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On Wednesday morning, in retaliation for the U.S. assassination of military leader Qassem Soleimani, Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops. This action marks the most direct Iranian attack on the U.S. in almost 40 years. Early reports suggest Iran may have intentionally avoided loss of life in the attack in an attempt to make a statement—and to address anger among its public—without escalating the situation in a way that would lead to a large-scale military confrontation....

President Bush signed a bill into law Thursday that broadens the government’s surveillance power. The move came just a day after the Senate passed the legislation, by a 69-to-28 margin, culminating months of political fireworks. The package includes a controversial clause that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that participate in National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The change is the most sweeping since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was adopted three decades ago to prevent the government from spying on people in the U....

China’s booming economic growth is helping to degrade the country’s coastal marine ecosystem at an alarming rate, despite the total population remaining steady, according to a new study. A joint Chinese and American research team analyzed five decades of data from Chinese government records and found that the country’s coastal marine ecosystem has steadily degraded to an almost irreversible point since 1978—the year the Chinese government introduced sweeping reform to industrialize the country’s economy....

Watch Frontline’s documentary produced in conjunction with this story tonight. (Check local listings.) And listen to NPR’s All Things Considered for more on this story. (Check local listings.) In detective novels and television crime dramas like “CSI,” the nation’s morgues are staffed by highly trained medical professionals equipped with the most sophisticated tools of 21st-century science. Operating at the nexus of medicine and criminal justice, these death detectives thoroughly investigate each and every suspicious fatality....

Most of the matter in the universe remains missing in action—at least, that’s long been the standard cosmological paradigm. Now, however, a small but vocal group of cosmologists is challenging the dark matter tenets of the widely accepted cosmological model, which holds that the universe is composed of roughly 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter, and only 5 percent normal (or baryonic) matter. Dark matter, whatever it is, exerts a gravitational pull but only interacts with ordinary matter very weakly, if at all, beyond that....

Decades ago regulators banned cigarette advertisements that targeted young people in an effort to prevent them from growing up to smoke tobacco products. Today, with the science still unsettled around the health effects of smoke-free electronic cigarettes, controversy surrounds the idea of television advertisements for the nicotine-laden products that often come in kid-friendly flavorings. That swirling fog of unknowns was on full display at a Senate Committee hearing on May 15, where lawmakers pressed for answers about the potential benefits and pitfalls of e-cigarette regulations....

Since it resurfaced in 2003, avian flu has claimed more than 50 human lives, mostly in Vietnam. Avian flu is devastating to poultry and officials worry that it could kill millions of people globally if it acquires the ability to move among humans. At the conclusion of a three-day conference in Malaysia earlier this week World Health Organization officials announced that $150 million is needed to fight the spread of the disease in people and another $100 million should be allocated to stopping its spread in animals in Asia....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the cultures of the ancient world, there was no need for designations such as LGBTQ+ because there was no difference noted between what is now defined as “homosexual” and “heterosexual” relationships. There was no “us” and “them” dichotomy to encourage such labels; there was only “us” and whoever one chose to love was one’s own business....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A stupa is a reliquary containing the remains (relics) of an individual associated with great spiritual power and insight, most often (since the 3rd century BCE) with the Buddha (l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE). The form, a hemisphere topped by a spire and surrounded by a gate and walkway, originated in India during the reign of the Mauryan king Ashoka the Great (268-232 BCE)....

The Supreme Court is due to rule by the end of June on the landmark question of whether companies have the right to patent genes. One party in the case is Myriad Genetics, a company that by 1998 had patented two genes strongly linked to breast and ovarian cancer risk, called BRCA1 and BRCA2. Since then, thousands of genes have been patented. Opponents argue that genes are products of nature, which cannot be patented....

