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Developers of a new gel inspired by sea urchins and Venus flytraps say the material—which straightens silicon columns at the touch of moisture and leaves them limp as it dries—may one day be used to make water-repellant clothes and microscopic plumbing systems. One of the big challenges in turning nano- or micro-scale objects into useful devices is getting them to switch between states, such as bright and dark for communications or open and shut for releasing a chemical into the body....

There are many tangled causes for World War I, fought from 1914 to 1918. Historians cite the alliance system, imperialism, nationalism, and the social shifts caused by modernity and industrialization. Rival nations raced to build more efficient and effective weapons and ways to control sea, sky and land. Countries also raced to develop the military systems to wield these weapons and industrial capacity to supply them. There is something of a chess game in watching the buildup of Germany’s zeppelin fleet in an attempt to gain an advantage over Britain’s battleship fleet, or seeing French aircraft industry as it was built up to gain an advantage over the German land war capability....

A wide variety of E. coli bacteria in China have developed resistance to a key antibiotic of last resort, a new study has revealed, a worrying development in the rise of so-called superbugs. A second study released Friday, like the first published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, found the superbug is still uncommon in Chinese hospitals—though not a rare as experts might like. The gene known as mcr-1—which has the capacity to move from one bacterium to another—was found in about 1 percent of E....

Even when it is inscrutable, math is beautiful. Photographer Jessica Wynne set out to capture this appeal when she began photographing mathematicians’ chalkboards around the world in 2018. “I’ve always been interested in entering into worlds outside my realm of knowledge,” Wynne says. Without comprehending what the math on the chalkboards represented, she was able to appreciate it on a purely aesthetic level. “It’s a similar feeling as when I’m looking at an abstract painting....

Grab your solar eclipse glasses or protected astronomical equipment, because Mercury is marching across the sun as we speak. The closest planet to the sun began its transit—an apparent passage across the sun from the perspective of Earth—at 7:35 a.m. EST (1235 GMT) and will continue its journey for 5.5 hours. It will be visible in the U.S.and many other parts of the world. Be sure to check this event out, as it will be the last time until 2032 that Mercury transits the sun....

Our genetic closet holds skeletons. The bones of long-dead genes–known as pseudogenes–litter our chromosomes. But like other fossils, they illuminate the evolutionary history of today’s more familiar forms, and emerging evidence indicates that a few of these DNA dinosaurs may not be quite so dead after all. Signs of activity among pseudogenes are another reminder that although the project to sequence the human genome (the complete set of genetic information in the nuclei of our cells) was officially finished, scientists are still just beginning to unravel its complexities....

Perhaps it’s natural, given the scale of these massive Egyptian icons of stone, that archaeologists have long focused on the construction methods and engineering used to create the Giza pyramids. Now we are at last learning that behind the heavenward movement of the looming tombs, there is an equally remarkable rise: that of an intricate and far-flung social network. New discoveries are revealing the real secrets of success for the pharaohs: government, labor and trade infrastructures that not only got the pyramids built but also set the stage for centuries of Egyptian prosperity and shaped the growth of civilization....

We’ll have to wait until this weekend to see Virgin Orbit take another crack at reaching space. The company is now targeting Sunday (Jan. 17) for Launch Demo 2, its second attempt to reach orbit with its air-launched LauncherOne rocket. (The booster didn’t make it on its first try, which occurred in May 2020.) If all goes according to plan, Virgin Orbit’s carrier plane, Cosmic Girl, will lift off from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port on Sunday during a four-hour window that opens at 1 p....

If you’ve ever shopped for milk, you’ve no doubt noticed what our questioner has: While regular milk expires within about a week or sooner, organic milk lasts much longer—as long as a month. So what is it about organic milk that makes it stay fresh so long? Actually, it turns out that it has nothing to do with the milk being organic. All “organic” means is that the farm the milk comes from does not use antibiotics to fight infections in cows or hormones to stimulate more milk production....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Human beings are born pretty helpless, with a lot of developing to do. And just as you must learn such skills as how to walk, so must your immune system learn to defend against infections. As time passes, your immune system matures through different stages, much the way you advanced from crawling to standing, walking and running....

