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In physics circles a sense of déjà vu is setting in—breathless headlines have recently championed a possible discovery of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Less than a year ago the same thing happened, although that time the team behind the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment claimed a discovery that turned out to be a mistake. Time will tell if the new potential detection, about which rumors have swirled in lieu of any official announcement by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), will turn out to be real....

In 2008 an engineer friend of mine helped to design the sky crane that lowered the Curiosity rover from the hovering rocket to the surface of Mars. In commemoration, his signature was engraved on a small plaque on the device. Thirteen years later this past February, that same crane design helped to successfully land Perseverance in the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet. Our space and physics senior editor Lee Billings and journalist Jonathan O’Callaghan report on this remarkable achievement and detail the tall order of tasks ahead for the fifth robotic visitor to Mars (see “Perseverance Has Landed!...

At one particularly strange moment in my career, I found myself picking through giant conical piles of dung produced by emus—those goofy Australian kin to the ostrich. I was trying to figure out how often seeds pass all the way through the emu digestive system intact enough to germinate. My colleagues and I planted thousands of collected seeds and waited. Eventually, little jungles grew. Clearly, the plants that emus eat have evolved seeds that can survive digestion relatively unscathed....

The human brain is a remarkably complex organic computer, taking in a wide variety of sensory experiences, processing and storing this information, and recalling and integrating selected bits at the right moments. The destruction caused by Alzheimer’s disease has been likened to the erasure of a hard drive, beginning with the most recent files and working backward. An initial sign of the disease is often the failure to recall events of the past few days–a phone conversation with a friend, a repairman’s visit to the house–while recollections from long ago remain intact....

The lovely, familiar swirl of the Milky Way, with its symmetric spiral arms winding outward from a central bulge, may be scars from a smaller galaxy punching above its weight. A new computer re-enactment of billions of years of galactic evolution suggests that the Milky Way owes much of its current shape to interactions with a nearby dwarf galaxy. The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, first discovered in 1994, is a satellite galaxy that is slowly being torn apart and ingested into the larger Milky Way....

I still have the first stone hand ax I ever made. It’s a pretty poor specimen, crudely chipped from a piece of frost-fractured flint I picked up on a walk through a farmer’s field in West Sussex, England. It would not have impressed the human ancestors known to us as Homo heidelbergensis. These cousins of Homo sapiens from 500,000 years ago left much nicer hand axes at a nearby archaeological site in Boxgrove....

What should we do about climate change? The question is an ethical one. Science, including the science of economics, can help discover the causes and effects of climate change. It can also help work out what we can do about climate change. But what we should do is an ethical question. Not all “should” questions are ethical. “How should you hold a golf club?” is not, for instance. The climate question is ethical, however, because any thoughtful answer must weigh conflicting interests among different people....

Alas, Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my afterimage he is! Well… that’s what William Shakespeare’s Hamlet might have said, had he been looking at a vintage Pears’ Soap advertisement bearing court jester Yorick’s skull, rather than holding an exhumed and rotting Danish cranium. Stare long enough at the skull in the ad, and it will be “burned” into your vision even after you look away....

It has never been a given that humans would survive on Earth. We have likely faced extinction several times in our evolutionary past, according to genetic analysis. The ease with which the novel coronavirus has swept around the planet reminds us that there are no guarantees. And yet we are a species to be reckoned with. We have accomplished a great deal in our relatively short history—extended our life spans, discovered vast knowledge about our world and ourselves, harnessed resources to improve quality of life, and developed rich histories of art and culture....

Rajendra Pachauri has weathered multiple storms over his 13-year tenure at the helm of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ science body on climate change. The one that led to his resignation yesterday was unexpected and characterized as “sad” by his colleagues. A 29-year-old employee at a nonprofit Pachauri founded and led in New Delhi alleged this month that the scientist had sent her inappropriate emails and text messages, and allegedly sexually harassed her (ClimateWire, Feb....

