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NASA space junk experts have refined the forecast for the anticipated death plunge of a giant satellite, with the U.S. space agency now predicting the 6 1/2-ton climate probe will plummet to Earth around Sept. 23, a day earlier than previously reported. The defunct bus-size spacecraft is NASA’s Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), which launched in 1991 and was shut down in 2005 after completing its mission. The satellite was expected to fall to Earth sometime this year, with experts initially pegging a weeks-long window between late September and early October, then narrowing it to the last week of this month....

I recently got a note from Diane, who was upset with me for supporting the consumption of dairy products. “No human should be consuming milk after they’ve been weaned from their mother’s breast,” she wrote. “It is completely unnatural. Cow’s milk is intended only for baby cows—and it’s cruel to take the milk away from the calves for whom it is clearly intended. Need calcium? Milk, which may contribute to osteoporosis and numerous other health issues, is the last place you should be getting it....

Instagram, the phone app that lets you take pictures, apply artsy filters and then share them, is huge. So huge that in 2012 Facebook bought it for $1 billion. Then, late last year, Instagram did something massively stupid: it changed its terms of use, the document of rules for using the service. The new terms included this gem: “You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos … without any compensation to you....

On July 4, 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to study the behavior of chimpanzees. Through her accounts of the drama-filled lives of Fifi, David Greybeard and other chimps, she showed that these apes share many traits previously thought to be unique to humans. These days the 76-year-old Goodall works to save endangered chimps and their habitats. Scientific American recently reached Goodall by phone in Hong Kong, where she was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the start of her work in Gombe....

Es imperativo que los gobiernos, las empresas, la sociedad civil y las organizaciones internacionales apoyen a los pueblos indígenas en la urgente restauración de los ecosistemas. Creemos que, a pesar de la responsabilidad del Norte global en la responsabilidad de esta catástrofe sin precedentes, son los pueblos indígenas de la cuenca Amazónica los que liderarán las soluciones más duraderas y audaces a la crisis actual. Esta alianza es única porque es una iniciativa de organizaciones indígenas, dirigida por indígenas (27 de los 29 miembros de la junta directiva son representantes de organizaciones indígenas) y es uno de los mayores programas de conservación de bosques en pie del mundo, con un plan de transición socio-ecológica que tiene acciones tanto a nivel territorial como global....

What is found in a good conversation? It is certainly correct to say words—the more engagingly put, the better. But conversation also includes “eyes, smiles, the silences between the words,” as the Swedish author Annika Thor wrote. It is when those elements hum along together that we feel most deeply engaged with, and most connected to, our conversational partner, as if we are in sync with them. Like good conversationalists, neuroscientists at Dartmouth College have taken that idea and carried it to new places....

Octopuses are well-known masters of camouflage and skillful escape artists, but they aren’t exactly famous for their social skills. Scientists have long thought that this many-armed denizen of the deep was strictly solitary and didn’t interact much with its fellows, reserving its color-shifting ability for intimidating predators — or hiding from them. But a new study reveals that both male and female octopuses frequently communicate with each other in challenging displays that include posturing and changing color....

Lasers have become indispensable for even the most humdrum tasks, from highlighting Powerpoint presentations to burning music CDs. Lasers are also essential for high-speed communications along optical fiber, which has vastly greater bandwidth and much less crosstalk than electrical transmissions in copper wire. Recently scientists developed lasers made from silicon, an important first step in the development of high-speed chips that will fully integrate light-speed communications with the processing power of silicon electronics....

A seemingly endless variety of food was sprawled over several tables at the home of Judith L. Baxter and her husband, mathematician Stephen D. Smith, in Oak Park, Ill., on a cool Friday evening in September 2011. Canapés, homemade meatballs, cheese plates and grilled shrimp on skewers crowded against pastries, pâtés, olives, salmon with dill sprigs and feta wrapped in eggplant. Dessert choices included—but were not limited to—a lemon mascarpone cake and an African pumpkin cake....

When Barry Webb is crawling around on the forest floor with a flashlight, passersby understandably give him strange looks. After all, the U.K.-based photographer is looking for something others might struggle to see: slime mold growths that only stand around a tenth of an inch high. For scientists, classifying slime molds has proved to be as slippery as their namesake. Though they have been labeled plants, fungi and even animals in the past, the protists coat wet and frequently decaying surfaces such as dead trees, leaf litter and even dung, often as single cells....

Person of interest is an overweight man of approximately 70 years of age with orange hair who was reported to be repeatedly riding up and down the escalators in a gaudy midtown Manhattan skyscraper. When approached by local authorities, subject claimed to be a prominent billionaire, the host of a wildly successful television game show and the president of the United States. Given the grandiose nature of these claims, subject was detained for observation....

In summer of 2020, in the throes of the global COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed more than 5,000 adults in the U.S. and found that symptoms of anxiety and depression had increased threefold and fourfold, respectively, compared with 2019. Meanwhile mental health hotlines were reporting surging call rates. And no wonder. The world was grappling with the devastation, fear and uncertainty of a once-in-a-century threat....

The night sky is a field of stars. In every direction, stars bright and dim fill the horizon to brimming. Some seem to form distinct patterns, which we recognize as constellations. Yet as beguiling as those patterns may be, most of them are no more than projections of the human mind. The vast majority of stars, in our own galaxy and in others, have no true physical connection to one another....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday submitted to the United Nations its vision for a new international climate agreement that is “built to last,” outlining what it thinks should be the main elements of a climate deal to be agreed upon in Paris in 2015. The U.S. delegation was the first to share its ideas for what the 2015 climate deal could look like, and made clear that a future framework should not use the “bifurcated approach” of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which placed different burdens on developed and developing countries to reduce pollution....

By Christopher D’AngeloLIHUE, Hawaii (Reuters) - The governing body on the Hawaiian island of Kauai voted on Saturday to override their mayor’s veto of a bill that seeks to reign in widespread pesticide use and the testing of new genetically modified crops.The Kauai County Council’s 5-2 vote means agricultural companies will be unable to plant crops inside buffer zones created around schools, homes and hospitals. New limits will be placed on pesticide use and companies must disclose where they will plant test crops....

BEIJING (Reuters) - Authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Jingjiang have suspended water supplies after quality abnormalities were detected, state media said on Friday, with hundreds of thousands of people affected in China’s latest water pollution scare. Officials in Jingjiang, a city on the Yangtze River in Jiangsu province, did not offer any further details about why the water was shut off, the official Xinhua news agency said. “The government has started an emergency response plan,” Xinhua said, citing a brief government microblog post....

Remember when we got a few years off between operating systems? We got a little break between, say, Windows 95 and 98 or between Mac OS 8 and 9. But in 2011 Apple started releasing new versions of its Mac and iPhone operating systems every single year. Unfortunately, when you pile on new features that often, sooner or later the OS suffers. It gets harder to learn, harder to use and sometimes buggier....

By M. Mitchell Waldrop of Nature magazineIt wasn’t quite the lynching that Henry Markram had expected. But the barrage of skeptical comments from his fellow neuroscientists–“It’s crap,” said one–definitely made the day feel like a tribunal.Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modeling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists’ first real chance to get answers about Markram’s controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP)–an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

BERLIN—For a text that may rewrite the history of mathematics, it looks rather sloppy. The brown clay tablet, which could fit in the palm of your hand, is scrawled with hasty, highly abbreviated cuneiform characters. And, according to science historian Mathieu Ossendrijver, it proves that the ancient Babylonians used a complex geometrical model that looks like a rudimentary form of integral calculus to calculate the path of Jupiter. Scientists previously thought this mathematical technique was invented in medieval Europe....