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When night arrives on Mars, plunging temperatures can lead to weather much worse than researchers previously thought was possible on the Red Planet. Snowstorms can spring up with whipping winds that could create problems for missions to the planet, according to a new study. The analysis upends researchers’ previous assumptions that Martian snow falls slowly and gently from the sky. Getting a handle on the planet’s weather is important for future exploratory missions....

(Credit:Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)Microsoft and Google have both gotten in some April Fools’ Day zingers against each other.The two competitors often trade insults about each other’s respective search engines, online office suites, and other products. But April Fools’ Day inspired them to create a couple of full-blown Web pages to make fun of each other.Microsoft laid its prank at its Bing search engine.Surf to Bing and type Google in the search field....

In 2009, when Qatar placed its bid to host the men’s World Cup, many wondered how a country so hot—summer temperatures can exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit—could host a soccer tournament. To quell those concerns, Qatar built air-conditioned outdoor stadiums. This move could inspire other sporting venues to use such technology to protect the health of athletes and fans. But this is a flawed solution that is not environmentally sustainable, experts say, despite efforts to power AC systems with green energy sources....

Ever since U.S. health authorities began cracking down on opioid prescriptions about five years ago, one vulnerable group has suffered serious collateral damage: the approximately 18 million Americans who have been taking opioids to manage their chronic pain. Pain specialists report that desperate patients are showing up in their offices, after being told by their regular physician, pharmacy or insurer that they can no longer receive the drugs or must shift to lower doses, no matter how severe their condition....

EXCERPT Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells. Random House, 2010 Around 10,000 years ago humans invented agriculture, shedding the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for one in which they created their own food. This innovation, argues anthropologist and geneticist Spencer Wells, set into motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to our present era of overpopulation, infectious disease and anxiety—a mismatch between culture and biology. Below he describes modern-day stresses and their impact on our still fundamentally hunter-gatherer minds....

Scientists have peered into the heart of Mars for the first time. NASA’s InSight spacecraft, sitting on the Martian surface with the aim of seeing deep inside the planet, has revealed the size of Mars’s core by listening to seismic energy ringing through the planet’s interior. The measurement suggests that the radius of the Martian core is 1,810 to 1,860 kilometres, roughly half that of Earth’s. That’s larger than some previous estimates, meaning the core is less dense than had been predicted....

About 60 to 70 percent of a person’s risk for schizophrenia depends on their genes. Most of us have some of the schizophrenia-associated genetic variants—single-letter changes in the DNA of genes scattered across our genome—and the more we have, the greater our risk. At the same time, scientists have known that complications during pregnancy, including viral infections in the mother, increase the fetus’s risk for developing schizophrenia by two-fold, but scientists have been unsure why....

Amazement awaits us at every corner. —James Broughton, American poet and filmmaker (1913–1999) To people, the world looks richly complete in all details, like a film. The information transmitted by the retina to the brain is constrained by physical limitations, however, such as the relatively small number of nerve fibers in the optic nerve. One way our visual system overcomes these limitations—thus presenting us with the perception of a fully realized world—is by disregarding redundant features in objects and scenes, thereby extracting, emphasizing and processing only the unique components that are critical to describing an object....

If you were listening to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press briefing Tuesday (Oct. 30) as New York City began to tally the damage from Hurricane Sandy, you may have been surprised by what you heard. “There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement. That is a factual statement,” Cuomo said. " Anyone who says there’s not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think, is denying reality....

By Roberta Kwok of Nature magazineResearchers have equipped yeast cells with semi-synthetic chromosomes. It is the first such achievement in eukaryotic, or complex-celled, organisms, and marks a step towards large-scale genome engineering in these cells.The team publishes its results today in Nature1. The study suggests that the engineered yeast strains are as healthy as natural yeast.“It appears to be fantastically stable,” says Andy Ellington, a biochemist at The University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the work....

Physicists have a problem with time. Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward. Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes....

