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Human beings are social animals. We spend large portions of our waking hours communicating with others, and the possibilities for conversation are seemingly endless—we can make plans and crack jokes; reminisce about the past and dream about the future; share ideas and spread information. This ability to communicate—with almost anyone, about almost anything—has played a central role in our species’ ability to not just survive, but flourish. How do you choose to use this immensely powerful tool—communication?...

WHEN STUDENTS in Pinellas County schools fill up their lunch trays in the cafeteria and walk over to the cash registers, they just wave their hands and move on to have lunch with their friends. Schools in this Florida county have installed square-inch sensors at the registers that identify each student by the pattern of veins in his or her palm. Buying lunch involves no cards or cash. Their hands are the only wallets they need....

In the vast arsenal of animal weaponry, the most exaggerated, elaborate and diverse devices such as tusks, claws and antlers have not been shaped by a need to fend off fierce predators. Rather, these impressive forms are driven by sex. “Everybody understands at a gut level that it’s usually males that have flashy displays or weapons like tusks and antlers,” says Doug Emlen, an animal weapon expert at the University of Montana in Missoula....

In a striking about-face, the Interior Department announced yesterday that it wants to allow drilling in nearly all U.S. waters, the single largest expansion of offshore oil and gas leasing ever proposed by the federal government. The agency said it will hold 47 lease sales in every region of the outer continental shelf but one between 2019 and 2024. The updated five-year plan, required by President Trump in an executive order in April, puts regions that were long off-limits to oil and gas development back in play....

Our sun is not a typical star. Most stars are one tenth as massive and will live hundreds of times longer than the sun. Moreover, most stars formed billions of years before the sun, based on the observed star formation history since the big bang. Why were we born so late in cosmic history around a relatively massive star like the sun? Statistically speaking, we were more likely to exist earlier or around a lower-mass star....

Scientists have long thought the ocean sunfish (Mola mola) was the largest of the bony fishes, a group of animals with skeletons made of bone instead of cartilage. It turns out they were wrong. A research team reported in January in Ichthyological Research that the biggest is, in fact, the bump-head sunfish (Mola alexandrini), specimens of which had previously been misidentified as M. mola. Etsuro Sawai, a biologist at Hiroshima University in Japan, led the group that reexamined hundreds of sunfish specimens and scientific records from around the world....

In the realm of research, finding out what you don’t know is almost as important as knowing what you do. In marine biology, however, both of these knowledge bases have been rather murky. The international Census of Marine Life, a $650 million, 10-year-long endeavor, has started to fill in the large blanks, illuminating new swaths of the mysterious deep along the way. A report on the project’s findings was released today at a news conference in London....

It’s a rare kind of research that incites a frenzied panic before it is even published. But it’s flu season, and influenza science has a way of causing a stir this time of year. Epidemiologists have long debated the pandemic potential of H5N1, aka bird flu. On one hand, the virus spreads too inefficiently between humans to seem like much of a threat: it has caused fewer than 600 known cases of human flu since first emerging in 1997....

Astronomers have found the most distant Type 1a supernova, a kind of star explosion that should help scientists better understand the ever-expanding universe and the nature of dark energy, the strange force accelerating that expansion. Bursting into existence 9 billion years ago, the supernova (nicknamed SN Primo) was born from the violent death of a shrunken, super-dense star called a white dwarf. Light from such explosions falls within a very narrow range, which is why astronomers call them “standard candles....

Dear EarthTalk: Short of massive efforts to build a public transportation infrastructure, which doesn’t appear likely anytime soon, what is being done to address traffic congestion, which is reaching absurd levels almost everywhere? —John Daniels, Baltimore Traffic congestion has gotten way out of hand—and not just in developed countries anymore: Traffic jams and smog plague dozens of cities in China and in many other parts of the developing world. Here in the U....

