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The night sky on Earth (assuming it survives) will change dramatically as our Milky Way galaxy merges with its neighbors and distant galaxies recede beyond view. The quickening expansion will eventually pull galaxies apart faster than light, causing them to drop out of view. This process eliminates reference points for measuring expansion and dilutes the distinctive products of the big bang to nothingness. In short, it erases all the signs that a big bang ever occurred....

Extreme heat in the second half of June helped make the first six months of this year the hottest January to June ever recorded in the lower 48 United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. Eighty-six locations set temperature records in June, with another 87 tying existing marks. That helped push the average temperature in the contiguous United States to 71.2 degrees Fahrenheit, 2 degrees above the 20th-century average....

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. One common frame currently used in deep space is called the Earth Mean Equator and Equinox of Epoch J2000, abbreviated as EME2000. Its name is so involved because it captures the many elements required to define a three-dimensional coordinate system: a reference body (Earth); a reference plane (the mean equator, an idealized equator that does not include the small nodding motion, or nutation, of Earth’s axis); a reference direction (the vernal equinox, a line from Earth to the sun on the first day of spring); and a reference time (J2000, or January 1, 2000, at 12:00:00 Ephemeris Time, a uniform timescale used for planetary motion calculations)....

Fantastic creatures appear in myths and legends from cultures around the world. These beings take many forms. Some of them run, slither, swim or burrow. Many of them fly. As a paleontologist who studies fossil birds and pterosaurs (Habib) and an illustrator who designs creatures for books and films (Whitlatch), we are especially interested in the biomechanics of flight and how to portray flying beasts believably. We recently teamed up to produce a book on this topic called Flying Monsters: Illustrating Flying Vertebrates (to be published in 2021 by Design Studio Press), which covers both real and imaginary animals....

Our modern world is blessed with a wide array of products and services, health care options and medical treatments, gadgets and indulgences, all of which arrive on the scene with a rapidity that few of us can absorb. We find ourselves surprised and amazed by these wonderful innovations, and then we come to depend on them. What did we do before we had GPS, camera phones, brain scans and laser eye surgery?...

By Jim Finkle (Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson is telling patients that it has learned of a security vulnerability in one of its insulin pumps that a hacker could exploit to overdose diabetic patients with insulin, though it describes the risk as low. Medical device experts said they believe it was the first time a manufacturer had issued such a warning to patients about a cyber vulnerability, a hot topic in the industry following revelations last month about possible bugs in pacemakers and defibrillators....

It is a steep hill to climb if the world is to avoid warming the earth’s surface by no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the limit beyond which we will seriously harm the planet. That number is driving the commitments many nations will make at the 2015 United Nations climate change conference in Paris (COP21) to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet some critics have declared that the so-called 2° C target is impossible, saying we cannot deploy the technologies needed to decarbonize the economy in time....

Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan chilled global attitudes toward nuclear power, the world has been slowly reconciling its discomfort with nuclear and the idea that it may have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change. The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3....

A rubbery ribbon of silicone, laced with cracked bits of gold that transmit nerve signals, has been spliced into the broken spinal cords of paralyzed rats, restoring their ability to move. The implant may be the first step towards helping paralyzed people in the same way. Injuries that cause paralysis are like cuts in a telephone cable. Signals that start in the brain are supposed to travel down nerves in the spinal cord to muscles, but breaks in the nerves interrupt them....

By Aaron Mendelson (Reuters) - Prospects are dimming for a ban on plastic grocery bags in California, as the legislative session winds down and supporters remain three votes short of a majority in the face of strong opposition from manufacturers. A number of cities in California and other states, including Hawaii’s Maui County, have made it illegal for grocery stores to pack consumer purchases in plastic. But at the state level, support has generally crumbled because of opposition from plastic bag makers....

GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Utah—Like many places across the West, Lake Powell seems impossibly large, mythical almost, with its rich red rock canyon walls standing in dramatic juxtaposition to the expanse of cerulean below that seems to stretch on forever. Dramatic is an apt way to describe the second-largest man-made reservoir in America. When it was formed in 1963, following the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, Lake Powell was designed to hold a massive quantity of water—26,215,000 acre-feet—that flows down mostly in the form of melted snowpack from the Upper Colorado River Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico....

“Superbug Strikes in City” sounds like a horror movie title, but instead it is a headline printed in the October 26, 2007, edition of the New York Post. Twelve days earlier a 12-year-old Brooklyn boy, Omar Rivera, died after a wound he received on the basketball court became infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium that has become resistant to one of the most potent drug classes in the current antibiotic arsenal....

Earthquakes are notorious perils in California, but do you know how much damage they can do in the eastern U.S.? Our country turns out to vulnerable to many risky natural events: quakes and hurricanes, but also huge sinkholes and dust storms as well as rising seas, flooding rivers and wildfires. They cost lives and money. Identifying hazards like these and telling people how much risk the events pose at any given time is a focus of the U....

I’m standing on a catwalk in a giant cave crammed with industrial equipment, and I’m told that trillions of neutrinos are flying through every inch of my body each second. I reach out my arms as if to heighten the sensation, but of course, I can’t feel a thing. Nearly massless, traveling close to the speed of light, the ghostly particles traverse the empty space between my atoms without a trace....

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Jones v. Mississippi makes it easier for judges to sentence children to life in prison with no chance of parole. After 15 years of decisions that placed limits on the sentences given to juvenile offenders convicted of violent crimes, the Court reversed course in a profoundly antiscience decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The murderer in this case had just turned 15. This new ruling claims that the early teen years cast the die for how someone is likely to behave for the rest of their lives....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. What is storm surge? Of all the hazards that hurricanes bring, storm surge is the greatest threat to life and property along the coast. It can sweep homes off their foundations, flood riverside communities miles inland, and break up dunes and levees that normally protect coastal areas against storms. As a hurricane reaches the coast, it pushes a huge volume of ocean water ashore....

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazineWhen audiences saw dramatic scenes of people setting their tap water on fire in the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” was thrown into the spotlight. The technique, in which high-pressure fluids are pumped into shale formations to fracture the rock and force out natural gas, has been accused of releasing methane into well water (hence the flammable water), polluting groundwater with toxic chemicals and even causing earthquakes....

A blistering heat wave obliterated high temperature records in Oregon and Washington over the weekend, ratcheting up risks for deaths and fires, and underscoring the dangers of climate change. Portland, Oregon’s biggest city, hit a sweltering all-time high of 112 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday at its international airport, the National Weather Service said. That broke a record of 108 F set just a day earlier. Both days topped the previous record of 107 F, reached in 1981 and 1965....

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless have each introduced new “early upgrade” programs that allow wireless customers to trade in their smartphones as often as every six months. Are these plans really worth the cost? And which one offers the most value? I try to answer these questions in this Ask Maggie. As T-Mobile CEO John Legere said when he introduced his company’s new Jump program, “Two years is too long to be locked into a phone....

Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they’re so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time — it was the Bronze Age — humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps. The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge....