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Male pregnancy. A long, tube-shaped mouth with no teeth. A body covered with bony plates. These are the odd, quintessential features of seahorses, but why? Scientists dove into this question on Wednesday by publishing the first complete sequence of a seahorse genome. “We have discovered an array of changes in the genome, which helps to explain why the seahorse looks the way it does,” said Byrappa Venkatesh, a study co-author and molecular biologist with the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore....

Musk’s company, SpaceX, successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station during an orbital launch Monday night (Dec. 21). The historic accomplishment brings SpaceX a big step closer to developing fully and rapidly reusable rockets — technology that Musk says is vital to the colonization of Mars. “It makes all the difference in the world — absolutely fundamental,” Musk said in a teleconference after Monday night’s launch and landing....

In 1975 psychiatrist Robert Stoller of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote something bizarre in his textbook on sex and gender. He asserted that people who were assumed to be boys when they were born but whose gender identity or expression did not match that assumption “often have pretty faces, with fine hair, lovely complexions, graceful movements, and—especially—big, piercing, liquid eyes.” Based on this observation, he suggested a theoretical model in which transgender girls become transgender because they are especially cute....

Every evening, after twilight gives way to dark, hordes of marine creatures—from tiny zooplankton to hulking sharks—rise from the deep to spend the night near the surface. They revel in the upper waters, feeding and mating, before retreating back down before dawn. Known as the diel vertical migration, this mass movement is often heralded as the largest synchronous migration on Earth. As the planet spins on its axis and patches of ocean turn toward or away from the sun’s light, it happens in continual flux around the world....

Some wild mice are diligent parents, building elaborate grassy nests to keep their young safe and warm. Others are less attentive and construct shoddier homes for their offspring. Researchers recently identified a gene that regulates nest building—one of only a few genes known to affect parental behavior in mammals, including humans. In a study published in Nature, geneticist Andrés Bendesky of Harvard University and his colleagues worked with two kinds of mice that are genetically similar but differ in their pairing behavior: a subspecies of oldfield mice (Peromyscus polionotus subgriseus) form monogamous pairs, whereas deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) mate with multiple partners....

By Shereen Lehman (Reuters Health) – - Parents managing their preschoolers’ food allergies should also be alert to the need for their kids to have chances to solve other kinds of problems, suggests a new study. “I think the biggest take home message is to just be careful that you don’t let the real need to supervise and keep your child safe interfere with letting your child develop independence,” said Linda Dahlquist, who led the research....

“The problems of eating and drinking under weightless conditions in space, long a topic of speculation among science-fiction writers, are now under investigation in a flying laboratory. Preliminary results indicate that space travelers will drink from plastic squeeze bottles and that space cooks will specialize in semiliquid preparations resembling baby food. According to a report in the Journal of Aviation Medicine, almost all the volunteers found that drinking from an open container was a frustrating and exceedingly messy process....

Bacteria, viruses and fungi have been primarily cast as the villains in the battle for better human health. But a growing community of researchers is sounding the warning that many of these microscopic guests are really ancient allies. Having evolved along with the human species, most of the miniscule beasties that live in and on us are actually helping to keep us healthy, just as our well-being promotes theirs. In fact, some researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates....

By Scott HaggettCALGARY (Reuters) - Canada on Wednesday renewed its attack on the European Union’s plan to classify Canadian tar sands oil as particularly dirty and released a study questioning the data behind the controversial measure.Canada has the world’s third-largest proven reserves of crude, much of which is locked in the tar sands of Alberta. Extracting the oil requires more energy than conventional production, a fact regularly highlighted by environmental campaigners....

On June 18 China’s pioneering city of Shenzhen is set to notch up another first. From that day 635 companies in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone—which in 1979 became the vanguard for China’s capitalist revolution—will start using carbon markets to help meet greenhouse gas emissions targets. This year, alongside the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing as well as the regions of Guangdong and Hubei, Shenzhen is imposing greenhouse gas targets on hundreds of companies, ranging from power plants to airport operators....

