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The most detailed survey yet of planets orbiting nearby stars indicates that a full 30 percent of them may harbor jumbo versions of our own planet. Astronomers who presented the finding this week at an international conference also announced they had discovered a star system bearing three such super-Earths—potentially rocky planets up to 10 times as massive as our own. Both results come from the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) instrument at the European Southern Observatory on La Silla mountain in Chile, which looks for tiny changes in the color of starlight that indicate the star is wobbling under the sway of an orbiting planet....

Here are some of my favorite examples from the annals of consumer technology: December 2009: Verizon’s flip phones were programmed to take you to the Web when you pressed the “UP” button. An internal whistle-blower revealed that you got billed $2 each time, even if you immediately canceled. Verizon’s first response was to deny it. “Usage fees are not charged when a customer simply launches the Internet browser and lands on the Verizon Wireless Mobile Web home page, which is the default setting,” it said in a statement at the time....

Theoretical physics is full of weird and wonderful concepts: wormholes, quantum foam and multiverses, just to name a few. The problem is that while such things easily emerge from theorists’ equations, they are practically impossible to create and test in a laboratory setting. But for one such “untestable” theory, an experimental setup might be just on the horizon. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Waterloo in Ontario say they’ve found a way to test the Unruh effect, a bizarre phenomenon predicted to arise from objects moving through empty space....

One hundred students are competing for college scholarships. They come from 10 schools (10 students per school). From each school, one student has declared physics as a major; one has declared chemistry; one, biology; one, psychology; one, mathematics; one, economics; one, anthropology; one, linguistics; one, English; and one, history. So, the group has 10 students for each of these majors. Each of three judges is going to rank the students in 10 ranks from best (rank 1) to worst (rank 10)....

WHY CITIES SUCCEED In “Bigger Cities Do More with Less,” Luís M. A. Bettencourt and Geoffrey B. West assert that a high-rent city allows only greatly value-adding activities to be profitable, which leads to a cycle in which more talent is attracted, “pushing rents higher still, fueling the need to find yet more productive activities.” The serious downside of higher commercial property rents is that many small businesses, such as barbershops, dry cleaners and convenience stores, are forced out of residential neighborhoods....

For the 35 million American adults who are battling obesity, the age-old advice to “improve diet and exercise” often falls short. And surgical interventions that reduce stomach size—although effective—can prove risky. But there may be another alternative: flooding the body with a protein that makes an individual prefer low-fat food and feel full longer, and that activates neurons responsible for regulating the body’s energy intake. Such a simple fix may sound too good to be true, but the approach has shown promise in experiments with mice, rats and monkeys....

One of the top science stories of 2012 involved a furore about the wisdom of enhancing the transmissibility of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in ferrets. In that same year, fears mounted that do-it-yourself (DIY) biologists would cook up their own versions of the virus using information published in the academic press. Now, journalists and others are again targeting the citizen-science community—a group of people with or without formal training who pursue research either as a hobby or to foster societal learning and open science—amid fears about the nascent gene-editing technology CRISPR–Cas9....

Gaia, a European mission to map the Milky Way, has successfully launched from the European Space Agency’s base in French Guiana. Its two telescopes were dispatched from the launch pad in Kourou at 9.12 GMT on a Soyuz-Fregat rocket. The spacecraft will now journey 1.5 million kilometers to its destination — Lagrange point L2, a gravitationally stable point beyond Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Mission controllers confirmed that Gaia completed the most crucial part of its launch and early orbit, including deploying its 10....

Scientists start to meet a “grand challenge” and none too soon. Whenever an extreme weather event occurs these days, the question almost inevitably asked is: Was it caused by global warming? For years, the less-than-satisfying scientificresponse went something like this: We don’t know; even though global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme events, directly linking a specific event to global warming is not possible. What Had Been Impossible Approaches the Possible But that was then and much has changed of late....

On a late May morning a pair of young hikers were walking along a popular desert trail near Mesa, Ariz., when they heard the buzzing of honeybees. The hikers, Alex and Sonya, were unaware that they had happened upon an extraordinarily large hive, which experts later estimated contained about 50,000 Africanized honeybees. The bees gather nectar from the carpet of wildflowers that covers the desert floor, peaking in May and June, supporting colonies that quickly grow from a few thousand individuals to 10,000 bees or more....

