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Mars may be cold and dry, but it’s far from dead. The first official science results from NASA’s quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal a regularly roiled world. “We’ve finally, for the first time, established that Mars is a seismically active planet,” InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said during a teleconference with reporters Thursday (Feb. 20). Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, Banerdt added....

A new space robot now calls Mars “home.” NASA’s InSight lander completed its seven-month interplanetary journey of nearly 500 million kilometers in dramatic style on November 26, slamming into the Martian atmosphere at a speed of nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour. Only six-and-a-half harrowing minutes later, after ejecting its heatshield, deploying a supersonic parachute and firing retrorockets, its speed had dramatically slowed to a jogging pace after traversing the 130 kilometers between Mars’s upper atmosphere and the planet’s arid surface....

The vast, turbulent Southern Ocean circling Antarctica has an unexpected claim to fame: It’s one of the planet’s most important natural climate tools. Like all the world’s oceans, it draws carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into the water. But the Southern Ocean is a special case; it stores up more carbon than any other body of water on Earth. That could change, though. Some scientists believe that as the Antarctic climate changes—complete with melting sea ice, shifting wind patterns and changing ocean currents—the Southern Ocean might soak up less carbon....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve read that plastic bottles are not always safe to reuse over and over as harmful chemicals can leach out into the contents. I’m wondering if the same issues plague Tupperware and other similar plastic food storage containers. – Sylvie, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada The recent hubbub over plastic containers leaching chemicals into food and drinks has cast a pall over all kinds of plastics that come into contact with what we ingest, whether deserved or not....

Major automakers—along with upstarts such as Tesla and Uber—are racing to put self-driving cars on the road, leading to advances in enabling technologies such as laser range finders known as lidars. A lidar works like a hyperactive laser measure, scattering laser light in multiple directions to gather hundreds of thousands of measurements per second and build up a “point cloud” of spatial information. A computer processes these data to form a coherent picture of a vehicle’s surroundings....

The weeks before Hosni Mubarak’s ouster last winter turned into a tumultuous time during which precious artifacts were lifted from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities (aka the Cairo Museum). For an interview that appears in the August issue of Scientific American, former Newsweek foreign editor Jeffrey Bartholet talked to Zahi Hawass, the minister of state for antiquities, about efforts to recover the artifacts. An excerpt from that interview follows, with supplementary questions on the missing artifacts and on the more general problem of antiquity theft in Egypt....

The critically endangered Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer) has many peculiar qualities, but perhaps the most intriguing one is its curiosity. For biologists conducting fieldwork in Zapata Swamp, Cuba’s largest wetland and the only place in the world where the species is found, this is a notable trait. The crocs will investigate a campsite if nothing prevents them. Protective netting is deployed to keep them out, although not always successfully. “The animal comes inside the camp looking for a warm place to sleep beneath”—referring to human bodies in hammocks, says Etiam Pérez, a Cuban crocodile researcher and manager of the Zapata Swamp Captive Breeding Farm....

Key concepts Physics Boiling point Condensation Distillation Introduction Do you like cooking? If you have helped in the kitchen at home or watched someone else cook, you have probably seen lots of liquids—such as water, milk and soup—heated. Did you notice that once the liquid boils, a lot of steam develops? Have you ever wondered what the steam is made of and what happens to all the substances such as sugar or salt that are dissolved in the solution you are boiling?...

Magnetars certainly know how to make an entrance. A recent study suggests that these highly magnetized stars make their cosmic debut amid the brightest flares of radiation in the universe, called ultralong-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). This discovery ties together some of the most magnetic and energetic phenomena in the cosmos and sheds light on the mysterious origins of ultralong-duration GRBs. GRBs are blasts of gamma-ray radiation that typically fade after a few seconds, but on rare occasions can last up to a half hour....

By Andrew Mambondiyani MUTARE, Zimbabwe, Feb 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - S hylet Mutsago, a 63-year-old who lives near the diamond fields of Marange, cannot hide her anger over how mining in this gem-rich part of eastern Zimbabwe has failed to improve the lives of local people. From a distance she watches as companies turn the ground over in search of the alluvial diamonds, releasing clouds of red dust into the sky....

