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Earth’s moon doesn’t have much of an atmosphere today. However, it may have had a more prominent atmosphere 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when volcanic eruptions spewed giant clouds of gas above the lunar surface, a new study has found. Today’s moon is covered in dead volcanoes and dark maria, or plains that consist of hardened lava. The lunar atmosphere is so thin it’s not even technically an atmosphere—instead, it’s considered an “exosphere,” with molecules that are gravitationally bound to the moon but are too sparse to behave like a gas....

The idea of using financial incentives in organ donation, such as paying kidney donors, has been subject to heated debate. Now, a new study shows that using this strategy to address the shortage of kidneys would be less costly and more effective than the current organ donation system, researchers say. In the study, researchers found that assuming a payment of $10,000 and an increase of kidneys available for transplantation by 5 percent, a strategy of paying living donors would save the health system $340 over the lifetime of each patient, compared with the current organ donation system....

SARS, Ebola and now SARS-CoV-2: all three of these highly infectious viruses have caused global panic since 2002—and all three of them jumped to humans from wild animals that live in dense tropical forests. Three quarters of the emerging pathogens that infect humans leaped from animals, many of them creatures in the forest habitats that we are slashing and burning to create land for crops, including biofuel plants, and for mining and housing....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In this week’s episode I’m going to be covering sleep technology. I was talking with my friend Ellen who is a nurse. She was telling me about a lamp that she uses which is designed to simulate sunrise. Ellen uses it because she often has crazy shift hours, which will require her to sometimes sleep all day and work at night or wake up super early!...

A precise measurement of the Hubble constant, the value that describes how fast the universe is expanding, has eluded scientists for decades. Pinning this number down would put a long-simmering debate among astronomers to rest and bring us one step closer to understanding the evolution and fate of the universe. Now researchers have used recent detections of gravitational waves to present a proof of concept for an entirely new method of determining the constant....

By Lisa Rapaport NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The U.S. death rate for all causes is continuing to decline, aided by drops in fatalities from leading causes like heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and accidents, new research finds. Between 1969 and 2013, the death rate for all causes declined 43% from 1,279/100,000 to 730/100,000, according to the study published in JAMA October 27. Five of the six leading causes of death declined during the study period....

On the Tibetan Plateau in eastern China, 4 million solar panels silently soak up the sun as part of the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park. It’s the largest solar farm in the world, spreading over 10 square miles of the high desert landscape. The complex sprung into existence in 2013 and has been rapidly expanding ever since. Satellite imagery curated by NASA’s Earth Observatory chronicles its growth from a cluster of panels to a sprawling solar farm that looks like a giant, angular thought bubble as of January 2017....

By Bill Berkrot (Reuters) - It could take years to learn how long men infected with Zika are capable of sexually transmitting the virus, which can cause crippling birth defects and other serious neurological disorders. In the meantime, health officials have warned couples to refrain from unprotected sex for six months after a male partner is infected. The extraordinary recommendation, based on a single report of Zika surviving 62 days in semen, could affect millions....

Over the past decade optics researchers have shown mirrors are not necessary to see objects outside the line of sight. That success, though, required exotic lasers firing pulses lasting less than a trillionth of a second in duration and high-performance sensors able to detect single photons. Now a team at Boston University has shown an algorithm and an ordinary digital camera can also look around corners without mirrors—and do so without such costly and complex equipment....

The plot of the famous musical My Fair Lady is based on the idea that the way we speak determines our position in society. The main character, Eliza Doolittle, becomes the unwitting target of a bet between two phonetics scholars, one of whom (Henry Higgins) brags that he can convince strangers that Doolittle is a duchess by training her to speak like one. In reality, she is the poor daughter of a dustman who speaks with a thick Cockney accent....