Time and again humans have domesticated wild animals, producing tame individuals with softer appearances and more docile temperaments, such as dogs and guinea pigs. But a new study suggests that one of our primate cousins—the African ape known as the bonobo—did something similar without human involvement. It domesticated itself. Anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences noticed that the bonobo looks like a domestic version of its closest living relative, the chimpanzee....

Thirty years ago Alan H. Guth, then a struggling physics postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a series of seminars in which he introduced “inflation” into the lexicon of cosmology. The term refers to a brief burst of hyperaccelerated expansion that, he argued, may have occurred during the first instants after the big bang. One of these seminars took place at Harvard University, where I myself was a postdoc....

Every year around Valentine’s Day millions of almond trees begin to bloom in an expanse of more than 800,000 acres stretching from Sacramento to Los Angeles. In the following weeks more than 30 different varieties of almond trees unfurl five-petaled white and pink flowers at different times. At the center of each flower a cluster of thin pollen-tipped stalks known as stamens surrounds a pollen-catching stigma. In order to produce nuts, an almond tree’s flowers must receive pollen grains from a different type of almond tree....

Hospitals are not performing as many autopsies as they used to. Many health institutions are wary of the procedures, which often reveal doctors’ fatal mistakes. In most cases Medicare and private insurance do not reimburse autopsies, which means families have to pick up the tab. Compounding these issues are religious objections to opening a body after death. Throughout medical history, however, autopsies have taught doctors and pathologists a great deal about how to improve their techniques....

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The computer HAL’s memorable line from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t merely the sign of mutiny, the beginning of a struggle for machine liberation. It’s also a voice that should inspire concern with our lack of understanding of artificial psychology. In the movie, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name, HAL’s “malfunction” may be no malfunction at all, but rather a consequence of creating advanced artificial intelligence with a psychology we can’t yet grasp....

Two decades ago, Benjamin Santer chose 12 words that changed his life forever: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” That statement was part of the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, and it was the first time the international scientific organization had linked human activity to climate change. Santer, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, led the team that wrote those words....

Conventional wisdom used to be that the life span of a creature was roughly proportional to its body mass and heart rate—the big, slow elephant outlives the quick, small mouse. New research, however, presents a more complicated picture. Bats and birds, for instance, are small but tend to live longer than many larger creatures. Moreover, when scientists look within particular species, size does not correlate well with longevity, although fast growth is often associated with shorter life....

By Jane QiuSome tremors may be aftershocks of bigger earthquakes that occurred hundreds of years ago, researchers say.Scientists assess earthquake risks mainly by looking at fault movements and seismic activity along the boundaries of tectonic plates, where most quakes take place. But at the plate interior, “we have little idea where the next fault rupture will happen on the continent and every major quake came as a surprise”, says Mian Liu, a geophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and an author of a study in Nature looking at aftershocks....

A rooster-size dinosaur named Buitreraptor gonzalezorum provides solid evidence that a group of theropods known as dromaeosaurs originated at least 20 million years earlier than previously thought. Not only does the find indicate that the group got its start on the supercontinent Pangaea before it split in two, but it suggests that birdlike flight may have evolved twice on two separate supercontinents. “Buitreraptor is one of those special fossils that tells a bigger story about the earth’s history and the timing of evolutionary events,” says Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of a paper in the October 13 issue of Nature describing the species....

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life among the Stars Lee Billings Current, 2013 ($27.95) Exoplanets get all the headlines these days, but most planet hunters will tell you that the search for Earth-like worlds orbiting distant stars is just a step in the age-old quest to learn whether or not we are alone in the universe. In his compelling, wide-ranging survey, Billings steps back to look at this broader picture, largely through richly textured portraits of some of the giants of the field, including Frank Drake, inventor of SETI; Geoff Marcy, the world’s most accomplished planet hunter; Jim Kasting, who literally wrote the book on what makes a world habitable; and Sara Seager, whose thinking is firmly rooted in the exoplanetology of the future....