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A dozen years ago beekeepers started reporting that frightening numbers of their honeybees (Apis mellifera) were mysteriously dying. Scientists have since discovered multiple reasons, but “diseases are by far the main cause of problems with honeybee health right now,” says Leonard Foster, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia. The insects are afflicted by scourges ranging from varroosis (caused by mites) to the bacterial disease American foulbrood....

Passing through a park in Manhattan recently, I spotted a plaque with a poem on it, “Nature Poem,” by Tommy Pico. It includes these lines: When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a romantic comedy or a scary movie I feel a similar ambivalence when I contemplate the “metaverse,” a concept being floated by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other tech moguls. It calls for a much more immersive experience for consumers of social media, games and other digital technologies....

One of the best-selling books of 2014 is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty, a 696-page doorstop tome on economic history. Why is a data-heavy treatise from the “dismal science” so appealing? Because it is about income inequality and immobility, which in a December 2013 speech President Barack Obama called “the defining challenge of our time,” concluding that it poses “a fundamental threat to the American dream....

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it. —Charles Baudelaire, 1846 Urban landscapes are embodiments of human aspirations and dreams. They represent the spirit of an age and personify the minds and hearts of the people who inhabit them. Archaeological excavations of ancient cities, such as the magnificently preserved ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, bring to life our distant past....

Depression and other mood disorders often lack a discernible cause. Like many complex diseases, they emerge as genes and life circumstances interweave in mysterious ways. Less enigmatic, though, is the fact that these conditions affect women about twice as often as men. Understanding how and why requires a look at the underlying biology—the brain circuits and hormones that translate a person’s genetic makeup and life experiences into disease symptoms. Childhood hardships are known to raise an individual’s risk for mood disorders, and that susceptibility intensifies during hormone swings....

Many parasites commandeer the bodies of their hosts in order to spread. Examples of this include horsehair worms that reach water by forcing their cricket hosts to drown themselves, and liver flukes that drive infected ants to climb blades of grass, where cows can eat the insects, and so the flukes. But parasites can turn plants into zombies, too — and a team of scientists from the John Innes Center in Norwich, UK, has now discovered how they do it....

NASA and the German Aerospace Center are permanently shutting down the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope on an aeroplane that has been scrutinized for years for its high cost and low scientific output. Since 2014, the observatory has made hundreds of flights above the water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere to get an unobscured view of celestial objects and to gather data at infrared wavelengths. SOFIA has measured magnetic fields in galaxies, spotted water on sunlit portions of the Moon and detected the first type of ion that formed in the Universe, helium hydride....

The Pacific Northwest is still reeling after a series of devastating floods and landslides spurred by torrential rains last week. Floodwaters across western Washington state and British Columbia swamped homes, swept away vehicles, destroyed roads and highways, and cut off railroads. At least four people were killed by mudslides and nearly 20,000 were displaced by the floods. Canadian officials called the deluge a “once-in-500-year” event. The storms broke rainfall records across the region, in some places dropping more than 6 inches of rain in just 24 hours....

Hair, scales, fur, feathers. Of all the body coverings nature has designed, feathers are the most various and the most mysterious. How did these incredibly strong, wonderfully lightweight, amazingly intricate appendages evolve? Where did they come from? Only in around the past two decades have we begun to answer this question. Several lines of research have converged on a remarkable conclusion: the feather evolved in dinosaurs before the appearance of birds....

Editor’s Note (11/18/20): After this story was published, Pfizer announced results from its final analysis of 170 confirmed cases, showing its vaccine is 95 percent effective. A Pfizer press release claimed the vaccine’s “efficacy was consistent across age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics” and that it exceeded 94 percent in adults older than 65. Earlier this week, the company Moderna announced that, based on an early analysis of its data, its COVID-19 vaccine was 94....

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed new rules meant to help combat climate change by curbing methane emissions from new hydraulically fractured crude oil wells and natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure. The measure, part of the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan, seeks to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by up to 45 percent below 2012 levels over the next 10 years. Methane is about 35 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas over the course of a century, and is one of the largest short-term drivers of climate change....

Key concepts Physics Gravity Mass Inertia Introduction Have you ever while buttering toast had the bread slip away, tumble down and land on the floor butter-side-down? Would you blame the butter landing on bad luck—or physics? Time for science to tell us! Take a slice, try it out and learn about the science behind a falling slice of toast! Background Objects close to Earth fall because our planet, a very heavy object, pulls on them....

After a decade of searching and verification, a research team revealed a new exoplanet, and you could say it’s coming in hot. The orb is the hottest giant exoplanet ever found, according to a study published today in Nature. “KELT-9b” intrigues astronomers not just because of the unusual chemistry the heat is bound to create in its atmosphere, but also because of the opportunities it offers for more in-depth studies. “We’re fascinated with the weirdness that nature hands us,” says B....

Like a school of fish or flock of birds, a pack of bicycle riders (technically called a “peloton”) often behaves like a unified entity. When individuals engage in simple small-scale behaviors, a collective pattern emerges that helps the whole. But in densely packed groups, it can be unclear what determines each individual’s behavior. Mathematicians and biologists have argued that cyclists’ movements within a peloton are primarily driven by optimizing aerodynamics, but new research suggests a different explanation....

In a typical mindfulness meditation session, a person sits on the floor, eyes closed, back straight and legs crossed, his body positioned to facilitate his inner experiences. For 10 to 15 minutes, he observes his thoughts as if he were an outsider looking in. He pays particular attention to his breathing, and when his mind wanders to other thoughts, he brings his attention back to his breath. As he practices, his mind empties of thoughts, and he becomes calmer and more peaceful....

Anyone who has struggled to pinpoint his or her location in a mall, airport or urban canyon amid skyscrapers has experienced a GPS gap firsthand. In fact, the global positioning network is filled with them: buildings, jammers and the landscape itself can block a signal’s path between GPS satellites and receivers in a smartphone or other digital device. Technologies such as Apple’s iBeacon have attempted to fill in holes with linked sensors that track indoor location using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but a new ground-based system by Australian company Locata is the first to produce a signal that merges seamlessly with the GPS network....

The terrorist attacks that shook the United States 10 years ago had effects that reached all the way into space. Not only did the events of Sept. 11, 2001, prompt NASA to immediately beef up its already strict security procedures, they forced military space officials to reassess their priorities regarding space security and triggered a shift in space policy. “There were certainly efforts made to link responding to terrorist threats to support for and expanding missile defense,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a space policy analyst at the Naval War College in Newport, R....

Editor’s Note (9/26/22): After launching in November 2021, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is scheduled to collide with the tiny asteroid Dimorphos at 7:14 P.M. ET on September 26. Back when Andy Rivkin was in college, he had a few friends in medical school. “I was like, oh man, I don’t want do anything that has too much responsibility,” he says. Instead, he looked to the stars. “Astronomy seemed pretty safe....

The act of hearing is a group effort for the human body’s organs, involving the ears, the eyes and also, according to the results of a new study, the skin. In 1976 scientists discovered the importance of the eyes to our sense of hearing by demonstrating that the eyes could fool the ears in a peculiar phenomenon named the McGurk effect. When participants watched a video in which a person was saying “ga” but the audio was playing “ba,” people thought they heard a completely different sound—“da....

When a long, black bus bearing the logo of drugmaker AbbVie rolls through Washington state next year, it will promote a new effort to eradicate hepatitis C infections. The state is paying for the marketing campaign as part of a deal to give AbbVie the exclusive right to treat its citizens who have the potentially deadly liver disease. Armed with its medication, Mavyret, AbbVie beat out rivals Merck and Gilead Sciences in a blind bidding process....