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Ceramics are hard and durable; they resist scratches better than glass and stand up to high heat better than most metals. They could protect electronic devices from challenging conditions found in space or in the human body—but their very toughness makes them hard to manipulate. Joining two ceramic slabs with an airtight seal requires heating them to about 2,000 degrees Celsius, which would typically destroy embedded electronics. Now, however, researchers have developed a welding technique that spot heats the ceramics with lasers, as described in August in Science....

As a postdoc, plant biologist Christopher Topp was not satisfied with the usual way of studying root development: growing plants on agar dishes and placing them on flatbed scanners to measure root lengths and angles. Instead, he would periodically stuff his car with plants in pots dripping with water and drive more than 600 kilometres from North Carolina to Georgia to image his specimens in 3D, using an X-ray machine in a physics lab....

By Laila Kearney(Reuters) - Scientists in Utah say they have discovered Tyrannosaurus rex’s “great-uncle,” a massive predator with a thick skull and large teeth dubbed the “king of gore.“Bones of the 24-foot (7.3-meter) -long dinosaur, slightly smaller than T. rex and older by about 10 million years, were unveiled at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, and an announcement of the species discovery was published in the scientific journal Plos One....

Barred from her lab by pandemic restrictions, behavioral ecologist Daniela C. Rößler caught local jumping spiders and kept them in clear plastic boxes on her windowsill, planning to test their reactions to 3-D-printed models of predatory spiders. When she came home from dinner one night, though, she noticed something strange. “They were all hanging from the lids of their boxes,” says Rößler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany....

Hemoglobin is best known as red blood cells’ superstar protein—carrying oxygen and other gases on the erythrocytes as they zip throughout the bodies of nearly all vertebrates. Less well known is its presence in vegetables, including the sugar beet, in which Nélida Leiva-Eriksson recently discovered the protein while working on her doctoral thesis at Lund University in Sweden. In fact, many land plants—from barley to tomatoes—contain the protein, says Raúl Arredondo-Peter, an expert on the evolution of plant hemoglobins, or leghemoglobins, at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos in Mexico....

In the heat of summer, many people feel a need to slather on more sunscreen to prevent the sun’s ultraviolet radiation from crisping their skin. But scientists may have found a new way to block these dangerous rays: melanin-imitating nanoparticles that protect skin cells from within. If proved, this approach could be used to develop better topical protection and possibly treatments for certain skin disorders as well. The darkening pigment melanin is one of the body’s primary natural defenses against UV-induced DNA damage....

Patti Howell had thought long and hard about this moment in her 10th-grade biology class. She had spent months subtly preparing her students for it, had agonized and worried about it, had even attended a training session to get ready for it. Now, on a sun-dappled April morning, Howell stood before 26 15-year-olds at the Baconton Community Charter School in southwestern Georgia, scanning the slip of paper she had just plucked off a heavy wood table....

Most people think of bullies as a playground issue for schoolchildren. Adult bullying in the workplace, however, can be extremely harmful to its victims—even more so than sexual harassment—and it may be far more common than most people realize, according to new research. Business researchers Sandy Hershcovis of the University of Manitoba and Julian Barling of Queen’s University in Ontario combined and analyzed 111 studies on workplace social dynamics. They discovered that as compared with workers who have experienced sexual harassment, victims of bullying report feeling angrier and more stressed at work—and are more likely to quit their job....

In remembering Martin Gardner on what would have been his 100th birthday this month, we recalled a 1997 article he wrote for The Mathematical Intelligencer. In that piece he asks his imaginary friend Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix—“the world’s most famous numerologist” and a recurring character in his Scientific American Mathematical Games column—about 2187, the house number of Gardner’s childhood home in Tulsa, Okla. Dr. Matrix instantly regales Gardner with a raft of facts about the number 2,187....

Plenty of children refuse to eat their vegetables, but for some the problem extends far beyond picky eating. In severe cases, abnormal eating patterns can lead to dangerously low body weight or nutrient deficiencies. Such children meet the criteria for a diagnosis made official by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013: avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). Since its addition to the psychiatric manual, the diagnosis has remained largely unused because of a general lack of awareness and understanding on the part of clinicians....

