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Earth’s long-term warming trend continues, and 2017 now ranks as one of the top three hottest years on record, according to a report released today (Jan. 18) by NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Analysis by NASA scientists showed that 2017 was the second warmest year on record, with global average temperatures across land and sea surfaces measuring 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 degrees Celsius) above average temperatures from 1951 to 1980....

New Shepard’s Crew Capsule also carried a more efficient reaction control system algorithm that would yield a “Big performance win if it works,” Bezos added. Cameras on flying drones were in place to capture the feat. Blue Origin also packed two science experiments onboard the Crew Capsule during the test flight. One experiment, called the “Box of Rocks” Experiment," was exactly like it sounds: a box of rocks launched into space to observe how the rocks move in weightlessness....

In 2010, a massive, magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck the south central coast of Chile, rupturing beaches and launching a tsunami that rode inland with devastating effect. In an instant, whole sections of the coastline were transformed, with large swaths of sand and rock lifted from beneath the waves. For Chile, it was a disaster of sobering proportions. But for Eduardo Jaramillo and Jenifer Dugan – researchers who have spent years studying the effects of coastal erosion on beach ecology – it was also a rare opportunity to see one of climate change’s more immediate effects put in reverse....

In the quantum world, objects are described by wave functions. Electrons around a molecule, for example, exist in wavelike orbitals, smeared-out shapes that determine properties such as the electrons’ energy and the propensity for the molecule to undergo various chemical reactions. But orbitals are slippery critters that, because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, defy routine efforts to image them completely and accurately. Now, however, researchers at Canada’s National Research Council in Ottawa have produced a three-dimensional scan of the outermost electron orbital around a nitrogen molecule....

Viruses do not make good fossils. But advances in genomic technology have allowed scientists to peer into the genetic material of viruses and their hosts to search for clues about their shared evolutionary history. Genetic code from retroviruses has been found to compose some 8 percent of the human genome, having been copied in during replication and left to be inherited by us and our progeny. But non-retroviral RNA viruses do not use their host’s DNA to replicate—and some do not even enter the host cell’s nucleus....

CANCUN, Mexico—Taking a boat out from Cancun is like visiting an aquatic Disneyland for adults. Along a 25-kilometer coastal mainland stretch of luxury hotels, there’s parasailing, jet skiing and a “pirate boat” where tourists eat surf and turf while watching a Captain Jack Sparrow type perform on stage. Eight kilometers offshore, near Isla Mujeres, divers and snorkelers flood the reef—often with the unfortunate consequence of breaking pieces of coral, bleeding sunscreen toxic to wildlife and otherwise stressing a delicate ecosystem....

Evolutionary biologist Daniel E. Lieberman caused an international stir nearly a decade ago when he published a paper showing that running in cushioned sneakers encourages people to hit the ground harder than running barefoot. Lieberman, a professor of biological sciences at Harvard University, also started running barefoot himself as an experiment and kept doing it because he enjoyed it. Every spring, after running the Boston Marathon, he would trade his traditional sneakers for a pair of minimal shoes or no footwear at all....

Chemical content of bears’ hair reveals surprising eating habits Researchers from Canada and the US have revealed new insights into the eating habits and hair-growth patterns of a wild grizzly bear population, by analysing the chemical content of their fur. The team led by Garth Mowat, the head of the Canadian government’s Natural Resource Science Section in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, was studying the dietary patterns of grizzlies around the province’s Stikine river....

In the summers of the early 1950s, multitudes of American children were stuck in their home. Parents didn’t permit them to play together because, when the weather got warm, society entered a nightmare called polio. Children would eagerly begin their school breaks with a bicycle, scooter or kite and end them in crutches, braces or an iron lung. The disease poliomyelitis, or polio, had been in the medical textbooks for decades....

Searching for a reason major climate change legislation hasn’t passed Congress yet? You could do worse than start looking around Washington, D.C., with its endless think tanks, lobbying firms and trade groups, many of which have swung into action in the past to block such bills and stand ready to do so in the future. A recent study published in the journal Climatic Change finds that much of the millions of dollars that funds these groups comes from secret sources, and a good portion of the rest is from publicity-shy conservative foundations and wealthy donors....

