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Spaceflight fans will have a lot of cosmic action to keep them happy in 2016. While the coming year does not appear to promise anything quite as spectacular or awe-inspiring as 2015’s signature moment—the July 14 flyby of Pluto by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft—there will still be a lot going on overhead. Here’s a brief rundown of the biggest spaceflight milestones to keep an eye out for in 2016, from a NASA probe’s arrival at Jupiter to the highly anticipated maiden flight of SpaceX’s huge new rocket....

When most people think of someone who’s tone deaf, they’re likely to conjure up images of an American Idol contestant who’s is shocked when the judges tell her she’s got a horrible singing voice—or perhaps the man who belts out every hymn in church but always seems to be at least two notes off from the rest of the congregation. Being tone deaf often doesn’t refer just to poor hearing, but also to poor singing....

By Lizzie BuchenA once-mysterious neural pathway may have a crucial role in making injured areas overly sensitive to touch, a study in mice suggests.When a person has any kind of injury – a broken shin, for example, or a sunburn – the pain system becomes hypersensitized, firing up in response to normally painless sensations induced by, for instance, walking or a gentle massage. Normally, this tenderness protects the vulnerable tissue as it heals....

Geologists in New Zealand have discovered a magma chamber being born in a surprising place—not under the country’s most active volcanoes, but off to one side. The finding suggests that molten rock can accumulate underground in complex and unexpected patterns, but does not indicate that an eruption is imminent. “There’s no need to panic, but chances are there are lots of bodies of magma dotted throughout the crust,” says Ian Hamling, a geophysicist at GNS Science in Lower Hutt, New Zealand....

Astronomers have long searched for a planet that could harbor life outside our solar system. When reports came in earlier this fall of the not too hot, not too cold exoplanet Gliese 581g, it was like the answer to a dream. “If it’s confirmed, I think it’s definitely the planet we’ve been waiting for, for a long time,” says Rory Barnes, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington who wasn’t involved in the research....

Most people have one somewhere: a nasty scar from an old injury. It typically causes no serious harm, but can be unsightly. Scar-reducing creams and other dermatological procedures can help, but no one has known how to prevent scarring in the first place. Now scientists have discovered that the key to scar-free wound healing could involve blocking the action of a common sugar. Hyaluronan is a long, gooey sugar discovered in the 1970s....

A 2014 graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Danica Cotov was diagnosed with selective mutism at age three. The anxiety disorder affects about 0.7 percent of young children, causing them to go mute in stressful situations, most typically in school. Cotov barely said a word in class from kindergarten through the 12th grade. In an interview with MIND Managing Editor Claudia Wallis, she discusses her years of anxious silence, the treatments that did and did not help, and how, with some key tools from a therapist, she ultimately broke free of her “silent prison....

A bug’s eye can see in almost every direction at once. Such broad vision holds tremendous appeal for the makers–and users–of artificial lenses. But current options rely on the so-called fish eye, an array of multiple lenses that must be precisely configured to produce an image. Now researchers have fabricated an artificial eye that mimics an insect’s compound eye–from the lens through the light channel and down to the receptor....

Name: Debbie Chachra Title: Associate professor of materials science, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering Location: Needham, Mass. Polyester bees are all over the Northeast. The interesting thing about them is that they dig underground tunnels, about the width of your pinky finger, where they lay their eggs. To protect their larvae from heat, cold, fungus, bacteria and other dangers, the bees line these chambers with a clear, cellophanelike substance. The larvae then live underground for most of their lives in these reinforced cells....

Cocoa – one of West Africa’s most important cash crops and one of the Western world’s guiltiest pleasures – will be greatly affected by climate change, a new study says. More than half of the world’s chocolate is sourced from Ghana and Ivory Coast, or Côte d’Ivoire, where the cocoa-growing topography will be very different by 2050, according to the study by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). “There will be areas that remain suitable for cocoa, but only when the farmers adapt their agronomic management to the new conditions the area will experience....

