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The arid badlands of Ethiopia’s remote Afar region have long been a favorite hunting ground for paleoanthropologists. Many hominins?–the group that includes all the creatures in the human line since it branched away from that of the chimps–once called it home. The area is perhaps best known for having yielded “Lucy,” the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor known as Australopithecus afarensis. Now researchers have unveiled another incredible A. afarensis specimen from a site called Dikika, just four kilometers from where Lucy turned up....

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. cases of two deadly types of foodborne pathogens have fallen sharply since 2008, but rates of other key types of foodborne bugs have increased, according to the latest report on nine pathogens tracked by health officials. “The picture is mixed,” said Dr. Patricia Griffin of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of foodborne diseases, adding, “Most of it is not good news....

They fought about money, categories and assessments. They skirmished over scopes and road maps and timetables. But the true battle consuming leaders from 198 governments at a U.N. global warming conference that concluded yesterday after two weeks of negotiations and 32 hours of overtime debating was really about just one thing: balancing responsibilities between poor, rich and richer nations. “This, in a way, begins the future of whatever will follow as a replacement of the Kyoto Protocol, so it is from one generation to another....

Boredom manifests itself in more than yawns and glazed eyes. Subtle body cues called noninstrumental movements—squirming, scratching, shifting—also give away a person’s mental state. Like teachers and other public speakers, machines can now also pick up on these telltale signs of restlessness. A new study reveals that when computer users tune in to on-screen material, their fidgeting lessens—and algorithms can use that information to discern attentiveness in real time. To measure engagement, psychobiologist Harry Witchel of Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England and his colleagues outfitted 27 participants with motion-tracking markers that a computer’s visual system could follow....

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazineWith Texas pouring millions of dollars into developing adult stem-cell treatments, doctors there are already injecting paying customers with unproven preparations, supplied by an ambitious new company.The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any such stem-cell treatment for routine clinical use, although it does sanction them for patients enrolled in registered clinical trials. Some advocates of the treatments argue, however, that preparations based on a patient’s own cells should not be classed as drugs, and should not therefore fall under the FDA’s jurisdiction....

Parents who are considering whether to vaccinate their child against COVID may have heard about the risk of a rare side effect called myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart tissue that has occurred in some teenagers and young adults who have received an mRNA vaccine. These parents may be wondering, “Is this something I should be worried about for my child?” Here is what scientists know: Vaccine-related myocarditis is extremely rare; estimates vary, but the highest figures suggest there have been fewer than 200 cases per million fully vaccinated males ages 12–15, the youngest age group for which such data currently exist....

Paleontologist Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University explains. It is often stated in the paleontological literature that the chance an animal will become fossilized is “one in a million.” This number is meant to be taken figuratively, the point being that the odds of surviving the rigors of deep time are extremely remote. Nevertheless, all field paleontologists know that the earth is biased when it comes to giving up its dead–the odds of an animal being preserved and consequently exhumed are much greater in some settings than others....

The Great Barrier Reef will have a robotic protector beginning this winter. The underwater autonomous vehicle is programmed to patrol the massive living structure in search of destructive crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS), which it then kills by lethal injection. These starfish prey on coral polyps, and although they are native to the reef, their population has exploded in the past few years, possibly because of overfishing of their natural predators. The latest report from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority places the venomous invertebrates alongside climate change and human activity as a significant threat to the reef, which lost half its coral cover between 1985 and 2012....

Confounded by the inexhaustible array of choices available when you stroll through a supermarket today? Well, here’s another one to add to the list: How would you like your environmental degradation? By land or by sea? Whether it’s pesticides and fertilizers leaching out of croplands or marine fish stocks vanishing by the boatful, every food purchase carries increasingly visible ecological costs. Against this backdrop, a growing cadre of academics, farmers and aquaculturists is working to refine and popularize a technique that could slash those costs for both fish and vegetable products....

