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U.S. Washington became the first state to allow human bodies to be composted. The process, which turns a body into soil over several weeks, is seen by some as a greener alternative to cremation or burial. BOTSWANA The country’s government lifted a five-year-old ban on hunting elephants for sport, after a committee found a “negative impact of the hunting suspension on livelihoods.” CANADA Billion-year-old fungi have been found in the Canadian Arctic with the use of radioactive dating techniques....

SCIENTIFIC PAPERS tend to be loaded with statistics and jargon, so it is always a delightful surprise to stumble on a nugget of poetry in an otherwise technical report. So it was with a 2005 paper in the journal Development and Psychopathology, drily entitled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” which looked at kids’ susceptibility to their family environment. The authors of the research paper, human development specialists Bruce J. Ellis of the University of Arizona and W....

Small, emerald-coloured birds called monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) invaded Mexico in the span of a decade because of trade policies thousands of kilometres away in Europe, according to a study released this month. The research highlights how fears over avian flu, which prompted a ban on bird imports in Europe, had wide ranging effects in other countries. Monk parakeets, a type of parrot native to South America, popped up in countries such as the United States in the 1960s and have established themselves from Brooklyn to Brussels....

A hairlike, translucent creature that builds colonies on hermit crab shells is strange enough in appearance and living arrangements, but hydractinia’s oddities do not stop there. Scientists have now pinpointed a key gene—one also found in humans—that triggers this ocean floor dweller’s rare ability to make an unlimited supply of sperm and eggs. It is the first time a gene has been confirmed to solely activate an organism’s germ cell production, the researchers say....

From its earliest days as a science, physics has searched for unity in nature. Isaac Newton showed that the same force responsible for the fall of an apple also holds the planets in their orbits. James Clerk Maxwell combined electricity, magnetism and light into a single theory of electromagnetism; a century later physicists added the weak nuclear force to form a unified “electroweak” theory. Albert Einstein joined space and time themselves into a single spacetime continuum....

As a schoolboy growing up in the spectacular wilderness of southwestern India’s hill country, known as Malenad, I was enchanted by tigers. The many tiger-themed rituals in our Hindu culture fueled my fascination. During the autumn Dasara festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil, for example, muscular Huli Vesha men, their bodies painted in patterns of ochre, white and black, mimicked the cat’s graceful movements as the dancers moved to the crescendo of drumbeats....

What if your digital assistant could battle rap? That may sound far-fetched, but Gil Weinberg, a music technologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has adapted a musical robot called Shimon to compose lyrics and perform in real time. That means it can engage in rap “conversations” with humans, and maybe even help them compose their own lyrics. Shimon, which was intentionally designed to sound machinelike (listen here), is meant to be a one-of-a-kind musical collaborator—or an inhuman rap-battle opponent....

A new survey of the world’s 5,487 mammal species reveals that one in four is in danger of dying out—including some species of bats, the most numerous of mammals. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concludes that at least 1,139 mammals around the globe are threatened with extinction and that the populations of 52 percent of all mammal species are declining. South and Southeast Asia are home to the most threatened mammals....

Windows Phone now comes in the supersize variety. The third and latest update from Microsoft, released Monday, brings a number of incremental upgrades and changes to Windows Phone 8. The most crucial of them is support for a higher-resolution display and larger screen sizes, enabling its partners to finally get into the so-called phablet business. Phablets, a mashup of a phone and tablet, have quietly become a vital part of any handset manufacturer’s product lineup....

An old NASA spacecraft under the control of a private team fired its thrusters yesterday (July 2) for the first time in a generation. NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 probe (ISEE-3), which the agency retired in 1997, performed the maneuver in preparation for a larger trajectory correction next week. The spacecraft hadn’t fired its engines since 1987, ISEE-3 Reboot Project team members said. It took several attempts and days to perform the roll maneuver because ISEE-3 was not responding to test commands....

