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As moviegoers make plans to watch summer blockbusters this weekend, there is an additional choice for New Yorkers: Journey to the Stars, the new space show opening July 4 at the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Rose Center for Earth and Space. Aside from the three years of planning and 18 months spent making the film, what’s special about Journey to the Stars is the international effort that went into producing it, with leading astrophysics groups around the globe contributing the computer simulations derived from observational data....

Spider legs seem to have minds of their own. According to findings published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, each leg functions as a semi-independent “computer,” with sensors that read the immediate environment and trigger movements accordingly. This autonomy helps the arachnids quickly spin perfect webs with minimal brain use. The study authors simulated surprisingly simple rules to govern this complex behavior—which could eventually be applied to robotics. “The novelty of this paper is really to lay out an interesting and potentially very important paradigm to study and test new ideas about the next generation of robots,” says University of Oxford biologist Fritz Vollrath, lead author of the paper....

Microsoft, Google and several of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies have found a way to provide wireless Internet access that’s so fast it makes today’s Wi-Fi networks seem as sluggish as dial-up service. Trouble is, this blazing-fast network access may hamper television signals when they go digital next year. Such is the dilemma of so-called “white spaces,” the chunks of unused bandwidth layered between TV channels that are designed to keep broadcast signals from interfering with one another....

To many people, honey bees symbolize prosperity, sustainability and environmentalism. But as a honey bee researcher, I have to tell you that only the first item on that list is defensible. Although they are important for agriculture, honey bees also destabilize natural ecosystems by competing with native bees—some of which are species at risk. The rise in hobby beekeeping, now a trendy activity for hundreds of thousands of Americans, followed strong awareness campaigns to “save the bees....

President Trump’s budget released this morning aims directly at programs addressing climate change by eliminating funds for the Clean Power Plan and “reorienting” U.S. EPA on air pollution. The blueprint calls for a 31 percent spending reduction for EPA, slashing its budget by $2.6 billion. Environmental advocates described it as a crippling blow to an agency at the vanguard of climate action. The budget also seeks a 5.6 percent cut to the Energy Department and a 12 percent decrease for the Interior Department (Energywire, March 16)....

Twitter sees itself as the digital incarnation of the town square, eliminating time and distance as barriers to unfiltered communication among citizens. In this role as the world’s unofficial open idea exchange (in 140 characters or less, of course), the company is finding that governments, law enforcement agencies and even its own Twitterverse are increasingly holding it accountable for how people use its microblogging service. The social network appears to be taking this newfound responsibility seriously....

TORONTO—Who says toys are just for kids? Several items unveiled at the recent Canadian Toy Association annual toy fair show just how far toys have come since the introduction of one-time high-tech wonders such as the Speak & Spell and 2-XL in 1978. Among a new generation of toys are an interactive robot with a beat-box function, remote-controlled airboats that travel on the floor, a roving Wi-Fi–connected robot that lets you see and hear things in your home remotely, and speeding toothbrush heads....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals....

The record downpour began soaking the Chicago area before dawn, and foul liquid was soon gushing into a retired doorman’s basement. It climbed the walls as if filling a giant fish tank, and the result was a rare legal test about climate change. The court case blames local officials for failing to prepare for worsening flooding as temperatures rise, this time causing damage to about 300 homes. The class-action lawsuit, now in its seventh year and recently suffering a major setback, is believed by some experts to be among the earliest efforts to link real flood losses to global warming and government negligence....

Tesla Motors will accelerate production of all its electric vehicles, pushed by heady demand for its planned midpriced car, the company said yesterday. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla, best known as a maker of luxury EVs, said it’s on track to start making the mainstream Model 3 in 2017. In addition, because of the clamor for that car, Tesla will push up its plan to hit production of 500,000 total cars annually, reaching that road mark by 2018....

On a clear November morning in 1964 the Royal Canadian Navy’s Cape Scott embarked from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a four-month expedition. Led by the late Stanley Skoryna, an enterprising McGill University professor, a team of 38 scientists onboard headed for Easter Island, a volcanic speck that juts out from the Pacific 2,200 miles west of Chile. Plans were afoot to build an airport on the remote island, famous for its mysterious sculptures of enormous heads, and the group wanted to study the people, flora and fauna while they remained largely untouched by modernity....

Scientists have discovered that a cheap and common sponge they use to clean surfaces and equipment in their lab has a very high capacity to absorb bisphenol A (BPA). ‘It was an accidental discovery,’ says Wei Qiu, from the University of Massachusetts, US, one of the researchers involved. ‘There was a big tank of waste BPA solution and while we were testing some other absorbent materials we accidentally dropped a sponge into the solution....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Like many people, I have recently become fascinated the lives and loves of the ruling classes of the people of Westeros, where the occasionally charming inhabitants spend a lot of time bickering about who is in charge. Game of Thrones is very entertaining – but don’t get attached to any of the characters, as the lifespan in their world does seem quite variable....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineKeeping track of a country’s greenhouse gases is an accounting problem of epic proportions. In the United States, scientists have relied on a mix of methods to build up their national emissions inventory, including monitoring the electricity output of a power plant and assessing the quality of the fuel that powers it.Now they have a new resource: official data from the companies themselves, collated into a user-friendly online database that was launched on 11 January by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)....

Data are the common currency that unites all fields of science. As science progresses data proliferate, providing points of reference, revealing trends, and offering evidence to substantiate hypotheses. Decades into the digitization of science, however, data proliferate exponentially, at times threatening to drown knowledge and information in a sea of noise. The journal Science examines this trend in a special report this week that, according to the editors, turns up two themes: “Most scientific disciplines are finding the data deluge to be extremely challenging, and tremendous opportunities can be realized if we can better organize and access the data....

The beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew were perfectly lovely: round and hefty; with their skin a rich burgundy; their flavor sweet and faintly earthy, like the dirt from which they came. Unless someone told you, you’d never know the beets were fertilized with human urine. Pradhan and Heinonen-Tanski, environmental scientists at the University of Kuopio in Finland, grew the beets as an experiment in sustainable fertilization. They nourished the root vegetables with a combination of urine and wood ash, which they found worked as well as traditional mineral fertilizer....

Editor’s note: We turned to two public health researchers on gun violence to help us understand the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Florida. Sandro Galea is the dean of Boston University’s School of Public Health. Ziming Xuan is an assistant professor at the school who recently led a study of state gun laws and youth gun-carrying in the United States. We originally spoke to the researchers in the wake of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in October 2015....

Plastic may be fantastic, but it takes an awful lot of petroleum to make it. As such, efforts to cut oil use in the U.S. have produced, among other results, a budding bioplastics industry specializing in plastic manufacturing that relies less on oil for its raw material and more on biomass, carbon dioxide or even microorganisms such as Escherichia coli. Such efforts got a boost Monday when Ithaca, N.Y.–based Novomer, Inc....

Many of the greatest problems facing the planet will hit hardest in 50 to 100 years. Climate change, which already wreaks havoc through local droughts and heat waves, could well unleash global-scale havoc in a few decades. Higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns could cut global food production sharply and trigger mass famine in needy parts of the world; conceivably, the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica could partially collapse and raise the sea level by several meters, flooding the coasts....

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck New York last March and the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) closed its doors to the public, little did we realize we were about to open a virtual door to the rest of the world. A deadly public health crisis has taken over many aspects of our lives, affecting how we behave, what we read, what we talk about and what we fear. Yet within this new world context, we’ve discovered that, through the incredible richness of mathematics, MoMath is able to help create a global community of goodwill and mutual respect in an increasingly polarized world....