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A team of astronomers has found what may prove to be the oldest supernovae identified to date, and they estimate that tens of thousands from the same vintage will be detectable in the coming years. Jeff Cooke, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cosmology at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues found two supernovae, or stellar explosions, that are believed to result from the collapse of massive stars some 11 billion years ago, predating the previous record holder by roughly a billion years....

China’s first-ever Olympic summer games also marks the first time bicycle motocross (BMX) athletes can go for the gold in the world’s most prestigious athletic event. Forty-eight BMX cyclists—including four Americans—will bring the sport from its humble dirt track origins in Orange County, Calif., all the way to the Laoshan Mountain track in Beijing. BMX racing is different from other Olympic cycling events in several key ways: the races last less than a minute, the bikes are small and low to the ground, and the racers must wear protective gear over their faces, heads and joints to protect against likely collisions....

That image of a caveman gnawing on a hunk of bison meat may need a makeover. A new chemical analysis of modern diets suggests Stone Age humans ate less meat than thought. The findings, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, may explain why many archaeologists estimate that prehistoric people got most of their calories from lean meat or fish when modern humans would be literally poisoned by such a protein-heavy diet....

Cardiovascular risk from the accumulation of “bad” cholesterol in blood vessels is shifting from high-income Western countries, especially those in Europe, to low- and middle-income countries, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. A meta-analysis of 1,127 studies comprising 102.6 million people worldwide shows a significant drop in bad cholesterol from 1980 to 2018 in countries such as Finland, Belgium and the U.S. and a strong rise in Thailand, Malaysia, Nigeria and Malawi....

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is poised to announce a controversial rule today that would ban researchers with active agency grants from serving on EPA advisory boards. The announcement is expected to coincide with appointments to several agency advisory panels. In crafting the policy, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt sided with his agency’s most vociferous critics, who claim that EPA science panels are stacked with scientists who are biased in favour of the agency’s regulatory agenda....

Personal computers have been subject to cyber attacks from the moment we began connecting them to the Internet. Nowadays, malicious software lurking in spam and on Web pages is kept at bay only through effort and expense. So why don’t we have the same security problem with our smartphones and tablets, which are essentially variations on the PC? Several factors hold back what may someday become serious effort on the part of cyber attackers to infect mobile devices with malware designed to raid apps and commandeer sensitive data....

From Nature magazine. Could an analysis based on relatively simple calculations point the way to reconciling the two most successful — and stubbornly distinct — branches of modern theoretical physics? Frank Wilczek and his collaborators hope so. The task of aligning quantum mechanics, which deals with the behaviour of fundamental particles, with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity in terms of curved space-time, has proved an enormous challenge. One of the difficulties is that neither is adequate to describe what happens to particles when the space-time they occupy undergoes drastic changes — such as those thought to occur at the birth of a black hole....

A U.N. panel said today that biofuels’ effects on air and water have not been sufficiently explored despite growing global production. The U.N. Environment Programme’s report concludes that so-called lifecycle assessments must go beyond calculating greenhouse gas emissions and consider how agricultural production of feedstocks affect the acidification and nutrient loading of waterways. “The available knowledge from life-cycle-assessments … seems limited, despite the fact that for those issues many biofuels cause higher environmental pressures than fossil fuels,” the report says....

Climate change is a culprit in the long list of catastrophic natural disasters in 2010, according to insurance company Munich Re, adding to trends pointing to more frequent and riskier events. “Fire, water, earth and air – the four basic elements have seldom been so destructive as in 2010,” said Torsten Jeworrek, chairman of Munich Re’s reinsurance committee in a letter accompanying a new report. “The overall economic loss amounted to some US$ 150bn, with earthquakes alone accounting for almost one-third of this total,” Jeworrek said in the letter....

Most of us have heard it: if you drop food on the floor, it’s still okay to eat it, as long as you act quickly and pick it up within five seconds of it hitting the ground. But does the so-called “five-second rule” have any scientific backing? Anecdotally, most of us would agree—it depends on the kind of food. I’m more likely to eat a cracker that I’ve dropped on the floor than I am, say, a buttered bagel that lands spread-side down....

