visited the school’s health services clinic since Wednesday complaining of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea—all symptoms associated with norovirus, a group of viruses formerly known as Norwalk-like viruses....