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Last month, the American Heart Association released a new scientific statementthat seemed to suggest that eating late in the day is bad for your heart. At least, that was the take home message that made the rounds on evening news and morning shows. The actual statement was a bit more cautious: “Allocating more calories earlier in the day might help reduce cardiovascular disease risk,” it read. But that was immediately followed by the disclaimer that “large studies tracking patients’ cardiovascular health over a long period are needed to show how meal timing and patterns impact disease risk....

During the early morning hours of September 9, 2002, Peter Clancy arrived at his house in upscale Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., armed with a large kitchen knife. He tried the garage, which did not respond to his opener, and then the front door, but the lock had been changed. So he picked up a chair from the deck and hurled it through a kitchen window. Hearing the breaking glass, Debbie Clancy called the police and told them her husband had just broken into her house....

NASA’s Artemis program has been called ambitious for its goal of returning humans to Earth’s moon as early as 2024. But its most audacious aspiration is something else entirely: a plan to usher in an era of sustainable lunar operations by mining the moon’s reserves of water ice. Once tapped, this extraterrestrial reservoir could become the elixir of life to support human outposts, supplying not only drinking water but also oxygen and even rocket fuel....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In early November, a self-driving shuttle and a delivery truck collided in Las Vegas. The event, in which no one was injured and no property was seriously damaged, attracted media and public attention in part because one of the vehicles was driving itself—and because that shuttle had been operating for only less than an hour before the crash....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that the price of getting solar panels installed on a home is lower than ever, but has it gotten to the point anywhere in the U.S. where it’s actually cheaper than traditional grid power yet? –Lester Milstein, Boston, MA Rooftop solar panels on have always been the province of well-to-do, eco-friendly folks willing to shell out extra bucks to be green, but that is all starting to change....

SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—has been one of the most captivating areas of science since its inception in 1960, when the astronomer Frank Drake used an 85-foot radio telescope in the first-ever attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions sent by beings outside our solar system. Yet despite its high public visibility and near-ubiquity in blockbuster Hollywood science fiction, throughout most of its 55-year history SETI has languished on the fringes of scientific research, garnering relatively scant funding and only small amounts of dedicated observation time on world-class telescopes....

This was only the third flight in the aerial segment of FIREX-AQ, an ambitious three-year project led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. It is attempting to sniff out the precise chemical composition of smoke emitted from biomass burns and determine, among other things, when, and why, it is most dangerous for human health. For six weeks last summer the DC-8 and a pair of Twin Otters similarly quilled with atmospheric-sampling instruments flew through more than 100 different columns....

We may think we know the telltale signs of lying, be it shifty eyes or nervous fidgeting. Professional interrogators look for such tells, too, assuming a suspect’s nervousness betrays his guilt. But interrogation can rattle even the innocent, so nervousness alone cannot distinguish liars from truth-tellers. Scientists looking for better ways to detect lies have found a promising one: increasing suspects’ “cognitive load.” For a host of reasons, their theory goes, lying is more mentally taxing than telling the truth....

You can assume quite a bit about the state of a used car just from its mileage and model year. The wear and tear of heavy driving and the passage of time will have taken an inevitable toll. The same appears to be true of aging in people, but the analogy is flawed because of a crucial difference between inanimate machines and living creatures: deterioration is not inexorable in biological systems, which can respond to their environments and use their own energy to defend and repair themselves....

When a giant wall of ocean water rose up from the sea and slammed into the Philippines on Friday, it caused immediate devastation, obliterating entire cities and crippling hospitals and transport in the central part of the archipelago. Thousands are reported dead or displaced. Far-flung coastal communities accustomed to the Pacific Ocean’s mighty onslaughts were flattened by Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most intense storms currently on record, with sustained winds ripping through their streets at around 320 kilometers per hour and gusts reaching 370 kph....

Maddie* couldn’t stop crying. The first few days after her stroke, it had made sense. She had led a charmed retirement, with annual trips across the country, time with family and an active life. Now everything was in flux. A week before, Maddie, who was in her late 70s, had woken up unable to use half of her body. Her husband called an ambulance, and a diagnosis was reached within hours....

New analysis of infants lends further credence to the rapidly advancing theory of mirror neurons. Key to learning, mirror neurons fire in our brains when we perform physical actions but also fire similarly when we observe other people conducting those same actions. Psychologist Claes von Hofsten of Uppsala University in Sweden has shown that these cells become active before our first birthdays, earlier than scientists had anticipated. In a 2003 experiment adults stacking blocks shifted their gaze to the site to which they were moving a block a few hundred milliseconds before the object reached the target....

On Nov. 4, 2008, two divers were cleaning sludge and silt from an entry bay for water pumps that serve Constellation Energy Nuclear Group’s Nine Mile Point nuclear power plant near Oswego, N.Y. In the midst of the operation, the diver and the hose tender shifted their positions and the diver lost control of a plastic suction hose, leaving its trailing section in front of one of the water pipe entries....

By Marian Turner of Nature magazineA long-term study of children from Romanian orphanages suggests that the effects of childhood stress could be visible in their DNA as they grow up.Children who spent their early years in state-run Romanian orphanages have shorter telomeres than children who grew up in foster care, according to a study published today in Molecular Psychiatry. Telomeres are buffer regions of non-coding DNA at the ends of chromosomes that prevent the loss of protein-coding DNA when cells divide....

China is revving up its next-generation neutron generator and will soon start experiments there. That will lift the country into a select group of nations with facilities that produce intense neutron beams to study the structure of materials. The China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongguan, a 2.2-billion-yuan (US$331-million) centre, will allow the country’s growing pool of top-notch physicists and material scientists, along with international collaborators, to compete in multiple physics and engineering fields....

Some of the best movies are origin stories. When we know where a superhero is coming from, then we can understand why they do what they do. The same goes for planets: knowing how they formed is key in understanding their internal structure, geology and climates. We know a lot about how Earth formed from decades of analyzing meteorites and lunar rocks. We think the final phases of Earth’s growth involved titanic collisions, the last of which spun out a disk of vaporized rock that coalesced into the moon....

By Carey Gillam (Reuters) - A coalition of U.S. farmer and environmental groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to overturn regulatory approval granted last week for an herbicide developed by Dow AgroSciences. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California, argues that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not adequately analyze the impact of one of the new herbicide’s active ingredients, 2,4-D, before granting approval on Oct....

When the hacker telephoned one of the U.K.’s largest cosmetic surgery chains, his Slavic accent was so thick that the operator struggled to make out what he was saying. Eventually staff at the London-based Harley Medical Group realized the man had stolen the names of 350,000 past and potential clients, and information about the procedures they sought. It was not the crime of the century but the extortionist knew who wanted a breast enhancement, a nose job or a tummy tuck, and he demanded cash—six figures—to keep quiet....

A swarm of tornadoes that tore through the Midwest and Southeast in early March has earned the grim title of the nation’s first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2012. From March 2 through the early hours of March 3, 132 tornadoes were reported across nine states. Although those numbers are preliminary, and will undoubtedly decrease once overlapping reports are eliminated, their aftermath was devastating, causing more than $1.5 billion in damage and killing 40 people....

Israel is heading for the moon—and a lunar milestone. If all goes well, a lander scheduled to launch on 21 February will become the first privately funded craft to land on the moon. The feat seems set to kick off a new era of lunar exploration—one in which national space agencies work alongside private industries to investigate and exploit the moon and its resources. The craft, named Beresheet—‘in the beginning’ in Hebrew—was built by an Israeli non-profit company called SpaceIL that raised US$100 million for its mission, much of it through philanthropic donations....