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HE PEERS OUT AT ME a bit disdainfully, I think, with his diadem and brocaded fabric slung regally over one shoulder. But I don’t take it personally. After all, the so-called priest-king has regarded all comers that way since he emerged from soapstone under the careful ministrations of an Indus Valley sculptor some 4,000 years ago. His enigmatic gaze—by turns seemingly guarded, pensive, smug or maybe just sleepy—is emblematic of the challenges for archaeologists who are trying to interpret the physical signs of everyday life left behind by ancient peoples....

A massive feature on the moon formed due to lunar rifts, in a surprise revision to earlier theories, research shows. Previously, scientists thought the moon’s Ocean of Storms was a round crater left after a giant impact, but now researchers have found it is underlain by a giant rectangle created by cooling lunar lava as the moon formed. This finding reveals the early moon was far more dynamic than previously thought, scientists added....

UCLA neuroscientists reported Monday that they have transferred a memory from one animal to another via injections of RNA, a startling result that challenges the widely held view of where and how memories are stored in the brain. The finding from the lab of David Glanzman hints at the potential for new RNA-based treatments to one day restore lost memories and, if correct, could shake up the field of memory and learning....

It may well end up in the paper shredder, but a bipartisan group of defense experts and former military leaders sent Donald Trump’s transition team a briefing book urging the president-elect to consider climate change as a grave threat to national security. The Center for Climate & Security in its briefing book argues that climate change presents a risk to U.S. national security and international security, and that the United States should advance a comprehensive policy for addressing the risk....

Mosquitoes prowling for a blood meal are drawn to the plumes of carbon dioxide exhaled with each human breath. But they also buzz around dirty socks and worn clothes—gravitating toward skin odor even in the absence of a panting human—leaving scientists to puzzle over what internal guide drives mosquitoes to dinner. A closer examination of mosquitoes’ neurons and behavior has now revealed that mosquitoes suss out eau de human in the same way they sense carbon dioxide....

Tens of thousands of years ago modern humans crossed paths with the group of hominins known as the Neandertals. Researchers now think they also met another, less-known group called the Denisovans. The only trace that we have found, however, is a single finger bone and two teeth, but those fragments have been enough to cradle wisps of Denisovan DNA across thousands of years inside a Siberian cave. Now a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct their entire genome from these meager fragments....

Shadows shroud Issam Salim’s face as he recounts the operations he’s performed. Yesterday, he tended to fractures, mangled limbs and intestinal injuries caused by an explosion from an unknown source. “The situation was very tense,” he says. Today, there have been no war-wounded patients, so he saw people with bladder stones and hernias instead. Salim is deputy director of a hospital in southern Syria, and he’s talking to an Iraqi surgeon, Ghassan Aziz, through a flickering Skype video call....

Humans have shaped the domestic pigeon into hundreds of breeds of various shapes, colors and attributes — a diversity that captivated Charles Darwin, who even conducted breeding experiments on his own pigeons. Now, a number of domestic and feral pigeon genomes have been sequenced for the first time, giving scientists a resource for studying the genetics of how these traits evolved. The study, published online today in Science, gives insight into the genetics of both ‘fancy’ domestic breeds and plain street pigeons and supports their common origin from the wild rock dove (Columba livia)....

Polynomials, the meat and potatoes of high-school algebra, are foundational to many aspects of quantitative science. But it would take a particularly enthusiastic math teacher to think of these trusty workhorses as beautiful. As with so many phenomena, however, what is simple and straightforward in a single serving becomes intricately detailed—beautiful, even—in the collective. On December 5 John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, posted a collection of images of polynomial roots by Dan Christensen, a mathematician at the University of Western Ontario, and Sam Derbyshire, an undergraduate student at the University of Warwick in England....

The long search for an AIDS vaccine has produced countless false starts and repeated failed trials, casting once bright hopes into shadows of disenchantment. The now familiar swings appeared in high relief this past fall, with news of the most recent, phase III trial in Thailand. Initial fanfare for a protective outcome gave way to disappointment after reanalysis showed that the protection could be attributed only to chance. But rather than dashing all hopes for an AIDS vaccine, the trial has heartened some researchers, who see new clues in the battle against the fatal illness....

