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Physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked the question “Where are they?” to express his surprise over the absence of any signs for the existence of other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Although many potential resolutions to this so-called “Fermi paradox” have been suggested over the years, there is still no consensus on which one, if any, is correct. The question of whether we are alone in the Milky Way (or in the universe at large) remains, however, one of the most intriguing questions in science in general, and in astronomy in particular....

Last month, the American Heart Association released a new scientific statement that seemed to suggest that eating late in the day is bad for your heart. At least, that was the take home message that made the rounds on evening news and morning shows. The actual statement was a bit more cautious: “Allocating more calories earlier in the day might help reduce cardiovascular disease risk,” it read. But that was immediately followed by the disclaimer that “large studies tracking patients’ cardiovascular health over a long period are needed to show how meal timing and patterns impact disease risk....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The launch debut of NASA’s first deep-space capsule in more than 40 years will have to wait at least another day after a series of delays thwarted repeated liftoff attempts on Thursday (Dec. 4). The Orion spacecraft, NASA’s first space capsule since the Apollo era, was poised to launch from a pad here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to test its heat shield, parachutes and other vital spaceship functions....

Key concepts Biology Life DNA Double helix Introduction Ever wondered how DNA, the genetic blueprint of a life-form, can encode and pass on the information on how to grow and maintain that life-form? Just like a cookbook contains a recipe for a dish, DNA stores the recipe for the life of an organism. Unlike various recipes, however, very different organisms’ DNA such as in a fungus, plant or animal all look very similar....

The hottest spots in the search for alien life are a few frigid moons in the outer solar system, each known to harbor a liquid-water ocean beneath its icy exterior. There is Saturn’s moon Titan, which hides a thick layer of briny water beneath a frozen surface dotted with lakes of liquid hydrocarbon. Titan’s sister Saturnian moon Enceladus has revealed its subsurface sea with geyserlike plumes venting from cracks near its south pole....

By Richard MonasterskyJane Lubchenco smiles as a dolphin leaps out of the water, arcs in the air and splashes back down just a few metres away. The 63-year-old marine ecologist is out on a boat near Pascagoula, Miss., with a team of researchers studying how the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has affected dolphin communities there. On this October day, Lubchenco wears starfish-shaped earrings and a cap emblazoned with the letters “NOAA,” for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....

Two years after retiring most of its research chimpanzees, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is ceasing its chimp programme altogether, Nature has learned. In a November 16 e-mail to the agency’s administrators, NIH director Francis Collins announced that the 50 NIH-owned animals that remain available for research will be sent to sanctuaries. The agency will also develop a plan for phasing out NIH support for the remaining chimps that are supported by, but not owned by, the NIH....

President Obama wants America’s transportation to go green, and he wants oil companies to pay for it. The White House announced yesterday that it will propose a $10-per-barrel tax on oil as part of the fiscal 2017 budget. The money will go toward a $32 billion annual investment in clean vehicles, public transit and urban planning. Oil companies immediately lambasted the idea of a tax. Republicans pronounced the plan dead on arrival in the GOP-led Congress....

For decades Pluto, later joined by its moon Charon, had a wide swath to itself on astronomers’ plots of the solar system—no other bodies were known to dwell beyond Neptune in the long-hypothesized debris field known as the Kuiper Belt. But in 1992 a pair of astronomers turned up 1992 QB1, a body about 200 kilometers wide circling the sun at a distance of about 6.5 billion kilometers, well beyond Neptune’s orbit....

Stephen Joseph’s stunning images present, for the very first time, a recreation of John Muir’s herbaria. Here are plants collected over a century ago by the naturalist considered by many to be America’s first environmentalist. Muir was blessed early on with a love and aptitude for botany, a study that helped him become one of the most influential field scientists in the world. Botany was for Muir a means of making sense of the natural world, and it would significantly contribute to the value he placed on nature and the wilderness....