Unlike other primates, the whites of human eyes contrast sharply with our colored irises and dark pupils. One theory suggests that our eyes evolved this way specifically to make it easier to figure out the direction of another person’s gaze. If this theory is correct, you would expect humans to pay more attention to eye orientation than other primates do. To find out, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig compared the behavior of adult chimps, gorillas, bonobos and human children....

Looking deep into the sky—and, by extension, far back in time—astronomers have spotted a curious space blob that existed when the universe was only 800 million years old, about 6 percent of its present age. Masami Ouchi, a fellow at The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif., who led the research reported in the May 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, says that the luminous gas cloud, which spans some 55,000 light-years (about half the diameter of the Milky Way), is unique for its time....

My daughter’s friend was recently alarmed when she was told that her two-year-old must wear a mask in preschool. Her little girl already struggles to make herself understood, and her mother worries that the mask will make it harder for her daughter to be understood and that she will have trouble telling what her masked peers and teachers are saying. Now that the face mask has become the essential accoutrement of our lives, the COVID pandemic has laid bare our fundamental need to see whole faces....

On April 30, after more than four years in orbit around Mercury, NASA’s MESSENGER probe will plunge to its doom. Out of fuel and long past its intended one-year mission, the spacecraft will crash into the planet’s surface at a speed of 3.9 kilometres a second. Mission head Sean Solomon, a planetary scientist and director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, sat down with Nature to talk about what MESSENGER has accomplished since it launched in 2004....

Not all of Mitchell Elkind’s stroke patients are on social security. In recent years he has treated devastating attacks in people as young as 18. And he is not alone. A growing body of research indicates strokes among U.S. millennials—ages 18 to 34—have soared in recent years. But an analysis by Scientific American has revealed significant differences in where these strokes are occurring, depending both on region and whether people live in rural or urban settings....

A type Ia supernova is perhaps the ultimate combination of insult and injury—a star steals material from a companion star, reaches critical mass, becomes unstable, and then unleashes a nuclear blast powerful enough to decimate or destroy its already diminished victim. The culprit in these cases is clear: type Ia supernovae arise from the cataclysmic explosions of small, dense stars known as white dwarfs. But the victim’s identity is clouded, limiting the precision of cosmological distance estimates that rely on these luminous beacons as markers....

From Nature magazine The administration of US President Barack Obama announced this week that it is committing US$200 million to create three advanced-manufacturing innovation institutes, focusing on digital manufacturing, lightweight composites and next-generation power sources. The new institutes are another step in Obama’s plan to reboot America’s manufacturing sector with a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. Obama’s fiscal 2014 budget requested a one-time $1-billion investment to fund the network, which would consist of 15 more institutes around the country....

Will Turner: “If we can outrun her, we can take her. We should turn and fight.” Captain Jack Sparrow: “Why fight when you can negotiate?” —Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest From countless films and books we all know that, historically, pirates were criminally insane, traitorous thieves, torturers and terrorists. Anarchy was the rule, and the rule of law was nonexistent. Not so, dissents George Mason University economist Peter T....

Pumpkin lovers, it’s time to stock up. Poor growing conditions and significantly lower-than-normal yields of processing pumpkins used for baking mean that the popular canned pumpkin brand, Libby’s 100% Pure Pumpkin, may be in short supply in the coming months—just in time for the holiday season. Yields of the pumpkins were low enough that Paul Bakus, president of corporate affairs at Nestlé Corp., which owns Libby’s, urged shoppers to take immediate action....

Eight-and-a-half minutes after North Korea set off a nuclear bomb on September 3, a second burst of energy shook the mountain where the test had just occurred. More than a week later, researchers are still puzzling over what caused that extra release of seismic energy—and what it says about North Korea’s nuclear-testing site, or the risks of a larger radiation leak. Monitoring stations in South Korea have already picked up minute levels of radiation from the test....