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Since rocketing into space in 2009, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 4,500 confirmed or candidate worlds, in the process reshaping our entire view of the prospects for life in the universe. Thanks to Kepler, we can now conjecture that planets circle essentially every star in the sky, perhaps 10 percent of those might be habitable, and our solar system’s familiar architecture of small inner worlds and outer giants is rather rare in the cosmos....

We packed into the elegantly appointed White House room. The buzzing crowd hushed as President Barack Obama stepped to the lectern. He spoke about the work of some two dozen honorees sitting before us—the winners of the National Medals of Science and Technology, the highest honors bestowed by the U.S. government. “Thanks to the sacrifices they’ve made, the chances they’ve taken—the gallons of coffee they’ve consumed—we now have batteries that power everything from cell phones to electric cars,” he said....

Children with a large vocabulary experience more success at school and in the workplace. How much parents talk to their children plays a major role, but new research shows that it is not just the quantity but also the quality of parental input that matters. Helpful gestures and meaningful glances may allow kids to grasp concepts more easily than they otherwise would. In a study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Erica Cartmill of the University of Chicago and her collaborators videotaped parents in their homes as they read books and played games with their 14- or 18-month-old children....

“In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word." Neville Chamberlain’s first impression of Adolf Hitler can charitably be described as an error in judgment. Rarely do our own miscalculations result in tragedy, yet popular sentiment seems to hold that when it comes to truly trusting others, you just never know....

Physicians are detecting allergies in an increasing number of children. Some of that comes from quicker, somewhat better diagnosis and increased awareness, and some from an increase in allergy prevalence. But whatever the cause, many studies indicate that getting one allergy increases the odds of suffering from others, especially if the first one appears at an early age. “It’s like turning on a switch when you get an allergy, and there will be more,” says Jonathan Malka—a childhood asthma specialist and chief of pediatric allergy/immunology at Pediatric Associates of Fort Lauderdale, FL....

Earthquakes are unique in the pantheon of natural disasters in that they provide no warning at all before they strike. Consider the case of the Loma Prieta quake, which hit the San Francisco Bay Area on October 17, 1989, just as warm-ups were getting under way for the evening’s World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s. At 5:04 p.m., a sudden slip of the San Andreas Fault shook the region with enough force to collapse a 1....

I’ve never known an Earth that wasn’t on fire. I’m 23 years old, and I’m not alone. My entire generation has come of age in a world so defined by climate change and human destruction—by forests burning and glaciers melting, by extinguished species and rising seas—that it’s sometimes been hard to fathom what an even more dismal future might look like. That is, until the pandemic reared its ugly head, bringing about the kind of worldwide lockdowns and upheavals of daily life that have given terrifying prescience to the term “global emergency” while still falling far short of what scientists say will be the worst environmental catastrophes that await us....

The White House announced this morning that the U.S. will rapidly increase exports of liquefied natural gas to Europe as Germany and other E.U. nations try to diminish their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The move will ramp up LNG shipments carried by seagoing tankers by 15 billion cubic meters this year, according to a fact sheet released by the White House. As a comparison, the United States sent 22 bcm of LNG to Europe last year, the highest ever traded between the two continents....

Large-scale brain-like machines with human-like abilities to solve problems could become a reality, now that researchers have invented microscopic gadgets that mimic the connections between neurons in the human brain better than any previous devices. The new research could lead to better robots, self-driving cars, data mining, medical diagnosis, stock-trading analysis and “other smart human-interactive systems and machines in the future,” said Tae-Woo Lee, a materials scientistat the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea and senior author of the study....

Scientists have created a robot consisting of multiple units that can operate as a cluster, responding to stimuli and acting on their environment without the need for any centralized control—much like living cells. Each of the circular units, or “particles,” measures up to 23.5 centimeters in diameter. The particles are loosely joined together with magnets and can move only by expanding or contracting. But despite their individual simplicity, as a group they are capable of more sophisticated behavior, such as moving toward a light source....