A leading Japanese research institute has opened an investigation into a groundbreaking stem-cell study after concerns were raised about its credibility. The RIKEN center in Kobe announced on Friday that it is looking into alleged irregularities in the work of biologist Haruko Obokata, who works at the institution. She shot to fame last month as the lead author on two papers published in Nature that demonstrated a simple way to reprogram mature mice cells into an embryonic state by simply applying stress, such as exposure to acid or physical pressure on cell membranes....

A pair of bright spots that glimmer inside an impact crater on the asteroid Ceres, mystifying scientists, could be coming from some kind of icy plume or other active geology. New images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show the spots, known as ‘feature number 5’, at changing angles as the asteroid rotates in and out of sunlight. The pictures reveal the spots even when they are near the edge of Ceres, when the sides of the impact crater would normally block the view of anything confined to the bottom....

Lawmakers grilled NASA chief Charles Bolden today (March 21), saying the deep cuts to NASA’s planetary science program in the agency’s 2013 budget request will “cannibalize” future Mars exploration and threaten America’s leadership in space. Bolden testified before members of the U.S. House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee that approves NASA’s annual budget in a hearing this morning in Washington, D.C. Throughout the nearly three-hour-long hearing, Bolden fielded tough questions from Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike....

On September 23, 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle, director of the Berlin Observatory, received a letter that would change the course of astronomical history. It came from a Frenchman, Urbain Le Verrier, who had been studying the motion of Uranus and concluded that its path could not be explained by the known gravitational forces acting on it. Le Verrier suggested the existence of a hitherto unobserved object whose gravitational pull was perturbing Uranus’s orbit in precisely the way required to account for the anomalous observations....

Telecommuting, Internet shopping and online meetings may save energy as compared with in-person alternatives, but as the digital age moves on, its green reputation is turning a lot browner. E-mailing, number crunching and Web searches in the U.S. consumed as much as 61 billion kilowatt-hours last year, or 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity—half of which comes from coal. In 2005 the computers of the world ate up 123 billion kilowatt-hours of energy, a number that will double by 2010 if present trends continue, according to Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory....

Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-conditioned offices of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. As New York City wilted beneath them, they sat insouciant and comfortable, hurling editorials of stunning misdirection at their readers, continuing their irresponsible drumbeat that global warming is junk science. Now I have nothing against the Wall Street Journal....

By Elie DolginMedical researchers’ hopes of replacing politically fraught embryonic stem (ES) cells with stem cells derived from adult tissues have suffered a setback. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, created by turning back the developmental clock on adult tissues, and ES cells display similar gene-expression patterns, and both can produce any of the various tissues in the human body. But patterns of epigenetic changes – alterations that affect gene expression without changing the DNA sequence – tell a different story about iPS cells, a team led by Joseph Ecker, a molecular geneticist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, reports online in Nature this week....

The phrase “artificial intelligence,” or AI, seems to be on everybody’s lips these days—along with a lot of questions. After a spurt of development in the 1950s and 1960s, AI languished for a time. Now advances such as machine learning are driving it into multiple fields of human endeavor, from transportation to medicine to finance. But applying AI successfully for all of us means improving it. And one way to do that, writes researcher Alison Gopnik in our cover story, “An AI That Knows the World Like Children Do,” is to teach its networks to learn like a child....

No need to fear blindness (or apocalypse) from Saturday night’s total lunar eclipse. Earth’s shadow will completely block the face of the moon from reflecting the sun’s light for one hour and 13 minutes on March 3. “Europe and Africa have the ringside seats,” says Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “[But] every single continent will see at least part of the eclipse.” That is rare, as most eclipses can only be viewed from certain vantage points on Earth....

A Cosmos of Particles You can read more about the South Pole’s high-energy neutrino detector in this related online story. The study referenced in our November issue is available in Physical Review Letters. A New Race to Earth’s End The most remote point in the Arctic Ocean, known as the north pole of inaccessibility, has been misidentified for years. Its true location, 1,008 kilometers from the presumed spot, is published behind a pay wall in Polar Record....