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When astronomers point their telescopes up at the sky to see distant supernovae or quasars, they’re collecting light that’s traveled millions or even billions of light-years through space. Even huge and powerful energy sources in the cosmos are unimaginably tiny and faint when we view them from such a distance. In order to learn about galaxies as they were forming soon after the Big Bang, and about nearby but much smaller and fainter objects, astronomers need more powerful telescopes....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Physical inactivity has consistently been shown to be one of the most powerful, modifiable risk factors for all causes of death and disease, alongside smoking and obesity. This interactive body map brings together scientific evidence on the links between lack of physical activity and disease. Click on the colored dots on the body, or choose a specific disease from the dropdown menu, or cycle through all diseases via the next and previous buttons....

President Obama has called for an “all of the above” energy strategy, ranging from taxpayer funding for electric vehicles to more drilling for oil and natural gas. The goal is to get a greater contribution from domestic renewable energy sources, such as the sun and wind, yet maintain cheap domestic energy from traditional fossil fuels. “We’re not going to be able to just drill our way out of the problem of high gas prices,” Obama told a North Carolina crowd on March 7....

In October 2009 Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet was sitting in her office when graduate student Eric Greer came to her with a slightly heretical question. Brunet’s lab had recently learned that they could lengthen a worm’s lifetime by manipulating levels of an enzyme called SET2. “What if extending a worm’s lifetime using SET2 can affect the life span of its descendants, even if the descendants have normal amounts of the enzyme?...

In the past researchers have observed an association between poor mitochondrial function and Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system that impairs speech and motor functions and affects five million people worldwide. A new meta-analysis suggests that low expression levels of 10 related gene sets responsible for mitochondrial machinery play an important role in this disorder—all previously unlinked to Parkinson’s. The study, published online today in Science Translational Medicine, further points to a master switch for these gene sets as a potential target of future therapies....

Brain aneurysms, which affect as many as one in 50 people, occur when a blood vessel wall weakens and bulges, setting the scene for a potentially deadly rupture. Now scientists have created a 3-D-printed aneurysm model in the laboratory and “operated” on it: they inserted a device to seal it off and prevent it from bursting. Such models could be tailored to replicate an individual patient’s blood vessel, letting doctors try different treatments and find the best solution....

Reading, writing, arithmetic—and grit and gratitude? A growing number of students and schools may start receiving grades for the two Gs, plus other so-called noncognitive traits, thanks to a recent update to the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The new law requires states to include at least one nonacademic factor in their school evaluations. This year nine California school districts started including progress in social and emotional learning (SEL), as reported by students on questionnaires, in rating their schools....

Smoke from Australia’s disastrous bush fires killed hundreds of people and sent thousands to hospitals and emergency rooms, according to a new study. The estimated death toll does not include fatalities resulting directly from the flames that spread across much of eastern Australia late last year. A research letter made public yesterday in the Medical Journal of Australia finds that at least 417 people died from smoke inhalation. Bush fire smoke also sent over 3,000 people to hospitals for cardiac and respiratory problems and forced more than 1,300 to emergency rooms for asthma attacks....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. March Madness is here, and basketball fans are making predictions: Who will be the Cinderella story of the college tournament? Which teams will make a run to the Final Four? And of course, which player is going to get “hot” and carry their team to a championship? To say a player is “hot” or has “hot hands” means the player is on a streak of making many consecutive shots....

Cruise through many neighborhoods or parks around the world, and you will find no shortage of well-manicured expanses of grass. Lawns look attractive, but they also choke out biodiversity and can require environmentally questionable practices to maintain. In dry areas of the U.S., three quarters of annual household water use is for lawns. As climate change becomes more and more urgent, these grassy plots only make things worse. Researchers and landscape architects are increasingly considering alternatives that are more sustainable, demand fewer resources and help people connect more intimately with nature....

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has released new guidelines to protect researchers from political interference—a move that many say is long overdue. “DOE officials should not and will not ask scientists to tailor their work to any particular conclusion,” said energy secretary Ernest Moniz, who announced the guidelines on 11 January. The plan allows scientists to publicly state their opinions on science and policy, as long as they make clear that they are not speaking for the government....

When a woman falls ill, her pain may be more intense than a man’s, a new study suggests. Across a number of different diseases, including diabetes, arthritis and certain respiratory infections, women in the study reported feeling more pain than men, the researchers said. The study is one of the largest to examine sex differences in human pain perception. The results are in line with earlier findings, and reveal that sex differences in pain sensitivity may be present in many more diseases than previously thought....

Spring is a time for budding flowers, tender green leaves and baby animals. But 66 million years ago, that gentle season instead brought mass death and carnage from Earth’s catastrophic impact with a massive space rock. Earth was forever changed after an enormous asteroid smashed into our planet at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), triggering a global extinction that wiped out 76% of life on Earth, including all nonavian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and most marine reptiles....

Glaciers in Antarctica are melting from the bottom up as warm ocean water seeps underneath the ice. It’s now the dominant driver of ice loss across most of the continent. But while researchers know it’s happening, they’re still trying to figure out what’s pushing that warm water to the ice sheet in the first place. Now, a team of researchers from institutions in Tasmania, Australia, and Japan may have added one more piece to the puzzle....

As a science journalist, I’ve been to countless science conferences over the years where I’d hear about the latest discoveries or a plug for a new telescope or particle accelerator destined to yield fresh insights into the workings of nature. But last week I found myself in a small but elegant auditorium at Dartmouth College for a different kind of meeting. Scientists and philosophers had gathered not to celebrate research accomplishments but to argue that science itself is inadequate....

What made the recent Ebola outbreak in west Africa so virulent? The virus that seeped across borders and killed more than 11,000 people in the region had at least one genetic mutation that better equipped it to breach human cells, new research suggests. The startling discovery provides the first evidence that genetic changes likely sped up transmission—and may have made the terrifying disease even more deadly for humans. Earlier studies of the 2013–16 Ebola outbreak have emphasized how its location—at the contiguous corners of several countries with porous borders—as well as human behavioral factors helped the virus explode across west Africa and eclipse any Ebola outbreaks that preceded it....

What is over 4 miles long, is full of dirt and has a potential power output of 50 megawatts? If you’re stumped, don’t worry—not many people have heard of energy-storage-by-rail, a concept soon to be launched on the southwestern edge of Nevada. But its architects have high ambitions for a project they say could go a long way toward stabilizing the regional power grid. Compared to the mechanics of chemical batteries, the idea behind rail storage is simple....

By James Mitchell Crow of Nature magazineThe hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is starting to heal, say researchers in Australia. The team is the first to detect a recovery in baseline average springtime ozone levels in the region, 22 years after the Montreal Protocol to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and related ozone-destroying chemicals came into force.Each spring, those chlorine- and bromine-releasing chemicals eat a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic....

Some aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants brought different tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo, researchers say. This scenario is the result of a large genetic analysis outlined today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It contradicts a commonly held view that Australia had no contact with the rest of the world between the arrival of the first humans around 45,000 years ago and the coming of Europeans in the eighteenth century....

Researchers at Google (GOOGL), working alongside experts at Northwestern University and three British medical institutions, have created an AI model that appears capable of more accurately spotting breast cancer in mammograms than human experts, according to a new study. The AI model both detected cases of breast cancer at higher rates than radiologists and reported fewer false positives, according to the study, which was published on New Year’s Day in the high-caliber scientific journal Nature....