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Agave may be most associated with tequila, but this plant has a less familiar use—it’s teaching scientists about how to craft more drought-resistant plants. The hardy succulent, along with species like prickly pear (an edible cactus), pineapple and vanilla orchids, has evolved over millions of years to perform a different kind of photosynthesis that allows the plants to survive in semiarid environments where water isn’t always readily available. The process is called crassulacean acid metabolism, or CAM, and a small group of scientists have been studying it for several decades because the plants that have it use less water....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Vannevar Bush, the director of the World War II–era Office of Scientific Research and Development, was an innovator in fields including electrical engineering, computation and medicine. He invented the differential analyzer (an early analog computer), a silicone rubber valve for the heart and even an early version of a machine to search across large amounts of books and periodicals (what we now call a search engine)....

Ever since Johannes Kepler traipsed over half of Europe wooing aristocratic patrons, scientists have grumbled about money. But their complaints these days go beyond the familiar griping about being underpaid and underappreciated. They amount to a powerful case that the system for funding science is broken—that it hinders scientific progress and fails to deliver the most bang for the buck. Fixing the system can no longer be put off. Most scientists finance their laboratories (and often even their own salaries) by applying to government agencies and private foundations for grants....

It’s official: The $30 million Google Lunar X Prize is no more. “After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar X Prize teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the moon by the March 31, 2018, deadline,” X Prize founder and chairman Peter Diamandis said in a joint statement today (Jan. 23) with Marcus Shingles, the organization’s CEO....

Rapid economic growth in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other emerging countries will drive global energy consumption to nearly double by 2040, according to new projections released yesterday by the Department of Energy. But the associated rise in carbon emissions will not keep pace with overall energy consumption, thanks to a shifting global energy portfolio that relies less on coal for power generation and more on natural gas and renewable energy resources, the U....

Cancer immunotherapies unleash the body’s immune system to fight cancer, but microbes living in a patient’s gut can affect the outcome of those treatments, two research teams have found. Their studies, published on November 2 in Science, are the latest in a wave of results linking two of the hottest fields in biomedical research: cancer immunotherapy and the role of the body’s resident microbes, referred to collectively as the microbiome, in disease....

Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who doesn’t hesitate to swim in the shark-infested waters of controversy, is proposing a major effort to find aliens in our solar system, perhaps even in our airspace. He has raised $1.7 million in private funding to launch something he calls the Galileo Project, an initiative to bring the rigor of experimental science to ufology. Loeb’s plan is to use a telescope now under construction, the Vera C....

Few people check into a hospital expecting to come down with a severe case of diarrhea while undergoing care for an entirely unrelated problem. And even fewer expect to die of the hospital-acquired intestinal infection that causes the watery stools. Yet for approximately 14,000 Americans each year, that is exactly what happens. The culprit is a strain of a spore-forming bacterium known as Clostridium difficile, or C. diff—in particular, a relatively recent strain that has grown more virulent and resistant to drugs....

India’s energy landscape is changing so swiftly that researchers are having a tough time keeping up with it. Prospects for the country’s coal sector continue to drop along with the falling price of renewable energy. Some situations seem to be developing in the time it takes to get a research paper out. In July, for instance, the nonprofit CoalSwarm conducted a survey of proposed coal plants in India and found 370 in the pipeline, amounting to around 243 gigawatts of power....

Torraca is a small village of 1,200 people in Italy. It is also the first place in the world to be totally illuminated by light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Representing a sea change, much like when electric lamps first graced London’s Holborn Viaduct back in 1878, some 700 streetlights (each containing 54 LEDS) now line Torraca’s arteries—and locales around the world, from Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium to the Raleigh Convention Center’s Shimmer Wall in North Carolina, have begun to use LEDs to light up the night....

Morphine and other opioids work wonders for pain. Unfortunately, their effectiveness declines over time while their addictiveness grows, meaning patients need the drug even as it affords them less and less relief. But new research into the cellular workings of opioids offers a promising new pathway to improved pain relief–without the addiction–by triggering one receptor and blocking another. Medicinal chemist Philip Portoghese of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues began by studying two of the four major opioid receptors in the cells of the central nervous system....