The combination of climate change and last year’s El Niño phenomenon likely created the perfect playground for the Zika virus to spread rapidly across South America, a new study finds. Both the Zika virus and the mosquitoes that carry it have been present in different parts of the world for a while. But several factors, including specific climatic conditions, could have catapulted the disease to public health emergency status, according to researchers from the University of Liverpool....

By Peter Jones KINSHASA (Reuters) - A sharp rise in elephant poaching in a remote park in Democratic Republic of Congo has conservation groups asking if the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is hunting the protected animals in its stronghold there. Thirty-three elephants have been killed in Congo’s Garamba National Park in the past five weeks, including 10 poached last Friday, according to African Parks, a conservation group that manages the park along with Congolese authorities....

In May 2012 a hospital in small-town Exeter, N.H., notified the state of a possible cluster of linked hepatitis C cases. Four people had recently been diagnosed, and testing soon revealed that the genetic codes of the strains that they carried were nearly identical. Because hepatitis C virus (HCV) mutates rapidly, epidemiologist Jose Montero knew that the infections most likely originated from the same person. “We knew we needed to find this person immediately,” says Montero, the state’s director of public health....

Around 252 million years ago, more than 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species disappeared in a geological instant. This mass die-off has become known as the end-Permian mass extinction. What was its cause? Scientists now think that massive volcanic activity, in a Large Igneous Province called the Siberian Traps, raised air and sea temperatures and released toxic amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over a very short period of time....

Wall paintings previously discovered in three Spanish caves have now been dated to 65,000 years ago—some 20,000 years before Homo sapiens is thought to have arrived in Europe. Researchers say this find is the first clear evidence that Neandertals created art. BORNEO Half of the orangutans on the vast Southeast Asian island died between 1999 and 2015 as a result of hunting or habitat destruction by oil palm and other industries, a new study found....

The Great Lakes are feeling the heat from climate change. As the world’s largest freshwater system warms, it is poised to systematically alter life for local wildlife and the tribes that depend on it, according to regional experts. And the warming could also provide a glimpse of what is happening on a more global level, they say. “The Great Lakes in a lot of ways have always been a canary in the coal mine,” Cameron Davis, the senior adviser to the U....

(Reuters) - Almost 200 nations began global climate talks on Monday with time running out to save the Kyoto Protocol aimed at cutting the greenhouse gas emissions scientists blame for rising sea levels, intense storms, drought and crop failures. Countries have been at loggerheads for years and hopes are slim of any major progress, despite increasingly dire warnings from climate scientists. Diplomats also wonder whether host South Africa is up to the challenge of brokering the tough negotiations that run until December 9 in Durban....

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A new fissure eruption in an ice-free area of Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano system prompted authorities to raise their warning level for the risk of ash to aviation to the highest level of red on Sunday. Iceland’s largest volcanic system, which cuts a 190 km long and up to 25 km wide (118 miles by 15.5 miles) swathe across the North Atlantic island, has been hit by thousands of earthquakes over the last two weeks and scientists have been on high alert....

From Nature magazine The emergence of the H1N1 influenza virus that leapt from pigs to humans in 2009, triggering a global pandemic, reminded us of the need to monitor animals such as pigs that can host the development of dangerous viral strains. A study published today re-emphasizes that need. Young-Ki Choi at Chungbuk National University in Cheongju, South Korea, and his colleagues have isolated a new strain of H1N2 influenza from Korean pigs that kills infected ferrets — the model animal of choice for influenza work — and can spread through the air[1]....

The Martian Giant is not a big dude discovered by the Curiosity rover. The Mexico Midget is not the most popular wrestler south of the Rio Grande. The Three Sisters is not the title of a play by Anton Chekhov. Well, actually, it is, but that’s not this Three Sisters. This Three Sisters—like the Martian Giant and the Mexico Midget—is a tomato. All are varieties of heirloom tomatoes being crushed, pureed, ground up and analyzed in a noble and flavorful quest....