Himalayan glaciers are melting and retreating at their edges because of global warming. But they also conceal a more ominous effect of climate change: they are deflating. They are losing internal ice mass to melting, which can substantially hasten their disappearance. Scientists have recently captured real-time video showing a glacier purging its own meltwater, and at rates far faster than the experts had imagined. Ulyana Horodyskyj, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, climbed to 5,000 meters on the Ngozumpa Glacier in Nepal....

Today, in the sunburnt desert north of Las Vegas, a tech firm conducted a demo of a cutting-edge propulsion system. The firm is among a handful of companies and universities vying to build the first hyperloop. Hyperloop is a futuristic transportation system that resembles a supersized version of a pneumatic tube at the drive-through window of a bank. Here’s how it would work. People hop into a pod, which would travel up to 760 miles per hour inside a tube....

When an interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua raced through our solar system last year, astronomers were thrilled. The event provided the first glimpse, however fleeting, of a visitor from another star. But almost immediately a taxing question was raised: where did it come from? A number of studies have since attempted to answer this question, pointing in the general direction of constellations like Lyra. But none is as accurate as the latest effort by Coryn Bailer-Jones from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and his colleagues, to be published in The Astronomical Journal....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine Two weeks after receiving an experimental treatment for his cancer, David Porter’s 65-year-old leukemia patient seemed to take a turn for the worse. Fatigue and fever drove the patient back to hospital, where his temperature surged to more than 39º C and he began to shake, his body racked with nausea and diarrhea. But rather than being a clinical failure, the patient’s return to hospital heralded the treatment’s success....

A heartbreaking, out-of-the-gate failure of Russia’s sample return mission early this year created a wide circle of disappointment. For Russia, it was supposed to be a “cavalry charge” toward a hyperambitious goal that would have redeemed a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence but instead became a cosmic humiliation when the craft died shortly after liftoff. For planetary science, it meant that the composition of the Martian moon Phobos remains speculative and its origins still undetermined....

Dear EarthTalk: Is there really such a thing as “sun-protective clothing?” If so, does it mean I can dispense with oily sunscreens once and for all? – John Sugarman, San Diego, CA While there will always be a place for high-quality sunscreen on body parts exposed to the sun, covering up elsewhere—ideally with clothing designed to absorb or shield the sun’s damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation—can minimize a person’s skin cancer risk significantly....

A cryptographer and a geneticist walk into a seminar room. An hour later, after a talk by the cryptographer, the geneticist approaches him with a napkin covered in scrawls. The cryptographer furrows his brow, then nods. Nearly two years later, they reveal the product of their combined prowess: an algorithm that finds harmful mutations without actually seeing anyone’s genes. The goal of the scientists, Stanford University cryptographer Dan Boneh and geneticist Gill Bejerano, along with their students, is to protect the privacy of patients who have shared their genetic data....

The New York City homes where 11 people drowned during Hurricane Ida last month are located in areas designated on federal flood maps as having low inundation risk, a senior member of Congress said yesterday. The disclosure by House Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) illustrates the shortcomings of the nation’s flood maps as Congress debates a historic spending provision for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mapping program. Hurricane Ida killed 13 New York City residents, including 11 who drowned in residential basements when record rainfall overwhelmed the city’s sewer system and caused widespread flooding....

Are you impressed with meals that look like one food but are actually made of something else? Tofu burgers and artificial crabmeat, for example, are not what they appear to be. It’s actually an old trick. In medieval times fish was cooked to imitate venison during Lent, and celebratory banquets included extravagant (and sometimes disturbing) delicacies such as meatballs made to resemble oranges, trout prepared to look like peas and shellfish made into mock viscera....

Reservoirs and hydropower are often thought of as climate friendly because they don’t burn fossil fuels to produce electricity. But what if reservoirs that store water and produce electricity were among some of the world’s largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions? Scientists are searching for answers to that question, as they study how much methane is emitted into the atmosphere from man-made reservoirs built for hydropower and other purposes. Until recently, it was believed that about 20 percent of all man-made methane emissions come from the surface of reservoirs....