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When robot Nao laughs, he does so with his whole body: slapping his knees, shaking his head. But the adorable android, made by SoftBank Robotics, is not merely good at expressing mirth; he can correctly identify as much as 65 percent of happy laughter outbursts in humans, according to a study presented in 2015 at a nonverbal language workshop in the Netherlands. Once robots like Nao master human laughter, they will make far more likable and realistic companions....

One person has died, and five others were hospitalized, after a clinical trial of an experimental drug in France went tragically wrong. But days after the first public acknowledgement of the incident on 15 January, a lack of official information has left outside experts and the public largely in the dark as to what happened. “The French authorities have not been very rapid nor transparent in their response,” says Catherine Hill, an expert in clinical-trial design and a former member of the scientific advisory board of France’s National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety (ANSM)....

The helicopter fell like a stone. It dropped by more than 1,500 meters over Maryland, twisting slightly as the ground grew rapidly closer. Although this was all according to plan, that didn’t settle James Garvin’s nerves. Nor did the realization that his seat belt wasn’t fully fastened—a moment that sent his heart rate skyrocketing. Then, a mere six meters above the ground, the ride got even wilder when the pilots pulled the aircraft out of the fall and climbed skywards, only to fall again....

COOK: How did you become interested in the neuroscience of reading? DEHAENE: One of my long-time interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children’s brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact. As I started to do experimental research in this domain, using the different tools at my disposal (from behavior to patients, fMRI, event-related potentials, and even intracranial electrodes), I was struck that we always found the same areas involved in the reading process....

Over the past few years public participation in science projects has surged, and research involving dogs is no exception. Often the work consists of online activities, but sometimes it requires participants to go into the world, do something and report back. Here’s a list of online dog science projects that will be active through 2015 and that, in most cases, anyone in the world can join. All are in English at a minimum; a few are also bilingual....

The long-term warming of the planet, as well as an exceptionally strong El Niño, led to numerous climate records in 2015, including milestones for global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels and ocean heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s annual State of the Climate Report. “The future is happening now,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “The alarming rate of change we are now witnessing in our climate as a result of greenhouse gas emissions is unprecedented in modern records....

Scientists say they have pinpointed a gene in the brain that can calm nerve cells that become too jumpy, potentially paving the way for new therapies to treat autism and other neurological disorders. “It’s exciting because it opens the field up,” says Michael Greenberg, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School. “Nobody has [found] a gene that controls the process in quite that way before.” The brain is continually trying to strike a balance between too much and too little nerve cell activity....

Children at an increased risk of autism may have abnormal structures in the placenta that can be detected at birth, a new study finds. The findings suggest behavioral interventions aimed at social and motor skill development in these children could be started right away, the researchers said. Studies have shown that such interventions are more effective in children with autism when they are started earlier. It’s much too early to say that an examination of the placenta could be used as a definitive test for autism at birth, said study researcher Dr....

The death of Osama bin Laden on Sunday, after more than a decade of pursuit, is a huge symbolic victory for U.S. forces. If the history of counterterrorism is any guide, the action will also inspire a desire for retribution among al Qaeda and its myriad affiliate groups throughout the world. The threat is real but not as great as it might loom in our imaginations, argues sociologist Charles Kurzman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill....

NASA launch managers this morning cleared space shuttle Endeavour to lift off before dawn Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the five remaining flights before the shuttle program concludes this year or early next. The planned launch comes less than a week after the future of human spaceflight in the U.S. was shaken by President Obama, whose budget request for fiscal year 2011, released Monday, would cancel Constellation, the planned successor to the shuttle....

By Nate Raymond(Reuters) - Two former BP Plc supervisors won the dismissal on Tuesday of some of the manslaughter charges facing them over the Gulf of Mexico drilling rig explosion that killed 11 people in 2010.U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval in New Orleans dismissed 11 counts of seaman’s manslaughter facing Deepwater Horizon rig well site leaders Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine.But the judge refused to dismiss 11 other counts of involuntary manslaughter, leaving those and a Clean Water Act violation charge to be heard at a trial starting in June....

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved brexanolone, the first drug specifically targeted to treat postpartum depression—the most common complication of childbirth. Yet it’s a condition that often goes untreated because new mothers fear being stigmatized if they report symptoms. Brexanolone is the first drug developed by and approved from Sage Therapeutics. The Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech company will market the new medicine under the brand name Zulresso. “This approval is important for postpartum depression patients and it’s important for our company....

Telescopes in space and across Earth captured the spectacular aftermath of NASA’s DART spacecraft crashing into the asteroid Dimorphos on 26 September. The smash-up was “the first human experiment to deflect a celestial body”, says Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, and “an enormous success”. “We’re all pretty stoked here,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, who works on the mission....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineWith the battle to host the world’s most powerful radio telescope growing increasingly acrimonious, the project’s leaders are considering whether to divide the spoils.The US$2.1-billion Square Kilometer Array (SKA) would open a window on the early Universe. As yet, international partners have not committed to covering the hefty price tag. But if the project goes ahead, it would bring a flood of funding, prestige and scientific opportunities to one of the two competing teams: South Africa or joint bidders Australia and New Zealand....

Mercury, a hard-baked pebble of a planet patrolling the inner solar system, has long been a bit of an inscrutable runt. But now that scientists are finally getting a close look, Mercury is proving to have just as much personality as its bigger siblings. The smallest planet in the solar system had not received much research attention until 2008, when NASA’s Messenger spacecraft made its first flyby en route to entering orbit around Mercury earlier this year....

Most people forget they even have an appendix unless it bursts or becomes inflamed, but a new study suggests the organ may play a key role in the development of Parkinson’s disease. Those who have their appendixes removed in young adulthood run a nearly 20 percent lower risk of developing Parkinson’s decades later, according to a study published in October in Science Translational Medicine. The new finding helps solidify the developing view Parkinson’s is not just a motor disorder characterized by tremors, stiffness and imbalanced walking—but a whole-body condition that often involves the digestive system, says lead author Viviane Labrie, an assistant professor at the Van Andel Research Institute’s Center for Neurodegenerative Science....

Scientists have had a rough year. The leaked “Climategate” e-mails painted researchers as censorious. The mild H1N1 flu out­break led to charges that health officials exaggerated the danger to help Big Pharma sell more drugs. And Harvard University in­vestigators found shocking holes in a star professor’s data. As policy decisions on climate, energy, health and technology loom large, it’s important to ask: How badly have recent events shaken people’s faith in science?...

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazineHomo floresiensis, dubbed the ‘hobbit’ of Indonesia, is once again igniting debate. A skull-scanning study supports the idea that the diminutive individual was not a separate species, but simply a stunted human.The study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But other anthropologists are far from impressed with the analysis, claiming that ‘hobbit politics’ is yet again clouding the debate.The 18,000-year-old fossil stunned the anthropology community when it was discovered in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003....

In the forests of Australia and New Guinea lives a pigeon-sized creature that is not only a master builder but a clever illusionist, too. The great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis)—a cousin of crows and jays—has an elaborate mating ritual that relies on the male’s ability to conjure forced perspective. Throughout the year he painstakingly builds and maintains his bower: a 60-centimeter-long corridor made of twigs, leading to a courtyard decorated with gray and white pebbles, shells and bones....

A new type of machine could rival quantum computers in exceeding the power of classical computers, researchers say. Quantum computers rely on the bizarre properties of atoms and the other construction blocks of the universe. The world is a fuzzy place at its very smallest levels — in this realm where quantum physics dominates, things can seemingly exist in two places at once or spin in opposite directions at the same time....