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A three-day ship journey off the Mexican coast brought Maya Tolstoy to a part of an ocean known only by its map coordinates. Below was the East Pacific Rise, a point in the ocean floor where continents move apart, causing magma contained in the Earth’s core to rise to the surface and spew from underwater volcanoes. Into these depths, Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, dropped 12 seismographs....

In a fenced enclosure amid the red-orange sand and sparse vegetation of remote South Australia, newly released burrowing bettongs—small marsupials that look like a mix between a rat and a miniature kangaroo—used to spend their time blithely lounging around.* They were so naive that they approached humans without hesitation and kept their heads down as they ate. “They showed absolutely zero vigilance behavior,” potentially making them easy meals for feral cats and other predators, says ecologist Rebecca West at the University of New South Wales....

Despite the impressive progress in COVID vaccinations across the country, cases and hospitalization rates are stubbornly rising again in many states. But one state in particular has been leading the new surge: Michigan. The Great Lakes state has been reporting thousands of new infections per day, and hospitals are nearing capacity again. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan asked the Biden administration for more vaccine supplies but was rebuffed, with the government saying vaccination is not the answer to an acute surge....

Thomas Devine, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, provides this answer. Stainless steels are iron-based alloys primarily known for their generally excellent corrosion resistance, which is largely due to the steel’s chromium concentration. There are several different types of stainless steels. The two main types are austenitic and ferritic, each of which exhibits a different atomic arrangement. Due to this difference, ferritic stainless steels are generally magnetic while austenitic stainless steels usually are not....

Last year, there was the temperature spiral. This year, it’s the temperature circle that’s making the trend of global warming crystal clear. A new video shows the rhythm of global warming for countries around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Bars representing each country’s annual average temperature anomaly pulse up and down. It’s like watching a heartbeat on a monitor. Rather than staying steady like a normal heartbeat, it’s clear that temperatures for more than 100 countries are climbing ever higher on the back of increasing carbon pollution....

In recent years fast food has been linked to the country’s rising obesity rates and the increased incidence of diabetes. Findings presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego may provide a means of tempering the cuisine’s ill effects: an additive that can slow the absorption of fat to a healthier rate. Wallace H. Yokoyama of the United States Department of Agriculture and his colleagues fed a group of hamsters a diet with a fat content similar to that of typical American fast food–that is, with about 38 percent of its calories derived from fat–for four weeks....

As Hurricane Joaquin gained wind over the Atlantic today, meteorologists scrambled to figure out where it’s headed next, leaving the rest of us scratching our heads. Will this storm currently punishing the Bahamas turn west and make landfall along the East Coast, or will it turn east and leave us alone? Both of these forecasts aired today. The American Global Forecasting System (GFS) predicted the storm would make landfall on the U....

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, and hope to learn the genetic basis behind its traits, such as sociability and aggression. Nature, October 26, 2006 The U.S. can meet its need for iron via recycling of scrap alone. It would both eliminate mining and the most energy-intensive step in steelmaking—the conversion of iron ore into iron. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, October 31, 2006...

Flawlessly accounting for the behavior of matter on scales from the subatomic to the astronomical, quantum mechanics is the most successful theory in all the physical sciences. It is also the weirdest. In the quantum realm, particles seem to be in two places at once, information appears to travel faster than the speed of light, and cats can be dead and alive at the same time. Physicists have grappled with the quantum world’s apparent paradoxes for nine decades, with little to show for their struggles....

By Heidi LedfordThe American Psychiatric Association is unveiling a host of suggested changes to its influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Proposed revisions include uniting several autism-related diagnoses, including Asperger’s syndrome and Rett’s syndrome, under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder; introducing a diagnosis of gambling addiction; and eliminating the distinction between alcohol dependence and alcohol abuse.The proposals, to be posted to the association’s Web site on February 10, will be open for public comment until April 20....

By Adam Rose and David StanwayBEIJING (Reuters) - A chronic shortage of natural gas is hurting China’s plan to move away from burning coal to heat homes and offices, raising the prospect of more choking air pollution this winter and beyond.The problem is worst in northern China, where air pollution mainly caused by decades of reliance on coal has lowered life expectancy by an estimated 5.5 years compared to the south, Chinese and international researchers said in July....

In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China—each separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory and firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning “quantum space race” to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network—that is, a potentially unhackable “quantum Internet” that would be of immense geopolitical importance....

Neutrinos, some of the most abundant particles in the universe, are also among the most mysterious. We know they have mass but not how much. We know they come in at least three types, or “flavors”—but there may be more. A new study found that a mismatch between observations of galaxy clusters and measurements of the cosmic background radiation could be explained if neutrinos are more massive than is usually thought....

Records stretching back to 1960 prove what climate models had predicted: warmer oceans contain less oxygen. Oceanographer Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and his colleagues report in Science that an analysis of historical records and recent samples show that as the globe has warmed, waters with low oxygen content have expanded in the tropical Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans. “The oxygen concentrations in these oxygen-minimum zones have decreased with time,” says oceanographer and study coauthor Gregory C....

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers,” Carl Sagan said in his landmark TV series Cosmos. By that standard, astronomer Frank Drake, who passed away recently, put our planet on a trajectory to greater significance. Until Drake came along, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) was not really considered a scientific matter. But that didn’t stop him. Drake wanted to know the answer to a question, and he had the courage to ask it....

Gene therapy has been rhapsodized and vilified in its nearly two decades of human testing, helping some and making others sicker. But a new 12-month clinical trial has shown that, at least in one ocular disease, it appears safe and—perhaps even more impressive—effective. The research, part of a phase I clinical trial to test the safety of the treatment, was published as a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine earlier this week and will be in the September issue of Human Gene Therapy....

Allegations of scientific meddling at the Interior Department are giving watchdogs déjà vu. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke faces criticism that his department is chilling research that contradicts the administration’s energy and climate agenda. It’s a throwback to more than a decade ago, critics say, when investigations revealed that President George W. Bush’s Interior Department rewrote scientific papers to suit their preferred policies. “Interior has sort of a rich history of scandal,” the department’s former inspector general, Earl Devaney, said, drawing a line from the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s—involving Interior’s secret federal oil leases—to the Bush and Trump administrations’ perceived coziness with industry....

A rocket that was set to loft an Earth-gazing satellite to space did not get off its launch pad in California today (July 1) due to a problem with the pad’s water system. The problem arose less than a minute before the liftoff was expected. Because the launch window was only 30 seconds, mission controllers did not have time to analyze the issue and get the United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) spacecraft back on track for launch this morning....

And it’s going to get worse, even quicker. Scientists now say one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation’s history is rushing toward a catastrophic conclusion over the next 50 years, so far unabated and largely unnoticed. At the current rates that the sea is rising and land is sinking, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists say by 2100 the Gulf of Mexico could rise as much as 4....

Car commercials put their vehicles in the most improbable of places: sides of cliffs, tops of rock pillars, middles of deserts. But NASA is about to outdo them all. In 2010 it plans to land a Mini Cooper on Mars–or more precisely, a rover of about the same size and weight. And it plans to do so using a procedure never before seen in spaceflight: piloting the craft to its landing site using its entry capsule like a hypersonic flying wing, then hovering above the ground and lowering the buggy down on a long rope....