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NASA’s Kepler space telescope has unexpectedly gone into an emergency operations mode, halting the start of a much-anticipated phase of its planet hunt. Engineers are working to try to get the probe working normally. Kepler apparently entered the mode on April 6, according to an April 8 update from Charlie Sobeck, the mission manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. In emergency mode, Kepler burns more of its dwindling supply of fuel, which is needed to ignite its thrusters and orient the spacecraft to communicate with Earth....

MDMA, or ecstasy, once had the reputation of exclusively being an illicit party drug popular at raves and dance clubs. That view has changed in recent years. The substance, known for its ability to produce feelings of euphoria and affection for others, has developed a new identity as a promising therapeutic tool. Researchers are currently investigating MDMA-assisted therapy as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in late-stage clinical trials. The drug’s capacity to enhance sociability has also led to studies investigating its benefits for other conditions, such as social anxiety in individuals with autism spectrum disorder....

Temperatures on Mars today hover around a chilly -58 degrees Celsius. Some scientists have proposed, however, that the planet could have been balmy in the past, allowing for liquid water and the possibility of life. But the results of a new chemical analysis have dealt a blow to that theory, indicating that the surface temperatures on the Red Planet barely rose above freezing in the past several billion years. David L....

The hundred or so farmers crowding the ballroom of the Mendenhall Inn in Chester County, Pennsylvania, might not have had a background in gene editing, but they knew mushrooms. These local growers produce a staggering 1.1 million pounds of mushrooms on average every day, which is one reason Pennsylvania dominates the annual $1.2-billion U.S. market. Some of the mushrooms they produce, however, turn brown and decay on store shelves; if you’ve ever held a slimy, decomposing, formerly white mushroom in your hand, you know why no ones buys them....

Driving his car through a Tennessee ice storm in early February was a risk that veterinarian Logan Kopp knew he had to take. The reward: rescuing four vials containing 40 doses of a new vaccine for a highly contagious and fatal virus afflicting rabbits. A storm-related power outage had knocked out refrigeration at Priest Lake Veterinary Hospital in Nashville-Antioch, Tenn., threatening to degrade the vaccines doses in cold storage there. Kopp managed to preserve the vials of vaccine by transferring them from his workplace to his home refrigerator....

A new grenadelike gadget—designed to quickly extinguish flames in small quarters, thereby limiting injury to victims as well as firefighters—is becoming an important part of firemen’s arsenals. More than 37 fire departments along the U.S. east coast now carry Vancouver-based ARA Safety’s FIT-5 (for fire interruption technology). The device, available to firefighters since December, is a means of knocking down or even extinguishing fires in rooms, basements and attics. The FIT-5 (price tag: around $1,300) is a nine-pound (four-kilogram) red disk that resembles a land mine and is deployed like a grenade: A firefighter pulls its cord and tosses the disk into the area engulfed in flames; within seconds the FIT-5 releases a wispy cloud of potassium carbonate, a flame retardant that suppresses combustion and disrupts fire at the molecular level....

Amputees who experience phantom limb pain can sometimes get relief from an optical illusion. This trick involves looking in a mirror at the reflection of a healthy limb from a certain angle, which causes it to appear where the missing limb should be. Seeing the limb move freely fools the brain into relieving the pain. Now a study suggests this technique might also work for arthritis pain. Cognitive scientist Laura Case, working in the lab of Vilayanur S....

Raymond, a high-powered attorney, habitually put off returning important business calls and penning legal briefs, behaviors that seriously threatened his career. Raymond (not his real name) sought help from clinical psychologist William Knaus, who practices in Longmeadow, Mass. As a first step, Knaus gave Raymond a two-page synopsis of procrastination and asked him to read it “and see if the description applied.” Raymond agreed to do so on a flight to Europe....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is trying to sharply reduce its use of animals in toxicity tests. Many scientists and environmentalists say the move is premature and could undermine chemical regulation. In a memo to staff, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said that the agency would make use of “cutting-edge, ethically sound science” that does not rely on animal testing. Wheeler signed a directive on 10 September that commits the EPA to reduce its funding request for animal studies by 30% by 2025, and to phase them out entirely by 2035....