The year 2016 may be remembered for important medical advances, but a glance at the headlines also offers a grim reminder of the many diseases that remain unyielding adversaries for science. Parkinson’s disease claimed tens of thousands of Americans, including former US Attorney General Janet Reno; Maurice White (founder of Earth, Wind & Fire); and, quite possibly, Muhammad Ali. (The boxer, who suffered from Parkinson’s, died of sepsis, his family said....

A few years ago, marine ecologist Melanie Bergmann was on the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, studying the effects of climate change on Arctic marine ecosystems. She kept noticing how much plastic litter was turning up in samples and images of the nearby ocean floor. After doing several analyses, she and her team found tiny pieces of plastic permeating seafloor sediment and ocean waters and frozen into layers of sea ice....

In this postcard from a series beginning in the late 19th century, Jean-Marc Côté, a French artist, depicts a classroom in the year 2000. Rather than lecturing, the instructor drops texts into a hand-cranked device that delivers information straight to the pupils’ ears. A century later our perspective on where learning is headed is obviously different but perhaps no less remarkable to us. That future is also closer than ever: just as digital technology has led to transformations in many areas of our lives—from instantly finding information online to harnessing big data for managing society’s needs—it is now sweeping through education....

China’s new space station is about to get its first human visitors. The Shenzhou 12 mission launched Wednesday (June 16) from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, rising off the pad atop a Long March 2F rocket at 9:22 p.m. EDT (0122 GMT and 9:22 a.m. Beijing time on June 17). Shenzhou 12 — China’s first crewed spaceflight in nearly five years — is sending three astronauts to Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”), the core module of the nation’s new Tiangong space station....

Climate change will be the fastest-growing cause of species loss in the Americas by midcentury, according to a new set of reports from the leading global organization on ecosystems and biodiversity. Climate change, alongside factors like land degradation and habitat loss, is emerging as a top threat to wildlife around the globe, the reports suggest. In Africa, it could cause some animals to decline by as much as 50 percent by the end of the century, and up to 90 percent of coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean may bleach or degrade by the year 2050....

Tesla Motors has received more than 325,000 preorders for its hot new Model 3 electric car even though it will not be available for at least another year. That almost equals the 340,000 electric cars and plug-in hybrids now on American roads. Tesla has advertised its vehicles as having zero emissions, helping fuel the mania for the fun-driving sedan, but that’s not necessarily true. Although the battery-powered car itself doesn’t produce any emissions, the power plant that generates the electricity used to charge those batteries probably does....

By Zeeya MeraliWhirling electron vortices could help materials scientists to map the properties of nanomaterials in new detail. A technique, detailed in the September 16 issue of Nature, could be used in electron microscopes as part of the continuing quest to scale down the size of electronic chips.Optical physicists have been using spiraling laser beams, in which light waves are twisted into vortices, for almost 30 years, says Jo Verbeeck, a materials scientist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and first author on the Nature paper....

On February 22 “Mad” Mike Hughes died when his self-built steam rocket crashed shortly after takeoff. Hughes was a famous flat-earther, one of a growing group who do not accept that Earth is an oblate spheroid (which it is). His fatal launch was apparently general daredevilry and not an attempt to gather data for flatearthism. Although coverage by our friends at Space.com quoted him as saying in a 2017 documentary, “I’m going to build my own rocket right here, and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on....

In the wake of massive flooding from Hurricane Irene, consumers may be hit with an unsuspected trick. Several flood-damaged automobiles will be sold without accurate damage reports. This is not a new practice, as flood-damaged vehicles are sold every year in various parts of the U.S., according to New Jersey Business. “We’ve had quite a bit of rain and flooding, so it will be worse than usual this year,” said Senior Consumer Advice Editor for automotive research site Edmunds....

The procurement arm of the federal government is imposing new limitations on high carbon-emitting building materials for all its major projects, a move that will affect billions of dollars of federal infrastructure investments. The new General Services Administration standards—to be released this morning—will require that federal contractors use climate-friendly concrete and asphalt in all the agency’s major projects. GSA oversees $75 billion in annual contracts, and the agency’s real estate portfolio comprises more than 370 million square feet....