In my career as a chemist, I owe a huge debt to serendipity. In 2012 I was in the right place (IBM’s Almaden research laboratory in California) at the right time—and I did the “wrong” thing. I was supposed to be mixing three ingredients in a beaker in the hope of creating a known material. The goal was to replace one of the usual ingredients with a version derived from plastic waste, in an effort to increase the sustainability of strong plastics called thermoset polymers....

CHONGQING, China—The people of this city stood stock-still and bowed their heads for three minutes of silence beginning at 2:28 P.M. local time this afternoon, solemnly observing the one-week anniversary of the earthquake that the government estimates has killed nearly 35,000 people in Sichuan Province and injured nearly 250,000. Drivers honked their horns in solidarity as sirens and horns blared to mark the somber occasion. Nearly 4,000 villages and cities have been affected by the quake, including this city of 30 million to the east of the epicenter....

The justices of the Supreme Court may be among the best legal minds in the country, but they have no eye for distances — and new research may help explain why. During oral arguments Wednesday (Jan. 15) in a case about the constitutionality of laws prohibiting protestors from gathering close to abortion clinic entrances, the justices were stumped at the size of the 35-foot-long (10.6 meters) buffer zone in question. “It’s pretty much this courtroom, kind of,” ABC News quoted Associate Justice Elena Kagan as saying....

Superconductivity is one of those nearly magical properties that seem to defy all intuition for how the physical world ought to work. In a superconductor, electric currents flow without resistance—an electron passes unimpeded through the material like a torpedo through some frictionless ocean. After discovering the phenomenon in 1911 Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes showed that an electric current in a closed superconducting loop of mercury would keep flowing long after the driving potential was removed; he demonstrated his discovery by carrying such a persistent current from the Netherlands to England....

This is the seventh article in the Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions. It’s Valentine’s season, which means that everywhere you look there are heart-shaped balloons, pink greeting cards and candy boxes filled with chocolate. But what is true love? Does it exist? Or is it simply a cognitive illusion, a trick of the mind? Let us count the ways. Contrary to the anatomy referenced in all of our favorite love songs, love (as with every other emotion we feel) is not rooted in the heart, but in the brain....

By Ros Krasny WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The world loses or wastes a staggering 25 percent to 33 percent of the food it produces for consumption, losses that can mean the difference between an adequate diet and malnutrition in many countries, the World Bank said in a report released on Thursday. “The amount of food wasted and lost globally is shameful,” said Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank. “Millions of people around the world go to bed hungry every night, and yet millions of tons of food end up in trash cans or spoiled on the way to market....

Holiday lights will adorn many neighborhoods this Christmas, but look out for a very special lighting treat in the form of a full moon this Friday. This month, the full moon will peak at 6:11 a.m. EST (1111 GMT) on Dec. 25. This will be the first time a full moon has graced the skies on Christmas Day in 34 years, and it won’t happen again until 2034. When the December full moon rises, it will be a Full Cold Moon, because it will light up the sky during the beginning of winter, according to NASA....

It seems unlikely that the maker of hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbusters such as Armageddon and The Transformers could inspire scientists to develop an ultralow-cost tool for quickly sensing airborne chemical weapons. Yet one former University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (U.M.) researcher says his idea to use a nerve-gas antidote to create an inexpensive litmus paper–like nerve-gas sensor emerged shortly after watching The Rock on DVD a few years ago. During the climax of that 1996 Michael Bay movie, chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed (played by Nicholas Cage) injects himself in the heart with atropine to prevent certain death from VX gas....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. This summer the insurgent group ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions’ worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army, including Humvees, helicopters, antiaircraft cannons and M1 Abrams tanks. ISIS staged a parade with its new weapons and then deployed them to capture the strategic Mosul Dam from outgunned Kurdish defenders....

We are raising the anxious generation, and the conversation about the causes, and the potential cures, has just begun. In The Self-Driven Child, authors William Stixrud and Ned Johnson focus on the ways that children today are being denied a sense of controlling their own lives—doing what they find meaningful, and succeeding or failing on their own. Screen time, the authors say, is part of the problem, but so are well-meaning parents and schools, who are unwittingly taking from children the opportunities they need to grow stronger, more confident and more themselves....