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In February 2009 the U.S.’s Iridium 33 satellite collided with the Russian Cosmos 2251, instantly destroying both communications satellites. According to ground-based telescopes tracking Iridium and Cosmos at the time, the two should have missed each other, but onboard instrumentation data from even one of the satellites would have told a different story. Why weren’t operators using this positional information? Orbital data are actually guarded secrets: satellite owners view the locations and trajectories of their on-orbit assets as private....

Being a scientist can be a strange job. Like on the days when your work involves inserting the artificially inflated penis of a dead dolphin into the recently thawed vagina of another dead dolphin, all inside a CT scanner. For new research presented yesterday (April 23) at the annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists in Chicago, scientists did just that in the pursuit of a better understanding of how male and female anatomy co-evolve....

Josephine Karwah stepped out of the Ebola treatment unit and cradled her pregnant belly. She had hobbled into the white tent in Monrovia, Liberia, two weeks earlier, during August of 2014, her knees burning with pain and threatening to buckle every fourth step. Josephine’s mother had died in this unit. Her body had been carried away in a white body bag that nurses had prepared with her name written neatly on the side....

Key concepts Elements Metals Magnetism From National Science Education Standards: Properties of Earth materials Introduction What does your breakfast cereal have in common with Earth’s crust? They both have some of the same materials in them. It might seem strange to compare a bowl of cornflakes to a pile of dirt. But science can help us find one of the most common elements on Earth in your cereal: iron. Even though iron only makes up less than 5 percent of the mass on Earth, it is found in a lot of places: rocks, cereal—and even in your blood!...

It’s possible to escape some tree and weed allergies by moving to a new town, state or region, and the same may be true of dust-mite allergies. The microscopic arachnids—which leave behind feces and corpses that can trigger allergic responses and asthma—are sparse across large swaths of the Great Plains and Mountain West, according to a new survey of the arthropods that inhabit our homes. With the help of citizen scientists, researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado Boulder analyzed arthropod DNA found in 732 dust samples collected from interior door frames throughout the U....

When Miami-based physicist Neil Johnson heard about the Orlando nightclub massacre he felt a particular chill, and not because it had happened in his home state. “The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh, no, I wonder if this person is in our database.’” It’s a painful coincidence for Johnson that his new paper about the ecosystem of online pro-ISIS groups is being published Thursday, just five days after professed ISIS follower Omar Mateen murdered at least 49 people and wounded another 53 in the worst mass shooting in U....

National leaders have yet to sign a new United Nations climate pact, but developments during the three months since the Paris Agreement was finalized have been feverish. The fate of electricity rules underpinning U.S. commitments under the pact has been thrown into doubt, new data suggests China may have already hit its targets, and Europe has been embroiled in a debate over whether its climate commitments are sufficiently aggressive. The recent developments suggest momentum is still building in many places toward a meaningful global solution to global warming....

Anyone who’s ever been a kid, which means all of us with the possible exception of ageless celebrities like Cher, remembers their childhood fears. What was it for you? Maybe you were afraid of your closet, thunderstorms, or the neighbor down the street who was so old he might still owe Fred Flinstone a few bucks? For me, I distinctly remember going to the circus as a small child and bursting into tears when approached by a clown....

TEEN BRAIN In Leslie Sabbagh’s revealing article on brain development in adolescents, “The Teen Brain, Hard at Work,” psychologist Robert Epstein’s passionate objection to data suggesting differences in teenage and adult brains seems puzzling and misplaced. I have worked for the past 15 years with children who come from immigrant homes with tightly knit family units, where social interaction is closely monitored and limited, as well as with children from more open-ended family structures, where preteens and teens are allowed greater autonomy in regard to peer relations....

A Hollywood thriller due out this year centers on a young man who awakens while undergoing open-heart surgery but is unable to move or cry out. The film’s plot will undoubtedly take many more dramatic turns from there, but its early premise is, sadly, not entirely far-fetched. Episodes of intraoperative awareness while under general anesthesia are reported by one or two of every 1,000 patients. In reality, such incidents are usually brief and generally do not involve pain or distress, but they do highlight one of several ways that even the newest generation of anesthetic drugs can sometimes leave much to be desired....

