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In October, NASA announced that the $1.5-billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), a car-size rover planned for launch this fall, had become the $2-billion Mars Science Laboratory. When first conceived, it was the $650-million Mars Science Laboratory. Even more egregious is the $1-billion-make-that-$4.5-billion James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble. Complex projects of any kind—not only in the space program—always cost more than anticipated. But experts say the agency could—and needs to—do better....

Supersized portions and a lack of exercise may not be the only reasons for the spread of obesity in the U.S. A new study finds that having an obese friend makes a person 57 percent more likely to develop a bulging waistline too. The effect was strongest for close friends but also occurred if friends of friends—or even their friends—gained weight, suggesting that obesity spreads as a kind of social contagion, the same phenomenon popularized in the 2000 book The Tipping Point as an explanation for fads from trucker hats to management philosophies....

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down in the lunar module Eagle, becoming the first humans to walk on the moon. Nearly 50 years later, Apollo 11, a documentary by Todd Douglas Miller that included raw footage from the days leading up to the mission, the landing and return—much of which had not been seen by the public—premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The film was released in IMAX theaters in March, and will be broadcast on CNN on June 23 at 9 P....

La Shawn Ford has always been meticulous about his health. He ate well, exercised regularly and never smoked. But last year, when the 48-year-old Illinois state representative learned that actor Chadwick Boseman had died of colon cancer, he decided to take his health-care game up a notch. In October 2020 Ford scheduled an appointment with his primary care physician for a colonoscopy and, while he was at it, a prostate cancer screening, too....

Spending about 100 hours each month in the air, flight attendants are bombarded with pesticides, radiation, ozone and any illnesses passengers carry on board. Now new research shows that they also fly along with some of the highest levels ever measured for some flame retardants. All 19 commercial airliners in a new study had several flame retardants in their dust. And one chemical was measured at concentrations more than 100 times higher in the airplane dust than in dust collected from homes and offices....

As far as we know, no dog can compose music, no dolphin can speak in rhymes, and no parrot can solve equations with two unknowns. Only humans can perform such intellectual feats, presumably because we are smarter than all other animal species—at least by our own definition of intelligence. Of course, intelligence must emerge from the workings of the three-pound mass of wetware packed inside our skulls. Thus, researchers have tried to identify unique features of the human brain that could account for our superior intellectual abilities....

Over the past few years researchers in Mexico have become global leaders in developing drugs to treat bites from poisonous spiders and snakes. Several of their remedies are clearing the hurdles of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, including the scorpion antivenom Anascorp, which was approved by the FDA in 2011, and black widow drugs that are in advanced clinical trials. Antivenoms are among the oldest drugs in the medical arsenal....

From time immemorial, people gazing up at the night sky have dreamed of reaching out to touch the stars. But today we know that even the closest ones are so far away that light itself, the fastest thing known, takes several years to make the trip. The dream of such a visit seems as remote as the stars themselves—unless, perhaps, the stars somehow send emissaries to us. Remarkably, that may be happening....

On the video feed overhead, I see workers out on the floor of this nondescript warehouse near Irvine, Calif., walking away from the large reactor toward the doors. The shiny, cylindrical vacuum chamber at the reactor’s center, about as long as two school buses parked bumper to bumper, is encircled by two dozen ring-shaped electromagnets, each taller than I am and as thick as my leg. The temperature inside that chamber will rise, on my command, to around 10 million degrees Celsius—though only for an instant....

A number of studies have used functional MRI to see what our brain looks like as we recall pleasant memories, watch scary movies or listen to sad music. Scientists have even had some success telling which of these stimuli a subject is experiencing by looking at his or her scans. But does this mean it is possible to tell what emotions we are experiencing in the absence of prompts, as we let our mind wander naturally?...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. On June 27, the ATM turns 50. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker once described it as the “only useful innovation in banking.” But today, the cash that ATMs dispense may be on the endangered list. Cash is being displaced in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track. There are credit cards and electronic payments; apps such as Venmo, PayPal and Square Cash; mobile payments services; cryptocurrencies that operate outside the purview of central banks; and localized offerings such as Kenya’s mPesa, India’s Paytm and Bangladesh’s bKash....

