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My grandfather first taught me about the Great Bear constellation. After that, I had fun wielding an old pair of binoculars and picking out other constellations in the wide sky over Colorado–or even inventing my own. At the time, of course, I gave no thought to the age or origin of the constellations, but the curious pictures in the sky present a fascinating scientific puzzle. In 1922, when the International Astronomical Union officially defined 88 constellations, it drew the bulk of them from Ptolemy’s The Almagest, which was written around A....

The leaves are turning as I write in early October. Also turning is my stomach, from the accounts coming out of something called the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. According to Sarah Posner writing online in Religion Dispatches, talk-radio host Bryan Fischer went out of his way to attack me. And probably you. Anybody, really, who accepts science as an arbiter of reality. Fischer told the assembled that America needs a president who will “reject the morally and scientifically bankrupt theory of evolution....

By Alister Doyle OSLO, (Reuters) - Climate change is aiding shipping, fisheries and tourism in the Arctic but the economic gains fall short of a “cold rush” for an icy region where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the world average. A first cruise ship will travel the icy Northwest Passage north of Canada in 2016, Iceland has unilaterally set itself mackerel quotas as stocks shift north and Greenland is experimenting with crops such as tomatoes....

Farmers have always depended on both honeybees and native bees to pollinate crops. As honeybees die en masse, wild bees are needed more than ever—but they, too, are disappearing. In the late 1800s naturalist Charles Robertson traveled around Carlinville, Ill., by horse and buggy, meticulously recording which bees visited which flowers. In 2009 and 2010 ecologist Laura A. Burkle, now at Montana State University, and her colleagues repeated some of Robertson’s studies....

Gray wolves once roamed the entire North American continent, from the scrubby deserts of Mexico to the boreal forests of Alaska. But by the 1950s decades of overhunting and habitat loss had nearly extirpated the species in the contiguous United States. In a remarkable conservation success story, the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) helped push the number back up to about 7,500 gray wolves in the lower 48 states as of 2020....

A group of open science advocates have launched the first preprint aimed exclusively at African scientists. AfricArxiv seeks to improve the visibility of African science by helping academics share their work quickly, say co-founders Justin Ahinon, a web developer and student in applied statistics at the National School of Statistics, Planning and Demography in Parakou, Benin, West Africa, and Jo Havemann, a trainer at the science communication consultancy, Access 2 Perspectives, based in Berlin, Germany....

The view that Earth’s moon is a dried out, desolate world may be all wet. A new analysis of data from the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, which operated at the moon from 2008 to 2009, has revealed what researchers say is definitive proof of water ice exposed on the lunar surface. Gathered by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) spectrometer onboard the Indian probe, the data all but confirm extensive-but-tentative evidence from earlier missions hinting at water ice deposits lurking in permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s poles....

Key concepts Chemistry Molecules Physics Chemical solutions Introduction Bubbles can be fun to play with outdoors, but does it seem like they just don’t last very long? With a little chemistry on your side you can mix up a solution that lets you make some amazingly huge and durable bubbles—ones that like to linger! Experiment with the shape and size of bubbles as you design your own wands, make a colorful bubble snake and try to grow giant bubbles....

The companies most to blame for global warming should be taxed to help pay for the damage they’ve done to the planet, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Tuesday during the opening session of the annual U.N. General Assembly. In a pointed speech to world leaders, the U.N. chief delivered scathing criticism of the fossil fuel industry and emphasized the need for payments to cover the cost of irreparable climate damages. “The climate crisis is a case study in moral and economic injustice,” Guterres said....

Many of our leaders, from politicians to university administrators to business owners, face difficult trade-offs during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has created increasingly tense conflicts of interest. Across the globe, decision-makers grapple with dilemmas that weigh economic outcomes with responsibilities for public safety and health. Conflicts of interest impact decisions to close borders, implement quarantines, impose lockdowns, stagger reopenings, enforce social distancing and mandate mask-wearing. What’s striking is that many of these decision-makers believe, and sometimes explicitly state, that they are not at all influenced by financial incentives....

