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A Chinese space lab is bound to come back to Earth relatively soon, but when and where this happens is a matter of debate and speculation. For example, some satellite trackers think China may have lost control of the uncrewed 8-ton (7.3 metric tons) vehicle, which is called Tiangong-1. That’s the view of Thomas Dorman, who has been documenting flyovers of the spacecraft using telescopes, binoculars, video and still cameras, a DVD recorder, a computer and other gear....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - A Congolese-Belgian woman has become the first in the world to give birth to a healthy child after doctors restored her fertility by transplanting ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen when she was a child. The woman, who was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia when she was five and emigrated to Belgium at age 11, needed a bone marrow transplant. Thinking of her future potential to have a family, the Belgian doctors decided before starting the treatment to remove the patient’s right ovary when she was 13 years and 11 months old and froze tissue fragments....

Recovering from a concussion typically takes female athletes more than twice as long as males, according to a new study that tracked hundreds of teenagers active in sports. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that vulnerability to this injury—and aspects of the healing process—may vary by sex. A handful of studies published since the mid-2000s have suggested that girls in high school and college may sustain a higher rate of these injuries on the playing field than boys do, and investigations over the last few years have indicated they may also take longer to recover....

DURBAN, South Africa—Former entomologist Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum of the World Health Organization worries about nosebleeds more than the average person. That’s because he’s one of the estimated 12 million people worldwide afflicted with leishmaniasis—a potentially fatal parasitic disease characterized most often by lesions on the skin and/or mucus membranes—caused by the bite of a sandfly. As the team leader for climate change and health at WHO and an environmental epidemiologist, Campbell-Lendrum is also in a position to worry more about how global warming is going to affect such so-called vector-borne diseases....

A massive black granite sarcophagus and a sculpture of a man who may be buried inside have been discovered in a tomb in Alexandria, Egypt. The granite sarcophagus looks foreboding: It’s nearly 9 feet long, 5 feet wide and 6 feet tall (2.7 by 1.5 by 1.8 meters). And, it may be the largest sarcophagus ever discovered in Alexandria, said Mostafa Waziri, general secretary of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, in a statement released by Egypt’s antiquities ministry....

Blockbuster-moviemaker-turned-aquanaut James Cameron’s solo dive in the Pacific to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep site last month opens up a vast, under-explored region of the world’s oceans to researchers. There, scientists hope to discover, retrieve and study a host of previously unknown organisms and chemical compounds that may someday help solve decades-old medical mysteries. “What better place to look for adaptations and unusual compounds that have unusual characteristics than in the most extreme environments we can go to on this planet,” says Richard Lutz, a professor of marine ecology and biology of deep-sea hydrothermal vents at Rutgers University and director of the school’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences....

Every month, Scientific American—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public\ policy. Key information from this month’s issue: Obesity Crisis • One third of Americans are obese, and another third are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If current trends continue, obesity will soon surpass smoking as the biggest single factor in early death....

November in Antarctica, and the ice is on the wane. Soon the emperors will go fishing. They’ll spend the austral summer gliding through the frigid Southern Ocean, diving to depths of more than 1,500 feet in search of fish, squid and krill to gorge on before making the long trek inland for the winter to breed. When the time comes to haul out, they will launch themselves out of the water back onto the ice....

The devastating magnitude 7.0 quake that ripped through Haiti Tuesday, reportedly killing thousands, did not catch everyone by surprise. In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University in Corvallis and co-author of a June 1989 article for Scientific American “Hidden Earthquakes,” said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a “big one” that might occur in Haiti, due to the large fault near the capital city of Port-au-Prince—and the poverty-driven low level of earthquake-preparedness there....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The dream of a human habitat in orbit about the moon came a step closer on September 27, when NASA and the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) signed up to a common vision for future human exploration. The project, a follow-up to the International Space Station (ISS), involves a facility placed in orbit somewhere between the Earth and the moon—a region known as cis-lunar space....

