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The largest full moon of 2013, a so-called “supermoon,” will light up the night sky this weekend, but there’s more to this lunar delight than meets the eye. On Sunday, June 23, at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT), the moon will arrive at perigee — the point in its orbit its orbit bringing it closest to Earth), a distance of 221,824 miles (356,991 kilometers). Now the moon typically reaches perigee once each month (and on some occasions twice), with their respective distances to Earth varying by 3 percent....

If you’ve ever dreamed of building a rocket and launching it skyward, dream no more! Maybe just dream a little smaller. This summer, Scientific American Custom Media and our partners at Bayer are hosting the BUILD-YOUR-OWN ALKA-ROCKET CONTEST for backyard craft powered by water and effervescent tablets. The winner will become a legend overnight—and walk away with a $2,000 prize. So dust off your sketchbook, pick up some effervescent tablets and get busy building....

We’re all familiar with the feeling—waking up from a restless night only to realize that this will be a very long, sleepy day. Recent research reveals that honeybees are also sensitive to sleep deprivation, and although a cup of coffee may give you a morning buzz, the bees aren’t so lucky. Neurobiologists at the Free University of Berlin have found that sleepy bees fail to remember lessons learned the day before, a finding that could help scientists discover the neural processes involved in sleep and memory formation....

MADRID, Feb 12 (Reuters) - Three people were injured in an explosion at a chemical plant in northern Spain on Thursday and authorities advised residents of several small towns near Barcelona to stay indoors as a large toxic cloud spread over the area. The regional government of Catalonia said in a statement that the blast appeared to have been caused by two chemicals coming into contact during delivery to the plant, owned by Spanish company Simar....

With the Ebola outbreak in west Africa stubbornly hanging on, officials have brokered an agreement to ensure that a vaccine is available to fight future occurrences. On 20 January, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, announced that it has paid US$5 million to Merck, the manufacturer of the first Ebola vaccine shown to protect against the virus in a human clinical trial. The deal marks the first time that the public-health organization has committed to purchase a vaccine before it has been licensed....

If you read Arabic and want a degree in jihad, click on www.al-farouq.com/vb/. If you’re lucky–the site disappears and reappears–you will see a post that belongs to the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF). It announces the “Al Qaeda University of Jihad Studies.” According to Ahmad al-Wathiq Billah, the GIMF “Deputy General Emir,” students “pass through faculties devoted to the cause of the caliphate through morale boosting and bombings,” and the site offers specialization in “electronic, media, spiritual and financial jihad....

James Carpenter just needed some fake Moon dirt. Carpenter, a lunar-exploration expert at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, works on a drill designed to hunt for buried ice on the Moon. His team recently ordered half a tonne of powdery material to replicate the lunar surface from a commercial supplier in the United States. But what showed up was not what the team was expecting. “The physical properties were visibly different,” says Carpenter....

Robots can capture a child’s imagination like no other tool by creating a fun, physical learning process. With robots, kids learn programming via interactive play by moving a robot in various sequences and using intuitive, visual programming on a computer screen. The children also learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) by watching and interacting with robots that demonstrate the practical results of the day’s lesson. “Kids recognize when they are learning something themselves—robots give them that,” says Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, a research organization that specializes in educational technology....

If Earth were as small as a marble, the solar system out to Neptune would cover an area the size of San Francisco — and that’s just in two dimensions. That point is driven home by a new video called “To Scale: The Solar System,” which shows filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, along with a few of their friends, building a size-accurate model of our cosmic backyard in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert....

On Sunday, ahead of a key UN climate summit in New York, the World Meteorological Organisation published new data showing 2014-19 to be the warmest five-year period on record. But the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said recent action by some countries and businesses, as well as the stunning rise of the youth climate movement, gave him hope that international goals to avoid catastrophic global heating could be met. “I see a new momentum,” Guterres said....

