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How do spacecraft orient themselves in the absence of magnetic poles? Is there any truth to the system they use on Star Trek? —S. Messick, Oklahoma City Christopher Potts, a navigation engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., shows the way: Without an ever present magnetic field to rely on, as compass users have on Earth, those of us responsible for spacecraft navigation must utilize a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, or frame, of our own devising....

A long overdue and growing body of research on concussions is providing today’s young athletes, parents and coaches with more information about identifying and treating head injuries—but not all of that research is reliable. For instance, one new study on youth concussions offers valuable information about recovery time, whereas potentially flawed conclusions in a second new study illustrate one of the biggest challenges in studying youth concussions—missed diagnoses. An estimated 170,000 children go to the emergency room for concussions annually, but this number does not capture the millions treated outside of hospitals by athletic trainers, family doctors or specialists....

On August 30, 2006, a 19-year-old youth, clad in a trench coat, drove into the parking lot of his former high school in Hillsborough, N.C.–and began firing. Eight random shots wounded two students. When the police arrived, Alvaro Castillo gave up without a struggle. It was Castillo’s second exploit involving firearms that day. Earlier Castillo had murdered his father in the family home. Three months later in the small town of Emsdetten, Germany, 18-year-old Sebastian Bosse posted a video message on the Internet: “I can’t f–kin’ wait until I can shoot every mother-f–kin’ last one of you....

(Reuters) - The death toll in a mudslide that devastated a rural Washington state community last month rose to 35 on Tuesday as two more bodies were extricated from the rubble and President Barack Obama pledged to visit the town at the center of the devastation. A rain-soaked hillside collapsed without warning above the north fork of the Stillaguamish River on March 22, unleashing a torrent of mud that engulfed some three dozen homes on the outskirts of the tiny community of Oso....

Americans are becoming more tolerant of people of different races, ethnicities and sexual orientations, recent research indicates. Yet discrimination toward people in marginalized groups persists at disturbingly high levels. Scientists have proposed two hypotheses to explain this apparent paradox. The dispersed discrimination account holds that, because of implicit biases, most people—even those who hold strong egalitarian beliefs—regularly engage in subtle but still harmful acts of discrimination, albeit with little or no awareness....

NEW YORK—A trio of senior environmental officials from local and federal government yesterday offered its views on how the average American might need to get a better grasp of the risks posed by climate change. Speaking here during a conference on rising seas, the officials were pressed by a moderator from the Association of Climate Change Officers to discuss how they tend to approach widespread ambivalence or downright ignorance about global warming....

A new study looks at those downstream effects of flooding in particular and finds that nearly half of the world’s land areas experience a shift in the odds of flooding during El Niño (or it’s opposite phase, La Niña). That means some areas are exposed to higher flood risks, endangering infrastructure and people, while other areas get a reprieve. Those findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide a more detailed look at the next level of forecasting....

In the small city of Terni in central Italy, researchers are putting the final touches on what could be the world’s most sophisticated mosquito cages. The enclosures, each occupying 150 cubic metres, simulate the muggy habitats in which Africa’s Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes thrive. By studying the insects under more-natural conditions, scientists hope to better understand how to eradicate them—and malaria—using an emerging genetic-engineering technology called gene drives. The technique can quickly disseminate genetic modifications in wild populations through an organism’s offspring, prompting some activists to call for it to be shelved....

The Earth’s rising temperature is expected to knock the global water cycle out of whack, but exactly how it will change is uncertain. Scientists, though, can look for clues as to what the future might bring in the major climate swings that have happened in the past. A new study that does just that suggests that Earth’s rain belts could be pushed northward as the Northern Hemisphere heats up faster than the Southern Hemisphere....

In the film Amèlie, the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind....

Hypnosis has long been considered a valuable technique for recreating and then studying puzzling psychological phenomena. A classic example of this approach uses a technique known as posthypnotic amnesia (PHA) to model memory disorders such as functional amnesia, which involves a sudden memory loss typically due to some sort of psychological trauma (rather than to brain damage or disease). Hypnotists produce PHA by suggesting to a hypnotized person that after hypnosis he will forget particular things until he receives a “cancellation,” such as “Now you can remember everything....

Facilitating Immunotherapy Drug Development Naiyer A. Rizvi, MD, an internationally recognized leader in the treatment of lung cancer and immunotherapy drug development, is Director of Thoracic Oncology and Immunotherapeutics in Medical Oncology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Rizvi’s research of antibodies that can reinvigorate T cells to recognize lung cancer cells as foreign and destroy the cancer cells has been a major development in thoracic oncology. Dr....

The Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s most sweeping climate change policy, is being challenged in federal appeals court and its future is expected to hinge on the outcome of at least one court decision—and possibly two—over the next year. The merits of the lawsuit are set to be argued June 2 before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Groups on both sides of the issue filed “friend of the court” briefs at the end of March....

Pluto isn’t quite as lonely as scientists had thought. Astronomers have discovered another dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. But this newfound world, dubbed 2015 RR245, is much more distant than Pluto, orbiting the sun once every 700 Earth years, scientists said. (Pluto completes one lap around the sun every 248 Earth years.) You can see an animation of the new dwarf planet’s orbit here....

The number of 2D materials has exploded since the discovery of graphene in 2004. However, this menagerie of single-atom-thick semiconductors, insulators and superconductors has been missing a member—magnets. In fact, physicists weren’t even sure that 2D magnets were possible, until now. Researchers report the first truly 2D magnet, made of a compound called chromium triiodide, in a paper published on June 7 in Nature. The discovery could eventually lead to new data-storage devices and designs for quantum computers....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Imagine that you are constantly eating, but slowly starving to death. Hundreds of species of marine mammals, fish, birds, and sea turtles face this risk every day when they mistake plastic debris for food. Plastic debris can be found in oceans around the world. Scientists have estimated that there are over five trillion pieces of plastic weighing more than a quarter of a million tons floating at sea globally....

Twenty-five years after a toxic gas cloud from a pesticide factory killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India, groundwater at the accident site—a drinking water supply for 15 communities—remains contaminated, according to a report released today by an advocacy group and a medical clinic. The U.K.-based Bhopal Medical Appeal and the Sambhavna Clinic say water contamination is worsening as chemicals leach through soil into the aquifer. “A huge proportion of the factory site is full of very toxic waste,” said Colin Toogood, the report’s author....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Clay minerals cannot form unless there is water available—it is an essential ingredient in their microscopic crystalline structure. Clays are found virtually nowhere on the red planet except in Mars’s most ancient terrains, dating back to an epoch about 3.7-4.1 billion years ago, called the Noachian. Understanding these martian clays is difficult, because they can be seen only sparsely across the surface....

The vast majority of the radioactive plutonium on the planet is man-made—roughly 500 metric tons, or enough to make 100,000 nuclear weapons. Much of it is the legacy of the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. More and more, it is also the legacy of nuclear power. Now a team of scientists is arguing that burying plutonium is the only reasonable solution to this problematic stockpile....

In the aftermath of November’s election, many have expressed distress at an apparent wave of reported bias incidents. There were 867 reported incidents of language or behavior in which bias or prejudice played a role in the 10 days following the election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an antibigotry advocacy group. One of the most visible such events occurred on December 6, when a man screamed “terrorist” at a hijab-wearing New York City transit worker and pushed her down the stairs in Grand Central Station....