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NASA’s carbon-monitoring satellite has passed its post-launch checks and is beaming high-quality data back to Earth. But getting to this point required some last-minute adjustments: after the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) launched in July, the agency had to overcome a key design problem with the spacecraft that had gone unnoticed in a decade of planning. News of the satellite’s status came on December 18 briefing at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California, where OCO-2 scientists released the first images from the probe....

International tourism accounts for 8 percent of all carbon emissions worldwide—about three times more than previously thought, according to a study released yesterday. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, estimates that global tourism—including transportation, accommodations, activities, food consumption, and all the energy and infrastructure required to accommodate visitors—produced about 4.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2013. Air travel accounts for one-fifth of these emissions. And the United States has the biggest footprint of all....

1 All the digits from 1 to 9 are used only once in the multiplication example below. Two digits have been filled in. Fill in the others and solve the equation. ? ? 3 X ? ? = ? ? ? 6 2 Fill in the grid below with four words. The answer will contain a total of four As; two each of Ds, Es, Ns and Rs; and one each of L, P, W and H....

Cyber criminals shut down parts of the Web in October 2016 by attacking the computers that serve as the internet’s switchboard. Their weapon of choice? Poorly secured Web cameras and other internet-connected gadgets that have collectively come to be known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The attack created a minor panic among people trying to visit Sony PlayStation Network, Twitter, GitHub and Spotify’s Web sites, but it had little long-term effect on internet use or the hijacked devices....

This month my Scientific American column contemplated the new world of ad blockers. It’s a world where a huge percentage of Web visitors never see the ads that pay for everything they read and watch. Who or what, then, will pay for the Internet? It’s a problem that has the media and advertising worlds tied in knots. How will we solve this? Native ads (articles sponsored or written by advertisers)? Micropayments (a few cents per article you read)?...

Wind turbines are lightning magnets—and strikes on these tall, spinning structures can cause significant damage. Blades explode; generators and control system electronics fry. To figure out how to safely disperse lightning, turbine manufacturers have turned to the Technical University of Denmark’s High Voltage Lab. Using giant versions of standard electrical devices such as sphere gaps, transformers and capacitors, the facility can generate huge arcs of electricity—up to 800,000 volts AC. The equipment helps companies test how new turbine parts or mechanisms will respond to electrical surges out in the field....

By Jonathan Allen (Reuters) - The first serious, prolonged storms of the year were brewing on Saturday in the Great Plains, with a growing risk of tornadoes touching down in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas in the coming days, federal meteorologists said. A separate storm system sent at least one tornado tearing through coastal North Carolina overnight on Friday. Dozens of homes in Beaufort County collapsed, at least 16 people were hurt and thousands lost electricity, a county official said....

After three months of research, scientists say the cause and the intensity of the most damaging blaze in Colorado history remain a mystery. Researchers participating in three separate studies to explore the 6,000-acre blaze, which began just before noon on Dec. 30, said they haven’t been able to pinpoint what caused the fire to destroy 1,084 houses and damage 37 commercial buildings. One reason is that characteristics of the fire, which started in rural grasslands and then jumped an eight-lane highway before raging through two densely populated suburbs of Boulder, do not appear in computer models used to explore the potency of fires....

For decades, NASA has relied on an efficient but highly toxic fuel known as hydrazine to power satellites and manned spacecraft. Now the agency is laying the groundwork to replace that propellant with a safer, cleaner alternative. NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission, or GPIM, has passed its first thruster pulsing test, a major milestone that paves the way for a planned test flight in 2015, agency officials said. NASA unveiled the rocket thruster success Tuesday (July 9) in Washington, D....

A veritable zoo of never-before-seen particles, including the famed Higgs boson, was generated in recent years inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. Hiding amid the data, another new particle has recently made itself known: the pentaquark, a composite of five quarks, the fundamental bits that make up protons and neutrons. The long-awaited discovery—pentaquarks were first predicted more than 50 years ago—provides insight into how matter’s building blocks stick together to organize the universe as we know it....

