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Wormholes aren’t just for time travel or teleportation anymore. Some very real and ancient wormholes are now helping to trace the distribution of insect species and artwork. A biologist found himself in the unlikely world of centuries-old European woodblock print art. There he discovered that many of the small imperfections in the prints could be identified and traced back to specific species of bugs that had burrowed through the surface of the original woodblock before the print was made....

Hundreds of years ago explorers sailed across oceans and traversed uncharted continents to map Earth, and in the past half a century space probes have photographed most of our solar system. Yet as well as we have come to know our astronomical backyard, our image of the larger neighborhood—our Milky Way galaxy—is blurry. The reason is obvious: we cannot get outside it to take a peek. Imagine sending a spacecraft on a multimillion-year journey to go beyond our galaxy, look back and snap a picture: clearly impractical....

A girl and a man are sitting on a park bench. She’s staring into a book; he’s staring at her. After a while they start to talk and get into a friendly conversation. “Would you like to sit on my lap?” he asks softly. The stirrings of sexual excitement are faintly audible in his voice. Uncomfortable, moviegoers squirm in their seats. They are watching Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman, a 2004 movie about the life of a pedophile....

On June 13 an asteroid called 2007 XB10 with a diameter of 1.1 kilometers—and the potential to cause major global damage—will zip past Earth. As far as near-Earth objects go, it will pass, fortunately, pretty far, at 10.6 million kilometers, or 27.6 times the Earth-moon distance. Indeed, no giant asteroids appear poised to rewrite history any time soon. The bad news is that we can expect in the next 200 years a small space rock to burst in the atmosphere with enough force to devastate a small city....

Razza the rat nearly ended James Russell’s scientific career. Twelve years ago, as an ecology graduate student, Russell was releasing radio-collared rats on to small islands off the coast of New Zealand to study how the creatures take hold and become invasive. Despite his sworn assurances that released animals would be well monitored and quickly removed, one rat, Razza, evaded capture and swam to a nearby island. For 18 weeks, Russell hunted the animal....

Expectations are high for geneticist Eric Lander, who was sworn in on 2 June after a months-long confirmation process, as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). In a first for any US president, Joe Biden elevated the position of OSTP director to his cabinet, potentially granting Lander more access and influence than any science adviser before him. Lander has a decades-long reputation as a hard-charging and competitive leader....

Brain Drain: The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin Penguin, 2014 ($27.95) The subtitle of The Organized Mind is “Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.” If you are hoping this lengthy book (512 pages) will help you do that, think again. Instead of helping you focus, Levitin, a professor of psychology and music at McGill University, makes your head spin by rambling unevenly and inexplicably over the entire range of topics you would find in almost any introductory psychology text....

In the nearly five years since their first direct detection, gravitational waves have become one of the hottest topics in astronomy. With facilities such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), researchers have mostly used these ripples in spacetime to study the inner workings of merging black holes, but LIGO has also detected gravitational waves from other sorts of celestial crashes, such as the collisions of ultradense stellar remnants called neutron stars....

The Biden administration is preparing to reinstate California’s authority to set auto emissions rules that are more stringent than federal standards, taking a major step toward cutting transportation-related climate pollution and continuing to chip away at former President Trump’s environmental rollbacks. The waiver, granted decades ago because of California’s severe pollution problems, gave the Golden State the legal authority to surpass national fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards. But under Trump, EPA revoked California’s Clean Air Act waiver, citing a need for national uniformity....

President Biden’s EPA is expected to draft interim auto emissions standards based on an agreement last year between California and five car companies, according to sources following the matter. EPA is poised to unveil the interim standards and notify the auto industry by April 1. The development, which was first reported by The New York Times, signals that California is influencing the Biden administration’s climate and clean transportation policy in the near term....

The shift from hunting and gathering to farming altered human evolution—and that of our closest companions, dogs. Coprolites, or fossilized poop, are a “phenomenal” source of information on how diet influenced such changes, says University of Oxford archaeologist Greger Larson. “They’re snapshots of somebody’s gut.” A recent analysis of 13 Bronze Age canine coprolites reveals how shifts to a grain-based diet affected dogs’ gut microbes, which may have played a role in the animals’ domestication....

Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn’t crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel....

San Francisco, California Magnetic minerals in ancient Greenlandic rocks suggest that Earth’s magnetic field arose at least 3.7 billion years ago. The finding pushes back the time of the magnetic field’s birth to about 200 million years earlier than the commonly accepted estimate—around the time life first appeared on Earth. Scientists think that having a magnetic field makes Earth more hospitable to life. The field, which is generated by liquid iron sloshing about in the planet’s core, shields Earth from energetic particles flowing from the Sun....

In the spring of 1922 Conan Doyle visited Houdini in his New York City home, whereupon the magician set out to demonstrate that slate writing—a favorite method among mediums for receiving messages from the dead, who allegedly moved a piece of chalk across a slate—­could be done by perfectly prosaic means. Houdini had Conan Doyle hang a slate from anywhere in the room so that it was free to swing in space....

On February 24 Ukraine’s electric grid operator disconnected the country’s power system from the larger Russian-operated network to which it had always been linked. The long-planned disconnection was meant to be a 72-hour trial proving that Ukraine could operate on its own. The test was a requirement for eventually linking with the European grid, which Ukraine had been working toward since 2017. But four hours after the exercise started, Russia invaded....

Kelly Ramirez was distraught as she watched the US presidential election results come in on 9 November. The soil microbial ecologist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen started texting friends—all women scientists—back in the United States. They were appalled at the eventual winner, Republican Donald Trump, for what they saw as his cavalier attitude towards facts and discriminatory actions against groups such as Muslims, Latinos and women. Although few of the scientists had any experience with political activism, they felt an urge to respond to Trump’s victory....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How life came about from inanimate sets of chemicals is still a mystery. While we may never be certain which chemicals existed on prebiotic Earth, we can study the biomolecules we have today to give us clues about what happened three billion years ago. Now scientists have used a set of these biomolecules to show one way in which life might have started....

Much of the world’s climate fate may depend on a person you’ve never heard of. Louisa Terrell, director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, is tasked with shepherding President Biden’s bold policy promises through a divided Congress. And since the president has centered a significant chunk of his climate policy on a $2.2 trillion infrastructure package that requires congressional approval, Terrell faces enormous challenges. Republicans are unlikely to go along with Biden’s idea to use government spending to shift the economy away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy....

Private access to space took a giant leap forward on June 4 with a successful test launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, developed and built by SpaceX, a venture headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. The two-stage Falcon 9, which stands 48 meters tall, lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a dummy capsule that could soon deliver supplies to the International Space Station—and, one day, even astronauts to orbit. Hopes are especially high for SpaceX in light of President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget request, which calls for NASA to terminate its own line of Ares rockets and instead to contract with private operators....

The year is 2022, and for the fourth time the Navy was the last contingent to arrive at the scene of a humanitarian crisis in the Pacific Ocean. “This time it seems U.S. tardiness cost lives,” a news broadcaster says. The Navy was late, she explains, because of the 2018 directive on expeditionary energy consumption, which requires the Pentagon to prioritize engagements based on fuel requirements. The disaster in the Pacific wasn’t deemed critical enough to merit a fuel exemption....