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Readers who tucked the December 2004 issue into their travel bags for the holidays could take an armchair tour of a wide assortment of topics and times. They could hike through new evidence about the 19th-century Anglo-French controversy over whose citizen-scientist discovered Neptune first; reflect on the cover story’s very 21st-century question, “Are viruses alive?”; and take in culture by exploring whether or not 15th-century artists employed optical projections. Those preferring more exotic climes and times, say, the Cretaceous period, could track Arctic Alaskan dinosaurs....

Deposits formed in Martian gullies during the past seven years suggest that liquid water exists on Mars today. Researchers have observed two downhill tracks of light-colored material that were not present in images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft before 1999. These tracks follow narrow ravines present on the downward sloping walls of craters, and they branch and flow around obstacles like a liquid or watery sediment would, researchers report in the December 8 issue of Science....

The threat of sea-level rise remains one of the greatest global concerns about climate change, and scientists are still improving their predictions of how much — and how quickly — the world’s oceans may rise. To help answer those questions about the future, some researchers are looking into the past. New research has provided one of the most detailed looks yet into the patterns of sea-level rise that occurred during the world’s last major warming period, more than 10,000 years ago....

In The Orchid Thief, writer Susan Orlean describes the cultlike devotion that these exotic-looking flowers inspire among plant collectors. One reason, in addition to their beauty, that orchids are so prized is that they are fragile: although they grow in every U.S. state and on every con­tinent except Antarctica, many are endangered, and the flowers are exceed­ingly sensitive to environ­mental changes. Native orchids’ dustlike seeds will grow only if nourished by certain groups of root fungi, known as mycorrhizal fungi....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Artificial intelligence can already predict the future. Police forces are using it to map when and where crime is likely to occur. Doctors can use it to predict when a patient is most likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Researchers are even trying to give AI imagination so it can plan for unexpected consequences....

Tiny particles of air pollution contain more hazardous ingredients in non-white and low-income communities than in affluent white ones, a new study shows. The greater the concentration of Hispanics, Asians, African Americans or poor residents in an area, the more likely that potentially dangerous compounds such as vanadium, nitrates and zinc are in the mix of fine particles they breathe. Latinos had the highest exposures to the largest number of these ingredients, while whites generally had the lowest....

Plants take advantage of quantum mechanics to harvest sunlight with near-perfect efficiency—though only roughly 2 percent of that capture sunlight ultimately gets stored as chemical energy. Now scientists are studying how this light-harvesting step of photosynthesis is optimized by nature to learn how to mimic it in engineered systems for use in solar cells or artificial leaves that produce fuels directly from the sun. Plants rely on chromophores—molecules that absorb certain wavelengths of visible light while reflecting others—to harvest energy from the sun....

The main criticism of so-called “car hacking” over the past few years has been that cyber attackers could not use wireless commands to hijack and manipulate a driver’s vehicle under normal driving conditions. Sure, researchers could remotely unlock doors or prompt a car’s computer to jam on the brakes, but only after carefully manipulating the vehicle ahead of time. The recent crackdown on Fiat Chrysler—including an unprecedented fine and a recall of 1....

By Nicola NosengoAround four tons of ancient Roman lead was yesterday transferred from a museum on the Italian island of Sardinia to the country’s national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland. Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers’s slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos.The 120 lead ingots, each weighing about 33 kilograms, come from a larger load recovered 20 years ago from a Roman shipwreck, the remains of a vessel that sank between 80 B....

The tendency to become dependent on alcohol has long been known to run in families, which for some only added to the social stigma attached to this complicated condition. But to scientists, that apparent heritability suggested that some genetic component underlying vulnerability to alcohol problems was being transmitted from generation to generation. With rapid advances over the past 10 years in technologies for discovering and analyzing the functions of genes, researchers are now increasingly able to get at the biological roots of complex disorders such as substance abuse and addiction....

