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Private spaceflight company Orbital Sciences Corp. is starting to piece together the timeline of events leading up to the explosion of its Antares rocket just after liftoff on Tuesday evening (Oct. 28). Orbital Sciences is still in the process of investigating the root cause of the Antares rocket failure. No one was hurt in the explosion, but the rocket was carrying an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft expected to deliver supplies to the International Space Station for NASA when the accident occurred....

It sounds like a dream come true for parents—a vaccine that can help prevent agonizing middle ear infections in infants and toddlers. A new study found that the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) moderately lowered the incidence of middle ear infections and reduced the need for pressure-equalizing ear tubes, a common surgical treatment for recurrent infections. “Children prone to recurrent ear infections benefit from the vaccine,” says lead study author Katherine A....

Roboticists often take their design cues from nature—humans in particular. Robots working on assembly lines or as surgeons feature long arms designed to manipulate tools, whether it’s a welding gun or laser scalpel. Other robots, designed as telepresence surrogates for remote office workers or aids for the elderly and disabled, come equipped with head-mounted cameras for eyes and wheels for upright motion to mimic human locomotion. It’s tempting to think today’s robots are crude imitations of their human masters only because we lack the technology to make them more humanoid....

The planetary science community rippled with euphoria in June when Dragonfly, a bold mission to send a nuclear-powered dual quadcopter to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was given the green light by NASA. Yet even as the Dragonfly team erupted in celebration at the news, those working on its competitor, the Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return (CAESAR) mission, mourned. If CAESAR ever launches, it will be many years after Dragonfly, much later than its proposers had planned; more likely, in its current form, it will never be built at all....

Key concepts Physics Optics Light Shadow Introduction Halloween is almost here, and behind every corner there seems to lurk a spooky shadow! Luckily this is all they really are—just shadows that are part of decorations set up to give you a thrill while trick-or-treating. But where do these shadows come from, and how can some of them be so huge? Do this activity and find out how to generate the largest and scariest shadow of all!...

Georgetown, Texas, is home to the oldest university in the Lone Star State and is affectionately called the “red poppy capital” of Texas. It will soon add another accolade to the mix: the state’s first city-owned utility to run on 100 percent renewable energy. Last Wednesday, the city announced a 25-year contract with SunEdison to buy 150 megawatts of solar energy. In order to supply the power, SunEdison will build a solar farm in West Texas....

Over the next 50 years, climate change could drive more than 15,000 new cases of mammals transmitting viruses to other mammals, according to a study published in Nature. It’s one of the first to predict how global warming will shift wildlife habitats and increase encounters between species capable of swapping pathogens, and to quantify how many times viruses are expected to jump between species. Many researchers say that the COVID-19 pandemic probably started when a previously unknown coronavirus passed from a wild animal to a human: a process called zoonotic transmission....

Yards in Austin, Tex., look like most across the country: sprawling expanses of short, uniform grass. But when intense Texas droughts set in, dead brown patches deface the Kelly green monochrome. Instead of repeatedly replanting these patches with the typical sod, the homeowner association of one Austin neighborhood, Travis Country, offers another option: filling in the brown spots with less-thirsty native species. As Cynthia Wilcox, the association’s grounds committee chair, puts it: “When your grass gets big dead spots, stop fighting it....

“Temperatures have been flat for 15 years—nobody can properly explain it,” the Wall Street Journal says. “Global warming ‘pause’ may last for 20 more years, and Arctic sea ice has already started to recover,” the Daily Mail says. Such reassuring claims about climate abound in the popular media, but they are misleading at best. Global warming continues unabated, and it remains an urgent problem. The misunderstanding stems from data showing that during the past decade there was a slowing in the rate at which the earth’s average surface temperature had been increasing....

When COVID-19 disrupted the world’s economies last year, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel use fell by two billion metric tons. As some of the lead scientists of the Global Carbon Project (an international group that tracks greenhouse gas emissions), we wrote about how to keep this emissions drop going, including how COVID presented opportunities to rethink transportation and why stimulus funds should be used to promote green rather than brown (fossil) energy use....