To a neuroscientist, the trouble with cocktail parties is not that we do not love cocktails or parties (many neuroscientists do). Instead what we call “the cocktail party problem” is the mystery of how anyone can have a conversation at a cocktail party at all. Consider a typical scene: You have a dozen or more lubricated and temporarily uninhibited adults telling loud, improbable stories at increasing volumes. Interlocutors guffaw and slap backs....

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazineEndangered seals in a marine protected area are heading towards local extinction, even while the same species thrives in an unprotected area nearby. Researchers report in Conservation Letters this week that the monk seal population in Hawaii’s Papahnaumokukea Marine National Monument is shrinking by about 4 percent a year, while a sub-population of monk seals in the main Hawaiian Islands next door–where fishing, development and boat activity are permitted–is increasing by 7 percent a year....

The myriad liquid concoctions used in hydraulic fracturing make for quite a recipe book. Since January 2011, FracFocus, an online chemical-disclosure registry, has assembled a list of the mixtures used at more than 52,000 oil and gas wells across the United States. In these data, geochemist Brian Ellis sees opportunity. He plans to mix different chemicals into oil- and gas-rich shale rock inside a pair of high-pressure chambers that he is building....

Vultures carve lazy circles in the sky as a stream of tourists marches down a walkway into Colorado’s Spruce Canyon. Watching their steps, the visitors file along a series of switchbacks leading to one of the more improbable villages in North America—a warren of living quarters, storage rooms, defensive towers and ceremonial spaces all tucked into a large cleft in the face of a cliff. When ancient farmers built these structures around the year 1200, they had nothing like the modern machinery that constructed the tourist walkway....

On January 3 of this year the parents of a girl with static encephalopathy, a disorder that leaves her unable to move and with the cognitive capacity of an infant, announced on a blog that they had been using hormones to stunt the growth of their daughter for medical and quality-of-life reasons. [More details are available via the original news report of the story.] The resulting, and very public, debate–much of it carried out in the comment thread of the original blog–has ranged from support for the parents to accusations of eugenics and worse....

We spend most of our adult lives monitoring our cholesterol levels, making sure that they don’t get too high. If they get above a certain number, our doctors are likely to want to put us on cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins. These drugs have a long track record of reducing deaths from heart disease. Statin use also appears to reduce the risk of dementia later in life—although it’s not clear how much of this is due to its cholesterol-lowering effects....

The faded, “distressed look” of a favorite pair of blue jeans, may come with a hidden price for the residents of New York. The Hudson River dumps 300 million clothing fibers into the Atlantic Ocean each day, according to a recent study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Many of the fibers come from aging clothes, rinsed out with the laundry and into the environment. Approximately half of the fibers were plastic, while the remainder were spun from natural materials like cotton or wool....

In the Central African rain forest, a team of researchers and students from the U.S., Cameroon, Gabon, the U.K., Germany, France and the Netherlands is creating a conservation plan for the region that takes climate change and regional economic development into account. This group, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, includes biologists, agricultural experts and social scientists. Collaboration among people from many different disciplines and nations—sharing goals and resources—is becoming the new normal in science and engineering....

The question on the physics quiz seemed simple enough: “What is the smallest piece of matter that makes up everything in the universe?” Binta’s response: “Binta.” I laughed out loud. You would, too, if you saw tiny Binta, who is one of my smartest seventh graders. Surely she knew the correct answer is “atom.” Yet, I mused, a famous equation governing atoms could also apply to her. E = mc2. The equation says that under the right conditions, mass can become energy, and vice versa....

The debate over whether gender plays a role in color preference has raged since the late 1800s, with some arguing sex doesn’t make a shade of difference and others insisting that it does. One universal preference: blue appeals to all. But new research shows that girls really do prefer pink—or blue with a splash of red (think purple). “We can only speculate about the universal preference to blue from an evolutionary point of view,” says Yazhu Ling, a research associate in psychology at Newcastle University in England and co-author of the new study published in Current Biology....