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The Delaware-size iceberg that calved off Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017 is on the move. The trillion-ton chunk of ice performed a graceful northerly pivot over the course of July and August, satellite imagery reveals. Polar oceanographer Mark Brandon of the Open University in England noted the berg’s rotation on his blog, Mallemaroking. The iceberg will probably bump around in its current location near the ice shelf that calved it for at least a few months, periodically getting stuck on shallow seamounts on the ocean floor, said Theodore Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado....

Saturn’s frozen moon Enceladus is a tantalizing world—many scientists are increasingly convinced it may be the best place in our solar system to search for life. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn, has made intriguing observations of icy jets spewing from a suspected underground liquid ocean on the mysterious world that might be hospitable to alien life. Cassini’s tour is due to wind down in 2017, and scientists badly want to send a dedicated mission to Enceladus to look for signs of life....

Have you heard the story of the good sister and the bad sister? When they leave home, the good sister is kind to the people and animals she meets, and is rewarded in gold. The bad sister is haughty and greedy, and is rewarded with a box of snakes. This folk tale has hundreds of variants, and it has been passed on across Europe for centuries. But how similar your version is to mine depends not just on how far apart we live but also on how ethnically and linguistically different our cultures are, according to a new study....

The chill in the air last weekend was a reminder that fall has arrived in New York City. Time for the leaves to turn colors, for the stifling subway stations to air out and for hundreds of do-it-yourself tech enthusiasts to descend on the New York Hall of Science in the Borough of Queens for the annual New York Maker Faire. For the seventh time in as many years the science center was converted into an indoor/outdoor ode to the DIY movement, this year featuring mammoth 3-D printers, homemade Star Wars droids and acres of hands-on activities....

A visit to Block 71, the nexus of Singapore’s vibrant start-up scene, reveals a 50-year-old industrial estate that has been refurbished to bring out the vibe of entrepreneurship. The JTC LaunchPad @ One-North, as it is officially known, overflows with more than 500 start-up companies. So many, that in January the government agencies charged with industrial development and economic growth announced a mega-expansion expected to double its current size along several city blocks, including the well-known Block 71....

After 20 years of trying, scientists have transformed mature cells into primordial blood cells that regenerate themselves and the components of blood. The work, described today in Nature, offers hope to people with leukaemia and other blood disorders who need bone-marrow transplants but can’t find a compatible donor. If the findings translate into the clinic, these patients could receive lab-grown versions of their own healthy cells. One team, led by stem-cell biologist George Daley of Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, created human cells that act like blood stem cells, although they are not identical to those found in nature....

Race is one of the most inflammatory, slippery, maddeningly paradoxical concepts to afflict human consciousness; witness its ugly history. Shamefully, perversions of biology, anthropology and psychology have at various times racially justified colonialism, slavery and disenfranchisement. Medicine’s own intersections with concepts of race have tended to be horrible as well: the grotesque Nazi experiments and the notorious Tuskegee studies of syphilis spring to mind. Looking to change that awful record for the better is the drug BiDil, approved in 2005 to reduce the toll of congestive heart failure specifically among African-Americans....

Key concepts Physics Forces Surface tension Density Buoyancy Introduction Have you ever seen a “water strider” (also called water bugs, pond skaters, water skippers, etcetera)? They are bugs that effortlessly hop around on the surface of ponds, lakes and rivers. How do they do it without sinking? Try this project to find out! Background If you glance at a water strider, at first you might think it’s floating in the water, just like a boat....

Convenience and cost savings have fueled unprecedented growth of online banking and bill payment over the past several years. But as growth flags, environmentalists are urging consumers to put away their checkbooks and fire up their computers in the name of conservation. The fact that online banking and bill payment saves trees is a no-brainer. Less obvious is the reduction of resources required to make, ship and ultimately discard paper, according to a report by Javelin Strategy & Research....

Ice streams and their smaller cousins, glaciers, don’t just sit around looking frosty; they mosey along, albeit at different rates of speed. They also lose mass when snowfall cannot replace what is lost to melting. Global warming has hastened this loss, and may potentially raise sea levels to devastating heights. The big questions are: How important a player is climate change in the process—and what will its impact be in the future?...