Money can’t buy happiness, but placing less value on the things it can buy may improve your mental health. The longest ever study on this topic finds that becoming less materialistic leads to more contentment in life—and suggests ways to get to that happy place. Four related experiments investigated how changes in materialism affect well-being. The first three studies surveyed natural changes in materialistic values over six months, two years and 12 years in adults in the U....

Just as humans lament not pursuing a lover or bemoan having eaten that extra slice of chocolate cake, rats may experience feelings of regret, too, new research suggests. When rats were given the option of visiting rooms that contained different foods, and they skipped a good deal for a worse one, they glanced back at the former room, rushed through eating the snack and were more likely to tolerate longer wait times for what they considered the more desirable food , researchers found....

By Alexandra Bell of Nature magazineAn extinct primitive marine vertebrate had the sharpest dental structures ever known – with tips just one-twentieth of the width of a human hair, but able to apply pressures that could compete easily with those from human jaws.The razor-sharp teeth belonged to conodonts, jawless vertebrates that evolved some 500 million years ago in the Precambrian eon and went extinct during the Triassic period, around 200 million years ago....

Responses to March’s cover story, “How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?” by William F. Ruddiman, were outnumbered only by a multitude of reader questions, observations and alternative theories addressed to “Misconceptions about the Big Bang,” by Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis. Although many felt this article went where none had gone before in clearing up several cosmological misconceptions, the answers left one reader a tad disappointed in the possibilities an expanding universe might have afforded her interior space....

Melting glaciers might be making ocean water more acidic, an unexpected finding that’s given scientists new cause for concern. A new study published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests surprising ways that climate change is drastically altering the water chemistry in deep seas—a process that may happen faster than researchers anticipated. The threat of ocean acidification has drawn increasing attention in recent years. The ocean absorbs a substantial amount of the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere—and when carbon dioxide goes into the sea, a chemical reaction occurs that causes the water to become more acidic....

The molecules that kick-started life on primordial Earth could have been made in space and delivered by meteorites, according to researchers in Italy. The group synthesised sugars, amino acids and nucleobases with nothing more than formamide, meteorite material and the power of a simulated solar wind, replicating a process they believe cooked up a prebiotic soup long before life existed on Earth. Formamide is a simple organic compound first suggested as a starting material for the formation of prebiotic biomolecules back in 2001....

Transplanting tiny ’liver buds’ constructed from human stem cells restores liver function in mice, researchers have found. Although preliminary, the results offer a potential path towards developing treatments for the thousands of patients awaiting liver transplants every year. The liver buds, approximately 4 mm across, staved off death in mice with liver failure, the researchers report this week in Nature. The transplanted structures also took on a range of liver functions — secreting liver-specific proteins and producing human-specific metabolites....

A single “runaway” star in a distant star cluster could explain how a massive supernova avoided collapsing into a black hole, leaving behind a remnant object instead. The find explains the presence of a magnetar — a bizarre object that is not only highly dense but also extremely magnetic — in the star cluster Westerlund 1, about 16,000 light-years from Earth. Magnetars are a rare type of neutron star that is left behind after a supernova explosion....

The carbon content of the land they surveyed ranged from almost zero carbon near the Pacific coast to 150 metric tons per hectare, or 2.47 acres, deep in the rainforest. The team found an estimated 0.8 billion metric tons of stored carbon at risk of being released into the atmosphere because of deforestation. But if much of Peru’s lands with the highest carbon-storage potential were protected, they could store up to 3 billion metric tons of carbon nationwide, the team found....

For more than a century the only known skulls of the ancient bird Ichthyornis were either fragmentary, smashed flat or both. Now, high-tech analyses of four fossilized three-dimensional skulls provide tantalizing hints about what the beak of this iconic creature might have looked like as well as clues about the evolution of early birds. Ichthyornis, which was first described in the 1870s, was a ternlike bird that lived during the late stages of the Cretaceous period and apparently died out around the same time as the dinosaurs and many other species, approximately 66 million years ago....