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The first spacecraft to probe deep underneath Jupiter’s thick clouds is scheduled to arrive at the gas giant on July 4. Named Juno, the NASA orbiter will collect data that could elucidate the planet’s origins and evolution, gather details about its long-lived storm (the Great Red Spot) and send back the highest-resolution color images of Jupiter to date. Jupiter was apparently born from the leftover gas and dust of the primordial nebula that formed our sun, yet exactly how that birth occurred, or even whether the planet has a solid core, is unknown....

It’s a beautiful afternoon at the ballpark, at which you have plunked down good money to be a spectator. Then it starts heading your way. From off in the distance, other members of the crowd inexplicably sacrifice their individuality and join together to get up sequentially and then briefly raise their arms to the heavens before returning to their seats. The move rolls across sections of the stands. It draws closer and closer....

From precious pomeranians to mangy mutts, all domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) seem to be descended from the Eurasian gray wolf (Canis lupis). But what we still don’t know is exactly when and where our best friends transformed from predators into partners. And such knowledge might help solve the long-disputed question of exactly why dogs were the first animal to be domesticated. The dog genome (courtesy of a boxer named Tasha) was first decoded in 2005—and even before that researchers had been using genetic tools to track Fido’s first home....

Video cameras bolted into a glacial peak at roughly 4,800 meters in the Himalayas have touched off a small international incident that has derailed a U.S. researcher’s PhD work. “A reporter claimed [the cameras] were used to spy on China—since we’re so close to the border—and so the government confiscated them,” says Ulyana Horodyskyj, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The accusation was made with much fanfare on Nepalese television, reflecting a relationship with the neighboring Tibet region of China that is at times tenuous....

European settlers transformed America’s Northeastern forests. From historic records and fossils, researchers know the landscape and plants are radically different today than they were 400 years ago. But little direct evidence exists to prove which tree species filled the forests before they were cleared for fields and fuel. Swamp-loving plants, like sedges and tussocks, are the fossil survivors, not delicate leaves from hardwood trees. Now, thanks to a rare fossil discovery in the Pennsylvania foothills, scientists can tell the full story of America’s lost forests....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. From the days of the hoplites through the creation of the legionary until the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, the Roman army remained a feared opponent, and the Roman legionary’s weapons and armor, albeit with minor modifications, remained the same: a spear, a sword, a shield, and a helmet....

Peter Pan stayed forever young in Neverland. In real life, some scientists are looking at telomeres, or regions of repetitive DNA at the ends of our chromosomes, to try to arrive at something like a real version of this story. Telomeres consist of up to 3,300 repeats of the DNA sequence TTAGGG. They protect chromosome ends from being mistaken for broken pieces of DNA that would otherwise be fixed by cellular repair machinery....

The number 14 turns up conspicuously in discussions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , the soon-to-be world’s biggest particle accelerator. Construction of its underground, 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring on a site near Geneva, Switzerland, has taken 14 years. It is designed to reach energies of 14 tera- (trillion) electron volts (TeV), or about seven times that of the Tevatron , the world’s currently reigning accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois....

By tweaking an enzyme that cuts DNA, synthetic biologists say that they can make genome editing even more specific—an essential improvement if the technique is to be deployed in the clinic to treat genetic diseases. The enzyme, called Cas9, is a key component of a molecular-editing system that enables researchers to alter particular DNA sequences in the genome. That technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, is so quick, cheap and easy to use that it is already changing how genetic research is done and could one day provide a way to correct genetic mutations that cause disease in humans....

From Simons Science News (find original story here). In 1952, Alan Turing, a British mathematician best known for his work on code-breaking and artificial intelligence, was convicted of engaging in homosexual acts and sentenced to chemical castration. Amid that personal drama, he still found the time to publish a visionary paper on the mathematics of regularly repeating patterns in nature, which could be applied to the stripes on tigers and zebra fish, the spots on leopards and the spacing in rows of alligator teeth, to name a few....

