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The relationship between stars and planets is usually rather one-directional—the star rules over its celestial subjects, blasting them with radiation, blessing them with warmth. The puny planets simply take what they get. But sometimes a planet is so massive, and so close to its star, that the smaller object can exert considerable influence on its stellar neighbor. Such is the case with the planet orbiting the star Tau Boötis—Tau Boo for short....

When someone approaches you to ask, “What’s wrong?” you know that you are broadcasting unhappiness, whether or not you said a word. Perhaps it was a grimace or your sluggish gait that conveyed the message. You cannot help but communicate your mood to colleagues, neighbors and fellow commuters through numerous subtle cues. Sensing the emotional states of others is an important part of social interaction. If you could not do this well, you might end up incongruously slapping the back of a person who is teary or stopping an anxious co-worker on his way to a meeting....

Africa’s Lake Victoria is home to one of evolution’s greatest experiments. In its waters, what began as a single lineage belonging to the cichlid family of fishes has since given rise to a dazzling array of forms. Like Charles Darwin’s famous finches, which evolved a wide range of beak shapes and sizes to exploit the different foods available in the Galápagos Islands, these cichlids represent a textbook example of what biologists term an adaptive radiation—the phenomenon whereby one lineage spawns numerous species that evolve specializations to an array of ecological roles....

Although vaccination rates for U.S. children are high overall, many states are dropping below safety thresholds. That is because parents are opting out of state vaccination requirements for kids entering public school, despite a dearth of evidence that vaccines are harmful or unnecessary. “The vast majority of their concerns have no basis in science,” says William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. If enough parents in a community refuse or delay their children’s vaccinations, an infectious disease can spread among many individuals....

By Elizabeth Barber BOSTON (Reuters) - Biting cold and driving snow kept the U.S. Northeast in the grip of another major winter storm on Sunday that made February the snowiest month in Boston’s history. Blizzards forced the cancellation of more than 1,750 U.S. passenger flights, most of them into and out of airports in Boston and New York, where gusts of up to 60 miles per hour (97 kph) were predicted....

(Reuters) - The Obama administration on Wednesday unveiled the first-ever standards to slash mercury emissions from coal-fired plants, a move aimed at protecting public health that critics say will kill jobs as plants shut down. Facing fierce opposition from industry groups and lawmakers from coal-intensive states, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the benefits of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, will greatly outweigh the costs. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson revealed the rules, which have been about 20 years in the making, at a Washington, D....

The words used the most in everyday language are the ones evolving at the slowest rate, say two new studies published in Nature. In one paper, researchers at Harvard University focused on the evolution of English verb conjugations over a 1,200-year period. In a separate study, a team at the University of Reading in England reviewed cognates (similar sounding words in different languages for the same object or meaning, such as “water” and the German “wasser”) to determine how all Indo-European tongues progressed from a common ancestor that existed between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago....

Can the world’s existing farmlands provide enough crops to satisfy the hunger of the nine billion people—up from seven billion currently—that demographers predict will be living on the planet by the mid-21st century? Or will more and more forests and other ecosystems have to be cleared to feed all the extra mouths? A new study, published in Nature on August 30, suggests that increasing deforestation could be avoided provided farmers made better use of water and nutrients on land currently under cultivation around the globe....

By Jennifer Chaussee BERKELEY Calif. (Reuters) - A Northern California wildfire started by a lightning strike a month ago has burned more than 108,000 acres in the drought-stricken state, officials said on September 12. The fire in the Klamath National Forest started when lightning struck the Happy Camp area on August 11. It was 45 percent contained on September 12. The blaze formed a large ring and grew by 882 acres on the night of September 11, said Klamath National Forest spokeswoman Andrea Capps, and it is expected to continue to grow along the ring’s southern perimeter through September 12....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. If there was one thing the Roman people loved it was spectacle and the opportunity of escapism offered by weird and wonderful public shows which assaulted the senses and ratcheted up the emotions. Roman rulers knew this well and so to increase their popularity and prestige with the people they put on lavish and spectacular shows in purpose-built venues across the empire....

