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A Malaysia Airlines flight en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was downed over a warzone in eastern Ukraine today (July 17). Ukrainian government officials said a surface-to-air missile may have taken down the airplane. Flight MH17 crashed in the region of Donetsk, a pro-Russian rebel stronghold, killing all 298 people aboard, reported Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said in a statement he wasn’t ruling out the possibility that the plane was shot down, and the United States has since concluded the airplane was shot down, a senior U....

The first private team to send a robot to the moon can win $20 million—but it has to do it soon. After two extensions the new deadline for the Google Lunar XPRIZE has been pushed to 2016, leaving teams a mere two years to build, test and fly their missions. Succeeding within that time frame is a tall order, but still within reach for some of the top teams, experts say....

When Apple introduced the iPhone in June 2007, the company sought to test the limits of mobile communications and computing in a single, handheld device (handsomely packaged, of course). Software writers soon began taking Apple up on that challenge and, when the company opened its Apple App Store Web site in July, it gave these programmers an outlet for selling a vast array of new capabilities for the iPhone, including the ability to transform it into a number of different musical instruments....

STINSON BEACH, Calif. – The Pacific Ocean laps against a seaside property in the small Northern California town. If it comes a foot closer, it will breach the black-painted concrete wall that surrounds the wooden house on three sides. The threatening water isn’t the work of rising sea levels, but rather of “king tides,” which occur when the sun and moon’s combined influence is highest. They’re not caused by climate change, but according to activists and experts, they provide a convenient way to see what everyday tides might look like decades from now....

Melting glaciers in Asia could cause food shortages for up to 60 million people who live in the region’s major river basins, a new study finds. But the research, published yesterday in Science, found that the shrinking glaciers will have less of an impact on Asia’s freshwater supply than estimated in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That 2007 report suggested loss of glaciers and snowpack could eventually leave “hundreds of millions” of people in Asia without sufficient water....

NASA has updated its plans to deflect potentially hazardous Earth-bound asteroids—and none of them involve Bruce Willis. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report today (June 20) titled the“National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan.” The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event....

The relentless evolution of the COVID-causing coronavirus has taken a bit of the shine off the vaccines developed during the first year of the pandemic. Versions of the virus that now dominate circulation—Omicron and its subvariants—are more transmissible and adept at evading the body’s immune defenses than its original form. The current shots to the arm can still prevent serious illness, but their ability to ward off infection completely has been diminished....

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon By Kim Zetter. Crown Publishers, 2014 Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters By Martin J. S. Rudwick. The University of Chicago Press, 2014 The Walking Whales: From Land to Water in Eight Million Years By J.G.M. “Hans” Thewissen. University of California Press, 2014 Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble By Marilyn Johnson....

Some of the most brilliant colors found on butterflies, birds and squid are produced by nanostructures on wings, feathers and skin that reflect light. The effects can become even more varied when these “structural” colors are combined with filters made from light-absorbing pigments. For example, the characteristic green plumage of parrots seems to be produced by yellow pigment over a blue reflective nanosurface. The purple wing tips of Purple Tip butterflies come from red pigments beneath a blue iridescent nanosurface....

Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. According to a recent study in PLoS One, resting brain activity varies with a person’s scores on a well-established personality test. When awake but not engaged in a task, each subject displayed activity patterns distinct from those found in someone with different traits....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. Carnivorous plants hold a place of special fascination in elementary science classrooms and botany labs alike. Many of these plants have an obviously predatory look about them (think: Venus flytrap). But pitcher plants, as successful as they are at capturing insects for their nutrients, don’t make a lot of sense at first glance. A new study aims to make sense of the fact that the plants’ traps aren’t always slippery along the edges, even though a slippery edge would, in theory, catch more insects not sure of their footing....

In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania, a passenger vessel sunk during World War I—and not the Cunski, a cargo ship loaded with radioactive waste, as alleged by district authorities from nearby Calabria. Few locals are reassured, says Michael Leonardi of the University of Calabria. He and others maintain that the putative Cunski is still out there and is just one of numerous ships full of poisonous garbage that a crime syndicate has scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea....

The great Saturn ring debate is far from settled, a new study suggests. For years, scientists have argued about the age of Saturn’s famous rings: Are they ancient, dating to the birth of the planet itself? Or did the ring system form more recently, in just the past hundred million years or so? This latter hypothesis has been gaining steam in the last few years, with multiple papers reporting that the rings could be even younger than the dinosaurs....

Of the 20 million Americans suffering today from diabetes, one million will probably be killed by their feet. A diabetic foot ulcer and its attendant complications constitute a surer death sentence than colorectal cancer—just over half of all diagnosed patients survive for five years. More startling than these statistics, however, is that for 40 years, physicians have known about a safe medical procedure to prevent these ulcers. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve the treatment....

The number of U.S. children fully vaccinated against potentially deadly diseases such as diphtheria and measles had been slipping before 2011. Since then, national declines have slowed or even reversed. Rates for kindergartners are noticeably higher than for children 19 to 35 months old because of state laws requiring them to have the full series of inoculations before they can enter the classroom. The laws vary, “but overall they say, ‘We have to protect our children....

Drought is typically thought of as a simple lack of rain and snow. But evaporative demand—a term describing the atmosphere’s capacity to pull moisture from the ground—is also a major factor. And the atmosphere over much of the U.S. has grown a lot thirstier over the past 40 years, a new study in the Journal of Hydrometeorology found. Evaporative demand can be thought of as a “laundry-drying quotient,” says Nevada state climatologist Stephanie McAfee, who was not involved in the study....

Forget the psychiatrist’s couch. Your own bed could one day be a setting for psychotherapy. Targeted brain training during sleep can lessen the effects of fearful memories, according to a study published today in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers say that the technique could ultimately be used to treat psychiatric disorders, such as phobias and post-traumatic stress disorders. Today, those conditions are most commonly treated using ‘exposure therapy’, which requires patients to intentionally relive their fears....

The editors at Scientific American always look forward to creating our annual single-topic issues. These special editions give us the opportunity to more fully explore an area that is of deep scientific and public interest and to share that comprehensive package with you. About a year ago, when the editorial board first began discussing possibilities for the issue you now hold in your hands, we decided to harness our ambitions in a different way....

The Black Lives Matter protests shaking the world have thankfully brought renewed attention not just to police brutality but to the broader role of racism in our society. Research suggests some roots of racism lie in the stereotypes we hold about different groups. And those stereotypes can affect everything from the way police diagnose danger to who gets interviewed for jobs to which students get attention from professors. Negative stereotypes harm Black Americans at every turn....

Jars filled with alcohol were once the preferred method for preserving marine invertebrates like sea slugs for future study, but the specimens tended to fade and lose their shape. In the late 1800s father-and-son glassmakers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka found a more aesthetic and longer-lasting method: making startlingly intricate and colorful glass replicas. More than a century later scientists are using the Blaschkas’ handiwork as a time capsule to compare the status of today’s oceans with that of the late 19th century....