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The production of nuclear spacecraft fuel, currently a dwindling resource, could go into overdrive in the early 2020s. A public-private partnership led by a company called Technical Solutions Management (TSM) aims to start generating usable amounts of plutonium-238 (Pu-238) — the material that powers deep-space explorers such as NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and New Horizons Pluto probe — by 2022 or so. This newly unveiled project would complement, not supplant, the Pu-238 production efforts currently underway at the U....

Glaciologists will soon have a treasure trove of data for exploring how Antarctica’s underbelly has changed over nearly half a century. An international team of researchers has scanned and digitized 2 million records from pioneering aeroplane radar expeditions that criss-crossed the frozen continent in the 1960s and 1970s. “These are the flights that invented this way of doing glaciology,” says Dustin Schroeder, a radar engineer at Stanford University in California who is leading the new project....

Paleontologists working in the same area of Germany that yielded Archaeopteryx have discovered a new small theropod dinosaur. The nearly complete specimen–dubbed Juravenator starki–is one of just a few known fossils representing this group, which ultimately gave rise to modern birds. Indeed, it joins just two partial skeletons of another genus as the only European examples of the tiny carnivores. Unlike the other two specimens, however, it lacks any sign of feathers, complicating what researchers thought they knew about feather evolution....

Key concepts Slopes Angles Forces Gravity Friction Introduction Have you ever seen a video of a landslide? Landslides are powerful geologic events that happen suddenly and cause devastation in areas with unstable hills, slopes and cliff sides. Each year in the U.S. landslides can cause great damage to buildings and property, in addition to changing the surrounding habitats. In this science activity you will model landslides using a clipboard and pennies, and investigate how friction and the angle of a hill’s slope affects potential landslides....

During summer 2017 a large swath of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—normally a riot of electric oranges, reds and other colors—turned ghostly pale. Unusually warm water temperatures, partly due to global warming, had caused the corals to expel from their tissues the symbiotic algae that provide them with food and give them their brilliant hues. It was the second mass-bleaching event to hit the reef in as many years. Together, the back-to-back events hit two thirds of the reef....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In previous articles I’ve given mystery symptoms and shown how doctors make the diagnosis. But something needs to happen before the doctor can make a diagnosis: the patient has to come in. Deciding when to worry about symptoms is one of the hardest decisions. One one side, you don’t want to feel foolish coming in for something small; on the other side, you don’t want sit at home with a serious problem....

Of all of our organs, our brains and hearts get the most attention. But the liver once held top billing, preeminent over the heart and mind as the seat of emotion and even the soul. As its name implies, we need our liver to live—not only because it works hard as a detox unit but also because it quietly processes components our brains need to thrive. The Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research community is turning its attention to this liver–brain connection....

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration has created a task force to advance the use of cap-and-trade regulatory schemes for fisheries. The “Catch Share Task Force,” announced yesterday, includes 16 NOAA advisers and fisheries experts to shape a system for setting strict catch limits and distributing total catch shares to commercial fishers, usually based on their historical catch. Fishers can then buy and sell their shares. The 2006 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act authorized catch shares for the first time and added some safeguards for the environment and commercial fishers in the program....

Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?...

The European Union unveiled a €750 billion ($825 billion) recovery package for the coronavirus pandemic yesterday that includes plans to address another global crisis: climate change. Notable is that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen views the proposal as a vehicle to steer the continent toward carbon neutrality by 2050. That’s a critical deadline if the world is to avoid the worst effects of global warming. “We must ensure that the transition to a climate-neutral economy leaves no one behind,” von der Leyen told reporters after the plan was released....

People can work more when their ailments are treated. And HIV is no exception. Adults who tested positive for HIV in Uganda but had a less severe infection were able to work more hours per week, and their kids were more likely to be in school, according to findings presented July 26 at the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. If this correlation holds up in further research, more widespread testing and earlier treatment could mean greater earning potential for individuals—and, especially for some countries in Africa where HIV infection rates top 15 percent of the adult population, a better economic outlook for entire regions....

Enormous lakes atop the Greenland ice sheet have a habit of suddenly vanishing: One moment they’re there, and the next they’re rapidly draining through holes in the ice. Some scientists believe these events can increase the rate at which ice is being lost into the ocean. That’s a big concern for Greenland, where melt rates are currently at the fastest they’ve been in 12,000 years—and still speeding up. Until recently, scientists believed these drainage events happen almost entirely during the summer, when the ice is melting and the lakes are growing....

Many years ago, when I was still in high school, I was extremely fond of chewing gum, especially during class hours. However, sooner or later the chewing gum would either lose its taste or I would become bored with it. After a while, I would start looking around, wondering how I could get rid of the gum nice and quietly. As you might have guessed by now, yes, I was that kid sticking his used gum underneath the desk....

Protesters marching with “No CO2” signs against the prospect of stored gas beneath their homes. Town meetings filled with angry residents complaining about lower property values because of carbon dioxide sequestered deep underground. This is the horror scenario for developers of carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, which envisions grabbing carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and pumping the gas into saline aquifers and other deep geologic formations for permanent storage....

Ice skating, ice fishing, snowmobiling: These iconic winter activities are a way of life for many cold-climate communities. But in some regions, they may be on thin ice—literally. New research suggests that winter drownings increase with rising winter temperatures. The warmer the air, the more likely it is that someone will fall through an unstable sheet of ice. That means drownings could increase in cold countries as the climate continues to heat up, the study’s authors warn....

Much has been made about the “bromance” between President Obama and Narendra Modi, but in some ways, the Indian prime minister’s political leanings are more in line with the Republican-led Congress he addressed Wednesday than with the Democratic president. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, combine religious conservatism with support for free-market policies over a concentration of power in India’s massive bureaucracy. The party has a history of hostility to Muslims that would put Donald Trump to shame....

Two weird, mammal-like reptiles that sort of looked like scaly rats, each smaller than a loaf of bread, roamed ancient Brazil about 235 million years ago, likely dining on insects the predators snagged with their pointy teeth, a new study finds. The analysis of two newfound species of cynodont, a group that gave rise to all living mammals, sheds light on how mammals developed from these late Triassic creatures, the researchers said....

John Holdren is no stranger to the spotlight. Over his long career in science, Holdren—a physicist by training—has worked on controversial issues such as climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. But for nearly eight years, he has enjoyed an even higher profile, as US President Barack Obama’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). With Obama due to leave the White House in January 2017, Holdren—now the longest-serving US science adviser—recently sat down with Nature for a wide-ranging chat....

As every comic-book fan knows, Superman was born on the planet Krypton, which orbited a red star. Scientists are now learning that the Superman legend may contain a kernel of truth: the best places to find life in our galaxy could be on planets that circle the small but common stars known as red dwarfs. Last June astronomers reported the discovery of Krypton’s real-life counterpart, a planet orbiting a red dwarf called Gliese 876, about 15 light-years from our sun....

In transparent plastic bubbles 20 feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, an experimental garden grows. The strawberries, basil, beans and tomatoes within these air-filled biospheres thrive in their submerged homes. Surrounding water provides the constant temperature and humidity elusive at most terrestrial farms, and freshwater trickles down the spheres’ interiors after the seawater below evaporates and then condenses. These marine greenhouses, located off the coast of Italy, represent a foray into underwater farming by Ocean Reef Group, a diving and scuba gear company....