EPA published a proposal in the Federal Register yesterday that critics described as an assault on minority communities coping with the public health legacy of structural racism. The agency’s plan would mandate changes to the way future rules under the Clean Air Act would weigh the costs and benefits of climate and air pollution regulations. It’s the first time EPA has attempted such a rulemaking, and critics say the goal is to saddle future administrations with an inflexible set of cost-benefit methodologies that discount benefits from cutting pollutants while stressing cost to industry....

You may not know his name, but chances are that you have seen his work. Brooklyn-born artist Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) produced paintings and sculptures of dinosaurs, mam­moths and prehistoric humans that adorn the great natural history museums in the U.S. His dinos have appeared as toys, stamps and comics, as well as in books and scientific journals on paleontology. One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s illustrators swiped them for his 1912 novel The Lost World....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. program that pays farmers to idle fragile cropland soon will protect the smallest amount of land in a quarter-century, the government said on Monday, the result of several years of sky-high commodity prices that have encouraged farmers to plant as much as possible.The Conservation Reserve will hold roughly 25.3 million acres (10.2 million hectares) on October 1, down in size by one-third from its peak of 36....

Disaster researchers are used to seeing train wrecks coming. We study the worst moments in human history—their warning signs, failures, destruction, pain, corruption and injustice—so that we can lessen the hurt. But the scale of the pandemic, and the response to it, shook even the most practiced among us. In the beginning, I spent hours gaming out scenarios with other researchers, trying to answer the question everyone was asking us: How bad is this going to be?...

Most of us grew up with the conventional definition of a planet as a body that orbits a star, shines by reflecting the star’s light and is larger than an asteroid. Although the definition may not have been very precise, it clearly categorized the bodies we knew at the time. In the 1990s, however, a remarkable series of discoveries made it untenable. Beyond the orbit of Neptune, astronomers found hundreds of icy worlds, some quite large, occupying a doughnut-shaped region called the Kuiper belt....

By Chris Arsenault ROME, Dec 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Half a million people in three West African nations rocked by Ebola are going hungry and that number could double by March if food supplies do not improve, two United Nations agencies warned on Wednesday. In Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the countries at the heart of the worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, workers have been staying away from markets and fields for fear of spreading the virus that has killed more than 6,800 people since March....

Night by night, star by star, astronomers are edging ever closer to learning just how crowded our universe really is—or at least our galaxy, anyway. A quarter century after the first exoplanets were found orbiting other stars, statistics from the thousands now known have revealed that, on average, each and every stellar denizen of the Milky Way must be accompanied by at least one world. Look long and hard enough for a planet around any given star in our galaxy and you are practically guaranteed to find something sooner or later....

By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazine People who live with clinical depression must also suffer the ‘trial and error’ approach that psychiatrists take when prescribing antidepressants. Now, a study published this week signifies the beginning of the end of guesswork. In it, a blood test predicts who will respond well to a novel treatment for depression, and who might even fare worse.“We haven’t had a test like this in psychiatry before,” says Andy Miller, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University and an author on the study in Archives of General Psychiatry....

By Geert De Clercq CADARACHE France (Reuters) - Behind thick glass in a laboratory nestled in French woodland, a silvery molten metal swirls like a liquid mirror. But the material is no mere novelty; as dangerous as it is captivating, it could offer a solution to the nuclear power debate. For sodium, the sixth-most abundant element on the planet, is being held up as the key to one of several new types of nuclear reactor being developed as governments grapple with the problem of making atomic energy more environmentally friendly, safe and financially viable....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is struggling to meet its 2011-2015 targets to reduce pollution, cut greenhouse gas growth and introduce cleaner sources of energy, a report submitted to the country’s parliament said on Wednesday.The report, which covers the 2011-2012 period, said faster-than-expected economic growth was to blame for China’s failure to meet environmental targets ranging from energy use to nitrogen oxide emissions.The state of China’s environment has come into particular focus in 2013, with most major cities engulfed by hazardous smog during the course of the year, including Beijing in January and Shanghai earlier this month....