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Yesterday (June 7), the agency unveiled its 2017 astronaut class — seven men and five women chosen from a record-breaking initial pool of 18,353 applicants. (The previous high was 8,000 applicants, back in 1978, NASA officials said.) The 12 new astronaut candidates (or “ascans,” in NASA parlance) won’t become full-fledged astronauts until they complete two years of training. This work, which begins in August, will be varied and rigorous. [What It’s Like to Become an Astronaut: 10 Surprising Facts]...

A few seconds after a tear-gas canister burst near Marcelo Jaque’s feet, breathing became nearly impossible. Jaque, an astronomer at the University of La Serena in Chile, ran with his partner to safety as fellow protesters began choking and vomiting or fell unconscious. What moments earlier had been a peaceful demonstration dissolved into chaos as police forces tried to disperse the crowd. The demonstration in La Serena on 21 October was part of a nationwide upheaval that started three days earlier owing to a metro fare hike in Santiago, Chile’s capital, which sparked mass demonstrations across the country....

Standing in a field of corn and dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows, Carl Salvaggio looks every inch the traditional farmer. But the USD85,000 console clasped between his hands suggests his farming techniques are anything but ordinary. Salvaggio is a professor in digital imaging and remote sensing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and that the device he’s holding controls a drone with a hyperspectral sensor and a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system—all so he can conduct a forensic analysis of his cornfield from a height of 120 metres....

Flashes of radio waves lasting a thousandth of a second arrive on Earth every second from all over the sky. What makes them? We do not know. It is exciting to try and figure it out.
The frequency-dependent arrival time of these fast radio Bursts (FRBs) indicates a delay by a volume of electrons greater than the Milky Way can account for, and suggests that they originate much farther away—from the universe at large....

WASHINGTON—Should President Donald Trump make drug makers relieved? Or anxious? They’re not sure. On the one hand, it was Clinton who pledged repeatedly to crack down on prescription drug prices during the campaign. It was a Democratic takeover of Washington that was considered the drug industry’s “worst-case scenario.” Republicans now fully control the federal government. And yet. Trump broke with conservative orthodoxy when he said he wants Medicare to directly negotiate the prices it pays for prescription drugs....

By Ronnie Cohen NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Millions of people could be trying to measure their blood pressure with untested, inaccurate and potentially dangerous smartphone applications, or apps, a new study finds. Researchers analyzed the top 107 apps for “hypertension” and “high blood pressure” that are available for download on the Google Play store and Apple iTunes and found that nearly three-quarters offered useful tools for tracking medical data. But they also found seven Android apps that claimed users needed only to press their fingers onto phone screens or cameras to get blood-pressure readings – claims that scientists say are bogus....

A team in China has taken a new approach to fixing disease genes in human embryos. The researchers created cloned embryos with a genetic mutation for a potentially fatal blood disorder, and then precisely corrected the DNA to show how the condition might be prevented at the earliest stages of development. The report, published on September 23 in Protein & Cell1, is the latest in a series of experiments to edit genes in human embryos....

You can probably remember some morning you struggled to get out of bed. Maybe you kept thinking about the exam you failed, the party you were not invited to or the job you didn’t get. If you are clinically depressed, every day is like this—but worse. Nothing you used to enjoy is fun anymore, and you lack the will to do what it takes—to exercise, say, or reach out to a loved one—to pull yourself out of your gloom....

El Niño is gaining steam in the Pacific Ocean and forecasters are now leaning towards it being a strong event, the first since the blockbuster El Niño of 1997-1998. That possibility is again raising the collective hopes of Californians that this winter may finally see some desperately needed precipitation to begin the slow climb out of a historic drought. “In California, all eyes are on the Pacific given the ongoing historic drought,” Daniel Swain, an atmospheric science Ph....

A flexible and transparent power source inspired by the electric eel could be used to power electrical devices in the body, such as cardiac pacemakers, implantable sensors or even prosthetic organs. The prototype, described in Nature on December 13, runs on a solution of salt and water, but researchers hope that future versions might get their energy from bodily fluids. “Our artificial electric organ has a lot of characteristics that traditional batteries don’t have,” says Thomas Schroeder, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who co-led the research....

