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Many major discoveries in astronomy began with an unexplained signal: pulsars, quasars and the cosmic microwave background are just three out of many examples. When astronomers recently discovered x-rays with no obvious origin, it sparked an exciting hypothesis. Maybe this is a sign of dark matter, the invisible substance making up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. If so, it hints that the identity of the particles is different than the prevailing models predict....

On Monday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines on how fully vaccinated people can gather with others. The recommendations state that those who have completed a vaccine series or have gotten a single-shot vaccine more than two weeks prior can visit with one another indoors without masks or six-foot social distancing. And the CDC says that such individuals can similarly visit unvaccinated people from a single household if everyone in that household is at low risk of developing a severe case of COVID-19....

Christopher French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, explains: Although conspiracy beliefs can occasionally be based on a rational analysis of the evidence, most of the time they are not. As a species, one of our greatest strengths is our ability to find meaningful patterns in the world around us and to make causal inferences. We sometimes, however, see patterns and causal connections that are not there, especially when we feel that events are beyond our control....

Zoos are like fancy hotels, albeit without the fluffy pillows and individually packaged soaps, or so says Daniel Frynta, an ecologist at Charles University in Prague. Only the “richest” animals get to check in. And if an endangered species gets a room, he says, it might just survive. Frynta defines a rich animal as one that we humans find appealing. And, he says, we have very specific taste: It’s got to be big....

A machine that maintains livers for transplant at body temperature, instead of in a cold solution on ice, helps to improve tissue quality and reduce the discard rate of organs that are suitable for transplantation. In the first randomized clinical trial of its kind, researchers tested the technique head-to-head against cold storage, with the results published in Nature on 18 April1. The method could prolong survival for organ recipients and reduce the death toll among the tens of thousands of patients globally who need donor livers today....

Maybe it is a good thing we do not remember our births. Difficult ones can be traumatic and a major cause of brain damage. But researchers now suggest that a maternal hormone may protect our brains during birth, providing a natural safeguard against a problematic delivery. A recent study of pregnant rats, led by Yehezkel Ben-Ari of the Mediterranean Institute of Neurobiology in Marseille, France, examined the effects of the hormone oxytocin....

If you’ve ever asked a young child to cut a pie for several people, the child will likely cut a piece for himself or herself and then pass you the knife. Perpendicular cuts across the length of the pie come naturally to older children for the sake of overall efficiency. Young children may find this to be too altruistic. This puzzle is an attempt to help you recapture that inner child....

The Internet is indeed a wonder of our age. Why, just last night, while watching the DVD of Inherit the Wind (it’s Darwin’s bicentennial birthday week as I write), I was able to simultaskically discover that Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, who play Matthew and Sarah Brady, were married in real life and often performed together in movies and on stage. (Inherit the Wind, by the way, is actually a bombastically bad movie....

SAN FRANCISCO—Tomás Gutiérrez isn’t a brain scientist. But each morning, he mixes up a new chemical cocktail that he hopes will sharpen his focus and boost his intellect. He adds a dash of butter for flavor, stirs it into a cup of coffee, and downs it. A 31-year-old entrepreneur, Gutiérrez has thrown himself into the emerging movement of body hacking—or, more precisely, brain hacking. He’s a connoisseur of “nootropics,” a broad category that includes pharmaceutical drugs, dietary supplements, and do-it-yourself concoctions, all of them meant to turn the brain up a notch....

Srini Pillay, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, responds: Visualization and action are intimately connected, involving the motor cortex. Thinking about our body doing something—raising an arm or walking forward—activates the motor cortex directly. Imagining allows us to remember and mentally rehearse our intended movements. In fact, visualizing movement changes how our brain networks are organized, creating more connections among different regions....

It took two major expeditions charting the solar eclipse of 1919 to verify Albert Einstein’s weird prediction about gravity — that it distorts the path of light waves around stars and other astronomical bodies, distorting objects in the background. Now, researchers have created the first precise analogue of that effect on a microchip. Any large mass distorts the geometry of space around it, for instance making parallel light rays diverge or converge....

By Barbara Lewis BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is almost on track to reach its goal of improving energy savings by a fifth by 2020 and may consider a significantly higher target for the next decade, according to a draft European Commission document seen by Reuters. Energy efficiency has risen up the agenda in Europe as member states seek ways to reduce dependency on imported fossil fuels in the context of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, which has led to the cut-off of Russian gas to Ukraine....

“Brain fog” is not a formal medical descriptor. But it aptly describes an inability to think clearly that can turn up in multiple sclerosis, cancer or chronic fatigue. Recently, the condition has grabbed headlines because of reports that it afflicts those recovering from COVID-19. COVID’s brain-related symptoms go beyond mere mental fuzziness. They range across a spectrum that encompasses headaches, anxiety, depression, hallucinations and vivid dreams, not to mention well-known smell and taste anomalies....

By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - Premature deaths from air pollution will continue to rise to 2040 unless changes are made to the way the world uses and produces energy, the International Energy Agency said on Monday. Around 6.5 million deaths globally are attributed each year to poor air quality inside and outside, making it the world’s fourth-largest threat to human health, behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking. Harmful pollutants such as particulate matter - which can contain acids, metals, soil and dust particles - sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, are responsible for the most widespread effects of air pollution....

To make efficient hydrogen energy technology a reality—from generating hydrogen through electrolysis to next-generation chemical fuel cells—scientists need to know exactly how individual hydrogen atoms move through water. A neutral water molecule comprises two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom, the entire structure bending to give the molecule a partially positive side and a partially negative side, like a magnet. If you could zoom in on a glass of water, you would see trillions of such molecules, along with some excess individual hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons (in other words, just protons)....

Because nature does not present the world in the form we would like, we must reorder it. To create this new order, we need information about what that order is supposed to look like, knowledge about how to build it and energy to get it into shape. Many technological revolutions of the past have focused on the energy part of this equation—waterpower, the steam engine, the electric motor and the internal-combustion engine, to name a few....

All the fundamental forces of the universe are known to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, save one: gravity. Finding a way to fit gravity into quantum mechanics would bring scientists a giant leap closer to a “theory of everything” that could entirely explain the workings of the cosmos from first principles. A crucial first step in this quest to know whether gravity is quantum is to detect the long-postulated elementary particle of gravity, the graviton....

Walk into Kalypso Wellness Centers in San Antonio, Texas, and you might be treated with one of five “proprietary blends” of ketamine. They’re not cheap—$495 per infusion—and not covered by insurance, but the company offers a “monthly” membership program to cut costs and advertises discounts for members of the military and first responders. Kalypso promotes ketamine, long used as an anesthetic during surgery and more recently as a club drug, as a treatment for more than two dozen conditions, including depression, chronic pain, and migraines....

When a virus that no one has ever seen before spreads across the globe in mere months, science must race to find answers to some very hard questions: How fast will COVID-19 proliferate? How many will get sick? Can our health systems withstand the onslaught of this new illness? Will there be a vaccine anytime soon? As we wait for those answers, many of us sit and watch and read the news—at a social distance, it is hoped—without knowing exactly what to do or what the near future will hold....

During a 2016 solar eclipse, a team led by researchers at Sweden’s Lund University projected a beam of infrared laser light into the darkened Tanzanian sky to measure how insects responded to the unusual twilight. Afterward, the group continued monitoring for another five nights and four days. The laser-based system used, known as lidar, detected more than 300,000 insects during this time. Many of these bugs were the world’s deadliest: the mosquito, one genus of which can carry the parasite that causes half a million malaria deaths every year....