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The moon, our closest neighbor, remains in many ways a mystery to planetary scientists—a destination tantalizingly close, yet frustratingly difficult to reach. But even though an Earthling has not set foot on the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, samples brought back during that mission continue to grace the science community with insights into the nature of Earth’s satellite. A new study tracing the history of one of those moon rocks, published in this week’s Science, adds fuel to a long-running debate over the source of the faint magnetism present on the lunar surface....

From Nature magazine To those who enjoy the pleasures of the dining table, the news may come as a relief: drastically cutting back on calories does not seem to lengthen lifespan in primates. The verdict, from a 25-year study in rhesus monkeys fed 30% less than control animals, represents another setback for the notion that a simple, diet-triggered switch can slow ageing. Instead, the findings, published this week in Nature1, suggest that genetics and dietary composition matter more for longevity than a simple calorie count....

KAMPALA, Uganda—President Obama’s appeal for greater U.S. investment on the African continent was not major news in this booming East African capital where economic progress can be measured by glassy new office towers built for Chinese energy firms and the recent opening of Kampala’s upscale Acacia Mall, where the main imprint of U.S. culture and business is a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. Uganda’s national newspaper, New Vision, ran its coverage of the U....

SHANGHAI—Thin plastic bags are used for everything in China and the Chinese use up to three billion of them a day–an environmentally costly habit picked up by shopkeepers and consumers in the late 1980s for convenience over traditional cloth bags. Fruit mongers weigh produce in them, tailors stuff shirts into them, even street food vendors plunk their piping hot wares directly into see-through plastic bags that do nothing to protect one’s hands from being burned or coated in hot grease....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Heartbleed is the most serious Internet security flaw yet. For about two years, two thirds of Web sites were susceptible to having their memory extracted by remote attackers—memory containing private information, passwords and encryption keys. Heartbleed attacks would not have shown up in most sites’ logs, so we can’t be sure how widely it was exploited or what might have leaked....

This month the first U.S. experiment to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes into the wild gets put to a vote in Key Haven, Fla., and the county of Monroe. If the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District then approves the trial, U.K. biotech firm Oxitec will release millions of mutant male mosquitoes that had required an antibiotic to stay alive until adulthood. These males will pass the dependency to their offspring, which will then die without access to the drug....

By Matt Kaplan A small, toothy dinosaur known as Eoraptor, long considered to be the earliest member of the predatory branch of the dinosaur tree, is revealed to have traits that instead place it at the base of another dinosaur group that contains the largest of the plant-eaters. The study, published in the January 14 issue of Science, revolves around the discovery of a new dinosaur species that lived round the same time as Eoraptor in the late Triassic, some 230 million years ago....

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 set off from Rio de Janeiro en route to Paris. Partway over the Atlantic, the Airbus A330 encountered an area of intense thunderstorms and crashed into the ocean. While the final report from France’s air accident investigators, released earlier this year, cited human error and technical malfunctions of a set of the plane’s sensors, the Air France incident underscored the difficulty pilots on transoceanic flights have of knowing where storms will be given the limitations of current systems for monitoring storms far out over the ocean....

Last June, the Nicaraguan government granted a concession to a Hong Kong company to build a canal connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, through the Caribbean Sea. The HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (operating as HKND Group) signed a 50-year lease, renewable for another 50 years. It plans to break ground in December after spending this year establishing a route and conducting feasibility studies. Included in the concession are the rights to build and operate industrial centers, airports, a rail system and oil pipelines, as well as land expropriation and the rights to natural resources found along the canal route....

NEW YORK — Humanity’s advances in health, longevity and prosperity are in a precarious position as the environment strains under a growing population and economic development. To forestall future threats and to handle emerging medical problems, an international research commission yesterday called for the creation of a new field of medicine: planetary health. The commission, formed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the British medical journal The Lancet, investigated the links between Earth’s natural systems and human well-being, looking at how climate change and resource depletion cause problems like infectious disease and malnutrition....

Last weekend, a massive milieu of women in pink hats descended on Washington, D.C. for the Women’s March. The next big protest being planned for the nation’s capital could involve a sea of lab coats (and likely a few pink hats as well). A group of researchers have proposed a March for Science. What started as a discussion on Reddit has quickly blossomed into a movement. Organizers started a private Facebook group and Twitter account on Monday....

Most children with autism go undiagnosed until after age 3, and many of these children remain undiagnosed until after they reach school age, according to a new study1. The findings, published in the April issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, highlight gaps in implementing best practices for early autism screening and diagnosis. “There’s a lot of work to do,” particularly in translating advances in screening into actual practice, says lead researcher Chris Sheldrick, now research associate at Boston University....

In 541 C.E., after years of campaigning against Goths and Vandals, Emperor Justinian I had built the eastern Roman Empire into a vast dominion, nearly encircling the Mediterranean Sea. That year, however, gave the ruler no chance to celebrate. Instead he was attacked by a deadly new foe, an invisible and incomprehensible enemy. A mysterious plague swept across Justinian’s lands and into his capital, Constantinople. Victims spiked high fevers, their armpits and groins swelled painfully, and many became delirious....

In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in 1881. The floodwaters poured into Minot, North Dakota’s fourth-largest city, and spread across thousands of acres of farms and forests. More than 12,000 people were forced to evacuate. Many lost their homes to the floodwaters. Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn’t suddenly seemed more common....

New results challenge the view that a good night’s sleep can leave behind a dense bloom of brain cells in the morning. Prior studies had found that sleep-deprived rodents grow fewer new neurons than well-rested animals, suggesting that sleep somehow promotes the birth of brain cells, called neurogenesis. But that might not be the case: researchers report instead that lack of sleep likely cuts into neurogenesis by triggering a harmful stress response....

Environmental interests were trounced in the 2009 Supreme Court term that ends Monday. In five high-profile cases, the justices overturned decisions that favored environmentalists. They ruled in favor of the Navy in a case pitting national security concerns against the welfare of marine mammals; limited the scope of liability for a Superfund cleanup; and reversed a decision that held no cost-benefit test could be used to determine the best technology for withdrawing water from rivers to cool power-plant turbines....

Sanofi Pasteur has rejected a request from the US Army to set an affordable US price for a Zika virus vaccine that the company is developing with American taxpayer funds, prompting an angry response from Senator Bernie Sanders. For months, Sanders has pushed the Army to negotiate a more favorable agreement with Sanofi, which is one of the world’s largest vaccine makers and which has already received a $43 million US research grant....

As scientists, we have watched with dismay as senior positions in our federal science agencies remain unfilled, science advisory panels get disbanded and science-based policies are undermined. But amid this governmental turmoil, another, longer-term development is under way that will affect the lives of everyone in the U.S. and take its toll on others around the world—the loss of critical expertise and capacity in the science agencies of the federal government, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, among many others....

The temperature baseline used in the Paris climate agreement may have discounted an entire century’s worth of human-caused global warming, a new study has found. Countries in the Paris climate agreement set a target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius by curbing carbon emissions compared to their preindustrial levels. But a new study shows that the preindustrial level used in the agreement, based on temperature records from the late 19th century, doesn’t account for a potential century of rising temperatures caused by carbon dioxide emissions....

Architects have called the border wall a “pharaonic project” and a misplaced infrastructure priority. Environmentalists say it will continue to cut off the flow of water and wildlife in a changing climate but is little more than political grandstanding that won’t keep out people. And climate activists say that President Trump’s border wall with Mexico and other efforts to keep people out represent a backward effort to stem a tide of migration that would be better addressed at its source: in places where climate impacts are already happening....