The nutrition labels on packaged foods will likely get a makeover in the coming years, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Today (Feb. 27) the agency announced proposed changes to the labels, to reflect the latest nutrition science and the growing understanding of the link between our diet and chronic diseases such as obesity and heart disease, the FDA said. The labels were first introduced in the 1990s, and were last updated in 2006 to add information about trans fat....

Key concepts Circles Circumference Diameter Mathematical formula Pi Introduction Mathematicians get excited about the discovery of mathematical relationships. They look at the world around them in terms of numbers, formulas and equations. Mathematics is fun and practical, too. It comes in handy when calculating how long you need to save your allowance before you can buy a new game. You use math to double or triple a recipe or to calculate how late you can leave your house and still get to school on time, too....

Imagine this scenario, times infinity. (Credit: DotGears Studios/Screenshots by CNET) It was after maybe the 14th or 15th time I’d seen “Game Over” flash across my iPhone screen in the last maybe seven minutes that I decided that the app Flappy Bird – an experience so simultaneously simple and maddening that I could already picture it haunting my dreams – was perhaps the worst smartphone game ever created. I had hit a high score of 12 on my fourth or fifth attempt, finding myself secretly elated at the speedy proficiency of my mindless tapping timing....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichThe Newtonian constant of gravitation – known in the finely tuned business of metrology as ‘big G’ – has come a long way since British physicist Henry Cavendish first measured the gravitational attraction of Earth in 1798. Although G derived from Cavendish’s measurements had an uncertainty of about 1%, modern measurements have tightened that to just a couple of tens of parts per million.But the relentless honing of G may have hit a stumbling block....

The White House last night kicked off the process to formally approve an international treaty to phase down a powerful class of greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The treaty, known as the Kigali Amendment, was submitted by the White House and received by the Senate at the close of yesterday’s session after a lengthy delay that has spanned three presidential administrations. It is widely supported by environmental groups and U....

Irene traveled up the East Coast of the U.S. on August 26, 27 and 28, moving at bicycle speeds, sometimes as slowly as 16 miles per hour. The category 1 hurricane, later downgraded to a tropical storm as it approached New York City, made history for the numbers of people in its path—some 65 million—more than for the ferocity of its damage. Adopting a “better safe than sorry” attitude, public officials enforced mandatory evacuations of low-lying areas and mass transit shutdowns in numerous metropolitan areas, including New York....

An orchestra crescendos, and deaf audience members hear every note, thanks to cochlear implants that translate the complex sounds into a rainbow of optical light. That is the vision of a team of scientists in Germany, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, who believe a device that uses optics instead of sound waves might birth a refined class of auditory prosthetics. In people who can hear, spiral ganglion neurons in the inner ear allow for the precise discrimination of sound—we can recognize hundreds of people by the sound of their voice and distinguish between thousands of different pitches or frequencies of sound....

By Dominique Patton BEIJING (Reuters) - More than 40 percent of China’s arable land is suffering from degradation, official news agency Xinhua said, reducing its capacity to produce food for the world’s biggest population. The rich black soil in northern Heilongjiang province, which forms part of China’s bread basket, is thinning, while farmland in China’s south is suffering from acidification, the report said, citing agriculture ministry statistics. Degraded land typically includes soil suffering from reduced fertility, erosion, changes in acidity and the effects of climate change as well as damage from pollutants....

Alcohol has been a drink of choice for people for thousands of years, but scientists still do not know just how the stuff affects brain function when people become intoxicated. New research reveals that genetic change in a single nucleotide is enough to heighten alcohol sensitivity in rats and could help scientists design novel therapeutic approaches for alcoholism. Researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles led by H. Jacob Hanchar and Paul D....