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On her wedding night, Gita Paul felt doomed. Her parents had arranged her marriage to a man she had never seen who lived in Kolsur, an impoverished village kilometers from her own home in this landscape of rice paddies and cattle paddocks and clusters of homes, near the eastern Indian city of Kolkata. Arranged marriages to strangers are common in the region. But when Gita laid eyes on her husband, she was horrified to find him covered in open lesions and scabs....

Some of the first generation of stars, whose explosions breathed carbon, oxygen and other elements into the Universe, may have been glimpsed for the first time. Such objects are theorized to be hundreds of times larger than the Sun, and made up only of pristine hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium left over from the Big Bang. The earliest of them formed during the first few hundred million years of the Universe, living for only a few million years before exploding in supernovae that laid the seeds for the more element-rich stars to come....

Three wildlife biologists swat at the forest undergrowth, still soaked from the morning’s summer thunderstorm, trekking deep into the woods until they find what they are looking for: a camera tied to a tree. They had set it up weeks ago to spy on the coyotes. A plane suddenly flies overhead, interrupting the tranquil hush of the forest. This is a New York City park, after all. The camera traps are one of several methods the Gotham Coyote Project is using to track coyotes as they migrate into New York City, along with citizen science sightings, scat collection and now environmental DNA surveys....

To see how far-reaching climate change effects could be, you might try looking under your feet. In some regions, climate change models predict new rainfall patterns that may affect how leaves on forest floors decompose. Entomologists from the University of Kentucky report that low rainfall leads to a series of events that result in faster decomposition. Forest floors are active places consisting of intertwined life cycles among various organisms. The main predators in this web of activity, wandering spiders, do not actually spin webs themselves....

Over the weekend Erin Brockovich made the news yet again as she and her nonprofit team descended on the village of Le Roy, N.Y., determined to test for environmental toxins that might be giving the town’s teenagers symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. She has reportedly been stonewalled thus far by local officials, who have already ruled out toxins as the cause of last October’s sudden outbreak of tics and involuntary movements in 12 girls who attend Le Roy Junior–Senior High School....

LONDON (Reuters) - The world’s first man-made ash cloud has been created by a team led by airline easyJet and planemaker Airbus to test how passenger aircraft cope with volcanic blasts such as the 2010 Icelandic eruption.The eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano shut down much of Europe’s airspace for six days, affecting more than 10 million people and costing $1.7 billion.An Airbus A400M test plane on Wednesday dispersed one tonne of ash over the Bay of Biscay, off western France, creating conditions similar to that of the 2010 eruption, said the team, which also included Norwegian sensor maker Nicarnica Aviation....

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space. Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone....

More than 113 million years ago, a strange reptile lived in what is now South Korea. It strode around on two legs like many dinosaurs, yet it was not one of them. The tracks it left behind indicate it was a relative of today’s crocodiles. And the details of its Cretaceous footfalls resolve one mystery—but open another. Footprints like these had been found before, though in much older rocks. During the Triassic period (between 252 million and 201 million years ago) crocodile relatives—part of a group known as crocodylomorphs—were the dominant reptiles on land, and they included animals that resembled some dinosaurs by walking on two legs....

It appears that Greenland’s melt season is making up for lost time. After a cool spring kept Greenland’s massive ice sheet mostly solid, a (comparatively) warm late June and early July have turned half the ice sheet’s surface into liquid, well outside the range of normal for this time of year. Despite the ice sheet’s remote location, its slushy fingers reach across the globe, influencing sea levels and how fast the Gulf Stream current moves....

Bernard Feringa said he was shocked “when we started a molecular machine for the first time and saw motion.” The chemist said he was equally shocked this morning when he got a call from Stockholm telling him that his work netted him part of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Feringa shares the prize with chemists Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Sir. J. Fraser Stoddart as well as about $923,000 in prize money for building machines on the tiniest of scales—the nanometer scale, a thousand times smaller than the width of a hair, or a billionth of a meter....