As common wisdom has it, bird flocks in the Northern Hemisphere move from northerly locales in the summer to southerly ones in the winter. For many species, such as the White-throated Sparrow, this notion holds basically true. A closer look at the details of this bird’s movements, however, is much more intriguing, as you can see in this 25-second animation created by eBird, a citizen science project organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society....

When they were first publicized by NASA earlier this year, the agency’s Artemis Accords seemed harmless and trivial, almost self-evident. These tenets state, among other things, that emergency assistance will be rendered to foreign astronauts if they are endangered or in distress, that planning for space travel will take place transparently and that research findings will be published in a timely fashion—with these steps taken, of course, for the benefit of all humankind....

Pets do an awful lot for kids: they teach them about unconditional love, responsibility, death and, of course, pooper scoopers. But does a dog or cat also keep a child from developing allergies? Despite decades of research, the short answer is still a frustrating “maybe.” The idea that pets might provide an immune benefit stems from a controversial theory born in 1989 called the hygiene hypothesis. It postulates that the sharp rise in allergic diseases this century can be explained, at least in part, by our higher cleanliness standards....

A look at Google’s Chromecast (pictures) 1-2 of 21 Scroll Left Scroll Right Google wasn’t sure how much of a hit its Web-to-TV streaming dongle, Chromecast, would be. So to sweeten the deal, it included three months of Netflix for free. But Google has put a halt to the deal, only one day after the device debuted, because it was too popular. Google told the Los Angeles Times in a statement, “Due to overwhelming demand for Chromecast devices since launch, the three-month Netflix promotion (which was available in limited quantities) is no longer available....

Economist Bisakha Sen wants to study how US states’ gun laws and gun cultures correlate with certain crimes and with firearms deaths in each state — and whether differing laws and cultures in neighboring states “spill over” to influence a state’s statistics. But although President Barack Obama ordered the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to recommence gun research in the wake of last December’s massacre of 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut, federal funding for research on gun violence remains scarce so far....

It is often said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” In my case, a picture is worth 66,000 words, the length of my new book, Extraterrestrial. The picture, in this case, doesn’t exist—an image of the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua. It could have distinguished between ‘Oumuamua being a natural rock or an artificial object manufactured by an extraterrestrial civilization. But for now, the latter interpretation remains a hypothesis suggested by evidence that this object did not behave like a comet or an asteroid from the solar system....

Hurricane turned Tropical Storm Harvey has pounded Houston since last Friday, dropping over 35 inches of water in some areas of Harris County within 72 hours. The heavy precipitation has led to massive flooding, leaving people either fleeing or stranded, waiting for rescue. According to some estimates, the storm by Monday had already released 14 to 15 trillion gallons of water across the region. Rains have continued to thrash the city....

For a disease that can resemble the common cold, influenza packs a powerful—and sometimes lethal—punch. As many as half-a-million people around the world die annually from flu. The culprit is a virus that mutates to evade our immune systems, leaving vaccines and therapies scrambling to keep up. In some years, a mutation creates a pathogen that is particularly nasty, resulting in pandemic flu. Last year marked 100 years since the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide....

Despite strides in maternal medicine, premature birth remains a vexing problem for obstetricians worldwide. But an analysis of medical records from almost 3 million pregnant women in California1 suggests that a surprisingly simple intervention — better sleep — might help to address the issue. Researchers found that women who had been diagnosed with insomnia or sleep apnea were about twice as likely as women without sleep disorders to deliver their babies more than six weeks early....

Everything old is new again, as the saying goes, including the controversial idea that the solution to economic upheaval is free money. Universal basic income (UBI), a social policy that guarantees a fixed, unconditional stipend to all members of a designated group or entire country, has been kicked around for centuries by thinkers from Thomas Paine to Milton Friedman. Now it is experiencing new life as autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and other advancing technologies rattle labor markets and foreshadow a future in which there simply may not be enough jobs for everybody who wants one....