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Europe’s ExoMars rover, built to search for traces of life on the Red Planet, is unlikely to launch as planned in September aboard a Russian rocket as a result of sanctions rolled out by European countries in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. The ExoMars mission, which comprises the Trace Gas Orbiter (in orbit around Mars since 2016) and the yet-to-launch U.K.-built Rosalind Franklin rover, is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) most significant cooperation with Russia apart from the International Space Station....

Children from the poorer strata of society begin life not only with material disadvantages but cognitive ones. Decades of research have confirmed this, including a famous 1995 finding by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley: By age four children reared in poverty have heard 30 million fewer words, on average, than their peers from wealthier families. That gap has been linked to shakier language skills at the start of school, which, in turn, predicts weaker academic performance....

Galileo was the first person to discover that Jupiter was not alone, but that it was actually accompanied by other celestial objects that revolved around it. Ultimately, his finding presented the greatest evidence for debunking the geocentric view of the universe, relegating Earth from its center to that of a mere planet orbiting the sun. We would argue that our ability to understand and visualize large sets of data is entering a similar stage of evolution as 17th-century astronomy....

In work that may one day narrow the gap between speedy, voracious readers and slower, disinterested ones, researchers at New York University (N.Y.U.) have determined that three different mechanisms are used to decode the words in a particular sentence. The three processes: phonics (a letter by letter sounding out of words); contextual clues (earlier parts of sentences that help readers anticipate upcoming words); and holistic word recognition, or the physical shape of words....

Our bodies defeat infections in part because our immune system’s genes are many and diverse. This genetic heterogeneity, however, has a downside: it means that we each respond differently to vaccines. For example, compared with women men routinely produce fewer pathogen-fighting antibodies after vaccination, and in the last large U.S. measles outbreak in 1989 10 percent of previously vaccinated children were not protected. But these limitations could one day be overcome thanks to a push to replace one-size-fits-all vaccines with genetically “personalized” immunizations that are safe and effective for everyone....

By Andreas Cremer BERLIN (Reuters) - Volkswagen plans to make plug-in cars in China, company sources say, seeing a big potential market as the country’s leaders fight hazardous levels of air pollution with measures that include boosting green power. VW will announce its plans at the Beijing auto show on April 19-20 and will build the plug-in hybrids - a combined petrol engine and electric motor that can travel longer distances on battery power than ordinary hybrids - with their Chinese partner First Automotive Works, the sources said on Thursday....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the “Fair Trade Your Supermarket” campaign?—Brian Howley, Washington, D.C. A project of the non-profit Green America, the “Fair Trade Your Supermarket” campaign aims to empower consumers to advocate for more “Fair Trade” products on store shelves at their local supermarkets. Fair trade is a system of exchange that honors producers, communities and the environment by ensuring that farmers and artisans throughout the developing world are paid fair prices for their work and have direct involvement in the marketplace....

Astronomers know of more than 3,500 exoplanets—worlds orbiting stars other than our sun—and will probably find thousands more in the next few years. Some of these newfound worlds will resemble our own planet in size, composition and temperature. Yet many of these potential “mirror Earths” will be alien in one respect: they will orbit red dwarfs, also known as M dwarfs, rather than sunlike stars. M dwarfs are the universe’s smallest, coolest stars, but they are also the hottest sites for exoplanet discovery, largely because of their sheer abundance....

The universe in which the classic PBS series Cosmos debuted 40 years ago no longer really exists. In 1980 the Internet was in its infancy, scientists were just starting to sound the alarm about global warming, and present-day scientific realities such as exoplanets, dark energy and the Higgs boson remained entirely theoretical. Co-created by its host, the late astronomer Carl Sagan, with his wife Ann Druyan and their collaborator Steven Soter, the series’ clear-eyed view of the past, present and future of life in the universe has been clouded over by the passage of time....

Think of a number. Now think of a bigger number. Now imagine them in front of you. If you are seeing the smaller number on the left, you have just confirmed an oft-repeated finding: people tend to map numbers onto space from left to right. Mounting evidence, including research on preverbal infants, suggests this tendency is innate, although it can be easily overwritten by culture. Now, in a study published this past January in Science, a team of researchers at the University of Trento in Italy, led by cognitive psychologist Rosa Rugani, has shown that infants of a different species altogether also prefer to see bigger numbers on the right....