Bottled water sales are booming worldwide. It is now the most popular drink in the U.S., with consumption growing every year. It is portable, safe, and easily stored. It is also arguably the most unnecessary consumer product — a drink available in most places from the tap for free, packaged and shipped at great cost to the environment, and sold at exorbitant prices. Understanding the drivers of bottled water consumption is a first step to making the industry more sustainable....

How did you get the idea of combining botany with craft cocktails? AHMED: Our integration of botany and cocktails started when we were all graduate students through the New York Botanical Garden with fellowships and grants that emphasized broader impacts of science for society. As ethnobotanists who have carried out fieldwork in diverse communities around the world, we have encountered plants with fascinating attributes and cultural histories whose aromas and tastes captivate us....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign-up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. The role that symptom-free (“asymptomatic”) people infected with the new coronavirus play in spreading it grew more clear with a study published 8/6/20 and covered the same day by Apoorva Mandavilli at The New York Times. The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, “offers more definitive proof [than past studies did] that people without symptoms carry just as much virus in their nose, throat, and lungs as those with symptoms, and for almost as long,” Mandavilli reports....

Distraction can be a good thing for learning under the right circumstances—namely when you will be tested or have to perform under similarly distracting contexts. Psychologists know that the things we learn in one context might not be remembered in another. Famously, investigators once showed that words learned while scuba diving are easier to recall underwater than on dry land. Now Brown University psychologists suggest something similar happens with distraction. The researchers trained 48 people to hit a computer-screen target using a wonky touch pad—tracing up, for example, might move the cursor diagonally—and later evaluated them on their ability to quickly hit the mark....

When the 10-meter-high tsunami wave that followed the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan receded, it took with it some 23 million metric tons of material, including pieces of buildings, wood, plastics and more. Whereas most of the wreckage sank to the ocean floor, some of it is still floating toward other Pacific nations. The “debris field”—the visible wave of material—has dissipated, leaving the junk invisible to satellites. So scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Hawaii at Manoa (U....

Up to a quarter of the permafrost that lies just under the ground surface in Alaska could thaw by the end of the century, releasing long-trapped carbon that could make its way into the atmosphere and exacerbate global warming, a new study finds. The study, detailed in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, maps where that near-surface permafrost lies across Alaska in more detail than previous efforts. That detail could help determine where to focus future work and what areas are at risk of other effects of permafrost melt, such as changes to local ecosystems and threats to infrastructure, the study’s authors say....

A new imaging technique might one day help physicians peer into human tissue and behind bones, let mechanics inspect moving machinery such as airplane turbines for tiny defects, or enable automated vehicles to see through dense fog or around blind corners. A study detailed in Nature Communications shows how the process, called synthetic wavelength holography, can capture detailed and nearly instant snapshots of objects hidden from view. Light scatters when it bounces around a corner or travels through a cloudy material, says Atul Ingle, an electrical engineer at Portland State University who was not involved in the study....

Yellowstone National Park’s Old Faithful mystifies and delights tourists with its recurrent eruptions. But because of its popularity, it is heavily protected: the government limits access to curious scientists and restricts experiments on its plumbing. At least 80 smaller but equally percussive geysers also burst forth in Chile’s Atacama Desert, offering an analogous opportunity to probe the earth’s inner workings. Geologists laden with temperature and pressure sensors, GoPro cameras and a host of other gadgets recently observed one such geyser, nicknamed El Jefe, over the course of five days and more than 3,500 eruptions—one every 132 seconds....

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill added roughly 800 million liters of hydrocarbons to the Gulf of Mexico. One quarter of that has been burned, captured or skimmed, according to U.S. government estimates. That leaves the rest for trillions of microbes to feast on—a petroleum cornucopia that first became available April 20 when the oil platform exploded and the spill started. If the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, are to be believed, those microbes have made quick work of the spill, consuming as much as 50 percent of the remaining oil already....