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ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS American cartoonists of the 20th century was Rube Goldberg, who was widely known for his “Goldberg machines.” Each of these comical inventions depicted a complex set of “instructions” for completing what should have been a fairly simple everyday task. His Self-Operating Napkin, for example, required 13 sequential steps involving a parrot, a cigar lighter, a rocket and a sickle—along with various strings, springs and pendulums....

When news broke in March 2014 that Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 had gone missing, Jonathan Durgadoo watched in shock with the rest of us. The Boeing 777-200ER had departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, before unexpectedly turning west about halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam. An hour-and-a-half after take-off, the plane disappeared from radar over the Andaman Sea, southwest of Thailand. There were 239 people on board. Some 16 months later, a piece of debris from the aircraft—a hinged flap known as a flaperon that had broken away from the wing—was found on Réunion Island in the western Indian Ocean....

THERE WAS A TIME when soldiers went into battle in columns and rows. They would line up and march in orderly formation toward the enemy, armed with spears, bayonets or some other weapon of close combat. The enemy would do the same thing. One of these well-oiled formations would kill more soldiers than the other—and win the battle. Advances in firearms long ago made the marching formation obsolete. It just does not work with machine guns and guerilla warfare....

A growing number of migrants are forced from their homes each day by climate change, and President Biden signaled last week that he wants the United States and the world to pay more attention to the problem. His first step in that effort was the approval of an executive order Thursday that directs administration officials to undertake a six-month study of climate change’s impact on migration, including “options for protection and resettlement....

Moments of existential crisis can turn into opportunities for bold reform. World War II led to the creation of transformative institutions—the United Nations in 1945 and the World Health Organization in 1948. The birth of the WHO came the same year that the U.N. adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The COVID pandemic marks just such a moment of crisis. But instead of ushering in significant change, it has fractured global solidarity....

The summer solstice that falls this year on June 21 marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, sunlight-wise. Almost imperceptibly, however, Earth’s day–night cycle—one rotation on its axis—is growing longer year by year, and has been for most of the planet’s history. Forces from afar conspire to put the brakes on our spinning world—ocean tides generated by both the moon and sun’s gravity add 1.7 milliseconds to the length of a day each century, although that figure changes on geologic timescales....

Ellen Stofan, NASA’s former chief scientist, recently became the first woman to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. At NASA, Stofan supported commercial activity in low-Earth orbit, helped to develop a long-term plan to send humans to Mars and gave talks at schools around the world to encourage children—especially those in underrepresented groups—to pursue science careers. At the museum, she plans to further that commitment by overseeing a sweeping, multiyear upgrade meant to improve the experience for all of the museum’s seven to eight million annual guests....

Vaccines for malaria have never progressed very far. For the first time one has made its way to a late-stage trial in children at various sites in Africa, as described in this November 2010 feature article. If approved, it will be the only vaccine ever generally administered against a human parasite. Even if it is only partially effective, it could save the lives of millions. This trial is not the only research moving forward....

While I was training to become a family doctor, I learned the conventional wisdom about nicotine addiction. Physicians have long believed that people smoke primarily for pleasure and become psychologically dependent on that pleasure. Tolerance to the effects of nicotine prompts more frequent smoking; when the habit reaches a critical frequency—about five cigarettes per day—and nicotine is constantly present in the blood, physical dependence may begin, usually after thousands of cigarettes and years of smoking....

It’s hard to know what President-elect Donald J. Trump will do on scientific issues, since he has not gone into much detail on the stump. But before the election we and our partners at ScienceDebate.org asked his campaign for his positions on certain important science issues. Here are the relevant passages, which may offer clues on his policy directions. Innovation Science and engineering have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U....

My mother is a self-taught painter—one of her watercolors hangs framed in our living room. I, on the other hand, can barely draw a dog. My lack of skill in the visual arts never really bothered me until I had a child. Now, suddenly, the ability to sketch a chicken, horsey or princess on demand has become very important to my toddler (and therefore to me). In reality, the urge to be creative, for most of us, goes far beyond drawing for our children’s entertainment....