The now infamous condition long COVID presents as a wide range of symptoms—everything from persistent chest pains to rashes, pins and needles, and brain fog. Doctors can diagnose long COVID by speaking to their patients about their experiences before and after an initial COVID infection, but researchers still haven’t pinned down what causes the condition or how to treat it. Part of the difficulty is that there isn’t yet a way to measure biological signals of long COVID infections in the body to start the process of testing new treatments....

The ancient scourge smallpox was relegated to biowaste bin of history more than 30 years ago, the result of the world’s first and only successful disease eradication programs. Since then, however, cases of monkeypox—a serious, although less severe smallpoxlike illness—have substantially increased in central Africa, according to a study published August 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors stress that better surveillance and a thorough assessment of the public health threat posed by this once-rare viral infection are needed....

Ancient shipwrecks might not only hold buried treasures, but also countless historical secrets. Now researchers suggest satellites could help spot submerged wrecks that might otherwise go undiscovered. More than three million shipwrecks may be scattered across the oceans, UNESCO estimates. “Of all the wrecks in the world, maybe less than 10 percent have been found,” says James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries....

The all-powerful potential of stem cells to become any kind of cell is what makes them so promising for restoring diseased or damaged tissues throughout the body—and also what makes them so difficult for scientists to control. But several breakthroughs represent major strides toward understanding and harnessing the cells’ elusive property of inherent “stemness.” Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, who transformed a regular mouse skin cell into a cell with most of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) by turning up the activity of just four genes, demonstrated recently a more precise way of isolating cells “reprogrammed” to an ESC-like state—and several other laboratories have replicated his results....

Key Concepts Physics Engineering Earthquakes Measurement Introduction Scientists study earthquakes so we can understand and predict them better. In this activity you will learn about one of the tools scientists use to measure the strength of an earthquake—and build your own machine using simple materials. Background Earthquakes happen all the time, but most of them are so small that we can’t feel them, and they don’t cause any damage. Large earthquakes, however, can be catastrophic—causing significant damage to property and loss of life....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Private spaceflight supporters saw a major validation today (May 22) with the successful launch of the first commercial vehicle to visit the International Space Station. The unmanned Dragon capsule, built by the commercial firm Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), lifted off atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) from a pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. “I think we’re really at the dawn of a new era for space exploration and one where there’s a much bigger role for commercial companies,” SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk said during a news briefing following the launch....

Still no giraffe. Four of us had been walking half the day, tracking a wounded giraffe that Mwasad, a Hadza man in his late 30s, shot the evening before. He hit it in the base of the neck from about 25 yards with a steel-tipped, wood arrow smeared with powerful, homemade poison. Hadza are traditional hunter-gatherers who live off wild plants and animals in the dry savanna wilderness of northern Tanzania....

With that famous song, sleigh rides and snowmen who magically come alive, so much of the cultural imagery associated with Christmas features a glistening carpet of snow. But as rising global temperatures start to dull winter’s bitter edge, will the proverbial White Christmas become just a bit of Yuletide lore? Although logic would seem to suggest that warming would mean less snow, the impact of climate change on where—and how much—snow falls is more complicated than that....

With the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil less than a month away, concerns are mounting that the international event may spread the Zika virus to more countries around the world. Indeed, global travel has been contributing to the spread of virus in the Western Hemisphere since at least 2015, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, the new report, released today (July 13), should help quell fears for many countries that do not currently have the Zika virus: The CDC predicted that the Olympics will put only four countries at risk for importing Zika....

The moment I meet Horst Schmidt-Böcking outside the Bockenheimer Warte subway stop just north of the downtown area of Frankfurt, Germany, I know I have come to the right place. After my “Hi, thank you for meeting me,” his very first words are “I love Otto Stern.” My trip on this prepandemic morning in November 2018 is to visit the place that, precisely a century before February 8, 2022, saw one of the most pivotal events for the nascent quantum physics....