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When we think about “existential” threats, things that could potentially end the lives of everyone on Earth, most of the possibilities come from right here on our own planet—climate change, global pandemics and atomic warfare. Turning a paranoid gaze to the skies, we typically worry about asteroid strikes or perhaps some perilously massive burp from our sun. But if you trust everything you read on the fringe regions of the internet, you may think the most fearsome heavenly threat may not only be extraterrestrial, but also extrasolar....

Dear EarthTalk: How are wild dolphins faring on the high seas? Recent reports of dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico may well be due to last year’s BP oil spill, but I imagine there are many threats to dolphins from pollution, human overfishing and other causes.—Henry Milken, Atlanta Dolphins are probably the most iconic and best loved species of the marine world. Their playful nature and high intelligence have endeared them to people for eons....

My pet frog Gunther is clamped inside a latex-covered fist. His skinny leg sticks out the side and flails helplessly. Another gloved hand moves in and slips a cotton swab over his leg and between his toes; Gunther does not appear to be enjoying this. He wriggles free and splashes into a tub of water, but the ordeal isn’t over yet, and the hands grab him again. Despite several more escape attempts, including a few desperate hops across the lab table, they eventually manage to swab Gunther’s belly, backside and both legs....

The International Mathematical Union (IMU) has revealed on its website the winners of the 2014 Fields medals, considered the highest honour in mathematics. The four young medallists — including Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female winner since the prizes were established in 1936 — have been selected for their contributions to topics ranging from dynamical systems to the geometry of numbers and the solution of equations of the type that describe many physical phenomena....

Solar physicist Thomas Zurbuchen became NASA’s science chief in October, replacing astronaut John Grunsfeld. Just one month later, the US political system went through a seismic shift when Donald Trump was elected president. As a high-profile agency perennially favoured by politicians of both parties, NASA usually fares well regardless of which group is in charge. But Trump has appointed several climate-change deniers to his Cabinet, and questions remain about the future of NASA’s Earth-science programmes....

Biology Extracellular RNA RNA is now known to travel outside cells to tissues around the body. Researchers are working out whether they can exploit this extracellular RNA to detect and treat disease June 17, 2020 — Herb Brody Biotech Could Tracking RNA in Body Fluids Reveal Disease? Tests that detect extracellular RNA to spot cancer, heart disease and other conditions are in development June 17, 2020 — Elie Dolgin Medicine...

From Darwin to Einstein: Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe Mario Livio Simon & Schuster, 2013 ($26) Astrophysicist Livio unmasks the flaws in the work of some of our greatest scientific minds in this meditation on the winding, unpredictable path of discovery. Chemist Linus Pauling, a favorite to win the race to determine the structure of DNA in the 1950s, astonished his colleagues by proposing an erroneous “triple helix” model....

The presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a statement Wednesday advocating for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to stop separating migrant families. The statement cites research that indicates endangerment of those involved. Last week the American Psychological Association released a letter opposing the Trump administration’s policy of taking immigrant children from their parents at the border. Under the zero-tolerance immigration policy, since May more than 2,300 immigrant children—some of them babies—have been forcibly separated from their parents attempting to enter the U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Humanity is producing data at an unimaginable rate, to the point that storage technologies can’t keep up. Every five years, the amount of data we’re producing increases 10-fold, including photos and videos. Not all of it needs to be stored, but manufacturers of data storage aren’t making hard drives and flash chips fast enough to hold what we do want to keep....

Everyone in an earthquake-prone area wants to know when the next big one might come, but temblors are not well understood, and there is a plethora of methods that forecast quake risk. So which one works best? A test of seven different techniques that one day could reveal when quakes will occur could help narrow the field. So far, reliable predictions of earthquakes do not appear possible in the short term — no early warning came with the 2004 Parkfield magnitude 6 quake in California, for instance, or even the massive magnitude 9 that rocked Japan earlier this year, despite it being one of the most seismically monitored areas on Earth....

When NASA scientists launched twin spacecraft to probe the Van Allen radiation belts last summer, they were expecting to study two rings of high-energy particles circling Earth. Instead they found three, overturning a 50-year-old model of the giant rings’ structure. First discovered in 1958, the Van Allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed, electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth’s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000–60,000 kilometers above Earth, and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100–10,000 kilometers above Earth....

They all look the same in front of the mirror–attractive and slim–but one after another, they get up in swimsuits and bemoan their physical faults: fat thighs, shapeless silhouettes, flat chests. These young women are participating in group sessions focused on body image, co-sponsored by the universities of Bochum and Mainz in Germany. Senior therapist Silja Vocks knows she will have a hard time getting through to these girls, who all suffer from eating disorders, but it is her job to help them learn to like themselves again....

US president Donald Trump’s administration has disbanded a government advisory committee intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States, now and in coming decades....

Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin has wound its way back to the Supreme Court, which will once again examine whether consideration of race in undergraduate admissions is constitutional. One striking development during the oral arguments on December 9th was Justice Scalia’s invocation of the disputed mismatch hypothesis: that affirmative action hoists black students into schools that are “too fast” for them, leading to a mismatch between their true qualifications and the schools that they attend....

By Jeff TollefsonCOPENHAGEN–Two lines of evidence nearly brought down the last-minute climate agreement brokered last week in Copenhagen by US President Barack Obama: studies indicating that the impacts of global warming could be more severe than previously thought, and that rich countries could do more to counter the problem without breaking the bank.Now, negotiators are seeing whether they can strengthen a deal nearly universally acknowledged as weak – or whether even the mounting scientific evidence on the most dire effects of climate change will be enough to forge a more meaningful deal....

By Brendan O’Brien and Kim PalmerMILWAUKEE/COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Residents of the Midwestern United States on Sunday braced for the region’s coldest weather in two decades, with temperatures that forecasters warned would be life-threatening seen heading eastward during the week.Icy conditions snarled travel across the Midwest and thousands of flights were canceled or delayed, some officials preemptively closed schools and a plane skidded off a runway into snow at a New York City airport, days after the Northeast was hammered by the first winter storm of the season....

New temperature measurements are revealing extreme behavior in two planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. One study indicates that HD 149026 b—a relatively small but extremely dense planet orbiting a distant star—has an atmospheric temperature of 2,300 kelvins (about 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit), or twice that of the hottest previously studied planet. Astronomers have also mapped the surface temperature of one of those next-to-hottest planets, the larger and less dense HD 189733 b....

Since Charles Darwin’s day, biologists have depicted how new organisms evolve from old ones by adding branches to numerous trees that represent portions of the animal, plant and microbial kingdoms. Researchers from a dozen institutions recently completed a three-year effort to combine tens of thousands of trees into one diagram, most readable as a circle (below). The lines inside the circle represent all 2.3 million species that have been named. Biologists have genetic sequences for only about 5 percent of them, however; as more are finished, the relationships within and across groups of species may change....

In the Scientific American November issue cover story paleontologist Lars Werdelin of the Swedish Natural History Museum in Stockholm observes that the large-bodied carnivores inhabiting East Africa today represent a small fraction of the diversity this group once had. He argues that competition with humans for access to prey drove many of these species to extinction, starting more than two million years ago. It’s a bold hypothesis. Although researchers know that early humans began incorporating more meat into their diet around that time, the conventional wisdom is that ancestral population sizes were small....

In men the index finger is usually shorter than the ring finger, but in most women it’s the other way around, although in some women the fingers are of equal length. In mice the digit ratio corresponds to the female-male hormonal balance in the womb during the week digits form; androgen apparently produces a longer ring finger. Researchers study these ratios to see if they can serve as markers for certain human attributes....