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The fastest-known star in the Milky Way is on a path out of the galaxy, and new research suggests it was a supernova that gave it the boot. The runaway star, US 708, is traveling at 7,456 miles per second (12,000 km/s)—that’s 26 million miles per hour (43 million km/h)—making it the fastest star in the Milky Way ever clocked by astronomers, according to the new research. Its speed will allow it to escape the gravitational pull of the galaxy, and eventually make its way into intergalactic space....

Children breast-fed longer than six months scored a 3.8-point IQ margin over those who were bottle-fed, according to a seven-year study by researchers at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland. Medical epidemiologist Wieslaw Jedrychowski and colleagues followed 468 babies born to nonsmoking mothers. The children were tested five times at regular intervals from infancy through preschool age. The data showed that cognitive abilities of preschoolers who were breast-fed scored significantly higher than bottle-fed infants, and IQ score was directly proportional to how long the infants had been breast-fed: IQs were 2....

One of the biggest natural tragedies of recent years is the deterioration of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a vast structure of coral off the continent’s east coast that supports a profusion of wildlife. In addition to overfishing and nutrient pollution, the world’s largest natural structure has suffered from rising ocean temperatures. But, perhaps less well known, Australia’s west coast has some massive reefs of its own, offshore in the southeastern Indian Ocean....

Take a moment to look at the image above. What do you see? Just a neural network? Perhaps you spotted the hidden figure. If so, you have just had a moment of insight. You may have felt a similar jolt when discovering the solution to a math problem, understanding a joke or metaphor, or realizing something unexpected about yourself. These aha! moments occur when your brain spontaneously reinterprets information to reach a novel, nonobvious conclusion....

The Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. formed the backdrop of the Apollo program, as the two superpowers jockeyed for preeminence in space. Under premier Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had succeeded in launching Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and sending the first man into orbit. Reeling from a succession of Soviet space firsts, President John F. Kennedy promised that the U.S. would be first to send humans to the moon and return them to Earth before the end of the 1960s....

Controlling the Zika virus in the United States just got harder. The mosquito- and sexually-transmitted disease has now likely gone local, according to federal public health officials. In at least four instances patients have apparently contracted the virus via a bite from a mosquito in the continental U.S. This first recorded instances of local transmission—reported in Florida—signal a shift in the burden of Zika in the mainland U.S., where more than 1,600 people have been diagnosed with it after traveling elsewhere in the Americas or the Caribbean and returning with the virus in their systems....

The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB), an independent federal agency charged with investigating serious chemical accidents, is being accused of punishing whistleblowers and appears to have widespread employee dissatisfaction. Amid these developments, the embattled chairman of the board, Rafael Moure-Eraso, is under pressure to resign. Management issues at the CSB were scrutinised during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on March 4, and the committee’s chairman, Republican Jason Chaffetz, joined with fellow lawmakers in calling on Moure-Eraso to step down....

Lee Smolin, author of six books about the philosophical issues raised by contemporary physics, says every time he writes a new one, the experience completely changes the direction his own research is taking. In his latest book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum, Smolin, a cosmologist and quantum theorist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, tackles what he sees as the limitations in quantum theory....

The 1.5-meter-long gash that opened up in the upper cabin of Friday’s Southwest Airlines Flight 812 from Phoenix to Sacramento will have a deep impact on the nature and frequency of commercial aircraft maintenance. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a directive on Tuesday ordering about 175 Boeing 737 aircraft—80 of which are registered in the U.S., most of those operated by Southwest—to be inspected using an electromagnetic device that can identify metal fatigue....

Mileage maven Wayne Gerdes says drivers can improve fuel economy by 20 to 40 percent beyond their car’s EPA rating, simply by adopting techniques that he and his fellow enthusiasts have perfected. Gerdes, who lives in Wadsworth, Ill., coined the term “hypermiling” to describe tactics that significantly extend a vehicle’s gas mileage. He has set numerous records, prompting more than 8,000 compatriots to follow his lead. Gerdes tracks their feats at www....