Lucy is one of the star attractions on the Evolution Stairs in the central hall at Moesgaard Museum in Denmark. The new attraction had just opened, boosting annual visitor numbers from tens of thousands at the museum to a whopping 500,000 in the first year. Great care had been taken in giving the scientific reconstructions individual expressions, making them stand out as persons, not just distant evolutionary relatives. And there she was—dark and furry, standing one meter tall, with a confident air....

In 1939, Albert Einstein published a paper in Annals of Mathematics, arguing that black holes do not exist in nature. A quarter of a century later, Maarten Schmidt discovered quasars as powerful sources of light at cosmological distances. These enigmatic point-like sources were explained in the mid-1960s by Yakov Zel’dovich in the East and Ed Salpeter in the West as supermassive black holes that are fed with gas from their host galaxies....

Did you hear about the new restaurant on the moon? Great food, but no atmosphere. While that wisecrack has been floating about in space circles for decades, a NASA lunar orbiter will gather detailed information about the moon’s atmosphere next year, including conditions near its surface and environmental influences on lunar dust. NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is to depart the Earth for the moon in August 2013....

Failure to launch: it may be a 2006 Matthew McConaughey movie given one star by Roger Ebert, but more often, it’s the growing phenomenon of young adults not making the transition to adulthood. In most Western countries, young adults are expected to leave the nest. And while they may need a finite amount of time to launch themselves, ultimately, the goal or everyone involved is to see the young adult fly on their own....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Women may experience small benefits with a drug approved last year in the U.S. to treat low sexual desire in women, but at a high risk of experiencing unpleasant side effects, according to a new analysis. The findings “suggest that the benefits of flibanserin are marginal,” given that “one in three women experience side effects, of which the most common ones include dizziness, sleepiness, nausea, and tiredness,” said lead author Dr....

The average claim paid by the federal flood insurance program broke records in 2017 by surpassing $100,000 for the first time, raising new questions about the program’s financial viability, according to an E&E News analysis of federal data. The records also show that property owners in two states—Louisiana and Texas—have collected more than half of the $69 billion in claims paid by the National Flood Insurance Program since 1973. Homeowners in two counties—Orleans Parish in Louisiana and Harris County in Texas—have collected nearly a quarter of the claims....

Phosphate, critical for plant nutrition, exists at exceptionally low levels in the soils of many tropical nations. Phosphate fertilizers are expensive, the bane of many developing world farmers. Another solution is now under development by researchers in Switzerland and Colombia using soil microbes that help a plant procure this critical nutrient. Microbes in the soil called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are able to form spores and filaments within and around a plant’s roots to help them to obtain phosphate....

Last week the Women’s Congressional Policy Institute hosted the Fifth Annual Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) Fair in Washington, D.C. A theme of the bipartisan event is encouraging more participation in science and technology fields from women at all career stages, a topic near and dear to my heart. The fair has both nonprofit and private sector partners in attendance that give science demos, offer information on programs they have to promote women in STEAM fields, as well as provide examples of careers available to those interested in pursuing a science-based education....

Physicists have taken a step towards nailing down the mass of the neutrino, perhaps the most mysterious of all elementary particles. The team at the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment in Germany reports that neutrinos have a maximum mass of 0.8 electron volts. Researchers have long had indirect evidence that the particles should be lighter than 1 eV, but this is the first time that this has been shown in a direct measurement....

People getting treated for depression often have to suffer through months of trial-and-error testing of different drugs to see which of them—if any—will help. For a long time, scientists and clinicians have hoped for a biological means of diagnosing depression or predicting which patients will do better on a given treatment. A new study takes a step toward the latter kind of prediction by finding a distinctive signature with the noninvasive technique of electroencephalography (EEG) to test who will benefit from one common antidepressant....