CANAPÉ VERTE, Haiti – Robert Naylor walks the perimeter of an electricity substation high above the earthquake-battered capital of Port-au-Prince, pointing out new batteries, switches and transformers that his construction company, Perini Management Corp., installed here as part of a $12.7 million U.S. Agency for International Development project to strengthen Haiti’s energy infrastructure. This substation and others were damaged in the 2010 quake, and the United States is investing in repairs to the transmission and distribution systems as well as the installation of new equipment and worker training....

To see what University of York materials scientist Roland Kröger and his colleagues recently saw in their laboratory, you would have to take an incredibly close look at a human bone—closer in than at the scale of its spongy pattern of collagen threads that reportedly inspired the Eiffel Tower’s crisscrossing struts, and the star-shaped cells that populate our skeletons’ pale terrain. You would have to perform painstakingly difficult techniques with a state-of-the-art electron microscope that can resolve details less than 10 nanometers in size—smaller than 10 carbon atoms lined up side by side, or 3,000 times thinner than a sharpened pencil line....

People love to tinker. And so they often combine already good things to come up with newer, seemingly even better things. Iodized salt. Vitamin D fortified milk. Fluoridated water. Now add a newcomer to the list of such hybrids: the caffeinated doughnut. Currently being marketed under the trademarked name Buzz Donuts, the caffeinated doughnut is the brainchild of one Robert Bohannon, whom a press release about his invention describes as a “molecular scientist....

Astronauts describe the emptiness and darkness of space far from Earth as a startling experience. So did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a poem e-mailed to me by writer Dror Burstein. Without ever having ventured into space (obviously), Rilke wrote a century ago: “Night, shuddering in my regard, but in yourself so steady; inexhaustible creation, enduring beyond the fate of earth.”
Is there a modern scientific interpretation to Rilke’s poem?...

Scientists have long been aware that respiratory infections—such as influenza or certain types of coronaviruses—can trigger heart disease. This happens because they cause inflammation, which plays a major role in cardiovascular problems. Even before the first case of COVID-19 had been confirmed in the U.S., interventional cardiologist Mohammad Madjid began looking into the potential effects of coronaviruses on the cardiovascular system. Madjid, an associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, expected to see a similar increase in heart complications associated with COVID....

Just after midnight on Jan. 1, people around the world will ring in the New Year to the sound of noisemakers and popping corks. But on New Year’s Day on Brooklyn, New York’s Coney Island beach, the sound of chattering teeth will fill the air, as thousands of people gather in preparation for a ceremonial wintry dip in the Atlantic Ocean. The event is organized by the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, a group of dedicated open-water swimmers who brave the numbing ocean every Sunday from November through April....

A sweeping US government report on the state of climate-change science is nearing the finish line, but researchers who wrote it aren’t ready to relax just yet. Federal scientists have twice reviewed the roughly 600-page document — which examines everything from shifting weather patterns to rising sea levels — as have the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Just one hurdle remains, but it may be the highest: final sign-off by top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration, many of whom are sceptical of climate science....

Set against a backdrop of severe weather disasters, this year’s gathering collides with soaring energy costs, food insecurity and a looming debt crisis that undercuts resilience measures in peril-prone countries. Other complications include sharpening tensions between many of the world’s biggest climate polluters, a string of broken promises to lower emissions and failures to deliver money to people on the front lines of emissions-driven catastrophes. “The geopolitical context may not be conducive to ambition,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at E3G....

When Yvonne Y. Clark, also known as Y.Y., started college at Howard University as a mechanical engineering student, there were three things she swore she’d never do: marry a tall man, become a teacher and work for the government. But love and life had other plans. Y.Y. quickly encountered the difficulty of entering industry as one of the few Black women in her field but found employment at RCA Victor and Frankford Arsenal....

The answer is that the world is home to over three trillion trees—with almost half of them living in tropical or subtropical forests. There are roughly 400 trees for every human. 12,000 years ago, before the advent of agriculture, Earth had twice as many trees as it does now. Currently, our planet is losing 10 billion* trees a year. Researchers represented the number of trees across the globe using bars that are taller for denser forests....