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While the nonfiction of our childhoods was less exciting, the variety in nonfiction these days is amazing. The ease with which we can create graphic- and photo-heavy, well-designed nonfiction means that children are gravitating to nonfiction books like never before. We’ve long assumed that kids have to be convinced that reading is pleasurable, especially when the task is learning about our world instead of a fictional one, like Narnia. Yet, researchers and librarians who have tracked the reading preferences of real, in-the-wild kids would disagree....

The Mars rover Spirit, which this month passed its sixth anniversary of landing on the Red Planet, will apparently rove no more. NASA announced in a teleconference Tuesday that Spirit, stuck for months in a patch of soft soil known as Troy, has been designated a “stationary research platform”. Spirit has not managed to free itself in a series of extraction maneuvers that began in November, and the rover’s controllers say that their focus must now turn to preparing for the onset of winter in the Martian southern hemisphere—a harsh season, lasting nearly half an Earth year, that Spirit may not survive....

“In the ant’s house, the dew is a flood,” an old proverb tells us. Yet for floodplain-dwelling ants, a little dew is nothing. When a real flood arrives, some ant species are known to evacuate their nest and self-assemble into rafts that float to dry ground. Swarm behavior is common in ants: some species even build living bridges to let their kindred march atop. When it comes to raft building, the behavior has been observed in fire ants, but scientists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have discovered a peculiar design in living rafts of another species, which builds boat bottoms with its young....

After a week of contentious public and private debate, a small cluster of astronomers has voted to demote Pluto from its planetary status. Rejecting an expansive definition proposed by a special committee, the astronomers of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined a planet as: a celestial body that orbits around the sun; has sufficient mass to become round; and has “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” On the strength of puny Pluto’s inability to dominate nearby Neptune, whose orbit it crosses, as well as to clear out the Kuiper belt of many Pluto-size objects, it fails to qualify as a planet under the new definition....

The summer blockbuster “Jurassic World” roared through its opening weekend, showing moviegoers Hollywood’s version of baby Triceratops, armored ankylosaurus and long-necked sauropods, as well as a terrifying genetically engineered hybrid named Indominus rex. But how accurate are these dinosaur depictions? Live Science asked seven paleontologists to scientifically assess the film and its beastly characters. Their analyses revealed dinosaur faux pas, from the lack of dinosaur feathers to the strangely long arms of Indominus rex....

If you drew a large-scale map of the universe, it would look rather like a map of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Galaxies line up in filaments that crisscross intergalactic space like freeways. In between the roads are regions of relatively low density: the cosmic countryside. And at the crossroads, where multiple filaments converge, are clusters of galaxies: the cosmic megacities. The size of these clusters is daunting. It takes light a little more than a second to reach Earth from the moon and eight minutes to reach Earth from the sun....

A mop of light brown hair shakes as a slender nine-year-old boy named Jack bangs furiously at his keyboard. Jack’s eyes are fixed on a clock with six hands, which denote the month, day, hour, minute, second and 60th of a second. As soon as he types 10:28:2:14:56:32, a new clock appears, and he hammers out another set of numbers. An affable 14-year-old student named Marti had just taught me the exercise, and I guessed I could have solved one of these clocks in a few minutes....

Four people working for the Ebola containment effort in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were killed overnight Thursday in attacks on two locations where response teams were operating. Another six people were injured in the violence, forcing the World Health Organization and partner agencies to withdraw staff from a strategically critical location, a senior WHO official said. The attack was the deadliest yet during a 17-month outbreak in which response workers have been frequently targeted for violence, said Dr....

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, Dec 23 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday handed environmental groups a win by throwing out federal regulations that gave local government agencies more leeway in meeting air quality standards for ozone. In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on both of the legal questions raised by the Natural Resources Defense Council....

By Reuters Staff (Reuters) - The first uterus transplant in the United States has failed and the Ohio hospital that performed the procedure said on Wednesday the organ was removed due to an unspecified complication. “We are saddened to share that our patient, Lindsey, recently experienced a sudden complication that led to the removal of her transplanted uterus,” Cleveland Clinic said in a statement. It said the hospital was looking into the reasons for the failure and would provide more details later....

