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Stand atop the steep white cliffs that surround the giant rivers of Siberia, and your feet will mark a pivotal point in the history of life on Earth: the 541-million-year-old geologic boundary between the Precambrian and Cambrian periods. The rocks below this dividing line contain scant fossil remains—ghostly impressions of soft-bodied organisms and a smattering of shelly forms. But break open any of the rocks just above the boundary, and they will be teeming with shells....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Six people recently returned from an eight-month long isolation experiment to test human endurance for long-term space missions. Their “journey to Mars” involved being isolated below the summit of the world’s largest active volcano in Hawaii (Mauna Loa), and was designed to better understand the psychological impacts of manned missions. NASA, which aims to send expeditions to Mars by the 2030s, is hoping that the results could help them pick crew members for a future mission to Mars....

Eighty percent of the ocean floor, hidden deep below the waves, has not been mapped. It is out of the accurate range of surface sonar. But now a series of new maps have been produced, twice as precise as anything done before, and they reveal thousands of previously uncharted sea mountains as well as fractures at the ocean bottom that produce deep-sea earthquakes. You can see some of the maps here....

Scientists for the first time have identified long-term changes in mice brains that may shed light on why addicts get hooked on drugs—in this case methamphetamines—and have such a tough time kicking the habit. The findings, reported in the journal Neuron, could set the stage for new ways to block cravings—and help addicts dry out. Researchers, using fluorescent tracer dye, discovered that mice given methamphetamines for 10 days (roughly equivalent to a human using it for two years) had suppressed activity in a certain area of their brains....

The gardening cycle has been thrown off the rails in Debbie Ricigliano’s Howard County, Md., vegetable garden in past years. Shrubs are blooming earlier, cherry buds are opening in the fall and flower bulbs are emerging when they shouldn’t. “I definitely would say our climate has gotten warmer,” said Ricigliano, a horticulture consultant at the University of Maryland’s Horticulture and Garden Information Center. Scientists have long established that climate change will affect, either positively or negatively, the future of agricultural crops....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. News this week included word that a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine candidate to protect against the new coronavirus is showing positive progress in small sample-size, human testing for safety and effectiveness (phase I and phase II). It’s worth noting that a scientific report on these results, posted online 7/1/20, has not been formally published and reviewed by experts for flaws....

Courts are overwhelmed with couples who are splitting up and disputing custody of their children. If parents cannot agree on their children’s fates, a judge will decide who gets custody, and increasingly, psychologists are becoming involved as expert evaluators during legal wranglings. But do any of these professionals have proof that the bases for their life-determining decisions are empirically sound? It seems not, and it is the boys and girls who suffer....

Even as scientists and politicians from around the world debated in December how to deal with a practical problem of profound importance—global climate change—another international group of physicists was waiting with bated breath for a more esoteric development. In both cases, at the conclusion of events, the participants were left salivating and unsatisfied. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment, located in the deep Soudan mine in Minnesota, is designed to directly detect new elementary particles that might make up the dark matter known to dominate our galaxy....

By Alex Whiting ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - If drug-resistant infections in people and animals are allowed to spread unchecked, some 28 million people will fall into poverty by 2050, and a century of progress in health will be reversed, the World Bank said on Monday. By 2050, annual global GDP would fall by at least 1.1 percent, although the loss could be as much as 3.8 percent - the equivalent of the 2008 financial crisis - the Bank said in a report released ahead of a high-level meeting on the issue at the United Nations in New York this week....

Xenon from deep within the Earth’s mantle has shone a light on the planet’s formation and early evolution. The isotopic signature of this earthly xenon has been shown to resemble that of primitive meteorites and differs markedly from the profile of the gas found in the atmosphere, which is mysteriously missing most of its xenon. The origin of Earth’s volatile elements such as water, carbon and nitrogen remains a puzzle. It is difficult to determine if these elements originated from solar gas after the solar system formed or were delivered by asteroids or comets....

By Richard Van Noorden of Nature magazine After nine years of painstaking experiment, researchers in Japan reported yesterday that they have created a third atom of the element 113. That success, according to experts in the field, could see the element officially added to the periodic table. It would be the first artificial element to be discovered in East Asia, potentially giving the Japanese team the right to name it....

The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it has approved the first new influenza drug with a novel mechanism of action in nearly 20 years. The drug, Xofluza, is being brought to the U.S. market by Genentech, a division of Roche. The approval comes just in time for flu season, which should begin in earnest in coming weeks. The drug is a fast-acting treatment, taken in a single dose. A dose may be one or two pills, depending on the body weight of the person taking the drug....

Two European designers, Dries Verbruggen and Lucas Maassen, became enthralled recently with the idea of neuro-feedback in which a patient—say, someone with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—observes his or her own brain waves on a video screen and tries to alter their oscillations through mental effort. Electrodes attached to the head transmit patterns of neural activity that can be nominally altered to produce focused attention, a calm outlook or some other state of mind....

Hillary Clinton yesterday unveiled the first portion of her presidential campaign’s energy agenda, vowing an aggressive expansion of the nation’s renewable energy production while taking aim at the Republican primary field over the GOP’s widespread skepticism of climate science. In a 3-minute video posted to her campaign website, Clinton reiterated a vow she first made in June to make the United States a “clean energy superpower” while promising to expand the nation’s solar capacity 700 percent by 2020 and ensure that renewable energy sources contribute to at least a third of the nation’s energy generation....

Can you feel your heart beating? Most people cannot, unless they are agitated or afraid. The brain masks the sensation of the heart in a delicate balancing act—we need to be able to feel our pulse racing occasionally as an important signal of fear or excitement, but most of the time the constant rhythm would be distracting or maddening. A growing body of research suggests that because of the way the brain compensates for our heartbeat, it may be vulnerable to perceptual illusions—if they are timed just right....

Iceland’s Bárðarbunga volcano erupted just after midnight local time on August 29, sending small lava fountains into the air north of the ice cap that covers the main caldera. The London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which oversees the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, including Iceland, noted that an eruption had begun but said that it anticipated no immediate threat to aviation. The fire fountains are the most dramatic manifestation yet of unrest that began on August 16, when a swarm of small earthquakes signalled the movement of molten rock underground....

The claim that the RMS Titanic was “practically unsinkable” may have been more a marketing tactic than a commentary on its engineering, but its prelaunch reputation of being impervious to the perils of the high seas has lingered for the past 100 years. It is dangerous to cast engineering projects in such absolute terms—of course there had to be some combination of conditions under which the ocean liner would have failed....

By Joseph Milton Evolutionary advantage often makes for show-stopping stuff–a cheetah’s speed, for example, or a moth’s almost perfect mimicry of tree bark. In some snails, however, it’s simply down to a poor fit with a snake’s jaw. Some species of Satsuma snail have shells that coil to the left, which probably evolved because the snakes that prey on them have jaws specialized for feeding on the molluscs’ right-coiling ancestors, a study published December 7 in Nature Communications suggests....

The result: Scientists and policymakers can now pull up information that simulates how individual cities and towns may fare on a given day in the distant future. The information could be used to better cope with drought, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather linked to climate change. The maps were released as part of a White House push today to promote adaptation in developing nations. This is the first time that scientists have simulated the climate globally in this much detail, using 21 climate models....

The most popular news stories on our web site this year included viruses so large that they rival a bacterium, one of the longest-running experiments in history and how our universe could have been created in the collapse of a four-dimensional star. Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram A ten-dimensional theory of gravity makes the same predictions as standard quantum physics in fewer dimensions. December 10, 2013...