Tonight the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awarded the second annual Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics to Ian Agol of the University of California, Berkeley, for his work in geometric topology, which completed a revolution in the field that began more than 30 years ago. With an award of $3 million apiece in the categories of life sciences, physics and mathematics, the Breakthrough Prizes are the world’s richest science prizes. Agol’s field, topology, is the branch of mathematics that pretends all shapes are made of putty or stretchy rubber....

A few days ago, a friend gushed about the amazing curative properties of turmeric. If you’ve ever eaten Indian cuisine, you’ve most likely eaten turmeric. It’s a yellowish-brown spice that comes from (not surprisingly) the turmeric plant - more precisely from the rhizome of the turmeric plant, the thick root-like portion of the stem that remains underground. But did you know that there are scientists all over the world researching the curative powers of turmeric?...

Top climate scientists say their field can improve its transparency. A group of researchers presented their findings on reproducibility in climate science to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine yesterday as part of a monthslong examination of scientific transparency. The awareness of issues around reproducing scientific data has been driven by the political nature of climate science, said Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Florida and expert in sea-level rise....

DALLAS—For years, Exxon Mobil Corp. has held its annual meeting here in a cavernous symphony hall downtown, where shareholders today will discuss the company’s future and cast their ballots on more than a dozen proposals. But while the location hasn’t changed, the mood outside Exxon has shifted dramatically—particularly on global warming. The company is grappling with low oil prices and investigations from attorneys general into allegations that it downplayed the economic threat of climate change—and today will face a raft of resolutions demanding that it acknowledge and tackle rising temperatures....

No fundamental obstacle prevents us from developing an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Other troubles of human nature, such as violence, greed and intolerance, have a bewildering variety of daunting causes and uncertainties. But Alzheimer’s, at its core, is a problem of cell biology whose solution should be well within our reach. There is a fairly good chance that the scientific community might already have an unrecognized treatment stored away in a laboratory freezer among numerous vials of chemicals....

Much of the Middle East already swelters through what are some of the hottest summers on the planet, but, occasionally, a combination of sky-high temperatures and incredible humidity can take conditions to almost unreal levels. In late July this year, for example, a major heat wave combined with astronomically high humidity to send the heat index in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran—near the northern coast of the Persian Gulf—to a mind-bending 163°F. Such intense levels of heat and humidity tax the abilities of even healthy human bodies to cope and can be deadly for the elderly and infirm, as other recent major heat waves, such as the ones that swept across Europe in 2003 or Russia in 2010, showed....

Over a choppy phone call to the remote Nicobar archipelago, I told Indigenous leader Ayesha Majid that my friends in Delhi were dropping like flies. A horrific second wave of COVID-19 was ravaging India; crematoria were running out of wood and graveyards were running out of space. “Brother, how did this happen?” she asked in disbelief. Earlier this year, COVID resurged in India with a vengeance. For a week in May, the country contributed over half of the daily COVID cases reported globally....

Clay Shields, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, explains. The details of how this occurs depend on the operating system (OS) the computer is running, but the basics tend to be similar. A computer disk stores information in a series of chunks known as sectors, each typically 512 bytes long. Each sector has a number that serves as its address on the disk. A file on the disk is split across a number of sectors....

Since I wrote my column about Google Duplex in Scientific American, Google has cautiously moved ahead with testing this controversial technology. As you may recall, what Duplex does is to make reservations at restaurants and hair salons—by placing a phone call to their human receptionists. It perfectly impersonates a human voice, complete with “um”s, hesitations, and realistic inflections. When CEO Sundar Pichai first played a recording of a Duplex call at the company’s developer conference, the human receptionist had no idea she was speaking with an AI assistant....

Hunger is a part of daily life. Before each meal, it beckons us to the table and reminds us that our existence depends on putting food in our mouths. Hunger is so universal that a complete trilogy of young adult books and movie spinoffs take their name from the sensation. Hunger stems from a lack of food, but it can represent the yearning for something else entirely. Metaphorically speaking, we can say we hunger for knowledge, for recognition, for new experiences (or freedom from the Capitol)....