Geophysicists are returning to Earth’s most famous cosmic bullseye. Around April 7, from a drill-ship off the coast of Yucatán, Mexico, they will start to penetrate the 200-kilometre-wide Chicxulub crater, which formed 66 million years ago when an enormous asteroid smashed into the planet. The aftermath of the impact obliterated most life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. The expedition is the first to directly probe one of Chicxulub’s most striking features—its ‘peak ring’, a circle of mountains that rises within the crater floor....

For more than 20 years, the only known superconductors that worked far above liquid-helium temperatures were a few dozen compounds—virtually all based on copper. Now scientists have discovered the first high-temperature superconductors based on iron. These novel materials could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries in science—how exactly the high-temperature versions work. In superconductors electric current flows completely without resistance. For decades, the phenomenon was thought to occur only near absolute zero....

By Richard LovettBy 2080, global warming could result in one-fifth of the world’s lizard species becoming extinct, a global study has found.Even under the most optimistic scenarios for curbing carbon dioxide emissions, the analysis by an international team shows that one-fifth of the globe’s lizard populations, corresponding to 6 percent of all lizard species, may go extinct by 2050.“We’ve committed ourselves to that,” says Barry Sinervo, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study....

Researchers have identified a “critical period” during which new nerve cells in adult brains have the same capacity to learn as those in developing brains. The finding in mice, reported in this week’s Neuron, provides the promise of therapies that may one day limit or perhaps even reverse the damage of neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s. Scientists first observed neurogenesis—the creation of new neurons in the adult brain—in animal brains in the 1960s but did not find evidence of it in humans until the late 1990s, says senior study author Hongjun Song, an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore....

The grim kitty: cat senses death When a cat named Oscar curls up next to an ailing patient at a nursing home in Rhode Island, staffers start calling next of kin. Seems the standoffish kitty gets friendly when he senses the end is near: In the two years since Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence adopted the finicky feline, more than 25 residents in the center’s dementia unit died just hours after Oscar showered them with affection, Reuters reports....

Nuclear power plants cannot be built quickly enough and in a safe and secure manner to be a major global solution for climate change, according to a report released yesterday from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The report says the nuclear industry, under current policies and financing, won’t be able to build enough new reactors to make a difference in climate in the next 20 years. “Without major changes in government policies and aggressive financial support, nuclear power is actually likely to account for a declining percentage of global electricity generation,” the report says....

By Jo Marchant Oil droplets that creep purposefully through their watery environment, metabolize fuel, sense their surroundings and perhaps even replicate–could these be precursors to life? That’s the claim of a chemist with a controversial approach to modeling how Earth’s first organisms scraped themselves together.Theories about how life started range from fortuitous chemistry around hydrothermal vents on the sea floor to the delivery of precursor molecules from outer space. But there is little hope of finding geological evidence for this momentous event: Earth’s crust is continuously being recycled, with the oldest known rocks dating to only 3....

How do you get from Virginia to Paris? For one team of young rocketeers, the way across the Atlantic will involve a homemade model rocket, a chicken egg and some serious competition. On May 14, several hundred seventh- to 12th-graders from around the country will descend on The Plains, Va., for the finals of the 2011 Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC). The 100 student teams that have qualified for the TARC finals will compete for $60,000 in scholarship money as well as a trip to France to attend the Paris Air Show and compete against teams from Europe....

Innovation matters in an enormous variety of professions. It elevates the careers of chefs, university presidents, psychotherapists, police detectives, journalists, teachers, engineers, architects, attorneys and surgeons, among other professionals. The contributions of creative thought can directly translate into career advancement as well as financial rewards. In an unfavorable economic climate, raising your creative game may even mark the difference between survival and failure. Psychologists broadly define creativity as the purposeful generation and implementation of a novel idea....

Researchers have identified a gene that increases the risk of schizophrenia, and they say they have a plausible theory as to how this gene may cause the devastating mental illness. After conducting studies in both humans and mice, the researchers said this new schizophrenia risk gene, called C4, appears to be involved in eliminating the connections between neurons — a process called “synaptic pruning,” which, in humans, happens naturally in the teen years....