Why did the codependent cross the road? To help the chicken make a decision. Since its debut in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the term “codependent” has become the stuff of punchlines, but it is a real thing. While not an actual diagnosis, the term “codependent” was first used to describe how family members of individuals with substance abuse issues might actually interfere with recovery by overhelping. As the term spread, so did the idea of the importance of context for people struggling with substance abuse....

For the first time, researchers have inserted the genetic material of an extinct animal into a living one. The finding shows how lost information about species from the past can be retrieved, and also provides a glimpse into how long-gone creatures may someday get a second chance at life. “Now that we’ve shown you can do this, it opens up the floodgates for all kinds of extinct species,” says Andrew Pask, a fellow in zoology at the University of Melbourne in Australia and lead author of a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE....

Physicists recently teleported information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms, without destroying the sensitive quantum state, a feat essential for future quantum computers and cryptography systems. Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark first entangled the laser and atoms into sharing a complementary quantum state by shining a strong laser beam onto a cloud of cesium atoms. A second weak laser pulse, which stored the information to be teleported, was then mixed with the strong light beam, and their combined amplitudes and phases were measured....

SAN DIEGO—Kerri De Nies received the news this spring from her son’s pediatrician: Her chubby-cheeked toddler had a rare brain disorder. She’d never heard of the disease—adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD—and she soon felt devastated and overwhelmed. “I probably read everything you could possibly read online—every single website,” De Nies said as she cradled her son, Gregory Mac Phee. “It’s definitely hard to think about what could potentially happen. You think about the worst-case scenario....

The U.S. government on Tuesday issued rules for addressing cyber vulnerabilities in medical devices, providing manufacturers with guidelines for fixing security bugs in equipment, including pacemakers, insulin pumps and imaging systems. “Cybersecurity threats are real, ever-present and continuously changing,” Suzanne Schwartz, a senior Food and Drug Administration official who helped draft the new rules, said in a blog post. “And as hackers become more sophisticated, these cybersecurity risks will evolve.” The FDA released the 30-page guidance as the agency investigates claims from a short-selling firm and security researchers that heart devices from St....

An adult who happens to own a robust collection of plush pals might make you uneasy. Past studies of adult psychiatric patients, after all, had found that owners of toy animals were more likely than others to have a personality disorder. Now you can relax, however: a study in the September 2012 Journal of Adult Development found no such link in a nonclinical sample of typical adults. The researchers used physiological and self-reported measures of emotion regulation, including tests of psychological immaturity....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. On Oct. 9, Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago won the Nobel Prize for his extraordinary, world-transforming work in behavioral economics. In its press release, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences emphasized that Thaler demonstrated how nudging—or influencing people while fully maintaining freedom of choice—“may help people exercise better self-control when saving for a pension, as well in other contexts....

Editor’s Note: This article was originally printed in the 2008 Scientific American Special Report on Robots. It is being published on the Web as part of ScientificAmerican.com’s In-Depth Report on Robots. Sometime early in this century the intelligence of machines will exceed that of humans. Within a quarter of a century, machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to physical movement....

The word “sunflower” brings to mind a mane of vibrant yellow petals encircling a dark whorl of seeds. But not all sunflowers are alike. Some sunflowers have scraggly petals, for instance, or small centers. Many of the sunflowers Vincent van Gogh depicted in his famous series of oil paintings look rather unusual—they sport woolly, chrysanthemumlike blooms. Now scientists have pinpointed the genetic mutation responsible for these strange sunflowers’ abundance of small yellow petals....

Most of us think our pets say a lot about who we are. Why else would we proudly proclaim our loyalty on T-shirts and in online profile pictures? Yet few scientists have rigorously investigated whether our choice of pet reveals anything about our personality, beliefs or lifestyle. Scientific American MIND rounded up the smattering of available research and highlighted some of the more interesting findings in the infographic that starts below and continues on the next pages....