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Astronaut Donald Peterson, who trained for a classified military space station program before becoming one of the first people to spacewalk from the space shuttle, has died. Peterson’s death on Sunday (May 27) at age 84 was noted by the Association of Space Explorers, a professional society for individuals who have flown in space. “So sad to report that we have lost another member of the astronaut family,” wrote the association on its Facebook page on Monday....

I’m stuck—again. I’m sitting at my computer, playing a game. It’s not a typical game: I’m using human spatial reasoning and puzzle-solving know-how to manipulate and shape virtual proteins. The game—FoldIt—is an exercise in molecular origami. I use my mouse to tug and twist at a backbone of mottled greens, browns, oranges and reds on my screen, each color representing the properties of a particular region of the protein. Side chains, chemical pendants that make the protein’s building blocks unique, hang off the main backbone like charms on a bracelet....

SAN FRANCISCO – Sixteen thousand years ago, woolly mammoths, Beringian lions and short-faced bears roamed a grassy steppe that stretched across North America into Alaska. Two thousand years later—the equivalent of an eye blink in geologic time – the animals were extinct in the area that is now Alaska. The grasslands had been replaced by peaty soil covered with moss, sedge and lichen. Scientists presenting new research here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union say warm, wet conditions helped flip the switch that turned the mammoth steppe into the Alaskan tundra of today – and that episode hints at how rapidly an ecosystem can transform....

The high energy of a lightning strike creates an unusual form of phosphorus once common on primordial Earth and still used by many microbes today. Phosphorus forms the DNA molecule’s spine, enrobes every living cell as a constituent of their membranes, and is a key component of bones and teeth. Author Isaac Asimov once called phosphorus “life’s bottleneck,” because it makes up 1 percent of an organism but is only present in 0....

For the cover story of the February Scientific American I return to one of my favorite subjects: our mysterious cousins the Neandertals. This time I take stock of recent findings that bear on the question of how the cognitive abilities of Neandertals compare with anatomically modern humans. It’s an intriguing area of research, not least because in addition to illuminating the Neandertal mind, such investigations can help reveal what factors allowed anatomically modern humans—our kind—to succeed where other members of the human family failed....

It’s one thing to wish for a boy or a girl when pregnant; but it’s something else entirely to take steps to guarantee your wish comes true. Enter China and India, where the ratio of boys to girls is so lopsided that economists project there may be as many as 30 to 40 million more men than women of marriageable age in both countries by 2020. The question is: Why? It’s more than just the historic birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls....

Flu shots can be hard to sell to the public. Even a run-of-the-mill influenza infection can be debilitating to otherwise healthy people, and lethal to those who are elderly or frail, so vaccinations are important. The problem is that flu vaccines deliver inconsistent performance. “In a good season, we’re up to 60% effectiveness, but in bad, mismatched years it can be as low as 10% or 20%,” says Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland....

PROFILE NAME Manfred Kayser TITLE Professor of forensic molecular biology LOCATION Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands We have heard about DNA being used as evidence in court. What else can genetics do for forensics? One of my main interests is in using DNA to predict appearance traits. I combine fundamental research on the genetics of human appearance with applied research such as forensic DNA phenotyping, which is using the prediction of appearance from DNA as a tool in police investigations....

August 1968 Breathing Water “If by some special arrangement man could be made to breathe water instead of air, serious obstacles to attempts to penetrate deeper into the ocean and to travel in outer space might be overcome. Suppose we prepare an isotonic solution that is like blood plasma in salt composition and charge this solution with oxygen under greater than normal pressure. Can a mammal breathe such a solution? I performed the first experiments, with mice as the experimental animals, at the University of Leiden in 1961....

We’re officially living in a new world. Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it. A little 400 ppm history. Three years ago, the world’s gold standard carbon dioxide observatory passed the symbolic threshold of 400 ppm....

President Barack Obama wants NASA to send astronauts to Mars by the 2030s and eventually into deep space, he wrote in a CNN op-ed published today (Oct. 11). “We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time,” Obama wrote in the op-ed....

In the 1990s an experiment studying neutrinos saw something strange: too many particles showed up in its detector. In 2002 scientists began another experiment to figure out what happened. That trial also got surprising results—yet in a different way. Then came a third experiment in 2015. That one announced measurements last week that do not resolve either puzzle and only heighten the mystery. The projects have all looked at neutrinos—nature’s most abundant particle, save for photons (particles of light)....

Is carrying a few extra pounds really as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be? It’s true that body weight is strongly correlated with the risk of various diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. But there are numerous other indicators as well, including blood pressure, blood sugar, blood fats, and inflammation. Some have argued that you can be overweight and still be considered “metabolically healthy” if these other risk factors are normal....

LONDON – For years, the energy companies have been telling us not to worry. Yes, mounting carbon emissions threaten to heat up the world – but technology, particularly carbon capture and storage, or CCS, will come to the rescue. The trouble is that there’s been plenty of talk about CCS and little action, with few projects being implemented on a large scale. That could be about to change as China and the US, who have been leading the way on CCS research in recent years, this month signed a raft of agreements on tackling climate change − with half of them focusing on CCS....

Hundreds of birds and dolphins have been washing up dead along the Peru coast, and this has government officials looking for causes. The mass deaths have taken place against the backdrop of oceanic warming in the region. At least 1,200 birds, mostly pelicans, have been found dead in recent weeks along a stretch of Pacific coast in northern Peru, the Reuters website said on Sunday. Recent months have also seen an estimated 800 dolphins die in the same area, Reuters said....

If you believe the rumors, the successor to the Samsung Galaxy S3 (pictured) could scroll up and down based on your eye movements.(Credit:Josh Miller/CNET)If the Samsung Galaxy S4 rumors pan out, Samsung’s newest smartphone may let people interact with the screen using just their eyes. Join CNET on Thursday, March 14 at 3 p.m. PT / 6 p.m. ET for live coverage of the Samsung Galaxy S4 eventEye-tracking uses the camera to lock onto the motion of a user’s peepers, following wherever they move....

Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. The myth flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth....

Just five months after federal health officials asked hospitals and physicians to be on the lookout for an often-fatal, antibiotic-resistant fungus called Candida auris, 13 cases have been reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. It is the first time that the fungus, which is easily misidentified in lab tests as a more common candida yeast infection, has been found in the US, and four of the first seven patients with it have died....

The Middle East’s first major international research centre has weathered political unrest, international sanctions and even the assassination of two delegates. Now, the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, or SESAME, is on the brink of circulating its first subatomic particles. The machine, which lies outside Amman, Jordan, will start accelerating electrons around its 133-metre ring in December and begin using the resulting beams of intense radiation to do science from May 2017....

By Karen Brooks(Reuters) - A giant panda at the Atlanta zoo delivered an extra bundle of joy on Monday when she gave birth to twins, an apparent surprise to zoo officials who had been excitedly anticipating the birth of a single cub.Lun Lun delivered the tiny, hairless duo at 6:21 p.m. and 6:23 p.m. EDT, the first giant panda cubs to be born in the United States in 2013, Zoo Atlanta officials said....