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A transformative era in cosmological science ended this week when the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope released its final maps of the early Universe. Planck was the last in a line of three major space telescopes to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, resulting in the most precise measurements yet of the age, geometry and composition of the cosmos. With agencies in Europe and in the United States hesitant to fund a follow-up space mission, Planck looks set to be the last space telescope to study the CMB for many years—marking a big change for cosmologists....

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male. Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports....

Peering through the microscope at the thin slice of fossilized bone, I stared in disbelief at the small red spheres a colleague had just pointed out to me. The tiny structures lay in a blood vessel channel that wound through the pale yellow hard tissue. Each had a dark center resembling a cell nucleus. In fact, the spheres looked just like the blood cells in reptiles, birds and all other vertebrates alive today except mammals, whose circulating blood cells lack a nucleus....

Fungi and viruses are poised to doom chocolate, which is why scientists are racing to save cacao—the tree that sprouts the colorful, football-size pods containing beans used to make chocolate—with the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9, according to a new report. Cacao trees (Theobroma cacao) grow in tropical environments, within about 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the equator. Unfortunately for chocolate lovers, fungi also flourish in tropical conditions and can easily infect entire cacao tree farms, causing harmful conditions such as frosty pod, black pod and witch’s broom, according to a 2016 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....

When I first began to study cancer as a young postdoctoral fellow in the early 1960s, it looked to leading scientists as though viruses could be the cause of most, if not all, malignancies. That idea was based on the discovery of several tumor- and leukemia-producing viruses that could infect a host cell and insert their own genetic material into its genome, sparking a cancerous transformation and proliferation of the cell....

Renewable energy generation grew globally by 161 gigawatts in 2016, setting another annual record for capacity additions and pushing clean power capacity past 2,000 GW, according to newly released data from the International Renewable Energy Agency. That’s roughly double the amount of renewable energy that was flowing across the world’s power grids a decade ago, according to the Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates-based organization, and it reflects the unprecedented adoption of solar, wind, hydro and other emissions-free power by the world’s largest economies....

How do we avoid a future in which the best data for saving lives and property from climate destruction are only available to those who can afford it? That’s the question some observers and critics of “climate services” are asking. The fast growth of this field in recent years marks a profound shift in how our society creates and uses science. Rather than focus broadly on the regional, national or global impacts of rising temperatures, providers of climate services create data tailored to specific decision-makers: the mayor of a coastal city, say, or the CEO of an energy utility....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. White House advisers have made the case recently for a “natural” approach to herd immunity as a way to reduce the need for public health measures to control the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic while still keeping people safe. This idea is summed up in something called the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal put out by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank....

One of the world’s largest documented ice avalanches is flummoxing researchers. But they suspect that glacier fluctuations caused by a changing climate—may be to blame. About 100 million cubic metres of ice and rocks gushed down a narrow valley in Rutog county in the west of the Tibet Autonomous Region on July 17, killing nine herders and hundreds of sheep and yaks. The debris covered nearly 10 square kilometres at a thickness of up to 30 metres, says Zong Jibiao, a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITPR) in Beijing, who completed a field investigation of the site last week....

Gene therapy tries to replace, repair, augment or manipulate a patient’s own genes with the goal of treating illness. The technique not only can save lives but also can treat chronic conditions such as hearing impairment. Hearing loss affects roughly 28 million Americans because the nearly 50,000 inner ear hair cells that humans are born with die off gradually over time. Unlike those hair cells in fish, amphibians and birds, those of mammals cease proliferating early in life, meaning hearing loss is usually permanent....

Earlier this month came the news that China plans to invest $361 billion into renewable energy projects over the next three years. A few days later, President Barack Obama penned a single author article in the journal Science, “The irreversible momentum of clean energy,” in which he outlined four reasons the trend toward increasing use of clean energy does not show signs of slowing down or stopping. Even in the currently very divided U....

A new way of refining biodiesel so that it works in standard diesel car engines could help broaden the use of renewable fuels, according to scientists. Biodiesel made from plant material could present a more eco-friendly alternative to the fossil-fuel-derived diesel, or petrodiesel, that is currently used. In the European Union (EU), commercial diesel already has to contain at least 7 percent biodiesel. But the molecular makeup of these fuels means they boil at different temperatures from petrodiesel, which means only specially designed engines can run on pure biodiesel or blends that contain considerable amounts of the fuel....

As Barack Obama prepares to leave office, Nature examines the scientific highs and lows of his presidency. Read the other stories in this series about his policies on biomedicine, space and climate change. Many researchers who watched Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 were thrilled by his pledge to “restore science to its rightful place”. But scientists and legal scholars say that, in many ways, Obama has failed to live up to that lofty promise....

There’s a story about a truck driver who passed the long, lonely hours in his big rig knitting sweaters. His hands thus otherwise occupied, he steered with his knees. A highway patrol officer noted this behavior and set out after the truck driver. As the cop got close, he commanded via his vehicle’s loudspeaker, “Pull over.” To which the trucker shouted back, “No, it’s a cardigan.” Though not a bona fide law-enforcement officer myself, I sometimes act in loco centurion while on the road....

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A 2,100-barrel oil spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico forced Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday to shut in all wells that flow to its Brutus platform, federal regulators said. The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) said a 2 mile by 13 mile (about 3 km by 21 km) sheen was visible in the sea about 97 miles off the Louisiana coast. The sheen is near Shell’s Glider Field, a group of four subsea wells whose production flows through a subsea manifold to the Brutus platform, which sits in water with a depth of 2,900 feet (884 m)....

Self-serving impulses and moral considerations often act as two opposing forces that govern our everyday behavior. But how does the brain decide which one wins? As a step toward answering that question, Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and his colleagues watched as 52 volunteers played the ultimatum game, an anonymous exchange in which an individual decides whether to punish a partner’s behavior at his or her own cost. In this version of the game, one player proposes how to divide 20 Swiss francs with the second player....

“Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” announced President George W. Bush, addressing the nation for the first time on September 11, 2001. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.” Bush then promised “to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” These remarks, made from Emma T. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., may not seem extraordinary, but in subtle ways they exemplify Bush’s skill as a leader....

Now, more than 80 years after the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, creationism proponents are pushing for state legislation there that could make it easier for teachers to bring unscientific ideas back into the science classroom in public schools. To bolster their cause, the backers of the new bills are invoking none other than teacher John Scopes, the trial’s pro-evolution defendant, as an icon of independent thinking. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary scientists have become the modern-day equivalents of those who tried to silence Rhea County schoolteacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, by limiting even an objective discussion of the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory,” David Fowler, head of the Family Action Council of Tennessee and chief lobbyist behind Tennessee’s proposed anti-evolution bill, wrote recently in an op–ed in the Chattanoogan....

More than half the world relies on rice as a primary food source. Yet the essential crop faces an worrisome future as global warming cranks up the Earth’s temperature and intensifies storms, droughts and heat waves. It’s hard to overstate the danger of this development, scientists say. Rice is vulnerable to climate extremes and grows in places already experiencing many. Any disruption to that food source can cause massive problems. Just look at recent history....

Victor Pizzo, a physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Environment Center, explains. The fact that the sun’s corona is very hot–one million to two million kelvins in “quiet” regions, two million to five million in magnetically strong active regions and higher yet in solar flares–was well established by the 1940s. Temperatures in the cooler photosphere (the visible surface of the sun, where we see sunspots) and the overlying chromosphere (where we best see prominences and the expanding magnetic structure in the lower solar atmosphere) had been determined long before that by spectroscopic observations....