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Ancient Egyptians expected to be very busy in the afterlife. Thousands of years ago they painted big beautiful eyes on the outside of their coffins so that they could see what was going on in the world. Some of the nobility around the upper Egyptian city of Asyut even had detailed tables of star movements drawn on the inside of their coffins. The depictions look like timetables or spreadsheets of when various stars first appear (or disappear) over the horizon at different times of the year—only a lot more beautiful....

A cat has upper and lower eyelids that meet when the eye closes, along with a mysterious third eyelid—more properly called the palpebra tertia, also known as the nictitating membrane or “haw.” Tucked in the inner corner of the cat’s eye, the third eyelid is a biological curiosity long thought to be irrelevant, much like the human appendix or wisdom teeth. Veterinary articles written in the early 1900s even described methods for removing the extra eyelid to make it easier to examine the eye....

During a visit yesterday to the Harvey mine in Sycamore, Pa., U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt declared that “the war on coal is done.” But if the regulatory battle is over, the fight in coal’s largest domestic market has just begun. Wind generation accounted for nearly 23 percent of power generation for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in the first quarter of 2017, the Lone Star State grid operator said this week....

Excerpted from A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. Copyright © 2016 by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The year is 3,500,000,000 BC. The place is a rocky outcropping that juts out into a shallow, wave-lapped inlet on a landmass that will one day be called Australia. The seas are bright green and have the sulfurous stench of rotten eggs....

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has crossed into interstellar space, agency officials announced in December. The milestone makes Voyager 2 humanity’s second operating spacecraft in history to go interstellar after the Voyager 1 spacecraft did in August 2012. “One kind of feels like a lucky fluke,” says Justin Kasper, a scientist involved in the Voyager missions from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Two feels like we’re becoming a society that’s capable of exploring interstellar space....

The winter season has certainly arrived—with snot dripping, cough droplets swarming, temperatures spiking, and sick people moaning. Germs are spreading faster than wildfire as I write. And a sore throat is often where the story all begins. The winter season seems to also trigger allergies, asthma, and holiday dietary indiscretions. Therefore, many of you reading this may be wondering why you seem to have developed a sore throat. Is it a bug?...

Running bestows a broad range of health and fitness benefits, but those benefits are limited when you run the same way every single day. For instance, if you always run on a path, at the same speed, listening to your MP3 player, at the same time of day, on the same slope, in the same shoes, for the same distance…well, you are robbing yourself of some of the benefits you could be getting from all that valuable movement time....

AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center meteorologists, led by Meteorologist and Hurricane Forecaster Paul Pastelok, are predicting an active season for 2011 with more impact on the U.S. coastline than last year. The team is forecasting a total of 15 named tropical storms, eight of which will attain hurricane status and three of which will attain major hurricane status (Category 3 or higher). In a normal year, there are 10 tropical storms, six of which become hurricanes and two of which become major hurricanes, or attain winds that exceed 110 mph....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

In clinics today, fertility patients using in vitro fertilization (IVF) are routinely advised to pay for an expensive supplemental test called preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A), in which a handful of cells are removed from the embryo to examine their DNA. For those who can afford it, PGT-A is popular because it can flag genetic abnormalities that increase the odds that a pregnancy, should it occur, will end in miscarriage....

Antarctic sea ice hit a stunning record-low minimum at the end of February, dropping below 772,000 square miles for the first time since satellites began observing the southern continent more than 40 years ago. Now scientists say they’ve untangled the reasons why. A study published yesterday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences points to a perfect storm of factors that sent Antarctic sea ice spiraling downward in the past year....

Imagine getting to sit down with Columbus and ask him what he thought and felt as he first set eyes on the New World. That’s pretty much how it was for me when I interviewed Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, the crew of Apollo 8, who made the first manned voyage around the moon in December 1968. The stories I heard from Borman, Lovell and Anders about their historic voyage were postcards from the edge of human experience....

A small, newly discovered asteroid will pass within the distance from the Earth to the moon this weekend, and you can watch its approach live online today (June 7). The space rock, called 2013 LR6, is between 16-53 feet wide (5-16 meters) and is in no danger of hitting the Earth, experts say. The garbage truck-size asteroid’s closest approach will bring it about 68,351 miles (110,000 km) above the surface of the planet tomorrow....

Between Norway and the North Pole lies Svalbard—an icy Norwegian archipelago known for glaciers, freezing winds and polar bears. Swallowed by glaciers until 10,000 years ago, the island chain remains dominated by ice that covers 60 percent of its surface. But in the rest, hardy Arctic plants like mountain avens and white arctic bell heather have staked out territory. And a new analysis of thousands of samples of nine species of these types of plants reveals that Svalbard has been colonized frequently and repeatedly from all directions as it warmed and froze over thousands of years, indicating that Arctic plants can keep up with climate changes....

Omega fatty acids, including docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, are key to brain health and most likely helped to drive the evolution of the modern human brain. But how did early humans access these vital nutrients? The answer is a matter of some debate. For nearly two decades archaeologist Curtis W. Marean, associate director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins, has overseen excavations at a site called Pinnacle Point on South Africa’s southern coast, near where a newly discovered early human species, Homo naledi, was recently unearthed....

More Americans were born in 2007 than in any other year in history. According to preliminary data from the National Center for Health Statistics, births topped the previous record of 1957, at the height of the baby boom. Birth rates have been inching up in recent years, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Women living in the U.S. in 2007 will have an average 2.1 children over their lifetimes, a number that demographers consider the bare minimum to sustain population levels without immigration....

More than a mile and a half below the earth, deep in a sunless gold mine, water pools in a fracture heated, just barely, by the slow radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. That radiation is enough to split some water into one of its constituents: hydrogen. By combining this, the lightest element, with geologically produced sulfate, a newly discovered microbe species thrives far from the light of the life sustaining sun....

Planets orbiting binary star systems have to deal with the stresses of more than one star. But new research reveals that close binaries could be as good as singles when it comes to hosting habitable planets. Low-mass twins could make the best hosts, because their combined energy extends the habitable region farther away than would exist around a single star. After modeling a variety of binary systems, two astronomers determined that stars 80 percent as massive as the Sun, if close enough together, could allow for conditions that would be ideal for hosting habitable planets....

Even Albert Einstein made mistakes—as did other towering figures of science such as Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling and Lord Kelvin, to name a few. These errors were not unfortunate incidents in otherwise unsullied careers but vital parts of the scientific process, argues astrophysicist Mario Livio, formerly of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Livio will detail some central foibles in the history of science in a public lecture tonight at 7 P....

The other morning I found myself getting really agitated. Not because my three-year-old was whining or because I was behind on a deadline—no, I was antsy because there were no new posts in my Facebook feed. I had been constantly checking my phone during a rare stretch of free time and found myself jonesing for another “hit” of digital input. Dislike. I want digital technologies to take stress and brain strain out of my life, not add more....