In July 2015 the New Horizons spacecraft will venture past the farthest worlds nasa has ever visited, mysterious Pluto and its many moons. As if that achievement were not impressive enough, scientists are already plotting New Horizons’s next move, seeking uncharted worlds beyond Pluto for the craft to study close-up. Pluto is either the largest or second-largest member of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, a region boasting 1,600 objects that astronomers have discovered and tracked....

17 The minimum number of clues required for a Sudoku puzzle to have a unique solution. The finding, announced in January, is considered a major breakthrough in mathematics. 77%: Maximum number of clues a Sudoku puzzle can have without having a unique solution. 6.67 sextillion: The number of all possible Sudoku puzzles. SOURCES: “There Is No 16-Clue Sudoku: Solving the Sudoku Minimum Number of Clues Problem,” by Gary McGuire et al....

Dear EarthTalk: Is there a link between the recent spread of mosquito-borne diseases around the world and environmental pollution?—Meg Ross, Lantana, Fla. If by pollution you mean greenhouse gas emissions, then definitely yes. According to Maria Diuk-Wasser at the Yale School of Public Health, the onset of human-induced global warming is likely to increase the infection rates of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever and West Nile virus by creating more mosquito-friendly habitats....

Reverence for the sun deity Huitzilopochtli thrived among the Aztec peoples of Meso america as late as the 16th century. But students of history know that the true zenith of sun worship occurred in the 1970s, when engineers at Caltech constructed the first fully solar-powered George Hamilton and millions knelt at the feet of their fierce, tawny goddess Farrah Fawcett, whose gleaming tusks and shining blonde nimbus were foretold by Montezuma....

Created, written & designed by John Pavlus / Screencasts produced by Smashcut Media / Music by Jeff Alvarez Check out previous episodes of The Monitor. Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes or RSS 1. Bad times = good health? A study that appeared in the American Journal of Epidemiology was covered in the Guardian. While the study first appeared in December of this year, its findings have become newly relevant as a spike in food and fuel prices have put similar pressures on developing countries all over the world....

Five hundred million tweets are broadcast worldwide every day on Twitter. With so many details about personal lives, the social media site is a data trove for scientists looking to find patterns in human behaviors, tease out risk factors for health conditions and track the spread of infectious diseases. By analyzing emotional cues found in the tweets of pregnant women, for instance, Microsoft researchers developed an algorithm that predicts those at risk for postpartum depression....

In the wake of the near panic over the launch of Sputnik in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to become the first special assistant to the president for science and technology. Ever since, the relationship between the nation’s chief executive and the White House’s resident authority on nuclear fission, the workings of DNA and the greenhouse effect, among an array of topics, has had its highs and lows....

Machines have invaded a windswept rural valley in eastern Portugal. Squat white containers stare at the hillsides, sweeping lasers across the eucalyptus-studded slopes, and towers bristling with scientific instruments soar 100 meters into the air. Their international team of minders will spend the next five months measuring nearly everything it can about the wind that blows through the site. An unprecedented arsenal of meteorological equipment will study speed, direction and other characteristics for the world’s most detailed wind-mapping project....

Selfies, headshots, mug shots — photos of oneself convey more these days than snapshots ever did back in the Kodak era. Most digitally minded people continually post and update pictures of themselves at professional, social media and dating sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Match.com and Tinder. For better or worse, viewers then tend to make snap judgments about someone’s personality or character from a single shot. As such, it can be a stressful task to select the photo that conveys the best impression of ourselves....

Have you heard of the 24 Hours of Le Mans? The gruelling day-long endurance race held every year in the south of France? Just down the road in Toulouse, scientists are gearing up for an even longer, totally unprecedented race. It won’t take place on a classic track, but on the world’s smallest purpose built gold racing circuit. It’s the first ever nanocar race or, simply, nanorace. Fun as it may seem, the race has a serious scientific purpose: testing a unique scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) recently installed in the south of France....

Sometime around 35,000 years ago in Europe our ancestors embarked on what might be described as a creativity bender. They began making art, jewelry, musical instruments and complex tools in abundance, as evidenced by the remains of these items at sites across the continent. Archaeologists call this cultural period the Upper Paleolithic and it stands in marked contrast to the Middle Paleolithic that preceded it, during which anatomically modern humans and their archaic contemporaries, the Neandertals, focused their manufacturing efforts on a handful of relatively simple tool types....