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A couple receives an invitation to a birthday party. Through long experience, each intuitively knows what to do next. One partner figures out whether the dress code is formal or casual. The other makes a mental note of the time and place of the gathering so that they don’t forget. To some degree, we all delegate mental tasks to others. When presented with new information, we automatically distribute responsibility for remembering facts and concepts among members of our particular social group, recalling some things on our own and trusting others to remember the rest....

From Nature magazine The evidence is in every breath of air, but answers are harder to come by. Xenon, the second heaviest of the chemically inert noble gases, has gone missing. Our atmosphere contains far less xenon, relative to the lighter noble gases, than meteorites similiar to the rocky material that formed the Earth. The missing-xenon paradox is one of science’s great whodunits. Researchers have hypothesized that the element is lurking in glaciers, minerals or Earth’s core, among other places....

A judge’s order blocking the Biden administration’s application of an interim climate metric will cause sweeping delays in agency rulemaking and stall planned projects requiring new environmental reviews, a White House official said this weekend. Dominic Mancini, the deputy administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said a recent preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from using an interim calculation of the social cost of greenhouse gases could slow finalization of at least 38 pending rules from four different agencies....

The future will know us through our mines. Unlike many of the changes humanity has wrought on the planet’s surface, which will disappear in geologic time, some of our underground doings have left permanent scars. So argue the authors of a new paper examining such human impacts on Earth. “The underground realm for most of us is out of sight, out of mind,” observes geologist Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester in England, lead author of the new paper, published July 24 in the journal Anthropocene....

Thirty years ago, on May 18, Mount St. Helens lost its top—3.7 billion cubic yards of mountain, to be exact. The peak of the Pacific Northwest icon dropped by about 1,300 feet in a matter of seconds, taking down with it enough trees to build 300,000 two-bedroom houses. Gone, too, were 200 homes, 57 human lives and most of the visible wildlife across 230 square miles. “The first reaction for many of us was that what remained was a moonscape,” recalls Jerry Franklin, professor of ecosystem analysis at the University of Washington....

TOMSK, RUSSIA—Misha K.—ex-con, ex-drug abuser, family man—arrived promptly at 4 P.M. for his daily dose of antibiotics. He is fighting his second bout with tuberculosis (TB), both times caught while serving a four-year prison term in this small city at the edge of Siberia. His crime: petty thievery to support his drug habit. The first time, prison doctors put him on a nine-month regimen of antibiotics, a standard prescription for routine cases of so-called susceptible TB....

Excerpted from The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder by Linda Stratmann. Copyright © 2016 by Linda Stratmann. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved. On 30 July 1823 M Demoutiers, an examining judge of Paris, concerned that a serious crime had taken place, sent for the celebrated Professor Orfila and posed two questions. Was it possible to discover whether a person had been poisoned after the body had been buried for a month?...

MARCH 1958 ENERGY, ASH, MONEY— “If atomic power is to be developed on an important scale, methods will have to be found for safely disposing of the vast quantities of radioactive ‘ashes’ that will be produced by nuclear reactors. Last month a committee of the National Academy of Sciences reported on waste disposal, pointing out that the costs of storing radioactive fission products temporarily to ‘cool’ them, of extracting long-lived isotopes and of shipping waste to distant points for ultimate disposal will have a major influence on the economics of nuclear power....

By David Stanway BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s capital has ordered more than 50 companies to shut down this year in an effort to cut pollution but pushing factories out could raise objections in surrounding areas reluctant to host Beijing’s polluters. Smog-shrouded Beijing and the surrounding province of Hebei have become a front in a “war against pollution” declared by Premier Li Keqiang last month. But experts say efforts to cut coal consumption and industrial output in big cities like Beijing is likely to put pressure on other regions to endure more pollution to keep the economy growing, with overall coal consumption expected to rise by a quarter from 2011 to 2015....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Coffee is unique among artisanal beverages in that the brewer plays a significant role in its quality at the point of consumption. In contrast, drinkers buy draft beer and wine as finished products; their only consumer-controlled variable is the temperature at which you drink them. Why is it that coffee produced by a barista at a cafe always tastes different than the same beans brewed at home?...

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazineThe International Space Station (ISS) is just one space-shuttle flight away from completion, but the construction boom in low-Earth orbit looks set to continue for at least another decade. Last week, China offered the most revealing glimpse yet of its plans to deploy its own station by 2020. The project seems to be overcoming delays and internal resistance and is emerging as a key part of the nation’s fledgling human space-flight program....

Hiding negative results and harmful side effects that occur in clinical trials would become harder in the United States under regulations proposed on November 19 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One proposal would require companies seeking the FDA’s approval of a new drug or therapy to post all clinical-trial results to the government website ClinicalTrials.gov, even if the treatment being tested is never approved; current law mandates this only for drugs that are approved....

Genetically modifying cotton promises to reduce the use of chemicals and, potentially, create a better environment for harmless insects and other animals. For the last decade, some farmers in Arizona have been planting cotton engineered to contain a toxin that kills pests such as the pink bollworm. A study of randomly chosen cotton fields reveals that although this genetically modified cotton did reduce pesticide use, it did not reduce use of herbicides nor did it improve biodiversity when compared to unmodified strains....

In March, officials from Guinness World Records traveled to Haifa, Israel, to visit a retired candymaker named Israel Kristal. They came to proclaim him, at the age of 112 years and 178 days, the world’s oldest man. Kristal has led an extraordinary life. When he was born, in 1903, life expectancy for a boy in Poland was only about 45 years. As a child, he remembers throwing candies to Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary....

At long last, it snowed in northern China. The first snow of the year came to Hebei, the northern province surrounding Beijing. In the Chinese capital, it was the first real bout of precipitation since last October. The blizzard caused 12 area highways around Beijing to close. Travel inconveniences aside, the blast of moisture was more than welcome in China, which is suffering through its worst drought in decades. Earlier this week, government officials announced that even the country’s massive water projects, like the North-South Water Transfer Project, couldn’t hope to deal with future shortages—the country would have to cut back its demand as well....

By Eric HandA large array of radio telescopes has begun its first sustained search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and at rates faster than ever before. Even so, the project has scrambled to find money to stay open and reach its planned size. “We’ve had a chequered time here,” says Don Backer, director of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, California. “We’re skating on thin ice.“The ATA has 42 six-metre dishes swivelling in the high desert, far fewer than the 350 dishes planned....

Earth will be able to host life for just another 1.75 billion years or so, according to a study published on 18 September in Astrobiology. The method used to make the calculation can also identify planets outside the Solar System with long ‘habitable periods’, which might be the best places to look for life. The habitable zone around a star is the area in which an orbiting planet can support liquid water, the perfect solvent for the chemical reactions at the heart of life....

The deepest hole humans have ever dug reaches 12 kilometers below the ground of Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Although we now have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto—about six billion kilometers away from the sun—we still cannot send a probe into the deep earth. For practical purposes, then, the center of the planet, which lies 6,380 kilometers below us, is farther away than the edge of our solar system. In fact, Pluto was discovered in 1930, and the existence of the earth’s inner core was not established—using seismological data—until six years later....

From Nature magazine The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles....

In a waist-high trench alongside Spain’s national Highway 1, a dozen volunteers wearing rubber gloves brush tan clay from crumbling human bones. Their knees rest on foam cushions, and a white tent shades them from the summer sun. It’s July 2011—a full 75 summers after Spain erupted in the Civil War that put the bones of 59 civilians in the ground here. A few steps away from the trench, volunteers hold microphones up to the murmuring mouths of elders from the town of Gumiel de Izán, in the north-central region of Castilla y León....