Five years ago marked a peak for one of the predictable cycles of hyperbole for “self-driving” cars. At the time, virtually every major motor vehicle manufacturer and high-tech company predicted widespread deployment of automated driving systems (ADS) by 2020, which would purportedly lead to rapid obsolescence of conventional human driving. With the benefit of hindsight, it has become obvious that the prevailing view during that period was false, with no more than a handful of advanced prototype vehicles having been driven on public roads by last year without the need for onboard safety drivers to intervene when the automation systems needed human help....

Days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it made a much less publicized ruling on prescription opioids—one that was far more welcome in the medical community. In a rare 9–0 decision in Ruan v. United States, the court ruled in favor of several doctors who were criminally convicted of acting as drug dealers by overprescribing pain medications. The decision gives physicians charged with illegally prescribing opioids a fighting chance against law enforcement by requiring that prosecutors prove that they had criminal intent, rather than simply having to show that their prescribing did not conform to standardized guidelines....

I was eating breakfast on a Monday morning at Sears Fine Food in downtown San Francisco, casually watching the local five-day weather forecast on a television screen behind the counter. A little symbol along the bottom showed a happy-looking sun for the rest of the day. Wednesday had a friendly-looking cloud and a few raindrops, and Thursday had a dark, threatening cloud with heavier drops. I knew Thursday’s conditions would be much rougher than the symbol conveyed....

DEKALB, Miss.—The nation’s first coal-fired power plant aiming to capture the majority of its carbon dioxide emissions rises like a silver city from a vast, cleared plot of Mississippi pine forests. The Kemper County Energy Facility—which envisions grabbing 65 percent of the CO2 from a 582-megawatt gasification power plant here—is nearing completion, with hundreds of construction workers on-site. It has enough piping to stretch across much of the state, constructed conveyer belts as tall as buildings and an operating coal mine, where massive trucks ferry unearthed lignite coal to a storage dome....

There are something like a dozen little islands off the coast of New York City, near where I live. Most people don’t think of the Bronx or Queens or southern Westchester County in terms of natural riches, but look, and you will find them. Sometimes I like to visit these places with my kayak. Most are uninhabited by people now, but they are filled with stories. There is Huckleberry Island, the purported site of the buried treasure of Captain William Kidd (I haven’t found it)....

In the course of the Space Age, planets have gone from astronomical objects–wandering specks in the night sky–to geologic ones: full-fledged worlds you could imagine yourself walking on. In the 1990s asteroids made the same transition. And now it is comets’ turn, as exemplified by July’s (deliberate) crash of the Deep Impact probe into the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. In September researchers announced a batch of findings at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Cambridge, England....

In the dystopian world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government of Oceania aims to achieve thought control through the restriction of language. As explained by the character Syme, a lexicologist who is working to replace the English language with the greatly-simplified “Newspeak”: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” While Syme’s own reflections were short-lived, the merits of his argument were not: the words and structure of a language can influence the thoughts and decisions of its speakers....

It’s an all-too-familiar scene from the war in Iraq: A video shows a convoy of combat vehicles patrolling a dusty causeway. Suddenly, a huge detonation erupts next to one, often followed by a determined ambush. Over time, the guerrillas have steadily upgraded the lethality of their roadside bombs, suicide assaults and surprise attacks. This year, however, the U.S. military plans to field several new armor systems that should better defend its vehicles and personnel....

One of the most ambitious and extreme experiments on Earth opened at the South Pole in 2010. IceCube, a giant particle detector buried in the polar ice, captures elusive, high-energy species of neutrinos—fundamental particles that fly straight through almost everything they touch. The project, for which I am the principal investigator, aims to use neutrinos to study distant cosmic phenomena—particularly the mysterious, violent processes thought to produce the charged particles known as cosmic rays that continually bombard Earth....

Of the five species of North American Bombus bumble bees, two are facing steep population declines and one may be extinct. These bigger, gentler cousins of the imported honey-bee play a crucial role in pollinating flowering plants and their disappearance could prove disastrous to ecosystems. It could also provoke an economic disaster: New research shows that bumble bees and other insects provide $57 billion in pollination services as well as other free labor in the U....