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A pair of objects drifting in interstellar space may look like a rogue “double planet,” but it’s actually two failed stars, a new study finds.The duo is the most lightweight binary system ever discovered and may be the closest approximation of a free-floating “double planet” that astronomers have found so far. The object, named 2MASS J11193254−1137466, is located about 95 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Hydra. A 2016 study suggested it was a free-floating planet-like body — a “rogue” object without a parent star....

For the first time, researchers have used light to control the shape of nanoparticles and create micron-size hollow shells from crystals of cuprous oxide (copper and oxygen). Such particles could have future applications as a low-cost catalyst to help pull excess carbon dioxide from the air, a way to improve microscopic imaging and more, says Bryce Sadtler, a chemist at Washington University in St. Louis and senior author of a study on the new method, published last October in Chemistry of Materials....

The human genome is at last complete. Researchers have been working for decades toward this goal, and the Human Genome Project claimed victory in 2001, when it had read almost all of a person’s DNA. But the stubborn remaining 8 percent of the genome took another two decades to decipher. These final sections were highly repetitive and highly variable among individuals, making them the hardest parts to sequence. Yet they revealed hundreds of new genes, including genes involved in immune responses and those responsible for humans developing larger brains than our primate ancestors....

Apple, Nokia and Research In Motion (RIM) gave Indian intelligence agencies secret access to encrypted smartphone communications as the price of doing business in the country, according to what appear to be leaked Indian government documents. The purported documents, if they are real, indicate that the smartphone giants gave India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Indian military intelligence “backdoor” tools that would let the Indian agencies read encrypted emails sent to and from RIM’s BlackBerrys, Apple’s iPhones and Nokia smartphones....

Perhaps no one has been more vilified for his sentiments about and actions toward animals than René Descartes. Many scholars attribute the 17th-century belief that animals were mere machines devoid of fear, pain or pleasure to the French mathematician, philosopher and scientist. Animals’ feelings, even if present, were morally irrelevant to Descartes, who attempted to prove his point by subjecting dogs and rabbits to exquisite torture. Today, within society and the sciences, these Cartesian views are rarely tolerated....

It is 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon. “My wife is suicidal, Doctor. If you don’t admit her to the hospital, you’ll have blood on your hands on Monday…” If the apparently suicidal patient is not hospitalized it could be a difficult weekend for the patient, of course, but also for the understandably worried spouse and even the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist would be aware that the guidelines for patients with suicidal behaviors recommend estimating the likelihood of suicide by combining clinical findings (such as suicidal thoughts and behaviors) with multiple risk factors to judge the seriousness of the suicide risk....

What is a planet? It seems such a simple question, but the answer keeps getting more and more confused. On the one hand, the line between planets and lesser bodies is notoriously hazy. Just last year astronomers identified a body larger than Pluto in the outermost solar system, rekindling the old debate over whether Pluto really qualifies as a planet and, if it does, why large asteroids do not. Even newspapers and museums have jumped into the fray....

Dozens of the top clockmakers in the world convened in New Orleans one muggy week in May 2002 to present their latest inventions. There was not a mechanic among them; these were scientists, and their conversations buzzed with talk of spectrums and quantum levels, not gears and escapements. Today those who would build a more accurate clock must advance into the frontiers of physics and engineering in several directions at once....

Waiting at the doctor’s office has got to be one of the most frustrating things we all deal with. You are imprisoned in a cold, mundane room, bored out of your mind, listening to the ticking of the clock, feeling like every minute is a minute wasted. I know how you feel, because I’ve been there. I once waited for 4 hours to see my perinatologist (yep, 4 hours!) when I was pregnant with my twins....

In late October, the United States passed a grim milestone: more people in the United States had died of COVID-19 in less than two years than the approximately 700,000 who have died in the U.S. in the four decades of the AIDS pandemic. By World AIDS Day, this gap has grown. Nearly 800,000 people are known to have died of COVID-19. If current trends continue—and they don’t have to—hundreds of thousands of people could die of COVID in the U....

Are you a nice, well-rounded person, yet can’t seem to hit it off with the opposite sex? Maybe you need to embrace your dark side, according to a new study that shows people with certain extreme pathological personality traits fare well in the game of love. In the study researchers focused on nearly 1,000 heterosexual men and women with a variety of pathological personality traits whose disorders ranged in severity from none to diagnosable....

There’s something particularly cruel in using beauty to kill, but that’s exactly what scientists at the Chicago Botanic Garden set out to do earlier this summer in the sand dunes of northern Wisconsin. There Kayri Havens and her colleagues planted about 60 3-D-printed flowers to lure invasive weevils to their death. For more than a decade, beginning in the 1990s, scientists deliberately distributed the invasive weevil Larinus planus throughout the country to consume Canada thistle, an aggressive weed that had run rampant through American farm fields and rangeland....

When you sip a beer or sample wine, you could get more than a pleasant buzz—the drinks may contain low levels of heavy metals. These elements accumulate in the body and can cause medical problems, so health organizations worldwide have set or proposed standards for acceptable levels in some food and beverages. Researchers have now pinpointed a silty filtration material as the culprit behind traces of inorganic arsenic, cadmium and lead in beer and wine....

People have been observing birds singing and calling since there were people. Birds vocalize to attract mates, defend territory, find one another, and more. Many birds’ songs sound musical to us, with distinct notes that are repeated in pleasing patterns at a steady speed—melody, rhythm and tempo, basically. But as Adam Fishbein and other bird researchers have discovered recently, what sounds so entrancing to us isn’t that meaningful to them. Birds don’t seem to listen to the melody so much as to fine details within each note that humans can’t detect....

Key concepts Sound Acoustics Siren Physics Introduction You probably hear them almost every day: sirens. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks—they all can come blaring. Their wailing sound is piercingly loud and pretty effective at clearing the road in front of them. But have you ever thought about how this loud noise is generated? Make your own simple disk siren in this activity and find out for yourself. Background To understand how sirens work one must first look at the physics of sound, which is basically just the movement of air....

China launched the core of its space station in April, and sent three astronauts up in June. But although the space station probably won’t be complete until late 2022, there is already a long queue of experiments from across the world waiting to go up. Scientists in China told Nature that the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has tentatively approved more than 1,000 experiments, several of which have already been launched....

Crows are some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. They are capable of making rule-guided decisions and of creating and using tools. They also appear to show an innate sense of what numbers are. Researchers now report that these clever birds are able to understand recursion—the process of embedding structures in other, similar structures—which was long thought to be a uniquely human ability. Recursion is a key feature of language....

A new study may help explain why people of a more advanced age forget where they put their keys, hid important documents—or even who was on hand during a recent outing. University of Arizona in Tucson researchers report in The Journal of Neuroscience that forgetfulness may, at least in part, stem from a breakdown in the brain’s ability to store or consolidate memories, a process that involves “replaying” and filing away events while we snooze....

Sex is determined by chromosomes in mammals and by temperature in many reptiles. But for sea lampreys — eel-like creatures that dine on blood — the growth rate of their larvae seems to control whether they are male or female. They are the first creatures known to undergo sex determination in this way. Researchers know next to nothing about sex determination in sea lampreys (Petromyzon marinus) and have long been puzzled by the observation that some adult populations are mostly male, and others female....

Harry Mobley, chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School, provides this answer. In order to be useful in treating human infections, antibiotics must selectively target bacteria for eradication and not the cells of its human host. Indeed, modern antibiotics act either on processes that are unique to bacteria–such as the synthesis of cell walls or folic acid–or on bacterium-specific targets within processes that are common to both bacterium and human cells, including protein or DNA replication....