At first glance the mammoth screen running down a former parking ramp at Lincoln Center looks like something on loan from Times Square, about a dozen blocks to the south. But this 37.5- by 4.3-meter digital data-visualization wall, parked in the heart of Manhattan, is offering much more than enticements to buy snacks or the latest cologne. Watch the animated screen a little longer, though, and you will learn something—about the city’s largely untapped potential to collect solar energy, the amount of water from New York State’s reservoirs wasted before it ever reaches urban residents, and the patterns in traffic and air quality that change hourly....

A soft robotic hand has finally achieved a historic accomplishment: beating the first level of Super Mario Bros. Although quickly pressing and releasing the buttons and directional pad on a Nintendo Entertainment System controller is a fun test of this three-fingered machine’s performance, the real breakthrough is not what it does—but how it was created. The Mario-playing hand, as well as two turtlelike “soft robots” described in the same recent Science Advances paper, were each 3-D-printed in a single process that only took three to eight hours....

“Clow-dia,” I say once. Twice. A third time. Defeated, I say the Americanized version of my name: “Claw-dee-ah.” Finally, Siri recognizes it. Having to adapt our way of speaking to interact with speech recognition technologies is a familiar experience for people whose first language is not English or who do not have conventionally American-sounding names. I have even stopped using Siri because of it. Implementation of speech recognition technology in the last few decades has unveiled a very problematic issue ingrained in them: racial bias....

These are tumultuous times for the Supreme Court. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court in October 2020, the justices have issued a series of unprecedented decisions that have reshaped health law and policy in ways that will impede the health of all Americans. Among these decisions are orders blocking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, halting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s order requiring large employers to mandate vaccination or testing and masking, lifting a lower court injunction allowing medication for abortions to be prescribed via telehealth and enjoining several state COVID-mitigation measures as violations of religious liberty....

Audrey was six months old when her parents first noticed something wasn’t right. Without warning, her body stiffened, and her eyes rolled into the corners of their sockets for hours at a time. Despite visits to multiple specialists, no one knew what was wrong. Her doctors prescribed seizure medication—lots of it—which sedated her but did not stop the eye-rolling. Finally, they confessed that they did not know how to help and sent Audrey and her parents home with a handful of pamphlets about living with a disability....

Between 1925 and 1999 precipitation between 40 and 70 degrees north latitudes increased at the rate of 62 millimeters (2.44 inches) per century. The northern tropics and subtropics, between 0 and 30 degrees, became drier at 98 millimeters (3.86 inches) a century, while it got wetter in the corresponding zone between the equator and 30 degrees south at a rate of 82 millimeters (3.23 inches) per century. The models, which factor in natural effects such as solar winds and volcanic eruptions, along with anthropogenic forcings like greenhouse gases and aerosols, match these precipitation variations accurately in trend and reasonably well in magnitude....

Saturn and the bright star Spica have been making a pretty pair in our evening skies recently. This week they will be joined by the waxing gibbous moon, making a perfect threesome. Next Monday evening, June 17, the moon will be nine days old and just to the right of Spica. On Tuesday evening, it will have moved to a position between the two, as shown in the graphic above. By Wednesday night (June 19) it will be off to Saturn’s left, 11 days old....

Three hundred and thirty American men and women have served as astronauts since the start of NASA’s human spaceflight program. Only one is publicly known to have been gay or bisexual — Sally Ride — and she kept it private until her death, yesterday (July 23), when her obituary on the Sally Ride Science organization’s website stated that Ride was survived by Tam O’Shaughnessy, her “partner of 27 years.” As the first American woman in space and a scientist, Ride served as a role model for generations of young girls....

Shree Bose, who won the grand prize at this year’s Google Global Science Fair, credits her love of science to her big brother, Pinaki. As a child, he had a habit of teaching her what he’d just learned in science class. How atoms work, for example. “He’d spend an hour trying to explain the concept,” she said. “He’d gesture wildly with his hands. He was trying to get my brain to wrap around the idea that everything we see and touch is made up of tiny, tiny parts....

The 9/11 attacks, the deadliest terrorist acts on U.S. soil, were the first to use airliners as weapons. More attempts followed, including Richard Reid’s attempt in December 2001 to ignite explosives in his shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami, and at least 10 airliners were targets in a plot involving liquid explosives in 2006, forcing new policies regarding shoes at screening and liquids on airplanes. Then, on Christmas Day in 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate explosives in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit....