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New research shows that seasonal plants can adapt quickly–even genetically–to changing climate conditions and reveals various mechanisms by which they control their growing response when the weather shifts. The studies suggest, however, that longer-lived plants have a tougher time going with the flow. Plant evolutionary biologist Steven Franks of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues tested the weedy field mustard, introduced to California from the deserts of Mesopotamia by way of Mediterranean climes roughly 300 years ago....

NASA’s space shuttles have racked up an amazing set of accomplishments over the last 30 years, not to mention the miles and statistics. But after three decades and 135 flights, the era of the NASA space shuttle is at an end. The final shuttle flight, NASA’s STS-135 mission aboard Atlantis, will land Thursday (July 21) to cap a 13-day trip that delivered supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station....

Two and a half years ago Susan Baker spent three hours under general anesthesia as surgeons fused several vertebrae in her spine. Everything went smoothly, and for the first six hours after her operation, Baker, then an 81-year-old professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was recovering well. That night, however, she hallucinated a fire raging through the hospital toward her room. Petrified, she repeatedly buzzed the nurses’ station, pleading for help....

The February 11, 2016, announcement that scientists had successfully detected gravitational waves was a historic moment for physics. To be sure, the confirmation of Albert Einstein’s 100-year-old prediction sent ripples of excitement even beyond the scientific community. But that was just the beginning. Researchers have quickly logged additional records of gravitational waves using the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and a second wave detector called Virgo in Italy. As Davide Castelvecchi reports for our sister publication Nature (see “Here Come the Waves”), these and future observations will start yielding insights into the origins of black holes, the extreme anatomy of neutron stars, the structure and pattern of galaxies, and Einstein’s general theory of relativity....

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - World powers are running out of time to slash their use of high-polluting fossil fuels and stay below agreed limits on global warming, a draft U.N. study to be approved this week shows. Government officials and top climate scientists will meet in Berlin from April 7-12 to review the 29-page draft that also estimates the needed shift to low-carbon energies would cost between two and six percent of world output by 2050....

In a resignation letter addressed to Trump, scientist Daniel Kammen joined political leaders from both major parties who have criticized Trump’s equivocal response to violent demonstrations by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 August. Kammen also criticized the Trump administration’s “destructive” policies on energy and the environment, which he said have affected his work as a science envoy. Such policies include the president’s decision to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate pact....

Not far off the islands of the Republic of Vanuatu, a deserted trawl-fishing net undulates in the azure tropical Pacific. No one knows whom it belonged to or how it was lost, but it has twisted around a delicate garden of coral and damaged the reef. It is just one example among at least 640,000 metric tons of fishing gear that goes missing at sea each year, according to the United Nations....

The deep sea remains aqua incognita for the most part. Apart from a few deep sea vents and other locations of interest, the unfathomable depths of the world’s oceans remain unexplored. But three expeditions to the Weddell Sea between Antarctica and the wider South Atlantic have brought to the surface more than 1,000 species, ranging from single-cell foraminifera to oddly shaped crabs. “We have found hundreds of new marine creatures in the vast, dark, deep sea surrounding Antarctica,” says Angelika Brandt, a zoologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany....

NASA’s Opportunity rover on Mars did not return a call from Earth Tuesday (June 12) while enduring a massive dust storm that scientists have called “one of the most intense ever observed." “The Martian dust storm that has blotted out the sun above Opportunity has continued to intensify,” NASA officials wrote in a mission update Tuesday. “The storm, which was first detected on May 30, now blankets 14 million square miles (35 million square kilometers) of Martian surface—a quarter of the planet....

FINALIST YEAR: 1999 HER FINALIST PROJECT: Reducing mite loads in honeybee colonies, using natural compounds WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Carol Fassbinder-Orth grew up in Elgin, Iowa, where her mother and father owned an apiary featuring 2,000 colonies of bees. A colony has about 50,000 members, meaning Fassbinder-Orth played amidst, and later helped take care of, 100 million of the buzzing creatures. They stung as she drove her truck up to the colonies....

It is hard to court the opposite sex when you are cemented in place, which explains why polyps—the tiny creatures whose exoskeletons form corals—do not reproduce by mating. Instead they cast millions of sperm and eggs into the sea, where they drift up to the ocean surface, collide, form larvae and float away to form new coral reefs. Polyps may not be picky about their “mates,” but they are sticklers for timing....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here: This 10/28/20 story in El País, by Mariano Zafra and Javier Salas, features excellent visuals that illustrate the airborne risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection for a set number of people in indoor settings for several hours under various additive conditions, including: a) no protective measures, b) people consistently wear masks, c) masks are worn, the premises are ventilated, and people spend fewer hours in the setting....

A newfound alien world is quite Earth-like in some ways, but you wouldn’t want to live there. The exoplanet, known as OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb, is about as massive as Earth and orbits its star at about the same distance Earth circles the sun. But OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb’s parent star is tiny and dim, meaning the alien planet is likely far too cold to host life, its discoverers said. OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is not in Earth’s neck of the cosmic woods; the alien world lies nearly 13,000 light-years away....

In the app’s settings, you can turn on an option that also makes the Echo beep every time it hears its name, and again after it’s finished transmitting—even more cues to help you understand when the Echo is transmitting audio. You can also turn off the Echo’s microphones entirely when you need super-duper privacy; just press the microphone on/off button on the top. OK Google and Google Home Siri As with Alexa, no recordings are made or transmitted until you say “Hey Siri” or trigger her using a key or a button on an Apple iOS device....

While scientists are scrambling to understand the novel coronavirus and contain the chaos it has unleashed, the outbreak is creating chaos within science itself. As confirmed COVID-19 cases increase in the U.S. and around the globe, gatherings of all kinds are being canceled or postponed. They include tech developer conferences, book fairs, rock concerts, automobile expositions, a United Nations–sponsored climate week—and numerous scientific meetings, which are normally fertile ground for new ideas and collaborations....

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Hurricane Amanda rapidly gained strength far off the west coast of Mexico on Saturday evening and churned farther out to sea. Amanda reached category 3 strength after becoming the first named hurricane of the Pacific season earlier on Saturday. It was located 665 miles (1,075 km) southwest of the Mexican port of Manzanillo, with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 km/h), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said....

Editor’s note: Legged robots have the ability to follow troops on long journeys across extremely difficult terrain. In our series on legged robotics, Scientific American Online explores the challenges such technology poses as well as two DARPA projects—BigDog and LittleDog—that have shown great promise. NASA has robots that can wheel around on the surface of Mars, hundreds of millions of miles away, meanwhile mine rescue workers deploy models that climb through caverns hundreds of feet below this planet’s surface....

According to standard physics textbooks, quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins. The impression that quantum mechanics is limited to the microworld permeates the public understanding of science....

The instructions encoded into DNA are thought to follow a universal set of rules across all domains of life. But researchers report in the May 23 issue of Science that organisms routinely break these rules. The finding has implications for the design of synthetic life: by designing organisms that break the rules, researchers may be able to make novel life forms resistant to viral infection. Making these organisms also been proposed as a way to stop synthetic life forms from infecting unintended hosts....

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that gas furnaces cost less to run and burn cleaner than their oil counterparts? If I make the switch, how long should I expect it to take for me to pay back my initial investment? And are there any greener options I should consider? – Veronica Austin, Boston, MA It is true that natural gas has been a more affordable heat source than oil for Americans in recent years....