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By James Regan SYDNEY (Reuters) - The United Nations on Wednesday said Australia was making progress to preserve the Great Barrier Reef, a key tourist attraction that environmentalists say faces threats from industrial and agricultural development. The World Heritage Committee of U.N. agency UNESCO, meeting in Doha this week, deferred until 2015 a decision on whether to place the 300,000-sq-km reef on its list of sites in danger. “We welcome Australia’s progress in managing the reef,” panel director Kishore Rao said in a statement....

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie Orbit, 2014 (($16)) This follow-up to the Hugo Award–winning novel Ancillary Justice tells the story of Breq, a soldier who once controlled many bodies, and even an entire starship, through artificial intelligence but is now left stranded in a single human frame. Breq has achieved a measure of vengeance for the act that stripped her of her bodies and is now forging a new path for herself in an empire on the brink of a galaxy-spanning civil war....

Police in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China, have been collecting DNA samples from citizens and are now ramping up their capacity to analyze that genetic cache, according to evidence compiled by activists and details gathered by Nature. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported last month that Xinjiang authorities intend to accelerate efforts to gather blood samples from the region’s large population of Muslim Uighur people. China’s government has cracked down on Xinjiang’s separatist movement in recent years, so the prospect of a DNA database there has stoked fears that authorities could use it as a political weapon....

For the first time in history, a court yesterday ordered a private company, rather than a government, to curb its planet-warming pollution. Royal Dutch Shell PLC must slash its greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030 from 2019 levels, The Hague District Court ruled in a decision that could reverberate around the world. “This is a turning point in history,” Roger Cox, a lawyer for the nonprofit Friends of the Earth Netherlands, said in a statement after the decision....

Go outside on a dark, clear night, far away from the glare of city lights, and look up. You will see the glowing band of the Milky Way arching dramatically overhead. It has now been four centuries since Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope toward this awesome sight and noted that the “milk” is actually countless individual stars, too faint to be separated by the naked eye. It took another three centuries for astronomers to convince themselves that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe....

On the night of my 32nd birthday, my husband and I enjoyed a delicious dinner while on vacation in Orvieto, Italy. To complement my pasta, I enjoyed a single glass of red wine, my first since learning I was pregnant four months earlier. Even now my indulgence inspires periodic pangs of guilt: Did I stunt my son’s potential by sipping that Sangiovese? Nobody questions the notion that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful....

Playful, mischievous and much-beloved, Mac was just two years old when he became the latest Asian elephant to succumb to the herpes virus at the Houston Zoo last month. For animal welfare advocates, every early death is another piece of evidence that these 8,000-pound (3,625-kilogram) proboscideans don’t belong behind bars, where they can become obese, diseased and stressed out. A new study published today in Science provides the strongest evidence to date that zoo life is harmful to an elephant’s health....

When a sharp chest pain woke me up around 3 A.M., I had the obvious question: Was this truly panic-worthy? This had never happened to me before, and I’m in fairly good health—but I had lost one parent to a sudden, early death that may have been a cardiac event (we never learned for sure). I may have the word “doctor” in my title, but I’m not that kind of doctor....

Birds exposed to artificial lights at night nest up to a month earlier than those dwelling away from humanity’s glow, according to a study published recently in Nature. But, perhaps counterintuitively, this disruption may actually benefit some birds—in part by helping them adjust as global warming alters the rhythms of the natural world. The new paper offers a continent-wide, multispecies look at the impact of light and noise pollution on birds’ reproductive success, with the hope of giving land managers more concrete information to make conservation decisions....

Key Concepts Chemistry Biology Reaction Catalyst Surface tension Introduction Create a giant foaming reaction, and use science to wow your friends with this classic activity. With just a few ingredients you can make something that looks like foamy toothpaste being squeezed from a tube—but so big that it looks almost fit for an elephant! Background You might be familiar with hydrogen peroxide as an antiseptic used to clean cuts and scrapes, which it does by killing bacteria....

When you move, sense, speak, or do just about anything, your brain generates a specific corresponding pattern of electrical activity. For decades, scientists have run these impulses through machines to better understand brain diseases and help people with disabilities. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) under development can restore movement in some who have paralysis, and researchers are working on BCIs to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders. The next frontier in BCIs, however, may be something more like writing a text message....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Climate change is raising flood risks in neighborhoods across the U.S. much faster than many people realize. Over the next three decades, the cost of flood damage is on pace to rise 26% due to climate change alone, an analysis of our new flood risk maps shows. That’s only part of the risk. Despite recent devastating floods, people are still building in high-risk areas....

Imagine you are an expectant parent. Just a couple of months into your pregnancy, you opt for an easy genetic screen. A result comes back: the fetus is likely missing a chunk of DNA at site 11.2 on the long arm of the 22nd chromosome—a variant associated with serious medical and developmental issues. You go online and learn that at least 1 in 4,000 people have this “22q11.2” microdeletion, but the true figure may be much higher....

Secret’s out: U.S. Air Force stealth flies into the sunset The F-117A Nighthawk—the original stealth fighter aircraft, which made its first test flight in 1981—may have been developed in secrecy, but the U.S. Air Force gave the radar-defying combat craft a very public send-off this week at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A ceremony held to bid adieu to the aging fighter concluded with a flashy flyby of one of the retiring jets, its giant underbelly painted red, white and blue....

After years of warnings that the Internet’s predominant addressing system would run out of these numbers, the bottom of the barrel has finally been scraped. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced Thursday that it has delegated the final 300 million addresses available through version 4 of the Internet protocol (IPv4) to the five Regional Internet Registries. These RIRs will over the next few years assign these remaining addresses to new Internet-connected computers, smart phones, televisions and other devices worldwide...

Albert Einstein’s twin paradox is one of the most famous thought experiments in physics. It postulates that if you send one of two twins on a return trip to a star at near light speed, they will be younger than their identical sibling when they return home. The age difference is a consequence of something called time dilation, which is described by Einstein’s special theory of relativity: the faster you travel, the slower time appears to pass....

The article “Race in a Bottle,” by Jonathan Kahn, portrays the development of BiDil, the first “ethnic” drug. The controversy surrounding the medicine relates not only to scientific reasons for classifying the heart failure drug as a medicine for African-Americans but to possible commercial motivations for seeking this designation. NitroMed, the company that makes BiDil, and the Association of Black Cardiologists, a group attempting to eliminate disparities in cardiovascular disease for African-Americans, have taken issue with one aspect of Kahn’s critique—the use of race as a biological variable for assessing a drug’s effectiveness....

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,” as Carl Sagan once said, “you must first invent the universe.” And if you wish to make a moon from scratch, according to new research, you must first create planets with rings (after inventing the universe, of course). Earth’s moon may have emerged from a long-vanished ring system, much like the rings still encircling Saturn – and the same goes for many of the satellites orbiting the other planets....

This story was updated at 10:45 a.m. ET. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A privately built unmanned spacecraft launched for NASA by the commercial spaceflight company SpaceX blasted into orbit Friday (March 1), but has experienced some sort of malfunction after separating from its rocket, the company says. The robotic Dragon space capsule launched into orbit atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket in what appeared to be a smooth liftoff from a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 10:10 a....

As winter gives way to spring, farmers across the U.S. are ramping up for the growing season—hiring workers, purchasing materials and taking orders. But measures to rein in the COVID-19 pandemic may derail some of those efforts, experts say. “Everybody is scrambling to figure out what to do,” says Gail Feenstra, deputy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program at the University of California, Davis, who studies food systems and supply chains....