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In science, the grandest revolutions are often triggered by the smallest discrepancies. In the 16th century, based on what struck many of his contemporaries as the esoteric minutiae of celestial motions, Copernicus suggested that Earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. In our own era, another revolution began to unfold 11 years ago with the discovery of the accelerating universe. A tiny deviation in the brightness of exploding stars led astronomers to conclude that they had no idea what 70 percent of the cosmos consists of....

The hunt for dark matter—and the associated particles and forces that we expect to accompany it—has turned up numerous false dawns over the years. Try as we might, any evidence of what makes up this invisible form of matter—thought to be the vast majority of matter in the known universe—has remained elusive. But a team of Hungarian researchers suggested in 2015 that they had found a particle, dubbed X17, that possibly interacted with dark matter in some way....

From Nature magazine Kaboom! Controlled explosions in the legs of this silicone ‘soft robot’ make it leap higher than 30 times its own height. Researchers led by George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have engineered a three-legged silicone device that is powered by combustion — previously used only in hard systems such as diesel engines. The soft robot has in each of its legs a channel with a soft valve at the end....

MANILA, May 13 (Reuters) - A fire at a Philippine rubber slipper factory killed 31 workers on Wednesday and dozens were missing and feared dead, government and fire officials said. Ariel Barayuga, head of bureau of fire protection, said investigators were trying to determine the cause of fire in the capital, Manila, that trapped workers at the two-storey factory building of Kentex Manufacturing Inc, which makes flip-flops and slippers. A fireman who gave his name as Soriano said 31 bodies had been found, adding most of the victims had died of suffocation....

Each passing year, evidence grows that there is no single type of “breast cancer” or “lung cancer.” These broad categories simply refer to diverse tumors that just happen to originate in certain parts of the body. Scientists now know that what matters most in determining the behavior of a particular cancer (and its response to specific therapy) are the molecular pathways that drive malignant cell growth instead of where the tumor begins in the body....

Fishing, pollution and other human activities along the Yangtze River in China are driving yet another species of freshwater cetacean to the brink of extinction. That is the conclusion of a six-week survey of the river’s middle and lower stretches by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) in Wuhan and the conservation group WWF in China. The final results of the survey will be announced in March. But the preliminary findings are worrying: the survey team spotted fewer than half of the Yangtze finless porpoises (Neophocaena phocaenoides asiaeorientalis) that were seen during a similar expedition in 2006, which found 1,225 living in the river....

It is common for us to focus on the competitive aspects of the well-worn phrase “survival of the fittest.” As it turns out, however, we sell nature short when we do so. Fitness is not simply a cutthroat matter of outperforming others to survive and reproduce—thus passing along those successful genes. As you will learn in this issue’s cover story, “Why We Help,” by Martin A. Nowak, cooperation among members of groups, from single-celled amoebas to the complex assemblages found in mammals, has helped shape the evolution of all of life on earth in profound ways....

How fast is the universe expanding? One might assume scientists long ago settled this basic question, first explored nearly a century ago by Edwin Hubble. But right now the answer depends on who you ask. Cosmologists using the Planck satellite to study the cosmic microwave background—light from the “early” universe, only about 380,000 years after the big bang—have arrived at a high-precision value of the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant (H0)....

Car brands enjoy testimonials from happy drivers. But there’s something a little more powerful, when the testimonial is from a driver whose car just caught fire. In a blog post on Tesla Web site, Juris Shibayama, an MD from Tennessee, explains what happened when his Model S caught fire last Wednesday. He ends his explanation with a line that not everyone would expect: “I would buy another one in a heartbeat....

In the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective....

Benjamin Franklin might have been on the short list for a Nobel Prize if there had been such a thing during his lifetime. The amazing breadth of his contributions stands out even today: he worked in areas ranging from the science of electricity to the wave theory of light to demography, meteorology, physical oceanography and even behavioral science. Franklin was also the first U.S. ambassador to France. His reputation as a scientist galvanized his popularity in Europe and helped him secure France’s support for the fledgling nation....

By Ernest Scheyder Jan 22 (Reuters) - Nearly 3 million gallons of saltwater and an unknown quantity of crude oil have leaked from a North Dakota pipeline into a creek that feeds the Missouri River, by far the largest spill of its kind in the state’s history, officials said. The leak, from a saltwater collection line owned by Summit Midstream Partners LP approximately 15 miles north of Williston, occurred sometime earlier this month and was reported to state officials on Jan....

Scientist to creationists: Don’t quote me Former chemistry professor Homer Jacobson has requested that two passages be retracted from a 1955 paper he wrote on the origins of life after discovering that creationists were using them to support their arguments. The 84-year-old scientist told the New York Times that he made the discovery when, on a whim, he decided to Google himself and quotes from his paper popped up on creationist sites such as Darwinismrefuted....

More than 2,000 Scientific American readers responded to last month’s online survey asking how they use their smartphone, which gadgets it has replaced and which new features they would like to see. The results show that—despite widespread frustration with battery life—smartphones are superseding music players, digital cameras and GPS navigation systems, but not tablets or personal computers. Replacing yesterday’s toys is not surprising given that smartphones consolidate most of what those gadgets did into a single device....

Coastal California’s redwood forests—with their lush ferns, towering trees and damp petrichor scent—might not seem to want for water, but they do face dry summers. To survive them, the trees, Sequoia sempervirens, grow specialized shoots with leaves that scrape moisture from the air. Many plants (including redwoods) are known to drink through their leaves, but “no one ever really figured out how the water gets in there,” says ecologist Alana Chin, now at ETH Zürich....

Proponents of more-aggressive forest management practices are citing wildfires currently burning in the western United States and linking them to climate change. Western wildfire experts, brought together by the climate communications firm Climate Nexus, called yesterday for more intentional burning of forests, as well as mechanical tree removal, to make them less susceptible to extreme wildfires. They said treating the forests can help combat increased fire risk caused by climate change, as well as the buildup of fuel caused by previous attempts to suppress fires entirely....

Satellite radio can send the same 100 channels of music, talk and sports to you at any street corner in the nation. Yet someone next to you may receive a different set of channels, and a third person who does not subscribe cannot pick up a thing. How can the service blanket the country yet be so discriminating? Three companies provide the world’s satellite radio: XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio for the U....

The relief was as deep as the stakes were high. At 7:20 A.M. (ET), the rocket carrying the largest, most ambitious space telescope in history cleared the launchpad in French Guiana, and the members of mission control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore roared their elation. The suspense was not quite over. Half an hour postlaunch, the telescope still needed to decouple from its host rocket, after which it had to deploy solar panels to partly power its journey....

These days, a person can’t talk about football without bringing up questions about the health effects of hard hits. Evidence is mounting that concussions experienced by players could lead to changes in the brain, including cognitive impairment. But what about the bodily impacts football players experience? In a new study, researchers at the University of Michigan set out to answer that question. They monitored 33 NCAA Division I football players using a device custom-fitted into the players’ shoulder pads that had both a GPS receiver and an accelerometer....

Inserting a gene that controls human sleep habits into mice can transform the rodents into “early birds.” This result provides insight into the molecular mechanisms that drive biological clocks. Most organisms have an internal clock that synchronizes their activities to the 24-hour day—the so-called circadian rhythm. PER2 is one of the genes that controls this rhythm in humans. But in 0.3 percent of the population, the gene goes awry, causing familial advanced sleep phase syndrome (FASPS), which drives people early to bed and very early to rise....