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found what it went to Mars to look for: evidence of an environment that could have once supported life. Chemical analyses show that a greyish powder taken from the rover’s first drilled rock sample contains clay minerals formed in water that was slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life. “If this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” says Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena....

The remote northern corner of Alberta is home to the tar sands, a sprawling deposit of thick, heavy oil that is among the most greenhouse gas–intensive forms of petroleum to produce. In the past decade Canada has become the U.S.’s primary supplier of imported petroleum—ahead of Saudi Arabia—and more than half of it comes from this Florida-size reserve, the only place in the world where oil is mined, not drilled. Should President Barack Obama sign off on construction of the Keystone XL pipeline this year, the flow of tar sands oil, known as bitumen, into the U....

Octopus love: Make room for a little kink Apparently the octopus, once believed to be the loner of the deep, is actually the ocean’s resident fetishist. University of California, Berkeley, scientists report in Marine Biology that during many weeks of observing the cephalopod in reefs near Indonesia, the creatures engaged in everything from “cross-dressing” to strangulation during courtship and mating. Alpha males would never leave the side of their female consorts, and dealt with other suitors—that might try to remove the alpha male’s sperm from the female and replace it with their own—harshly, sometimes by strangling them to death with their tentacles....

We now know of more than 5,000 exoplanets beyond the solar system. What we really understand about each of these worlds, though, is barely anything at all. Most of them have been seen only indirectly from their shadows as they cross in front of the stars they orbit. The few that researchers have managed to actually take a picture of—that is, to directly image using light emanating from the planets themselves—appear as little more than monochromatic dots even with the very best current telescopes....

Antianxiety drugs may be making fish more aggressive. New laboratory tests reveal that even extremely low concentrations of the calming drugs benzodiazepines—more commonly known as Valium and Xanax, among others—cause fish to become less timid and to feed faster, among other effects. “This is an essential drug that is used around the world,” said chemist Jerker Fick of Umea University in Sweden at a press conference preceding publication of the research in Science....

Researchers have untangled some of the neurological events that may ultimately lead to Alzheimer’s disease. Two new studies show that a protein implicated in this form of dementia can infect other neurons to spread disease across the brain. These problematic proteins clump together, which can lead to cognitive problems. A protein’s shape—the way its chains of amino acids fold—determines its function. If a protein misfolds, its structure and function change. In Alzheimer’s, researchers have long suspected that misfolded versions of a protein called amyloid-beta might travel from cell to cell and cause more amyloid-beta proteins to take on a deformed shape....

THERE IS AMPLE EVIDENCE that men and women think, express themselves and even experience emotions differently (for more details, read on through this issue). But in the area of sensory perception, psychologists are hard-pressed to identify major discrepancies. By and large, the way the two genders experience the sounds, sights and smells of life is quite similar. The most striking exception may be found, at least for some, in the perception of colors....

Dinosaur fossils are rare finds. But the 70-million-year-old bones of a Tyrannosauraus rex recovered from Montana are proving to be even more exceptional than the usual dino remains. Researchers report today in the journal Science that they have recovered soft tissue, including blood vessels, from the ancient creature. Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and her colleagues studied T. rex remains recovered in 2003 from a quarry in the Charles M....

GIGLIO ISLAND, Italy—On May 6 salvage workers at the Costa Concordia wreckage off the Tuscan island of Giglio heard the worst sound possible on any such operation—groaning, bending steel. It was a sound they hoped not to hear when the ship was rotated to an upright position last September in a procedure known as parbuckling. And it is a sound they continued to listen for every day since, with microphones and monitors placed all over the ship....

Burning fossil fuels releases significant quantities of carbon dioxide, aggravating climate change. Although it gets less attention these days, combustion also emits volumes of pollutants, which can cause a variety of illnesses. The most extensive consequences across the U.S. are noted below. — Mark Fischetti U.S. Health Burden Caused by Particulate Pollution from Fossil-Fueled Power Plants Illness Mean Number of Cases Asthma (hospital admissions) 3,020 Pneumonia (hospital admissions) 4,040 Asthma (emergency room visits) 7,160...