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If Planet Nine really exists, astronomers have a pretty decent chance of spotting it. On Wednesday (Jan. 20), scientists announced that a planet about 10 times more massive than Earth likely lurks in the distant outer solar system, orbiting perhaps 600 times farther from the sun than Earth does on average. The evidence for the existence of this “Planet Nine” is indirect at the moment; computer models suggest a big, undiscovered world has shaped the strange orbits of multiple objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune....

Dear EarthTalk: Are there any conservation efforts focused on animal species endemic to islands likely to be submerged by rising sea levels? —H. Wyeth, Anahola, Hawaii Islands are indeed likely to be the areas hardest hit by our warming climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of leading climate scientists from around the world convened by the United Nations to assess the ongoing risk of global warming, predicts a global average sea level rise of between 3....

Neutrons shouldn’t be all that mysterious. Found inside every atomic nucleus, they may seem downright mundane—but they have long confounded physicists who try to measure how long these particles can live outside of atoms. For more than 10 years researchers have tried two types of experiments that have yielded conflicting results. Scientists have struggled to explain the discrepancy, but a new proposal suggests the culprit may be one of the biggest mysteries of all: dark matter....

When getting vaccinated against covid-19, there’s no sense being picky. You should take the first authorized vaccine that’s offered, experts say. The newest covid vaccine on the horizon, from Johnson & Johnson, is probably a little less effective at preventing sickness than the two shots already being administered around the U.S., from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. On Saturday, the Food and Drug Administration authorized the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after reporting it showed about 66% effectiveness at preventing covid illness in a 45,000-person trial....

By Alice Lighton of Nature magazineShortly after the Second World War, the Swedish government conducted a vast social experiment to decide whether to implement educational reform. An examination of data from people who took part in the study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revealed that those lucky enough to have experienced the reformed system have been more likely than their contemporaries to live a long life....

Extroverted gorillas in captivity outlive their shy brethren, a new study of these great apes in North American zoos and sanctuaries finds. Using methods adapted from studying human personality, keepers, volunteers, researchers and other caretakers gauged 298 individual gorillas’ temperaments. These gorillas were followed over 18 years and their life spans recorded. The results revealed the the more sociable, active, playful and curious the gorilla, the longer it was likely to live....

Honeybees have been dying in record numbers in the U.S. for at least the past two years. Experts attribute the mass deaths to a catchall condition known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), although both a cure and the culprit remain elusive. Despite as much as a 35 percent loss of bees per year, we remain almost entirely dependent on what until recently was a self-renewing annual population of billions of honeybees to pollinate over 130 kinds of fruit and nut crops....

CONSCIOUS POINT Christof Koch’s article on “How to Make a Consciousness Meter” discusses a technique purporting to deduce whether severely brain-injured patients are conscious by sending magnetic pulses to the brain while measuring its electrical activity and then creating a mathematical measure of the response called the perturbational complexity index (PCI). This article is problematic on several levels. Koch interprets the PCI data in one study as showing that some unresponsive brain-damaged patients have something akin to consciousness because they have a PCI value above a threshold that the researchers had established for conscious subjects....

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of women’s rights and one of the Supreme Court’s most liberal justices, has died. She was 87. Ginsburg, who had been the court’s eldest justice, had suffered from several health problems in recent years, including a recent recurrence of cancer in her liver (Greenwire, July 17). She died “surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer,’ the Supreme Court said in statement released today....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineNewspapers in the United Kingdom have jumped on the news that patients will soon be able to purchase ‘intelligent pills’ containing sensors to monitor their medication use. Nature looks at what these pills can do.What is the latest news?Proteus Biomedical, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., announced on January 13 that it would be launching a “digital health product” in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the pharmacy chain Lloydspharmacy....

WASHINGTON — Republican senators are promising that a new health care plan circulating on Capitol Hill will give states wide flexibility to set up an insurance system as robust or as limited as they like. States that want to cut ties with Obamacare will have that authority; states that want to preserve Obamacare can do so, supporters say. But experts argue that, given the funding structure proposed in the new plan from Sens....

Since the World Wide Web blossomed in the mid-1990s, it has exploded to more than 15 billion pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life. Today more and more people’s jobs depend on the Web. Media, banking and health care are being revolutionized by it. And governments are even considering how to run their countries with it. Little appreciated, however, is the fact that the Web is more than the sum of its pages....

Michael A. Lombardi, a metrologist in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., takes the case. In today’s world, the most widely used numeral system is decimal (base 10), a system that probably originated because it made it easy for humans to count using their fingers. The civilizations that first divided the day into smaller parts, however, used different numeral systems, specifically duodecimal (base 12) and sexagesimal (base 60)....

Subject 046M, for male, was seated nervously across from me at the table, his hands clasped tightly together in his lap. He appeared to have caught an incurable case of the squirms. I resisted the urge to laugh, and leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. “Today, we’re going to play a game with Mr. Moo” —I produced an inviting plush cow from behind my back. “Can you say hi to Mr. Moo?”...

In a vault kept at −18 °C in Fort Collins, Colorado, more than 5 million seeds now lie frozen in time—destined to wait for up to 50 years until evolutionary scientists earn permission to experiment with them. Unlike most seed banks, which aim to protect biological diversity, Project Baseline is designed to enable precise, controlled studies of how plants are evolving in response to climate change and environmental degradation. Taken from around 250 locations across the continental United States and stored at a US Department of Agriculture facility, the seeds represent some 60 species....

“Like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song—who strains a string to a new peg with ease, making the pliant sheep-gut fast at either end—so with his virtuoso ease Odysseus strung his mighty bow. Quickly his right hand plucked the string to test its pitch and under his touch it sang out clear and sharp as a swallow’s cry.” As Homer so dramatically noted nearly three millennia ago, archers must possess both muscle and skill, but bow technology has changed dramatically since Odysseus’s triumphant return to Ithaca....

On Monday (Feb. 27), SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced that the company plans to launch two paying customers on a weeklong trip around the moon before the end of 2018. Astronauts first saw the moon’s far side way back in 1968, but the antiquity of that achievement shouldn’t fool anyone into thinking that SpaceX’s proposed mission will be easy, said Wayne Hale, a former manager of NASA’s space shuttle program....

U.S. health regulators said a genetically engineered mosquito being used in the fight against Zika will not have a significant impact on the environment, possibly paving the way for the technique to be used in the country. The self-limiting strain of the Aedes aegypti mosquito was developed by Oxitec, the U.K.-subsidiary of U.S. synthetic biology company Intrexon Corp. The male mosquitoes are modified so their offspring will die before reaching adulthood and being able to reproduce....

Robots with emotions are a staple of science fiction, and a holy grail for AI researchers. But machines with another kind of feeling–a sense of touch–might be a more attainable goal for the near future. To that end, the results of a new study represent significant progress. Scientists have developed a pliable artificial skin that can sense pressure and temperature. Last year Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo and colleagues announced that they had developed an electronic artificial skin, or E-skin, that could detect pressure....

Scientists can now take snapshots of where and how thousands of genes are expressed in intact tissue samples, ranging from a slice of a human brain to the embryo of a fly. The technique, reported today in Science, can turn a microscope slide into a tool for creating data-rich, three-dimensional maps of how cells interact with one another — a key to understanding the origins of diseases such as cancer. The methodology also has broader applications, enabling researchers to create, for instance, unique molecular ‘barcodes’ to trace connections between cells in the brain, a stated goal of the US National Institutes of Health’s Human Connectome Project....