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Food deserts—areas where residents have limited options for purchasing fresh foods—are not easy to quantify. Access to food depends on a number of factors, from geography to transportation to the choices of individual grocers. One simple way to sketch out food desert boundaries is to chart those regions where supermarkets are scarce. The map below does just that for South Dakota, marking out areas that are more than 10 miles, and in many cases 20 miles, from a supermarket....

Massive meteorites are mercifully rare, but their miniature counterparts constantly bombard Earth. NASA estimates that approximately 100 tons of space dust, gravel and rock of various diameters hit our planet every day. “If you get down to the size of a marble, there’s about one of those to be picked up about every square kilometer across Earth’s surface,” says civilian astronaut and meteorite hunter Richard Garriott. “Once you get down to the size of a grain of rice, they’re incredibly common....

Sheep may come across as simple, straightforward followers. But as those who work with the animals know, sheep can behave in surprising ways. For one, flocking may not show a friendly tendency—there might be selfish motivations as well. In research published on July 24 in the print edition of Current Biology, scientists monitoring sheep have demonstrated empirical support for a behavioral theory first proposed almost 40 years ago. “We’re getting to the nitty-gritty of the real evolutionary rules selected for in behavior,” says behavioral ecologist Andrew King of the University of London Royal Veterinary College, a co-author on the study....

Politicians argue over the federal budget every time Congress reconvenes in January. But the money that the government spends each year, which can differ from the budget, reveals how much funding departments and agencies actually receive. The outlays for research and development, shown here for 2009 (latest available), largely support the nation’s science work. The relative proportions have been fairly constant in recent years (data do not include one-time American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money)....

NASA has picked three companies to develop new lunar landers that will carry astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2024 and beyond. The agency announced today (April 30) that it has awarded contracts to SpaceX, a Blue Origin-led team and Dynetics to design and build a human landing system for the Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable, long-term human presence on and around the moon by the late 2020s....

About a decade ago, I attended a conference inaugurating the campus of New York University in Abu Dhabi along with a colleague from Princeton University, Ed Turner. The conference included a tour through the neighborhood, during which the local guide bragged that their city lights can be seen all the way from the moon. Ed and I looked at each other and wondered: from how far away could the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) detect city lights?...

A vulnerability on SIM cards used in some mobile phones could allow malware infection and surveillance, a security researcher warns. Karsten Nohl, founder of Security Research Labs in Berlin, told The New York Times that he has identified a flaw in SIM encryption technology that could allow an attacker to obtain a SIM card’s digital key, the 56-digit sequence that allows modification of the card. The flaw, which may affect as many as 750 million mobile phones, could allow eavesdropping on phone conversations, fraudulent purchases, or impersonation of the handset’s owner, Nohl warned....

The furious majesty of a thunderstorm defies computer simulation. In a world divided up into 10,000 square kilometer grids to make the 510 million square kilometer Earth digestible to a computer, a thundercloud that rains over two square kilometers remains too small to properly calculate in a climate simulation—as does even a hurricane like Sandy that sprawled over 280 kilometers of ocean and land in 2012. Clouds control climate. Even if they could be correctly accounted for in computer simulations, there are all the complexities in the types of clouds, their height in the atmosphere, even the composition and shape of droplets in the cloud....

Although climate change, deforestation and depletion of groundwater are all serious threats to sustainable development, the biggest threat to future well-being remains the specter of war. The world was at the brink of a nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and could quickly find itself there again in South Asia, the Middle East, the Korean peninsula or some other hot spot. The Cuban crisis was transformed, through President John F....

About 1 in 59 children in the United States has autism, according to data released today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Four times as many boys as girls have the condition, according to the report1. The data are based on a 2014 survey of 325,483 children across 11 states. The data were collected by the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM). These numbers show an increase of nearly 16 percent from the previous prevalence of 1 in 68 children....

