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A group of terrorists has stormed into an office building and taken an unknown number of people hostage. They have blocked the entrances and covered the windows. No one outside can see how many they are, what weapons they carry or where they are holding their hostages. But suddenly a SWAT team bursts into the room and captures the assailants before they can even grab their weapons. How did the commandos get the information they needed to move so confidently and decisively?...

Earth’s surface is constantly sprinkled with space dust. Extraterrestrial material has rained down on our planet throughout its multi-billion-year history—and the celestial shower continues each passing day. Sizable chunks of rock and metal are the most dramatic examples, appearing as brilliant shooting stars during their fiery passage through the upper atmosphere and occasionally reaching the ground to become meteorites. But most of the space stuff that falls to Earth is quite small, submillimeter in size....

“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances,” German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935. We see the world, he was saying, as if on a screen constructed by everyone who came before us. Speaking of screens: Tucked into the product announcements at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June was a new piece of gear that set hearts aflame among photographers, film editors and designers....

Gravitational-wave observatories have released their latest catalogue of cosmic collisions, bringing their total number of detections to 90. The new crop of 35 events includes one featuring the lightest neutron star ever seen, as well as two clashes involving surprisingly large black holes. The detections come from the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) sites, in Louisiana and Washington State, and their sister detector, Virgo, in Italy. They were recorded during 21 weeks of operations, beginning on 1 November 2019, that racked up an average detection rate of one event every 4....

You know meditation is good for you. You know you should probably try it. But somehow, you just can’t make it stick. Maybe you don’t have time, think it will make you soft, or worry you have to sit in the lotus position or grow a man bun. Have no fear! Special guest Dan Harris will help put those fears to rest. Dan is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and the co-anchor of ABC’s Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America....

Humans have been understandably obsessed by our big brains and their big powers. After all, how many other species have invented ibuprofen, electric blankets and happy hour? But it may be time to take a big breath, a step back, and ask what a cell can do. I wrote recently about how Stentor, the enormous trumpet-shaped, single-celled predator, may be capable of changing its “mind.” But this is not the first or even second time free-living cells have shown signs that they possess something like cognition....

Chinese scientists are on the verge of being first in the world to inject people with cells modified using the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing technique. A team led by Lu You, an oncologist at Sichuan University’s West China Hospital in Chengdu, plans to start testing such cells in people with lung cancer next month. The clinical trial received ethical approval from the hospital’s review board on July 6. “It’s an exciting step forward,” says Carl June, a clinical researcher in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia....

A vocal set of conservative critics have increased their attacks recently on the data modeling behind the novel coronavirus response, and they claim—despite scientific evidence to the contrary—that the flaws also prove the limits of climate change forecasts. The group, which includes federal lawmakers, climate science deniers and conservative pundits with close White House connections, has even called for congressional hearings into the coronavirus modeling. That’s in spite of assurances from public health officials that better-than-expected U....

Could cancer be our cells’ way of running in “safe mode,” like a damaged computer operating system trying to preserve itself, when faced with an external threat? That’s the conclusion reached by cosmologist Paul Davies at Arizona State University in Tempe (A.S.U.) and his colleagues, who have devised a controversial new theory for cancer’s origins, based on its evolutionary roots. If correct, their model suggests that a number of alternative therapies, including treatment with oxygen and infection with viral or bacterial agents, could be particularly effective....

Public health advocates have long set their sights on wiping out polio worldwide, but recent resurgences of the pernicious disease raise questions about its future eradication. Several months ago a wild strain of the virus surfaced in a sewer system in Rahat in southern Israel, and now it has reportedly been detected throughout the country. Israel’s government this week launched a nationwide vaccination campaign, attempting to inoculate all children under nine years of age with oral polio vaccine (OPV), a form of the vaccine containing a live, weakened form of the virus....