The millions of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) that flit on fragile wings from North America to fir forests in Mexico have evolved a slew of special adaptations to allow this arduous flight, which can be as far as 4,000 kilometers. Now the draft genome of the species, published in the November 2011 Cell, suggests how genetic adaptations allow these lovely insects to survive their long journey. Brain Butterflies’ circadian clocks help them sense decreasing day length and trigger the migration, says study co-author Steven Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts....

By Julio Rodrigues and Ben Hirschler PRAIA/LONDON (Reuters) - Florzinha Amado is eight months pregnant and trying to stay calm about whether the Zika virus infection she contracted at 21 weeks could have harmed her unborn child. But Amado isn’t Brazilian. She lives on the volcanic archipelago of Cape Verde, 570 km (350 miles) west of Senegal, and is one of 100 pregnant women in the capital of Praia who have contracted Zika there....

The crack of bats this time of year means two things: Baseball is back and winter is over. But Major League Baseball’s spring soundtrack relies heavily on wood from white ash trees treasured for strength and flexibility. And it may soon sound different as a tiny beetle threatens the northern Pennsylvania stands that for more than a century have supplied wood for bats. Experts say climate change may alter just how far north and south the tree-killing pest will spread....

It will also cause climate feedbacks that will decrease the productivity of pasture and soybeans – the reason advanced for felling the trees in the first place. The researchers are from the Brazilian federal universities of Viçosa, Pampa, Minas Gerais and the Woods Hole Research Center in the United States. They predict that by 2050 a decrease in precipitation caused by deforestation will reduce pasture productivity by 30 percent in the governance scenario and by 34 percent in the business-as-usual scenario....

At the start of nearly every doctor’s visit, chances are you will be asked to step on a scale and get your weight measured for that day’s exam record—and you would be hard-pressed to find a person whose physician has not brought up his or her weight at some point. But many conversations around weight have become a hindrance, not a help, in the campaign to make people healthier. Doctors’ recommendations to drop pounds are still extremely common, even though using body size as a one-size-fits-all proxy for health can obscure the complexity of an individual’s particular physiology....

Scientists have thought that if planetary warming could be kept below a 2-degree Celsius increase, perils such as catastrophic sea-level rise and searing heat waves could be avoided. Ongoing data, however, indicate that three global feedback mechanisms may be pushing Earth into a period of rapid climate change even before the 2-degree C “limit” is reached: Ice melting into the oceans, which warms surface seawater, leading to more melting; thawing of permafrost, which releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, raising the air temperature and melting more permafrost; and glaciers breaking up and falling into the sea, which lessens the amount of sunlight reflected into space, thereby heating the atmosphere and further degrading glaciers....

An organic compound found in grapes, berries and some nuts extended the life span of fish in a recent study. Nothobranchius furzeri lives an average of nine weeks in captivity but lacing its food with resveratrol boosted longevity by more than 50 percent. Previous research had shown that resveratrol prolongs the life span of yeast and insects, but this study marks the first proof of its antiaging effects in a vertebrate....

You may have been shocked by reports of a 33-year-old California woman birthing octuplets in January—until, that is, there was news of a woman with two uteruses who popped two babies—one from each womb. The mother, dubbed “Womber Woman” by the New York Post, last week delivered two baby girls at Marquette General Hospital in Marquette, Mich., according to The Mining Journal. The twins were seven weeks premature and underweight—one weighed in at three pounds, 15 ounces (1....

This week, by request from Marilyn in Massachusetts, we’ll cover fear of driving. As fellow Bay Staters, Marilyn and I know that Massachusetts drivers are not called Massholes for nothing. Indeed, of the cities with the dubious distinction of having the worst drivers in the nation, 3 of the top 5 are in Massachusetts. But no matter where you live, being scared to drive can really get in the way; indeed, if life is a highway, it’s easy for a phobia to push you into breakdown lane....

Astronomers have learned a great many things about Mars since the first probes landed there nearly four decades ago. We know that liquid water once flowed across its surface and that Mars and Earth were similar in their early history. When life on Earth arose, some 3.5 billion years ago, Mars was warmer than it is today and had liquid oceans, an active magnetic field and a thicker atmosphere. Given the similarity between the two planets, it seems reasonable to think that whatever steps led to life on Earth could also have occurred on Mars....