Through the war in Ukraine, technology companies are showing how their decisions can affect geopolitics, which is a massive shift from the past. Technology companies have been either dragged into conflicts because of how customers were using their services (e.g., people putting their houses in the West Bank on Airbnb) or have followed the foreign policy of governments (e.g., SpaceX supplying Internet to Iran after the United States removed some sanctions)....

When you have cared for dogs and wild wolves from the time they are little more than a week old and have bottle-fed and nurtured them day and night, you are wise to their differences. Since 2008 Zsófia Virányi, an ethologist at the Wolf Science Center in Austria, and her colleagues have been raising the two species to figure out what makes a dog a dog—and a wolf a wolf. At the center, the researchers oversee and study four packs of wolves and four packs of dogs, containing anywhere from two to six animals each....

In early 2020, when SARS-CoV-2 spread around the globe, national, regional and local politicians and health authorities held daily press conferences to explain the importance of R0 (a mathematical indicator of a disease’s contagiousness pronounced “R naught”); media pundits debated the precise definition of “herd immunity”; and social media ads for face coverings promoted the concept of “viral load.” Never, perhaps, had the general public learned so much so quickly about the human immune system....

In a shocking reversal, Biogen (BIIB) on Tuesday said that it would resurrect an Alzheimer’s drug that the company previously said had failed and will ask the Food and Drug Administration to approve it. The company said a “new analysis of a larger dataset” showed that the drug, aducanumab, reduced clinical decline in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease on multiple measures of the drug’s effectiveness. That directly contradicts a decision in March to halt studies of the therapy based on the recommendations of an independent monitoring board that was charged with protecting patients in the study....

(Adds detail on accident, statement from Princeton) May 24 (Reuters) - Mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner whose longtime struggle with mental illness inspired the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, was killed in a car crash along with his wife in New Jersey, state police said on Sunday. The couple were in a taxi when the driver lost control, crashed into a guard rail and hit another car on Saturday afternoon on the New Jersey Turnpike, said police....

MONROVIA (Reuters) - An outbreak of Ebola cases in a western Liberia county threatens the country’s goal of recording no new cases of the disease by the end of the year. From Dec. 1 to 25, some 49 cases of Ebola were reported in Grand Cape Mount County. This included 27 confirmed cases, nine probable and 13 suspected, said Tolbert Nyensuwah, assistant minister for preventive services and the head of Liberia’s Ebola response....

The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann—or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. In this season, we peer into a fascinating moment in the postwar U.S. through the prism of Dán von Neumann’s work. We explore the evolution of early computers, the vital role women played in early programming, and the inextricable connection between computing and war....

GRAVITATIONAL WAVES “Gravitational-Wave Detectors Get Ready to Hunt for the Big Bang,” by Ross D. Andersen, discusses various strategies being studied in the U.S. to develop space-based gravitational-wave observatories but fails to mention the eLISA mission concept, a strong candidate for the European Space Agency’s next large mission. eLISA is a descendant of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission concept mentioned in the article. Europe has also made a particularly strong investment with the LISA Pathfinder mission, set to launch in 2015, which will demonstrate technological readiness and provide Europe with the opportunity to lead the first space-based gravitational-wave mission....

Are you a narcissist? Check your recent Facebook activity. Social-networking sites offer users easy ways to present idealized images of themselves, even if those ideals don’t always square with their real-world personalities. Psychology researcher Soraya Mehdizadeh has discovered a way to poke through the offline-online curtain: she has used Facebook to predict a person’s level of narcissism and self-esteem. Mehdizadeh, who conducted the study as an undergraduate at Toronto’s York University, gained access to the Facebook accounts of 100 college students and measured activities like photo sharing, wall postings and status updates; she also studied how frequently users logged on and how often they remained online during each session....

A post on YouTube can provoke global ridicule with the press of a return key. When a young man applied for a job at a U.S. investment firm, he sent along a video with his résumé. Called Impossible Is Nothing, it showed the student engaging in a variety of physical feats, from bench-pressing 495 pounds to doing a ski jump to breaking bricks with a karate chop. Throughout the clip, the student bragged about his athletic accomplishments and his overall success in life....