1971 Modern Glass “A process whereby plate glass of high quality is made by floating it over a bath of molten tin is rapidly replacing the conventional plate-glass process in the U.S. The float process, developed in England about 10 years ago by the glass-making company Pilkington Bros. and introduced into the U.S. by PPC Industries, does away with the mechanical grinding and polishing operations that must be performed in the conventional method....

China will widen its gap with the United States as the world’s largest coal-producing country by the end of the decade, riding continued strong demand from its electric power and steel-making sectors, according to a new analysis from New York-based GBI Research. By 2020, the report projects China will produce 4.5 billion metric tons of coal annually, reflecting a 3.5 percent compounded annual growth rate over the next eight years....

In a small windowless room on a sweltering summer’s day, I find myself face-to-face with an entomological rock star. I’m at the University of Lincoln in eastern England, inside an insectary, a room lined with tanks and jars containing plastic plants and dozing insects. Before I know it, I’m being introduced to a vibrant-green katydid from Colombia. “Meet Copiphora gorgonensis,” says Fernando Montealegre-Z, discoverer of this six-legged celebrity. The name’s familiar: It’s been splashed across the world alongside photos of the insect’s golden face and miniature unicorn’s horn....

Nobody likes a show-off. So someone with a singular skill will often hide that fact to fit in with a group. A recent study reported for the first time that this behavior begins as early as two years old. In the study, led by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and published in Psychological Science, two-year-old children, chimpanzees and orangutans dropped a ball into a box divided into three sections, one of which consistently resulted in a reward (chocolate for the children; a peanut for the apes)....

In 1900, at the Paris Conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians at the Sorbonne, David Hilbert enumerated 23 open mathematical questions and set an agenda for a broad range of studies that continue to influence modern mathematics today. Since then, scientists in other disciplines, such as astrophysics and biology, have followed Hilbert’s example: They periodically undertake so-called “decadal studies” in which the research community surveys unsolved questions in their specialties and tries to identify the most important and useful ones to pursue in the upcoming decade....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. What will happen to your Facebook account when you die? What about all your photos shared on social media, your texts with loved ones, or documents on cloud-storage systems? In just the two-year period from 2012 to 2014, humans produced more data than in all of human civilization before that—and the pace is only accelerating....

By Misha Hussain GUECKEDOU, Guinea, April 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Hiccups, say doctors in this remote corner of Guinea, are the final tell-tale sign of infection by the Ebola virus that has killed more than 100 people since an outbreak began this year. Then come profuse bleeding, circulatory shock and death. But for Rose Komano, the hiccups never came. On Saturday, the 18-year-old mother of three became the first victim to have beaten the disease in the region of Gueckedou, epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in this impoverished West African nation....

As the world’s population balloons to 9 billion by 2050, based on current agricultural practices, the global food system may not be able to meet the demands of an increasingly affluent and urban population. Yet shifting crops away from animal feed and biofuels to growing food exclusively for human consumption could increase global calorie availability by as much as 70 percent, according to a study from researchers at the University of Minnesota, St....

The ill effects of heat kill more people in the U.S. than those of any other weather phenomenon, according to the National Weather Service. And globally the growing number of longer-lasting and hotter heat waves because of climate change has left people more vulnerable to record-shattering highs. So beyond running through a sprinkler and drinking ice-cold lemonade, how can you keep cool when temperatures soar? Scientific American spoke with experts in environmental health and medicine about how to recognize the health risks associated with extreme heat and what you can do to stay safer during heat waves....

Who hasn’t woken up tangled in sheets, sweating, terrified from a nightmare? Whether you’re late for an exam, naked in public, or being chased by anything from a dinosaur to a scary clown, we’ve all been jolted awake, afraid of the monsters in our heads. But while nightmares are stressful for the dreamer, night terrors are often more stressful for the observer. We see our partner or child sit bolt upright in bed, scream, and thrash around with a panicked look in his or her wide open eyes....