Apple has until tomorrow to either help law enforcement unlock a suspected terrorist’s iPhone or formally challenge a court order demanding that the company do so. For the past week CEO Tim Cook has made it clear that Apple has no intention of giving in to what the FBI has positioned as a technological compromise. The case has since become more about setting legal precedents between tech companies and law enforcement than about overcoming technological hurdles....

Let’s hear from the two Toms. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong,” wrote Tom 1, “gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” Almost two centuries later Tom 2 stated that his “most fundamental objective is to urge a change in the perception and evaluation of familiar data....

On March 11, the seafloor 130 kilometers off Japan’s eastern coast slipped more than 20 meters beneath the crust that makes up the Pacific plate, pulling the island nation as much as 4.3 meters closer to California and its coast 66 centimeters down. In fact, the first geologic sensors on the seafloor, which happen to lie near the center of the Tohoku-oki quake, as it is now formally called based on the closest regions of the island nation to the quake’s epicenter offshore, registered a shift of some 24 meters east-southeast and an uplift of three meters at that point....

Nearly everything we can see in the night sky without the aid of a telescope is in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, the Milky Way Galaxy. And the hundreds of planets that have been discovered outside our solar system all orbit stars within the Milky Way; their relative proximity permits the kind of careful look needed to identify an orbital companion. Now a new study has located yet another extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, within our galaxy....

Austin Energy, the municipally owned utility providing power to roughly 1 million people in the Texas capital, will add 600 megawatts of solar to its generation portfolio by as soon as 2017. Under a request for proposal announced yesterday, Austin Energy said it would consider acquiring the solar power under power purchase agreements with independent solar firms, or it could own the solar capacity outright. All of the new solar energy must be produced within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas territory, officials said, and proposals are due by May 15....

Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked. But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate. For the last few decades, social scientists have been teasing out the mental and physiological systems involved in profiling and social bias....

Scientists, conservation organizations and governments trying to stem the tide of extinction often focus efforts on protected areas such as national parks and wildlife preserves. But with as many as a million species at risk, this strategy may not be enough to conserve wildlife, especially in a world increasingly disrupted by climate change. Slowing the mass extinction that now appears to be underway will require more creative means of coexisting alongside wild plants and animals....

NEW ORLEANS—Last year brought a huge advance in tornado forecasting: the first seasonal severe weather forecastfor the U.S. The forecast proved to be accurate and now researchers are back with a second forecast: a below average number of tornadoes and hailstorms for the coming year. The new forecast was presented at the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans on Monday. Whether the tornado forecasting continues to be accurate or faces a sophomore slump will play out in the coming months as severe weather season ramps up in the Plains....

Robots can already discern and react to speech thanks to voice-recognition software such as the iPhone’s Siri. But “smart” machines still struggle with most other sounds. “In some sense, it’s almost a simpler problem, but there hasn’t been a lot of work on noise in the environment,” says roboticist Joseph Romano of Rethink Robotics in Boston. “It hasn’t been in the loop for robotic feedback.” Now Romano is letting robots listen in on more than our conversations....

The more mysteries that scientists unlock, the more opportunities emerge for the next generation of researchers to transform newfound knowledge into tomorrow’s breakthroughs that serve society. The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized several potential breakthroughs Wednesday in awarding four of its $30,000 Lemelson–M.I.T. Student Prizes to those from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.). A key criterion in recognizing Caltech’s Heather Agnew, Harvard-M....

A DC-8 rumbles down the runway in Punta Arenas, Chile, bound once again for the fickle weather of Antarctica. Chock full of scientific equipment, the nearly 48-meter-long plane—the core of NASA’s Operation ICE Bridge—will fly as low as 300 meters above the glaciers and valleys of West Antarctica as well as the ice just off shore. Employing gravimeters, laser altimeters, even radar, the plane will attempt to get a handle on the rapid thinning of the Antarctic ice sheet—as well as fill in for the aging ICESat 1 satellite that is soon to be defunct....