The third of a three-part series. Click here for the first part and here for the second part. In May 2013, Kristen House, her husband and their three children packed up their Nashville, Tenn., home, strapped their Nissan Leaf to the back of the moving truck and hit the road to foggy San Francisco. Whenever they’d stop somewhere, House would pull the Leaf off the moving truck and the family would drive it around town, running errands or grabbing a bite to eat....

Vaccines Omicron Is Here: A Lack of COVID Vaccines Is Partly Why Global players need to get more vaccines to African nations and convince more people to take them November 30, 2021 — Michael Head Policy Global Vaccine Equity Is Much More Important Than ‘Vaccine Passports’ We need to suppress the level of SARS-CoV-2 in as many humans as possible as quickly as possible April 7, 2021 — Steven W. Thrasher...

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the skinny on fat these days? I saw a major magazine cover image recently that was suggesting fat wasn’t so bad for us after all? – Marcy Bellwether, Taos, NM Going “fat-free” might seem like an effective, safe way to lose weight when considering that fat contains nine calories per gram, compared to four calories per gram in carbohydrates and proteins. But if you take into account the fact that approximately 60 percent of human brain matter consists of fats, eating reduced fat or fat-free foods high in sugar and refined carbohydrates no longer seems as appealing for our health....

All of the companies, of course, say they’ll shut down your account if you go nuts with password sharing. But short of that, they offer a fascinating range of plans and restrictions. In general, the streaming video services prevent you from exceeding the “simultaneous logins” maximum using technological means—they simply block new people from logging in if others are already streaming video. On the other hand, paid news sites rely on your conscience not to distribute your passwords....

Toxic masculinity is best described as a box. It’s narrow, rigid, and men have to contort themselves to fit inside it. To fit in the man box of toxic masculinity, a man must live by a particular set of beliefs and behaviors: Suffer pain in silence Have no needs Never lose Show no emotions other than bravado or rage Don’t depend on anyone Don’t do anything that could be construed as weakness Never snitch....

For decades, scientists have treated Venus as Earth’s estranged sister gone bad. Once considered a promising planetary destination because of its near equivalence to our own world in size and mass, robotic scouts revealed Venus to be a pressure-cooked globe inimical to life—and to any further efforts to explore it. Now, however, hints of a possible Venusian biosphere are strengthening a surge of interest in our sister world. On September 14 an international team of researchers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales, announced the detection of phosphine gas lingering in layers of the planet’s atmosphere where temperatures and pressures are relatively balmy....

We have written these articles for a simple reason: we live in a world in which mental health literacy is more important than ever. According to survey data published in 2010 by psychiatrist Mark Olfson of Columbia University and psychologist Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania, about 3 percent of Americans are in psychotherapy, with most of them also receiving medication. Moreover, as psychiatrist Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, observed in a 2014 strategic plan, the incidence of a number of mental health conditions, including autism spectrum disorder and major depression, has soared in recent years, although the significance of these rising rates remains a matter of controversy....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineWhen NASA invites proposals in 2013 for its next round of low-cost planetary missions, ideas are sure to be plentiful – but not the leaders crucial to the missions’ success. That’s the conclusion of a demographic analysis that shows that the number of highly qualified principal investigators (PIs) willing or able to take the driver’s seat in NASA’s Discovery-class missions is dwindling.“We have to recognize that this is coming and this is a problem,” says Susan Niebur, who presented her analysis on 21 June at an international conference on low-cost missions at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland....

The latest in a series of anomalies spotted in five-year-old data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could point the way to an entirely new elementary particle, physicists hope. The most recent finding, reported at an April 18 seminar at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, may turn out to be a statistical fluctuation that fades as new data are analysed. But it is intriguing because it seems to chime with previously-reported oddities....

Name: Jean Schneider Title: Astronomer, Paris Observatory Location: France What motivated you in 1995 to start the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, which is a Web site that charts data on known and unconfirmed planets outside our solar system? I discovered the Web at the time, and I found it fantastic. I thought that the search for life in the universe is extremely important, and I wanted to make anything I could to encourage work on the search for life and other planets and possibly to unify the community....