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Two years ago, Shana Goffredi raced to the control room of the R/V Western Flyer, a 117-foot-long research ship in the Gulf of California. Television monitors onboard the vessel displayed what looked like an alien world near the ocean bottom, and Goffredi wanted to get a better look. On screen were thousands of tiny orange tube worms and dozens of other animals, some of which were new to science. The bizarre habitat gleamed in the lights of an underwater robotic probe as it explored the environs of a seafloor spring spewing water at superhot temperatures—known as a hydrothermal vent....

By Kate Kelland Britain on Thursday became the first country to formally license an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment designed to create babies from three people. In a long-awaited decision, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) gave the final go-ahead for the treatment known as mitochondrial transfer, which doctors say could help prevent incurable inherited diseases. Britain’s parliament last year voted to change the law to allow the treatments if and when they were ready for licensing....

Almost everyone who ever lived was wretchedly poor. Famine, death from childbirth, infectious disease and countless other hazards were the norm for most of history. Humanity’s sad plight started to change with the Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1750. New scientific insights and technological innovations enabled a growing proportion of the global population to break free of extreme poverty. Two and a half centuries later more than five billion of the world’s 6....

The sky is always changing. The planets move overhead as they trace their paths around the sun, and the moon rotates through the heavens as it circles our own world. Though the stars that provide their backdrop stay fixed in relation to one another, they too spin above as Earth makes its daily revolution and its yearly passage around the sun. To appreciate this ever-changing view, grab these sky maps, go outside at night, and look up!...

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. Science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft considered The Colour Out of Space his best story. In this 1927 classic tale of cosmic horror, a small Massachusetts farming community faces unspeakable evil from the outer reaches of the universe....

There’s money to be made in the barren corners of the world. From the California desert to the badlands around Chernobyl, Ukraine, bioenergy is taking root in the form of moss and algae. In Ireland and Denmark, farmers are planting switchgrass and miscanthus in low-grade soil, hoping to turn a profit on biofuels markets. Surplus land, or land unused in either conservation or agricultural production, offers an elegant solution to the food versus fuel arguments that have plagued bioenergy since its inception....

Why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than its surface? What drives its 11-year cycle of magnetic activity? And how does its solar wind propagate out into the solar system? Scientists hope to answer all these questions and more in the coming decade, thanks to an armada of new missions that will scrutinize the sun in more detail than ever before. With the debut of two unprecedented spacecraft and the largest ground-based solar observatory ever built, research into our home star is set to reach new heights....

If last year’s landmark Paris climate agreement enters into force this year or early next year, it will likely do so without the help of one of its strongest supporters. That’s because the European Union, which carried the torch for international climate action for two decades before playing a leading role in brokering the agreement last year, is not to be found on the growing list of countries pledging early adoption ahead of next week’s signing ceremony in New York City....

In June 2015, a white supremacist opened fire inside the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black congregants, including the minister. The massacre sparked a crescendo of anti-racist protest, including often successful demands for the removal of statues of Confederate Generals from public spaces throughout the South. Two years later, a coalition of white nationalists arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally aimed at protesting and reversing the local City Council’s decision to remove from the city’s center of a hundred year-old statue of Confederate General Robert E....

NASA runs a child-slave colony on Mars! Photos taken by a Chinese orbiter reveal an alien settlement on the moon! Shape-shifting reptilian extraterrestrials that can control human minds are running the U.S. government! What drives the astonishing popularity of such stories? Are we a particularly gullible species? Perhaps not—maybe we’re just overwhelmed. A bare-bones model of how news spreads on social media, published in June in Nature Human Behavior, indicates that just about anything can go viral....

When it comes to what people think of you, it’s been said that “bad is stronger than good.” In a given day, if you hear ninety-nine compliments and one criticism, you know which one will be running through your head as you try to fall asleep that night. It’s normal to care what people think—most of us care deeply what the people we love and respect think of us. Indeed, it’s hard-wired: not so many hundreds of years ago, banishment was the worst punishment possible....

More than a billion years ago two black holes in the distant universe spiraled around each other in a deathly dance until they merged. This spiraling collision was so violent that it shook the fabric of spacetime, sending perturbations— gravitational waves—rippling outward through the cosmos at the speed of light. In September 2015, after traveling more than a billion light-years, those ripples washed over our planet, registering as a “chirp” in the sensors of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO)....

Passenger cars have been generating much of the buzz around electrified transportation, but automakers are changing that with a suite of new electrified trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles that could soon hit the market. “Whether it’s an advanced drive vehicle of any sort – a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid or an electric vehicle (EV) – the manufacturers are taking it seriously, and they understand it as a growing market,” said Jeremy Acevedo, analyst at the automotive research website Edmunds....

In recent months several dozen test subjects have volunteered to gulp down billions of tiny, toxin-gobbling contraptions built to cure a crippling disease. The devices are not made from the usual machine parts of metal, wire or plastic. They are rebuilt organisms: bacteria, reconstructed from the inside out to perform an intricate feat of medical care. Researchers working at Synlogic, a Cambridge, Mass., biotechnology start-up, have been handing patients daily doses of a drink loaded with billions of Escherichia coli bacteria....

An international team of scientists has discovered a new plant enzyme that could eventually lead to a breakthrough in the production of cellulosic bio-based fuels made from crop wastes, as well as chemicals and plastics. Caffeoyl shikimate esterase (CSE) is an enzyme whose genes can be switched off to control the formation of lignin. Lignin is a lattice-like structure of cells that makes plants rigid. It is also a tough substance that makes it difficult to extract sugar from agricultural wastes to make biofuels....

As scientists and engineers, we feel privileged to have careers that contribute to the progress of knowledge and understanding. The rewards of participating in research and discovery and of mentoring emerging scientists are immense. Science itself is an extraordinary and essential institution. It continues to thrive after centuries of human ingenuity and effort, and to provide significant advancements for societal well-being in areas such as understanding and mitigating global environmental change, achieving innovations for improving public health, and creating technological solutions to widespread societal challenges....

For most people, “fat,” particularly the kind that bulges under the skin, is a four-letter word. It makes our thighs jiggle; it lingers despite our torturous attempts to eliminate it. Too much of it increases our risk for heart disease and type 2 diabetes (the most common form of the condition). For decades researchers have looked for ways to reduce our collective stores of fat because they seemed to do more harm than good....

Scientists around the country are nervous as hell. There seems to be a seismic shift happening in Washington, D.C., and our government’s relationship with facts, scientific reality and objective truth has never been more strained. It started with “alternative facts” about the size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration. The White House also asserted, without any evidence, that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the popular vote, even though numerous, bipartisan sources have debunked that claim....

A neutrino hit on September 22, 2017, at 4:54 P.M. Eastern time. The nearly massless elementary particle barreled through the sensors of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an experiment buried in the Antarctic ice. This neutrino was rare, carrying an energy of more than 100 tera electron volts, about 10 times the energy reachable by particles inside the most powerful accelerators on Earth. Thirty seconds later IceCube’s computers sent out an alert with the neutrino’s energy, the time and date, and roughly where it came from in the sky....

Scientists are racing to understand a puzzling series of massive ripples in Earth’s atmosphere triggered by the eruption of the Tongan volcano at the weekend. Satellite data shows that the event — which some fear might have devastated the Pacific-island nation — provoked an unusual pattern of atmospheric gravity waves. Previous volcanic eruptions have not produced such a signal, leaving experts stumped. “It’s really unique. We have never seen anything like this in the data before,” says Lars Hoffmann, an atmospheric scientist at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany....