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One early winter evening in 1824, English naturalist and theologian William Buckland rose to address the Geological Society of London. Anticipation filled the room. Buckland was known for his energetic lectures at the University of Oxford, where he would buzz around in full academic regalia, passing around severed animal parts and fossils to his adoring students. For years there had been rumors that Buckland had gotten his hands on some giant fossil bones, found by workers quarrying roofing stone in the English countryside....

Editor’s note (12/6/2016): Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will hear oral arguments in the ongoing proceeding about this CRISPR patent dispute. A defining moment in modern biology occurred on July 24, 1978, when biotechnology pioneer Robert Swanson, who had recently co-founded Genentech, brought two young scientists to dinner with Thomas Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist. As they stood outside Perkins’s magnificent mansion in Marin County, with its swimming pool and garden and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Swanson turned to his two young colleagues and said, “This is what we’re all working for....

When Craig Crews first managed to make proteins disappear on command with a bizarre new compound, the biochemist says that he considered it a “parlor trick,” a “cute chemical curiosity.” Today, that cute trick is driving billions of U.S. dollars in investment from pharmaceutical companies such as Roche, Pfizer, Merck, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. “I think you can infer that pretty much every company has programs in this area,” says Raymond Deshaies, senior vice-president of global research at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, and one of Crews’s early collaborators....

Do people, or perhaps just males, have an evolved predisposition to kill members of other groups? Not just a capacity to kill but an innate propensity to take up arms, tilting us toward collective violence? The word “collective” is key. People fight and kill for personal reasons, but homicide is not war. War is social, with groups organized to kill people from other groups. Today controversy over the historical roots of warfare revolves around two polar positions....

By Andrew Bennett HellmanThe body’s internal clock helps to regulate a water-storing hormone so that nightly dehydration or trips to the toilet are not the norm, research suggests.In an article published in Nature Neuroscience today, neurophysiologists Eric Trudel and Charles Bourque at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, Canada, propose a mechanism by which the body’s circadian system, or internal clock, controls water regulation1. By allowing cells that sense water levels to activate cells that release vasopressin, a hormone that instructs the body to store water, the circadian system keeps the body hydrated during sleep....

By Quirin SchiermeierDuring the warm periods between recent ice ages, temperatures in Antarctica reached substantially higher levels than scientists had previously thought. This conclusion, based on ice-core studies, implies that East Antarctica is more sensitive than it seemed to global warming.Previous estimates suggested that peak temperatures during the warmest interglacial periods – which occurred at around 125,000, 240,000 and 340,000 years ago – were about three degrees higher than they are today....

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, with Eric Klinenberg Penguin Press, 2015 (($28.95)) Among the facets of daily life that the Internet has irrevocably altered is certainly the search for love. Stand-up comedian Ansari is an unlikely but perfect tour guide through this changed landscape. He not only shares personal anecdotes (such as how waiting for a text message response from a date induced existential panic) but also parses data gleaned through a partnership with New York University sociologist Klinenberg....

Out on a Limb: What Black Bears Have Taught Me about Intelligence and Intuition by Benjamin Kilham Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013 Nearly 20 years ago, after dyslexia derailed his hopes for a scientific career, Kilham found another way to perform research, rearing and closely observing orphaned black bear cubs on his New Hampshire farm. He had “no reputation to worry about,” no hypothesis to prove; he simply raised cubs and watched over them through their reintroduction to the wild....

It has been nearly two weeks since a tongue of lightning touched down in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, sparking the biggest wildfire in Larimer County history and the most destructive – with almost 200 buildings damaged to date – in the state’s memory. The High Park fire comes as a kind of second death for this stretch of the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest, where mountain pine beetles have held at epidemic levels for almost half a decade....

Since the 1970s, Western parents have become increasingly concerned with building children’s self-esteem. Parents intuitively believe that high self-esteem is key to success, health, and well-being, and they try to raise self-esteem by telling children that they are unique and extraordinary. Unfortunately, there is some evidence that since the very same decade, Western youth have become increasingly narcissistic. The conclusion would seem obvious: in raising our children’s self-esteem too much, we have necessarily turned them into narcissists....