Today nanotechnology is still in a formative phase–not unlike the condition of computer science in the 1960s or biotechnology in the 1980s. Yet it is maturing rapidly. Between 1997 and 2005, investment in nanotech research and development by governments around the world soared from $432 million to about $4.1 billion, and corresponding industry investment exceeded that of governments by 2005. By 2015, products incorporating nanotech will contribute approximately $1 trillion to the global economy....

Gravitational waves were detected for the first time a year and a half ago, when some of them throbbed through Earth. Two incredibly sensitive detectors—one in Washington State and one in Louisiana—picked up the distortions in spacetime, emanating in this case from two merging black holes. When scientists in charge of the detectors, called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), announced the finding five months later, it created an international sensation and became the most important physics news of 2016....

I bet you can raed waht tihs syas, eevn tohguh smoe wrods are sracbmled. In his PhD thesis, Graham Rawlinson of the University of Nottingham showed that if one jumbles a word’s interior letters, but preserves the positions of its boundary letters, people can still read the word with more ease than one might expect. Language standardizes the position of letters in words—what linguists call orthography and what is more colloquially known as spelling—but clearly the human brain can handle a little disarray....

IMAGINE THAT Two words: What if? Like every family, mine has legends and folklore that may or may not be true. For the longest time one legend was that my father was recruited coming out of World War II by none other than the FBI. My brothers, sisters and I usually laughed it off. But a few years ago that legend became fact when my older brother uncovered a letter addressed to our father from one J....

Our planet is always on the move. Earth’s surface is a jigsaw puzzle of enormous plates of crust that continuously jostle about. They bulldoze into one another, slip under one another and slide apart in mighty processes that build soaring mountain chains, pave new lands with fresh lava and carve colossal oceans. But 2.3 billion years ago that motion slowed to a crawl. That strange hiatus shows up in an uncanny gap in the geologic record, revealed in research published January 29 in Nature Geoscience....

In 1975 electronics pioneer Gordon Moore famously predicted that the complexity of integrated-circuit chips would double every two years. Manufacturing advances would allow the chip’s transistors to shrink and shrink, so electrical signals would have to travel less distance to process information. To the electronics industry and to consumers, Moore’s Law, as it became known, meant computerized devices would relentlessly become smaller, faster and cheaper. Thanks to ceaseless innovation in semiconductor design and fabrication, chips have followed remarkably close to that trajectory for 35 years....

The video my colleagues and I shot is amazing. A blind man is making his way down a long corridor strewn with boxes, chairs and other office paraphernalia. The man, known to the medical world as TN, has no idea the obstacles are there. And yet he avoids them all, here sidling carefully between a wastepaper basket and the wall, there going around a camera tripod, all without knowing he has made any special maneuvers....

Imagine this scenario: a friend offers to flip a coin and give you $20 if it lands on heads. If it lands on tails, you give her $20. Would you take that gamble? For most of us, the amount you could possibly win would need to be at least twice as large as the amount you could lose before you would accept the risk. This tendency reflects loss aversion, or the idea that losses generally have a much larger psychological impact than gains of the same size....

This is a story about technology, science and goodwill coming together in a way that benefits everybody and costs nobody. Sound improbable? Well, it gets better. The architect of this arrangement is, if you can believe it, a municipal utility. It’s Con Edison—New York City’s electric company. Con Ed is offering its customers an Internet-connected thermostat. It’s smart, simple—and you can control it online or via a smartphone. For example, you can adjust your home’s heat or air-conditioning as you return from a trip to make it comfortable when you arrive....

What does it mean to be resilient? As our art director Patti Nemoto put it, “It’s kind of like being Gumby.” The green clay character bounces back from any setback—becoming stranded on the moon, getting turned into a robot, dissolving into a puddle. In the U.S. Marine Corps, where flexibility in changing circumstances can be lifesaving, a common saying is “Semper Gumby.” Adaptability in the face of challenges predicts success across many pursuits....