India’s first satellite dedicated to astronomy, ASTROSAT, blasted off into space on September 28 from the space port of Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal, equipped with five instruments to study astrophysical phenomena over a wide range of wavelengths simultaneously. An Indian-built Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) carrying the 1.5-tonne probe lifted off at 10:00 am India time and successfully placed it in a 650-kilometre orbit above Earth 22 minutes later, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) confirmed....

This past May, Harvard University (where I teach) issued a report on its relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was an admirably forthright mea culpa highlighting three areas of concern. The first was the contradiction of addressing sexual assault and harassment on campus while accepting money from a man who had promoted sexual abuse of minors. The second was the mockery made of academic standards when, after donating $200,000 to the psychology department, Epstein was appointed as a visiting fellow there despite a complete lack of appropriate academic qualifications....

Key Concepts Physics Gravity Potential energy Kinetic energy Friction Conservation of energy Introduction How much energy does a roller coaster need to go through a loop without getting stuck? Build your own marble roller coaster in this project and find out! Background Roller coasters rely on two types of energy to operate: gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy. Gravitational potential energy is the energy an object has stored because of its mass and its height off the ground....

For much of her life, Sparrow Rose Jones was the kind of late riser about whom other people roll their eyes, the kind who goes to bed at dawn and wakes in the midafternoon. As a kid growing up in Louisville, Ky., she had problems at school, in part because she is on the autism spectrum and struggled socially but also because she was always tired. At 16 she dropped out and resigned herself to dead-end night jobs at bars and fast-food joints....

BLACK HOLE BREAKOUT In “Escape from a Black Hole,” Steven B. Giddings gives us a fascinating update on developments in the black hole information crisis, the seeming paradox of quantum rules and general relativity indicating that black holes destroy information despite quantum mechanics saying that information cannot be destroyed. One thing puzzles me about his account. He explains that the three leading candidate solutions to the crisis all have the same thorny problem: they violate the principle of locality, which maintains that no influence can move across space faster than the speed of light....

After a hair-raising ride through the atmosphere, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) has landed safely on Martian soil with cheers all around. Now engineers are busy checking out the rover Curiosity’s condition while the mission’s science team takes a first look around the surface locale. In the months ahead (the prime mission is slated to last a few months shy of two years) scientists plan to drive Curiosity around its touchdown site in Gale Crater and then up the slope of Mount Sharp, which rises six kilometers from the basin floor....

The most popular method for monitoring depression is significantly flawed and needs replacement. So says R. Michael Bagby, clinical research director at the University of Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health. Although the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, developed in 1960, has long been a “gold standard” in psychiatric evaluation, Bagby says its shortcomings are well noted. Bagby was the lead researcher of a metastudy that analyzed 70 independent research papers on the Hamilton scale’s efficacy published since the last major review in 1979....

MUSEUMS/EXHIBITIONS The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso Our appearance and character seem to be immutable, fundamental aspects of ourselves. For centuries, artists strove toward capturing their subjects’ likenesses in the most lifelike portraits possible. During the course of the 20th century, however, the art of portraiture became heavily influenced by modernist, more emotionally expressive movements and by major historical events of the age. In this exhibit, drawings, paintings and sculptures by van Gogh, Matisse and Bacon, among others, reveal how they viewed and interpreted their family, friends and selves in the context of a rapidly modernizing world....

Climate change is the most severe global economic risk of 2016, the World Economic Forum said yesterday. The nonprofit economic analysis institution, set to convene next week in Davos, Switzerland, for its yearly meeting, has labeled climate change or related environmental phenomena—extreme weather, major natural catastrophes, mounting greenhouse gas levels, water scarcity, flooding, storms and cyclones—among the top five most likely and significant economic threats the world faced in each of its annual reports since 2011....