Armchair explorers can travel to the top and bottom of the earth with these coffee table books, each filled with glossy photos of the Arctic and Antarctica accompanied by narratives about the latest science from these regions. Science on Ice follows four groups of researchers who, among other projects, observe Adélie penguins, chart the floor of the Arctic Sea and trace the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. Frozen Planet, a companion to a forthcoming BBC Earth documentary, focuses on wildlife and describes how plants and animals are adapting to climate change....

In New Mexico, the Rio Grande is trickling through Albuquerque at only a quarter of its normal flow. The parched range and pastureland in the southwest part of the state are all rated in poor condition by the Department of Agriculture. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor published Thursday, 45 percent of the state is suffering from “exceptional” drought – the worst in the nation. Similar conditions exist across much of the southern Great Plains....

As the world’s leading spacefaring nations plan for their next big outpost in space—a successor to the International Space Station—scientists are drafting a wish list of experiments for the most remote human laboratory ever built. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are hosting meetings to discuss the science plans, the first of which are taking place on December 5–6 in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. No nation has yet committed to fully funding the project, which does not yet have an estimated cost but is slated for the 2020s....

Results from a highly anticipated clinical study show that an experimental drug suppressed the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to undetectable levels in people with highly drug-resistant forms of the pathogen. The drug, TMC125 (etravirine), is the first of its kind in nearly a decade and is one of three new drugs capable of treating drug-resistant HIV that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve this year. The new drugs offer the hope of treatment to perhaps thousands of HIV patients who have stopped responding to other medications, says William Towner, medical director of the Kaiser Permanente HIV/AIDS research trials program and member of the study team, which reported its findings online today in The Lancet....

Plants are the most efficient converters of sunlight into usable forms of energy, namely, sugar. And our industrialized society benefits from their efforts over the past few billion years: organic products, trapped in the passage of time deep below the earth, were transformed into the oil, coal and natural gas that largely powers our modern world. Cutting out the middle men–plants and tectonic processes–seems like a good solution to providing our energy needs....

To lessen the risk of catastrophic wildfires, California’s forests need more routine burns. This message has been echoed for years. Relentlessly putting out even small wildfires in the Golden State and other parts of the western U.S. has long deprived the regions of beneficial flames, resulting in the buildup of dense vegetation and dry leaf litter. The accumulation of this fuel, experts say, is creating a dramatic rise in megafires. More ironic is new research that shows that massive fires do not necessarily reduce the incidence of big future blazes in the same places....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Over the past year, I stopped responding to customer surveys, providing user feedback or, mostly, contributing product reviews. Sometimes I feel obligated—even eager—to provide this information. Who doesn’t like being asked their opinion? But, in researching media technologies as an anthropologist, I see these requests as part of a broader trend making home life bureaucratic....

What if your smartphone or laptop started charging as soon as you walked in the door? Researchers have developed a specially built room that can transmit energy to a variety of electronic devices within it, charging phones and powering home appliances without plugs or batteries. This system “enables safe and high-power wireless power transfer in large volumes,” says Takuya Sasatani, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering and lead author of the new study, which was published this week in Nature Electronics....

The death of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96 has prompted an outpouring of emotion — in the United Kingdom and around the globe. Her close family and confidants are grieving for the loss of someone they knew and loved, but what is everyone else feeling? Can feelings of loss for someone you’ve never met even be considered grief? Most grief research has focused on the loss of parents, close friends or spouses, says Michael Cholbi, a philosopher and ethicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK....

Bacteria are all around —and inside—us. Some are harmless, some are beneficial and some, of course, cause disease. Others, such as the common bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, defy categorization. They are turncoats, with the ability to suddenly switch from good to bad. Usually the microbe dwells harmlessly in people’s nasal passages. Every so often, however, when S. pneumoniae senses danger, it disperses to other areas of the body in a bid to save itself, making us sick....