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Why is there something rather than nothing? This is one of those profound questions that is easy to ask but difficult to answer. For millennia humans simply said, “God did it”: a creator existed before the universe and brought it into existence out of nothing. But this just begs the question of what created God—and if God does not need a creator, logic dictates that neither does the universe. Science deals with natural (not supernatural) causes and, as such, has several ways of exploring where the “something” came from....

A new gene that makes bacteria highly resistant to a last-resort class of antibiotics has been found in people and pigs in China - including in samples of bacteria with epidemic potential, researchers said on Wednesday. The discovery was described as “alarming” by scientists, who called for urgent restrictions on the use of polymyxins - a class of antibiotics that includes the drug colistin and is widely used in livestock farming....

A lawmaker streams live video with the first images from the Mars Phoenix lander, a technophile shares his experiences with his new iPhone 3G, and a dog owner shows off his canine comrade’s repertoire of tricks (clearly without the benefit of rehearsal). Welcome to the world of “qikking,” where mobile phone users spontaneously capture video and send it to the Internet where, unlike YouTube, the action can be viewed live....

The most contaminated wildlife on Earth—killer whales in the Pacific Northwest—are picking up nearly all their chemicals from Chinook salmon in polluted ocean waters off the West Coast, according to a new scientific study. The whales, which feed in coastal waters from British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands to the San Francisco area, were declared an endangered species in the United States and Canada after their numbers shrank. These killer whales, called southern residents, live in waters straddling the U....

A new type of cancer therapy—recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for children with leukemia who run out of options—is changing medical practice and has triggered excitement in the normally reserved world of cancer science. The new therapy, called Kymriah, comes from pharmaceutical giant Novartis. It is the first in a novel class of treatments known as CAR-Ts—for chimeric antigen receptor T cells—in which a patient’s own immune cells are withdrawn, engineered to target cancer cells, and then infused back into the body....

Honeybees have been dying in record numbers, yet many commercial crops depend on them for pollination. Entomologists who have been struggling to find an alternative now report that another bee might fill the void. The blue orchard bee, also known as the orchard mason bee, is undergoing intensive study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture pollinating insect research unit at Utah State University at Logan. James Cane, an entomologist there, says a million blue orchards are now pollinating crops in California....

Excerpted with permission from Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy, by David A. Mindell. Available from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright David A. Mindell © 2015. On a summer day in 1988, two years after the Titanic exploration, I walked down the stairs of an old, green aluminum building in Woods Hole with a small painted sign out front: “Deep Submergence Laboratory....

Every once in a while, something appears in the sky that attracts the attention of even those who normally don’t bother looking up. It’s likely to be that way on Saturday (July 5), when the waxing gibbous moon — 58 percent illuminated and just past first quarter phase — will appear in very close proximity to Mars. People who are unaware or have no advance notice will almost certainly wonder, as they cast a casual glance toward the moon on this night, just what is that orange-yellow “star” hovering just above it?...

With unconventional oil and natural gas drilling spreading across much of the country, U.S. EPA said yesterday it plans to regulate the industry’s air emissions tied to public health problems and that contribute to global warming. This comes as environmental groups, regulators and the booming natural gas industry debate how to safely drill tens of thousands of shale gas wells in the coming decade. The growing U.S. onshore gas supply is seen as a cleaner fuel source for electric utilities that burn a lot of coal, but there is a push for environmental regulations to accompany the boom....

Six years ago, on an early morning in September, Molly Birnbaum was out for her regular jog when she was hit by a car. Her pelvis was shattered, her skull fractured, her knee torn. Yet for her, the most serious damage was far less visible: she lost her sense of smell. Birnbaum, now 29, was an aspiring chef, and the loss meant the end of her career. It also meant something else, something that was potentially even more life-changing....

For decades scholars and public health officials have known that people with greater income or formal education tend to live longer and enjoy better health than their counterparts who have less money or schooling. The trend holds true wherever researchers look—in poor countries or rich ones, in Europe, Asia or the Americas—but two notable exceptions stand out. One is known as the healthy immigrant effect. Looked at as a group, immigrants to countries as diverse as the U....

Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of The Simons Foundation. With the right incentive, such as winning a prize, children with autism do fairly well at inferring the thoughts and beliefs of others, according to a study published in the May issue of Developmental Science. Research has shown that children with autism usually struggle with a widely used test designed to gauge this ability, called theory of mind....

2012 March on AIDS rally in Washington D.C. Credit: Al Ungar ©iStock Medications are keeping people with HIV alive longer than ever before, but women with AIDS tend to die at a younger age in the U.S. than men with the illness (see chart below). This long-standing gap may in part reflect differences in race among men and women with HIV, particularly as concerns access to health care. Nearly one in four people living with HIV in the U....

Viewed on a map, South Georgia Island is a speck in the vast Southern Ocean. But new research by the British Antarctic Survey suggests that the waters surrounding the tiny island are home to a disproportionately large slice of marine life. Nearly 1,500 species live off the coast of the former whaling outpost, including many found nowhere else on Earth. That puts South Georgia and the nearby Sandwich Islands ahead of well-known biodiversity hot spots like Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Bacteria have an unfortunate—and inaccurate—public image as isolated cells twiddling about on microscope slides. The more that scientists learn about bacteria, however, the more they see that this hermitlike reputation is deeply misleading, like trying to understand human behavior without referring to cities, laws or speech. “People were treating bacteria as … solitary organisms that live by themselves,” said Gürol Süel, a biophysicist at the University of California, San Diego....

Just about all of us have experienced a bloated belly. But for some people, bloating causes near daily distress. I hear from people all the time who suffer from bloating and want to know what they should be eating or not eating to avoid it. And of course you’ll see magazine and internet articles all the time with hints on foods to avoid to prevent bloating. The problem is that “bloating” is not just one thing....

By Gopal Sharma KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Rescuers recovered the body of one mountain guide on Saturday after an ice avalanche swept the lower slopes of Mount Everest, bringing the death toll to at least 13 in the deadliest accident on the world’s highest mountain. The avalanche struck a perilous passage called the Khumbu Icefall, which is riddled with crevasses and piled with serac - or huge chunks of ice - that can break free without warning....

The Argentine tango is famous for being a difficult but electrifying dance. Just one look at a performance by professional dancers Mora Godoy and José Lugones shows why. Whether dancing chest to chest or obliquely angled, Godoy and Lugones whip across the floor, legs whirring like blades on a fan. When she raises a bent leg forward, he answers with a quick kick aft. The pair slip easily between the two- and four-beat phrasing of the music, perfectly matching each other’s every hip swivel and toe tap, leg lick and foot volley....

February 1965 Planetwide Tinkering “The American Association for the Advancement of Science Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare report, entitled ‘The Integrity of Science,’ was specifically critical of failures to evaluate ahead of time the broad effects of scientific experiments or technological innovations. On these grounds it cited the widespread use of pesticides and detergents without preliminary tests of their effects on environmental pollution. Two major American military projects came in for similar criticism: Project Starfish, a high-altitude nuclear explosion above the Pacific Ocean, and Project West Ford, an attempt to orbit millions of tiny copper needles as a reflecting layer for military communications....

Information technology empowers complex group processes in striking new ways, but the breakthroughs are especially exciting in very low income settings. There mobile telephony and wireless broadband are ending the grinding isolation of rural communities and enabling workers—even those with fairly rudimentary training—to interconnect more successfully and to tap into expert systems and artificial intelligence. On a recent trip to Africa, I saw two simple but powerful examples of lifesaving protocols enabled by mobile phones....