The results of a major study into mobile-phone use and cancer were released this week, but media interpretation of the findings has varied wildly.One British newspaper, theDaily Telegraph, stated that the study had “found people who speak on their handset for more than half an hour a day over 10 years are at greater risk of brain cancer”. Reporting on the same work, the French news wire AFP said that the study showed “no clear link to brain cancer”....

The Obama administration is quietly working on new greenhouse gas emissions targets to deliver to the United Nations, even as it struggles to craft regulations that will enable the United States to meet its current carbon-cutting goals. With Republicans striking out at President Obama’s climate change agenda as part of an effort to unseat vulnerable Senate Democrats in November, the administration is hardly advertising its effort. But according to officials involved in the process, the treacherous political terrain has not stopped the administration from forging ahead with developing new emissions goals....

Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe by Alan Hirshfeld Bellevue Literary Press, 2014 (($19.95)) The fundamental tool of astronomy used to be the human eye. It is now the combination of the telescope and the camera, which together have allowed a deeper view of the heavens than earlier generations could have conceived of. Astrophysicist Hirshfeld chronicles the radical changes in our conception of the cosmos that have accompanied the advent of modern astronomy over the past century and a half, “a remarkable and complex period in the development of humanity’s oldest science,” he writes....

By Erika Check Hayden of Nature magazineAll science students learn the ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology: that the sequence of bases encoded in DNA determines the sequence of amino acids that makes up the corresponding proteins. But now researchers suggest that human cells may complicate this tidy picture by making many proteins that do not match their underlying DNA sequences.In work published today in Science, Vivian Cheung at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and her team report that they have found more than 10,000 places where the base (A, C, G or U) in a cell’s RNA messages is not the one expected from the DNA sequences used to make the RNA read-out....

It won’t be the first time NASA dabbles in lidar technology—shooting lasers onto things and recording what comes back—but it will be the first time the agency sends a laser specifically designed to measure the intricate structure of forests. The goal of the mission, fittingly named GEDI, an acronym for Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar, is to map forests trunk to canopy—or, to put it another way, to measure the volume of the world’s forests and visualize them in 3-D....

A new video from a NASA spacecraft studying the sun has captured an unexpected sight: a wandering comet posing with the planets Earth and Mercury. The cosmic view comes from one of NASA’s twin Stereo spacecraft that constantly watch the sun for signs of solar flares and other space weather events. It shows Mercury and Earth as they appeared with the Comet Pan-STARRS, a comet that is currently visible from the Northern Hemisphere during evening twilight....

A new study may explain how dust particles on the moon “levitate” just above the surface, even though there is no wind or flowing water on the moon to kick-up the material. In a recent laboratory study, researchers found that micron-size dust particles could “jump” several centimeters high under ultraviolet (UV) radiation or exposure to plasmas (electrically charged gas), said a statement from NASA. This finding may help researchers better understand how lunar dust is transported across vast regions of the moon and other airless bodies, according to the statement....

As awful as 2020 was, its ability to reveal the genuine strengths and weaknesses of our relationships was an unexpected boon. When severe trouble strikes, whether it be a death in the family, divorce, lost fortune, public cancellation or global crisis, true friends rise above the posers. Strange as it might sound, severe downturns are watershed moments. They enable us to discern fair-weather friends from friends tried and true. Flush times, when all is going well, do not provide the clarifying moments that enable us to see who will come to our aid when the chips are down....

In late October and early November 2003 scientists witnessed some of the largest solar flares ever recorded. These massive outpourings of charged particles were obvious on and near Earth–a full 150 million kilometers away from the source. For example, the barrage of particles reaching our neighborhood in space was at times so great that many scientific and communications satellites had to be temporarily shut down. A few suffered permanent damage. Astronauts on the International Space Station were endangered as well and had to take refuge in their facility’s relatively well shielded service module....