Lisa writes: “I recently came across a diet that’s supposed to help with acid reflux. In this diet, you cut way back on carbohydrates and replace those calories with fat. The theory is that your body sometimes cannot absorb certain carbs, so they sit in your gut and ferment, thereby causing gas to bubble up into the stomach and esophagus. If you cut back on these fermentable carbs, your acid reflux will go away....

SHANGHAI – China has set ambitious goals for itself to develop hydropower to help mitigate the risks of climate change, but increasing extreme weather events likely rooted in climate change are now sabotaging the goals’ foundations. The latest blow came in September, when many major rivers across China ran into an unusual shrinkage, with less than 20 percent water remaining at some stretches. As a result, the nation’s hydroelectric generation dropped by almost a quarter compared with last year....

In recent years, optics researchers have come up with numerous concepts for invisibility cloaks—camouflaging that would effectively reroute light so as to conceal an object within. Most of those approaches have relied on so-called metamaterials, carefully engineered structures designed to have bizarre optical properties. But a team of researchers has now designed a much simpler cloaking apparatus that does away with the need for metamaterials entirely. Even if a Harry Potter–style invisibility cloak never materializes, the simplification of such extreme light manipulation may have more immediate applications in communications and computing....

Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is about to get a science test. During Scott Pruitt’s tenure as EPA chief, the agency’s science was sidelined. Web pages explaining climate science disappeared. Pruitt contradicted scientists by claiming that humans aren’t the primary drivers of climate change. Researchers on EPA science advisory boards who received agency grants were deemed to have conflicts of interest, while industry researchers were framed as independent. A rule was proposed that would restrict which science could be used in regulations....

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon Halloween celebrates illusion. Even if we manage to ignore flights of fancy the other 364 days of the year, come October 31 we set out to enjoy trickery and pretense. We disguise ourselves, we carve malevolent expressions in bland, innocuous pumpkins and we do our best to suspend our disbelief as we enter supposedly haunted houses....

Homeowners looking to save electricity costs should replace all their incandescent light bulbs with LED-based lights instead of installing a small solar photovoltaic system, a report by J.P. Morgan shows. Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, will become mainstream over the next 12 months as improving technology and performance and higher subsidies lead to a rapid drop in costs, according to the report. “The residential user still uses a lot of incandescent bulbs and has the greatest opportunity to reduce electricity costs and consumption,” said Christopher Blansett, an analyst at J....

Homing pigeons combine precise internal compasses and memorized landmarks to retrace a path back to their lofts—even four years after the previous time they made the trip, a new study shows. Testing nonhuman memory retention is challenging; in research studies, “it’s rare that there is a gap of several years between when an animal stores the information and when it is next required to retrieve it,” says University of Oxford zoologist Dora Biro....

Snaking beneath the surface of many Eastern cities is a network of aging, cast-iron pipes carrying natural gas. The pipes, buried underground, have been shifted for decades by winter freeze-thaw cycles, and some are simply cracked from age. Because of this, some pipes leak. Just how much gas from those older pipes and their newer replacements in the pipeline distribution system leaks out and rises into the atmosphere, though, is up for debate....

Romantic relationships can begin anywhere. When Cupid’s arrow strikes, you might be at church or at school, playing chess or softball, flirting with a friend of a friend at a party or minding your own business on the train. Sometimes, however, Cupid goes on vacation, or takes a long nap, or kicks back for a marathon of Lifetime original movies. Instead of waiting for the capricious arrow slinger to get back to work, people are increasingly joining online-dating sites to assert some control over their romantic lives....

At a time when Brazil is expected to bump up its sugar cane output, researchers find that converting lands from tropical savannas to sugar cane plantations could alter the local climate. Temperatures could fall about 1 degree Celsius during the peak of the growing season and rise an equivalent amount after harvest, said researchers from Arizona State University and the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology. While the results suggest that more fields of sugar cane won’t drastically alter the landscape, they could affect local seasonal temperatures....