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The first in a long-sought type of asteroid companion to Earth has now been discovered, a space rock that always dances in front of the planet along its orbital path, just beyond its reach. The asteroid, called 2010 TK7, is nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) across and currently leading the Earth by about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers). The asteroid is the first in a category known as Earth’s Trojans, a family of space rocks that could potentially be easier to reach than the moon, even though its member asteroids can be dozens of times more distant, researchers said....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) - At first glance, they do not look like much: tiny fragments of a primordial fungus shorter than a single hair’s width. But these fungal remnants possess the unique distinction of being the oldest-known fossils of any land-dwelling organism on Earth. A study published on Wednesday described microfossils of a subterranean fungus called Tortotubus that was an early landlubber at a time when life was largely confined to the seas, including samples from Libya and Chad that were 440 to 445 million years old....

Scientists in the US have developed an alkaline flow battery that they hope will help to tackle the tricky problem of storing energy from renewable power sources such as wind and solar. The new battery’s performance is similar to current commercial flow batteries but uses cheap and non-toxic organic molecules to store energy. By contrast, conventional flow batteries use expensive and hazardous transition metal solutes. Solar and wind energy resources are a growing issue for utilities as they try to match fluctuating consumer demand for electricity to the intermittent nature of renewable energy generation....

Antarctic krill form the biggest biomass swarms on Earth. “You can even see them from space,” says Alicia Burns, a behavioral biologist at Taronga Conservation Society Australia. Krill swarms play a vital role in the food chain and in cycling atmospheric carbon into the depths of the Southern Ocean. How these tiny, shrimplike creatures form and maintain massive clusters is poorly understood. But Burns and her colleagues describe in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that unique and mathematically predictable social rules govern the seemingly chaotic crustacean crowds....

Dear EarthTalk: I heard someone say that the environmental benefits of natural gas for electricity generation were overstated, and that it is not as green-friendly as the industry would have us believe. What is your take on this?—D. Montcalm, Brewster, N.Y. In our increasingly carbon-constrained world, natural gas (also known as methane) does keep coming up as a potentially cleaner fuel source for electricity generation than coal, currently the nation’s primary source of electrical power....

From The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, by David Epstein (in paperback April 29), in agreement with Current, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © David Epstein, 2014. In this excerpt Epstein details the Australian success with “talent transfer,” in which talented athletes were brought to new sports they had never tried before. In August 2004, a small group of scientists at the venerable Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) bet all their chips on the primacy of general, non-sport-specific athleticism....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA has launched its next Mars rover, kicking off a long-awaited mission to investigate whether the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life. The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket today (Nov. 26) at 10:02 a.m. EST (1502 GMT), streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The huge robot’s next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take 8 1/2 months....

Where did your most recent meal come from? Whether or not it was the supermarket, a nice restaurant or nearby drive-through, its contents probably came from not just one U.S. locality but a smattering of states—and countries. Just which ones, though, neither you nor the people who sold, packaged or processed it are likely to know for sure. If The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act recently passed by the Senate becomes law, companies and consumers would have a much better chance of tracing food back to its farm and factory origins....

THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION: ETHICS IN THE AGE OF GENETIC ENGINEERING by Michael J. Sandel. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007 ENHANCING EVOLUTION: THE ETHICAL CASE FOR MAKING BETTER PEOPLE by John Harris. Princeton University Press, 2007 Few books could present more implacably opposed views, and few could raise more provocative questions. Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard University and a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, assumes that many people find the more extreme forms of genetic engineering (cloning and designer children, for example) disquieting, and he attempts to explain why this unease makes moral sense....

There has been a steady stream of headlines declaring that life expectancy in the United States is decreasing. And the often-cited reason is the climbing number of opioid-related deaths. Those two facts piqued the interest of a group of researchers who sought to reframe the way these trends can be viewed. “We have a problem that is otherwise being underestimated,” said Ian Rockett, an injury epidemiologist and professor emeritus at West Virginia University....

In the search for alien life, Earth—as the only planet known to be inhabited—has always been a starting point. “We look for something that reminds us of home,” says Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. That means a rocky planet at just the right distance from its star—a star similar to the sun—to soak up sufficient starlight to allow surface water to exist in liquid form....

Although Eban Goodstein has been educating people about the global-warming threat for a decade, he only recently took major action to help solve the problem. In 2006 he heard James E. Hansen, a leading climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, say that global warming could prove catastrophic sooner than anticipated and that the world needed practical solutions immediately. Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College, temporarily left teaching to form the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions....

Soon after the space shuttle atlantis launched a new observatory into orbit in 1991, Gerald Fishman of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center realized that something very strange was going on. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), designed to detect gamma rays from distant astrophysical objects such as neutron stars and supernova remnants, had also begun recording bright, millisecond-long bursts of gamma rays coming not from outer space but from Earth below....

When my Harvard colleague Stephen Greenblatt saw my book Extraterrestrial featured on the cover of the Orthodox Jewish magazine Ami, he commented “It is interesting that the Orthodox evidently do not consider their faith threatened by the possibility of other inhabited worlds.” To which I replied: “They appear to be less orthodox than my colleagues in the scientific community.” This was in reference to the pushback that my book received regarding the possibility that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been manufactured by another civilization....

Key concepts Electricity Conductor Insulator Introduction Electricity powers many of the devices you use every day. Those devices are made up of circuits, ranging from very simple (such as a lamp with a single lightbulb) to very complex (such as in a computer). Try this project to build your own simple circuit and use it to test which common household materials conduct electricity. Background You probably hear the word electricity a lot, but what does it actually mean?...

Many of us have known a dog on Prozac. We’ve also witnessed the eye rolls that come with canine psychiatry. Doting pet owners—myself included—ascribe all sorts of questionable psychological ills to our pawed companions. But the science does suggest that numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate. And that thing when your dog woefully watches you pull out of the driveway from the window—that might be DSM-certified separation anxiety....

Listener Adeel from England wrote in to ask how he can perform better under pressure. Adeel has spoken English as a second language for many years and has excellent communication skills. But he notes that in high-pressure situations, he sometimes gets anxious and the words don’t come, plus his accent becomes more pronounced. What can he do to remedy this? Performance Anxiety Is Universal Anyone who’s ever been in a similar situation—and that’s all of us—can empathize....

Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare....

Is there a difference between the brain of an atheist and the brain of a religious person? —Emma Schachner, Utah Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responds: RESEARCHERS HAVE pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet complete. Several studies have revealed that people who practice meditation or have prayed for many years exhibit increased activity and have more brain tissue in their frontal lobes, regions associated with attention and reward, as compared with people who do not meditate or pray....

Melting snow and ice may be speeding up the warming. Changes in atmospheric circulation could be playing a role. Many factors could be influencing the region’s temperatures, which are rising at least twice as fast as the rest of the world. Now, scientists think they may have discovered an additional piece of the puzzle. Plants, it turns out, may have an unexpected influence on global warming. As carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, plants become more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis and other basic life functions....