Let us give thanks on Thanksgiving for its cornucopia of foods: mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, creamed corn, cranberry sauce and, of course, turkey, among other delights. Every fourth Thursday of November, friends and family in the U.S. travel thousands of miles to gather and gorge in a celebration tracing back to 1621 when Plymouth Pilgrims and Native Americans spent three days breaking bread in gratitude for the year’s plentiful harvest. Those early revelers were probably knocked out by their marathon feast, and most people today are familiar with the post-Thanksgiving food coma....

Twelve years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, its successor made a big splash with one big number: Around 80 percent of the human genome is “functional,” the researchers leading the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project said. Their claim drew immediate criticism from biologists, many of whom said it is evolutionarily impossible for so much of the genome to truly function for human health. Seven months later, the controversy continues....

Dear EarthTalk: Not long ago there were concerns about honey bees disappearing. Are the bees still disappearing, and if so do we know why and do we have a solution? —David, Grand Rapids, MI The topic of disappearing honey bees first cropped up in 2004 and by the spring of 2007 was all over the news. Thousands of commercial beekeepers across the U.S. and beyond were reporting in some cases that as many as two-thirds of their honey bees were flying away from their hives, never to return....

In early October Travis Gienger hauled an enormous white-and-orange monstrosity of a pumpkin from his home in Minnesota to a championship weigh off in Half Moon Bay, Calif. There Gienger was crowned the winner—and his pumpkin, called “Maverick,” set the record for the biggest one ever grown in North America. It weighed 2,560 pounds and won him a total of $23,040, at $9 per pound. Gienger’s Maverick is part of a trend in prizewinning pumpkins, which keep getting bigger and bigger....

Pres. Donald Trump issued a major executive order last week that, if successful, could undercut the nation’s fight against global warming. In particular, the order kicks off an attempt to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, which regulates carbon emissions from the power sector. While Trump’s move represents a big blow to U.S. climate efforts, the renowned scientist James Hansen sees a different—and, he argues, better—way forward on global warming. “The problem is the Clean Power Plan is really not that effective,” says Hansen, former director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who brought climate change to the U....

Thank you for Peter Rogers’s timely article on the increasing threat to freshwater resources, “Facing the Freshwater Crisis.” I was, however, disappointed in the headline “Running Out of Water” and accompanying graphic on the cover. I speak frequently to the public about water and attempt to explain the hydrologic cycle. There are several bits of information that people have consistently told me were new to them, including that the cycle works on a global scale, that so little of the planet’s water is readily available for human use and that the total amount of water has been relatively stable for eons....

London is teeming with bacteria—some of which have developed resistance to antibiotics. These microbes are mostly harmless, but if they do cause an infection, it can be hard to treat. And there is a chance that they could transfer their resistance to more dangerous strains, experts warn. In a new study, researchers in England and their colleagues found that frequently touched surfaces—such as elevator buttons, ATMs and bathroom-door handles—can be reservoirs of drug-resistant staphylococcus, or staph, bacteria....

Global average temperatures in June were the fifth highest on record, as above-average heat conditions continued a multidecade streak, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported yesterday. June marked the 340th consecutive month – a span of time more than 28 years – that global temperatures surged above the 20th century average, according to the agency. “The last below-average June temperature was June 1976 and the last below-average temperature for any month was February 1985,” NOAA said in a release....

By Daniel Cresey The early stages of drug development could be freed from the shackles of intellectual property under a proposal to be tabled at a meeting of leading pharmaceutical players this week. Amid layoffs, drying pipelines and the closure of research centres, many observers have warned that, in its current form, the pharmaceutical industry faces a troubled future. The bleak outlook seems even more so in the wake of this month’s announcements by Pfizer of plans to reduce research and development spending by as much as US$2 billion and to lay off hundreds of researchers (see’Pfizer slashes R&D’)....

New York is set to become the first city in the country to charge drivers a fee for releasing planet-warming pollution from their cars. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and state lawmakers agreed to a congestion pricing plan in the $175 billion state budget that was finalized Sunday. That means drivers will soon pay more than $10 to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan below 60th Street. Specific fee amounts have not yet been decided....