US President Joe Biden has replaced his disgraced science adviser, Eric Lander, with two scientists who will split Lander’s duties “until permanent leadership is nominated and confirmed”, according to the White House. Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which Lander led, will become acting director of the agency. And Francis Collins, who led the US National Institutes of Health before retiring in December, will temporarily become Biden’s science adviser and co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)....

People may tell pollsters that they are not racist, for example, and polling data do indicate that bigoted attitudes have been in steady decline for decades on such issues as interracial marriage, women’s rights and gay marriage, indicating that conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in the 1950s. Using the Google Trends tool in analyzing the 2008 U.S. presidential election, however, Stephens-Davidowitz concluded that Barack Obama received fewer votes than expected in Democrat strongholds because of still latent racism....

So why did the format last so long? It’s easy to blame corporate stubbornness. But the persistence of obsolescent technologies goes beyond culture. It takes three forms: The first is pragmatic. Many people, including owners of the latest devices, retain some old ones because they avoid some of the vulnerabilities of newer equipment. Consider the often-ridiculed fax machine: A scanned document may be more convenient and cheaper to send than a fax, for example, but unencrypted personal information is notoriously easy to hack online....

A federal advisory panel has issued a startling report that says government disaster aid exacerbates inequality by enriching affluent areas and shortchanging low-income and minority communities. Programs by the Federal Emergency Management Agency “provide an additional boost to wealthy homeowners and others with less need, while lower-income individuals and others sink further into poverty after disasters,” FEMA’s National Advisory Council wrote in a recent report. “Through the entire disaster cycle,” the report adds, “communities that have been underserved stay underserved and thereby suffer needlessly and unjustly....

By Duncan Graham-Rowe of Nature magazineIdentifying people by scanning the irises of their eyes may not be as reliable as some governments and the public might think. That’s according to new research suggesting that irises, rather than being stable over a lifetime, are susceptible to ageing effects that steadily change their appearance over time.With iris recognition now being used at border control in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, this has huge implications, says Kevin Bowyer, a professor of computer science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana....

California regulators approved a set of greenhouse gas regulations for trucks yesterday that deviate from the Trump administration, setting up a potential legal conflict. The California Air Resources Board (ARB) voted unanimously to adopt emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks starting with the 2020 model year. The rules are largely parallel to Obama-era federal standards adopted by U.S. EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in October 2016. But they also seek to preserve California’s authority to regulate emissions from two sectors that the Trump administration has backed away from....

Last week U.S. state and federal wildlife agencies announced that white-nose syndrome—a deadly fungal disease that has killed more than six million hibernating bats in the eastern U.S.—has made a 2,000-kilometer jump across the country from eastern Nebraska to Washington State. There it is known to have infected and killed at least one bat in the small town of North Bend, 48 east of Seattle. How the disease made such a vast leap remains a mystery....

Ancient medical practitioners plied their trade by trusting their noses. They knew that diabetes could make a patient’s breath smell sweet and that a wound emitting a foul odor was infected. These early doctors, lacking today’s sophisticated technology, often relied on their sense of smell to diagnose illness. Technology is now turning this ancient art into a modern science. Engineers are developing electronic versions of the human nose that will allow doctors, ever in search of less-invasive techniques, to tap into what the nose knows about the human body....

A case to protect the whitebark pine has made its way to federal court. As temperatures warm in the West, mountain pine beetles and a foreign fungus called “white pine blister rust” have run amok and devastated the hardy, high-elevation tree. The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for its inaction on the group’s December 2008 petition for an endangered species listing. The agency missed a 90-day deadline to decide if the request warranted a formal review....

But some teachers are banning them from classrooms. And experts challenge the idea that spinners are good for conditions like ADHD and anxiety. Meanwhile, the Kickstarter online fundraising campaign for the Fidget Cube – another popular fidget toy in 2017 – raised an astounding US$6.4 million, and can be seen on the desks of hipsters and techies across the globe. My research group has taken a deep look at how people use fidget items over the last several years....