A lot will be riding on the European Space Agency’s (ESA’S) Euclid spacecraft when it blasts off in a rocket from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, in September 2022—far more than its 1.2-meter telescope and two sophisticated wide-field-imaging instruments. Paired with complementary measurements from two other next-generation facilities—the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—the data Euclid gathers during its six-year mission in a heliocentric orbit some 1....

From a small hill in the Puglia region of southern Italy, plant pathologist Donato Boscia gestures towards a landscape of the dullest brown—dead and dying olive trees as far as the eye can see. Six months earlier, he says, that canopy was mostly green, with just a few tell-tale brown spots marking the relentless advance of a vicious pathogen, Xylella fastidiosa, that was previously unknown in Europe. Almost three years ago, Boscia, who heads the Bari unit of the CNR Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection (IPSP), and other colleagues identified a subspecies of the bacterial pathogen,Xylella fastidiosa pauca, as the cause of olive quick decline syndrome (OQDS) in Puglia....

By Melissa Gaskill of Nature NewsIn April 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank. With the pipe that had once channeled oil 1,400 meters up from the sea floor now broken, some 4.9 million barrels of oil, and an equivalent volume of gas, spewed out over three months, according to the US government. BP added around 9 million liters of chemical dispersants to the oil, roughly a third of it at depth....

(Credit:Primate Labs)The iPad Air is 80 percent faster than the fourth-generation iPad, say new benchmark tests.Running the new iPad through the paces via Geekbench 3 tests, Primate Labs found that the tablet comes close to reaching Apple’s promise of doubling the speed of the iPad 4.The iPad Air is powered by an A7 processor, just like the iPhone 5S. But the new iPad runs at 1.4GHz – which is 100MHz faster than the 5S, Primate Labs founder John Poole said on Wednesday....

In 1974, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two men, Anthony Hewish and Sir Martin Ryle, for the discovery of pulsars, the dead remnants of massive stars left behind after the massive supernova explosions that ended their lives, a kind of star which had previously only been theorized to exist. However, the bulk of the work that led to the discovery from seven years earlier had actually been done by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish’s graduate student and one of the few female astronomers at the time....

Ancient fossils now reveal that the deep sea may be the origin of many lineages of sea creatures found closer to the surface, such as a number of sea stars, sea urchins and snails, researchers say. These new findings suggest the deep sea has played a much greater role in producing and preserving diversity in marine life than once thought, scientists added. The deep sea was long thought to be a lifeless desert....

Key concepts Acoustics Vibration Sound waves Hearing Introduction How well do you know your eardrums? You probably know that your eardrum is an essential part of your ear, allowing you to hear the world around you. But why do we call it a drum? It turns out that calling it a drum is a very accurate description of what your eardrum looks like—and what it does inside your ear. To understand how your eardrum works, imagine using a drumstick to bang on a real drum, and then touching the drum with your hand....

In 1776 Italian physicist Alessandro Volta discovered something bubbling up among the reeds at the marshy end of a mountain lake. It turned out to be methane, a potent greenhouse gas produced by microbes living in the lake’s sediments. According to the latest estimates, lakes and reservoirs account for 10 to 20 percent of global methane emissions, and scientists expect their contribution to rise because of climate change and nutrient runoff....

Intelligent people live longer—the correlation is as strong as that between smoking and premature death. But the reason is not fully understood. Beyond simply making wiser choices in life, these people also may have biology working in their favor. Now research in honeybees offers evidence that learning ability is indeed linked with a general capacity to withstand one of the rigors of aging—namely, oxidative stress. Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, has proposed the term “system integrity” for the possible biological link between intelligence and long life: in his conception, a well-wired system not only performs better on mental tests but is less susceptible to environmental onslaughts....

For years, much of the concern about the melting of Greenland’s massive ice sheet has been focused on the massive retreat of glaciers in the island’s southeast and west, fueled by climate change. Those on its colder, drier northeast corner were thought to be stable. But a new study detailed in the journal Science shows that two of those glaciers are showing worrying changes, and that one has been retreating at an accelerating rate in recent years as it faces a dual attack by warm air from above and warm water from below....