By Tom Westbrook Warm seas around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have killed two-thirds of a 700-km (435 miles) stretch of coral in the past nine months, the worst die-off ever recorded on the World Heritage site, scientists who surveyed the reef said on Tuesday. Their finding of the die-off in the reef’s north is a major blow for tourism at reef which, according to a 2013 Deloitte Access Economics report, attracts about A$5....

In the late 1990s our laboratory at the University of Rochester ran studies to explore the then somewhat unorthodox idea that even the adult brain could grow new brain cells or rewire itself in response to new experiences—a biological process called neuroplasticity. As part of this research, one of us (Green), then an 18-year-old undergraduate assistant in the lab, coded a computerized psychological test assessing how well one can search for a particular shape in a busy visual scene....

California today is announcing its intent to declare bisphenol A a reproductive hazard. Under a state law known as Prop. 65, warning signs would be required for consumer items that contain a certain high level of BPA. BPA is used to make polycarbonate plastic, and also is found in liners of food and beverage cans and some thermal receipts. Scientists say BPA is an estrogen-like substance that can alter reproductive hormones....

The first-ever attempt to make a soft landing on a comet is now underway. If all went according to plan, the European Space Agency’s Philae lander separated from its Rosetta spacecraft mothership at 3:35 a.m. EST (0935 GMT) Wednesday (Nov. 12), beginning a long, slow journey to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.You can watch the historic comet landing live on Space.com, courtesy of the European Space Agency (ESA). “We’ve been living in flight together for 10 years, now Philae’s gone,” Rosetta flight director Andrea Accomazzo said during a webcast just after separation comfirmation....

GETTING YOURSELF AND YOUR KIDS INTO the great outdoors may be the most essential step you can take to save the planet. Children (and adults) are increasingly plugged into electronic screens for entertainment. What you may not realize is the compounding impact of this trend: the less often people get out into parks and reserves, the less concerned they are about nature’s fate, and the more the budgets for these lands are cut because of lower attendance....

Tricky diagnoses abound, whether the field is medicine, auto repair or high finance. For climate change the problem is magnified: Those who have spent decades diagnosing the problem have no power to write the prescription. Scientists have the knowledge, but politicians and social institutions hold the power. Channels between them are rudimentary at best, many analysts say. Without a fundamental shift in emphasis, they caution, the scientific infrastructure so painstakingly erected to identify the problem will find itself impotent to ensure that global warming will be mitigated and civilization will adapt to its inevitable impacts....

Immunotherapy has transformed cancer care. Now the tools and new knowledge created by this strategy for treating disease by stimulating the body’s immune system are beginning to be employed for everything from fighting autoimmune illnesses to preventing tissue rejection in organ transplants. Although still mostly confined to scientific labs, the use of this approach outside of cancer has tremendous potential, researchers say, because the immune system is fundamentally involved in every organ and in many health conditions....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that current testing of hormone-altering chemicals is adequate for detecting low-dose effects that may jeopardize health. This comes in response to a report written last year by 12 scientists who criticized the government’s decades old-strategy for testing the safety of many chemicals found in the environment and in consumer products. The scientists specifically focused on a phenomenon called “nonmonotonic dose response,” which means that hormone-like chemicals often do not act in a typical way; they can have health effects at low doses but no effects or different effects at high doses....

By Barbara LewisBRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union should exert its right to impose carbon charges on aviation within its own airspace, the European Commission said on Wednesday, a step likely to rile emerging powers China and India and revive trade tensions.A major retreat from previous legislation, which sought to levy charges on the full length of flights in and out of the EU, the proposal from the Commission, the EU executive, might fail to satisfy critics both inside and beyond the European Union....

This week marks the anniversary of the largest earthquake ever recorded — a magnitude-9.5 earthquake that ripped along the coast of southern Chile on May 22, 1960. The colossal quake and the powerful tsunami that followed killed more than 1,400 people and left 2 million homeless in Chile. And its devastation reached far beyond South America. The tsunami swept across the Pacific Ocean, wreaking havoc in Hawaii, the Philippines and Japan; a day after the earthquake, walls of water up to 18 feet (5....