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On a dim February evening, seven people crowded around a row of television monitors in a shack on the rear deck of the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer. The research icebreaker was idling 30 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica with a cable as thick as an adult’s wrist dangling over the stern. At the end of that cable, on the continental shelf 1,400 meters down, a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) skimmed across the sea floor, surveying a barren, grey mudscape....

For the first time, scientists have discovered microbes living deep inside Earth’s oceanic crust — the dark volcanic rock at the bottom of the sea. This crust is several kilometers thick and covers 60% of the planet’s surface, making it the largest habitat on Earth. The microbes inside it seem to survive largely by using hydrogen, formed when water flows through the iron-rich rock, to convert carbon dioxide into organic matter....

Where some are planning walls, others are planning windows. Or rather, pipelines. Across the dusty 1,954-mile border between Mexico and the United States, international companies are gearing up to spend more than $10 billion on thousands of miles of steel tubes carrying cheap natural gas from Texas to hungry markets on the other side of the Rio Grande. The recent surge in natural gas investment is just one element of the colossal changes underway in Mexico’s energy portrait....

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy among women and, after lung cancer, the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in North America. Yet unlike the survival rate for individuals diagnosed with lung cancer, the rate for women diagnosed with breast cancer has been rising dramatically over the past decade—to the point where breast cancer could soon lose its ranking as the second-greatest cancer killer. Nothing would delight clinicians like us more....

If you’re looking for Star Wars’ forest moon of Endor or Avatar’s Pandora among exoplanets, prospects may not be promising: such Earth-like moons may be rare, and the ones that exist could be stranger than anyone thought. Using data from the Kepler space telescope, a pair of astronomers from Columbia University may have found the first example of an “exomoon”: a Neptune-size world circling a planet 10 times Jupiter’s mass that is about between 80 and 90 percent as close to its sun as Earth is to ours....

When the AIDS epidemic first surfaced in the U.S. 30 years ago, the illness was primarily an urban problem, centered in cities such as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Today New York State and California still rank among the highest in the number of cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with more than 150,000 people living with AIDS (the later stages of HIV infection) between them....

Sixty years ago at the launch of the World Health Organization, the world’s governments declared health to be a fundamental human right “without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.” Thirty years ago in Alma Ata, the world’s governments called for health for all by the year 2000, mainly through the expansion of access to primary health facilities and services. While the world missed that target by a long shot, we can still achieve it, at remarkably low cost....

The United States is in the grip of an epidemic. Opioid drugs are powerful pain-relieving medications, but come with a high risk of addiction. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 91 Americans die each day from opioid overdoses, and that figure is rising. Researchers in economics, psychology, and medicine are all working to combat the epidemic, but perhaps the frontline science is chemistry. By closely examining the underlying structures of the body’s opioid receptors, chemists can drive the development of safer drugs that treat pain effectively but are less likely to lead to addiction and abuse....

When the humanoid robot SAFFiR gets a shove, it reflexively moves to maintain its balance. SAFFiR can also walk over uneven terrain, turn its head to scan its surroundings and—with the help of a human operator—reach out to grasp objects. Built by a team at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, SAFFiR is a firefighting robot and a proto­type for one that will compete in the final stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a contest run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency....

Sea-level rise threatens thousands of homes in California by 2035, especially in cities near San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to an analysis released today. Chronic flooding by that year imperils nearly 5,000 homes in the Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, a region that’s home to affluent homeowners and an international airport. In the suburbs north of San Francisco, roughly 4,000 homes are at risk, according to the study from the Union of Concerned Scientists....

For Ramirez, who works with Colombia’s newly energized tourism industry to teach visitors about growing cacao, it’s a heavy workload to keep such diseases at bay. At least three pathogens frequent his farm, and each requires dedicated management. When it comes to black pod rot and the similar frosty pod—a fungus whose spores turn a pod’s surface velvety white—removing infected pods early can help prevent the spread of disease. Pods infected by another fungus, called mal de machete, stay on the tree, but require treatment with a blue fungicidal paste....

It’s official: El Niño is back. This winter is likely to be wetter and warmer than average, thanks to a strong El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean that will probably persist through the winter, forecasters said today (Oct. 15) during a news briefing. “We won’t be able to officially rank it until it peaks out and ends. But our expectation is that it will be amongst the three strongest,” with the other strong El Niño events occurring in the 1997–98 and 1982–83 winter seasons, said Mike Halpert, the deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)....

Key concepts Animals Predators Prey Camouflage Introduction Have you ever wondered how predators such as wolves, lions and hawks are able to find their prey? And what can an animal do to keep from being a predator’s dinner? To survive, some animals use camouflage so they can better blend in with their surroundings. In this science activity you’ll be the hungry predator and you’ll hunt for different colored candies. But it may not be as easy as it sounds—some of your prey will be camouflaged by their habitats....

The year 1916 opened with no prospect of victory for any of the participants in the Great War—or even the sign of an ending—despite millions of casualties on all sides. The belligerents had co-opted large segments of industrial and scientific capacity and shifted significant portions of their populations away from peacetime industries into military service. Those in charge desperately sought to find some way of gaining an advantage, of any kind, over their opponents....

If the memory center of the human brain can grow new cells, it might help people recover from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), delay the onset of Alzheimer’s, deepen our understanding of epilepsy and offer new insights into memory and learning. If not, well then, it’s just one other way people are different from rodents and birds. For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons—called neurogenesis—was possible in an area of the brain that is responsible for learning, memory and mood regulation....

From Train Wreck, The Forensics of Rail Disasters, by George Bibel. Copyright © The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Believe it or not, it’s possible to derail a train by going too slow—more about that later. Too fast on a curve In 1947, a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train with 2 steam locomotives and 14 cars left Pittsburgh at 1:05 a.m. bound for New York City. The train had just descended a steep 1....

It used to be tough to get porn. Renting an X-rated movie required sneaking into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, and eyeing a centerfold meant facing down a store clerk to buy a pornographic magazine. Now pornography is just one Google search away, and much of it is free. Age restrictions have become meaningless, too, with the advent of social media—one teenager in five has sent or posted naked pictures of themselves online, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy....

In May 1972 a worker at a nuclear fuel-processing plant in France noticed something suspicious. He had been conducting a routine analysis of uranium derived from a seemingly ordinary source of ore. As is the case with all natural uranium, the material under study contained three isotopes–that is to say, three forms with differing atomic masses: uranium 238, the most abundant variety; uranium 234, the rarest; and uranium 235, the isotope that is coveted because it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction....

How do fish swim in schools, effortlessly coordinating their every move? The answer appears to be ingrained in their genes. The genetic basis underlying the complex, social behavior of schooling is revealed in two studies published September 12 in Current Biology. The studies suggest that schooling is not a learned behavior, and instead show it relies on several regions of the fish genome. The findings may point to the genetic underpinning of why humans also are social, and tend to gather in groups, some experts said, although others debated this....

A brain scanner now used to guide treatment of patients with epilepsy and other neurological disorders is bulky and challenging to use on fidgety young children—but researchers hope it might soon be replaced by a new machine that’s not much bigger than a bike helmet. Scientists at University College London have created a prototype of a lightweight, easier-to-use version of a magnetoencephalography, or MEG, brain scanner. These machines monitor the magnetic field created when neurons communicate with each other, allowing physicians to see how the brain functions from one second to the next....