The Hubble Space Telescope stopped collecting science data on 5 October, because of a problem with one of the gyroscopes that the observatory uses to orient itself on celestial targets. Mission controllers are investigating the problem and expect to have Hubble working again soon. “Don’t worry, Hubble has many great years of science ahead,” says Kenneth Sembach, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which operates Hubble. But the glitch underscores that the 2....

The world’s only wild orangutans—already besieged by logging, hunting, pet trading and the steady expansion of palm-oil plantations—are now threatened by forest fires that have burned for months on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in southeast Asia. In the toxic smoke and haze, locals and researchers are scrambling to protect the estimated 50,000 remaining orangutans that live only on those two islands. Fires erupt every year in Indonesia during the dry season, as farmers, plantation owners and others deliberately burn forest to clear land or to settle territorial disputes....

At the end of their lives stars like our sun eject expanding gas shells known as planetary nebulae. Despite being spewed out by spherical stars, some 80 percent of these impressive displays are not spherical themselves, instead they exhibit complex morphologies. Astronomers have now, for the first time, detected magnetic fields in the central stars of four planetary nebulae, suggesting a cause of the irregular structures. Stefan Jordan of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues used a tool from the Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Atacama, Chile, to measure the polarization of light emitted by stars at the center of planetary nebulae....

In 1611 German mathematician Johannes Kepler made a conjecture about the densest way to stack oranges or other spheres with a minimum of space between them. It seemed nothing could beat the standard produce stand configuration, but he could not prove it for sure. Four hundred years later University of Pittsburgh mathematician Thomas Hales finally showed that the grocers were right all along. But the question of how to pack spheres most tightly is not confined to our measly three dimensions—mathematicians can also imagine the problem in hypothetical spaces of any number of dimensions....

For more than four centuries, archaeologists and geologists have sought to determine the geographical origins of the stones used to build Stonehenge thousands of years ago. Pinning down the source of the large blocks known as sarsens that form the bulk of the monument has proved especially elusive. Now researchers have resolved the mystery: 50 of the 52 extant sarsens at Stonehenge came from the West Woods site in the English county of Wiltshire, located 25 kilometers to the north of Stonehenge....

As Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” And if you wish to make a moon from scratch, according to new research, you must first create planets with rings (after inventing the universe, of course). Earth’s moon may have emerged from a long-vanished ring system, much like the rings still encircling Saturn—and the same goes for many of the satellites orbiting the other planets....

The acid rain scourge of the ’70s and ’80s that killed trees and fish and even dissolved parts of statues on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall is back. But unlike the first round, in which sulfur emissions from power plants mixed with rain to create sulfuric acid, the current problem stems primarily from nitrogen emissions mixed with rain to create nitric acid. “Both are strong acids, and both create serious problems for the environment,” says William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N....

Spring of 2000 found molecular biologists placing dollar bets, trying to predict the number of genes that would be found in the human genome when the sequence of its DNA nucleotides was completed. Estimates at the time ranged as high as 153,000. After all, many said, humans make some 90,000 different types of protein, so we should have at least as many genes to encode them. And given our complexity, we ought to have a bigger genetic assortment than the 1,000-cell roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, which has a 19,500-gene complement, or corn, with its 40,000 genes....

“Houston, we’ve had a problem,” were the famous words that announced a crisis onboard Apollo 13. Halfway through Apollo’s mission to the moon, one of the spacecraft’s oxygen tanks exploded, putting the lives of the crew in grave jeopardy. A group of engineers from NASA was hastily assembled. Their mission: invent a way for the crew to survive and to pilot their damaged vessel back to Earth. The engineers were successful, transforming a potential disaster into a legend of effective teamwork....

The US government is considering whether to charge for access to two widely used sources of remote-sensing imagery: the Landsat satellites operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and an aerial-survey programme run by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). Officials at the Department of the Interior, which oversees the USGS, have asked a federal advisory committee to explore how putting a price on Landsat data might affect scientists and other users; the panel’s analysis is due later this year....