Trees that were poisoned and killed by saltwater are emitting greenhouses gases known as “tree farts,” prompting researchers to warn of a secret warming source that could become worse as rising seas encroach on forests. Drowned trees in what scientists call “ghost forests” increased the amount of carbon dioxide released by these ecosystems by about 25%, according to a study published last week in Biogeochemistry. Melinda Martinez, lead author and graduate student at North Carolina State University, said the emissions they measured from dead pine and bald cypress trees, also called snags, in five ghost forests on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula in North Carolina need to be accounted for....

I saw my name followed by “RN” for the first time on July 27, 2020. The next day, my instructor, or preceptor, and I were assigned to the COVID intensive care unit at our hospital in Nashville, Tenn. I read the assignment sheet with a strange knot in my chest. It wasn’t fear or dread rising into my throat but something much harder to name. For months, as a nurse intern, I’d watched the battle-weary nurses emerge from COVID rooms, taking off their PPE like warriors stripping off armor, their faces lined from the pressure of the respirators....

The remains of a young boy, ceremonially buried some 12,600 years ago in Montana, have revealed the ancestry of one of the earliest populations in the Americas, known as the Clovis culture. Published in this issue of Nature, the boy’s genome sequence shows that today’s indigenous groups spanning North and South America are all descended from a single population that trekked across the Bering land bridge from Asia (M. Rasmussen et al....

Scientists in Italy have managed to decipher text on a badly scorched papyrus roll from Herculaneum, a town destroyed with Pompeii in the Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79AD. The imaging technique they used may allow archaeologists to analyse other texts previously thought to be too badly damaged to read. Hundreds of carbonised papyrus rolls were excavated from the ‘Villa of the Papyri’ in Herculaneum in 1754, said to contain the only surviving library from antiquity....

Dear EarthTalk: What is “nanotechnology?” I’ve heard that nanoparticles are already in consumer products, yet we haven’t really studied their potential health impacts. – Dan Zeff, San Francisco, CA Nanotechnology makes use of minuscule objects—whose width can be 10,000 times narrower than a human hair—known as nanoparticles. Upwards of 600 products on store shelves today contain them, including transparent sunscreen, lipsticks, anti-aging creams and even food products. Global nanotechnology sales have grown substantially in recent years, to $50 billion in 2007, according to Lux Research, author of the annual Nanotech Report....

After slipping a thumb-size silicon microprocessor into a small beaker filled with water, Daniel Nocera turns on a light. Instantly, bubbles stream from the chip. Turning off the light stops the bubbles. It’s a simple demonstration, but one that could promise power for the millions who have least access to it—those in under-developed countries and remote locations. The chip is an artificial leaf. Nocera—Harvard University’s Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy—has developed it to mimic photosynthesis, nature’s chemical process that turns sunlight into stored energy....

The stink gives it away. Spend half a day walking the streets of New York, Los Angeles or Boston and the occasional whiff of rotten eggs makes it clear that natural gas is leaking from somewhere. Just as oil and natural gas fields have been found to be emitting more methane than official government estimates suggest, a new study shows that more methane than previously thought may be leaking from the other end of that system—cities, where people actually use natural gas for heating and cooking....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In Canada, the government of British Columbia is cracking down on vaping products. The plan is to reduce nicotine content, limit access to flavoured pods, mandate plain packaging with health warnings and raise the tax on vaping products to 20 per cent. The rationale is simple. E-cigarettes have exploded in popularity around the world in recent years, especially among teens....

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan A magnitude-6.3 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, at 12:51 p.m. local time today is the country’s deadliest in 80 years. Details are still trickling in, and the numbers of dead and injured are expected to rise following what Prime Minister John Key has said “may well be New Zealand’s darkest day.“But this earthquake is just one of a series that has shaken the area during the past six months....

By Victoria Cavaliere(Reuters) - Carcasses of bottlenose dolphins are washing up on U.S. East Coast beaches from New Jersey to Virginia at a higher than normal pace, with more than 120 dead animals discovered since June, local and federal officials said on Thursday.The cause of the dolphin deaths has yet to be determined, said Maggie Mooney-Seus, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service, which is analyzing information collected by marine stranding response centers along the East Coast....