Down’s syndrome (DS) is an incurable, heritable disorder affecting an estimated 400,000 people in the U.S. It is characterized by impaired cognitive ability and abnormal physical growth. Whereas scientists have long known that DS is caused by inheriting an extra copy of all or part of chromosome 21, the underlying cause of the brain defects common in Down’s patients has not been fully gleaned. Now, a collaborative team of scientists working with a mouse model of DS has discovered that just two genes are responsible for the majority of the brain abnormalities present in their animals....

Before fulfilling its audacious dream of interstellar flight, Breakthrough Starshot—the private effort funded by billionaire Yuri Milner to conduct high-speed robotic voyages to the stars within a generation—must first find a destination. The project’s primary target is the triple star system Alpha Centauri, our nearest interstellar neighbor at just over four light-years away. Of its three stars, only the red dwarf Proxima Centauri is known to have a planet, an Earth-mass world in a star-hugging orbit where liquid water—and therefore life as we know it—could exist....

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Scientific American’s Take.” On March 28, 2008, some of the editors of Scientific American watched a screening of Expelled at our offices and had a discussion with the associate producer* of the film, Mark Mathis. This is the entire recording of the discussion, uncut. The first voice you hear is John Rennie, the editor in chief of Scientific American....

For more than a decade researchers have been trying to supercharge human defense systems against cancer with the help of a vaccine. These injections are not designed to prevent cancer from starting. Instead they provide a patient’s immune system with intel on what the enemy—cancer cells—looks like. Ordinarily, cancerous cells do not look different enough from normal cells to trigger an immune system response, but we have figured out ways to highlight and target some of the proteins that are unique to these malignancies....

Bowerbirds love discarded plastic. The males use colorful pieces to woo mates in an elaborate courtyard outside their nests. New research shows that another animal is putting our plastic waste to good use: two species of city-living bee have started building bits of plastic into their nests. The bees that J. Scott MacIvor, an ecologist at York University, studies aren’t social and don’t build hives. They construct small nests in plant stems, tree holes and fence posts....

By Ayesha Rascoe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday threw out an oil industry challenge to the Obama administration’s 2013 biofuel mandate, ruling that the government has “wide latitude” to decide whether to modify renewable fuel use targets, and by how much. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected arguments from refiners that the Environmental Protection Agency had not thoroughly considered how renewable fuel credits are used to satisfy federal targets....

When it comes to learning about emissions trading, China has had a leg up. The world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases has spent 15 years scouting the globe to learn from the mistakes of other nations and find the best ways to build a trading system of its own, which could become the world’s largest. One of China’s earliest mentors was Dan Dudek, an agricultural economist and vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) who, early in his career, got into an argument with its president, Fred Krupp, over whether China might be a big piece of the puzzle the group was exploring: Was there a way to use economics, rather than politics and regulations, to shift the world’s businesses away from polluting the environment toward protecting it and to reward low-cost innovations that do that?...

Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed Hillary Clinton to take a position on taxing carbon last night, saying the world is on a “suicide course” that can’t be corrected without a massive response to climate change similar to America’s mobilization during World War II. “We have an enemy out there. And that enemy is going to cause drought and floods and extreme weather disturbances,” Sanders said during the ninth Democratic debate, held in New York City....

By Matt FordArchaeologists are used to gathering data by scratching in the dirt. But when Richard Bradley set out to write a new prehistory of Britain in 2004, he unearthed his most important finds while wearing sandals and a sweater rather than work boots and a hard hat.Bradley is one of a growing number of academics in the United Kingdom who are doing their digging in the masses of unpublished “grey literature” generated when commercial archaeologists are brought in to excavate before any sort of construction....

A decades-long push to make Guinea-worm disease the first parasitic infection to be wiped out is close to victory. But a mysterious epidemic of the parasite in dogs threatens to foil the eradication effort. “If we’re going to be aggressive and achieve this, we have to eliminate the infection in dogs,” says David Molyneaux, a parasitologist at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK. The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, is leading the global campaign to eradicate Guinea worm....