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MEET THE BEETLES “Beetle Resurrection,” by Hannah Nordhaus, discusses the American burying beetle, which eats and breeds on the carcasses of small animals. This fascinating article reminded me of an event some years ago: I live in a wooded area with a large population of sexton, or burying, beetles. And mice. One of the latter found its way under the floorboards of my library, where it died. Oh, the stink! I removed the cover of an unused heating element in the floor, hoping to fish about and find the corpse....

Editor’s Note: Our partners at Space.com have updated this story throughout to include new details. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — An engine cooling issue on NASA’s giant new rocket for deep-space exploration forced the agency to call off the booster’s much-anticipated launch debut early Monday (Aug. 29). NASA had mostly fueled its first Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket to launch the Artemis 1 moon mission on Monday when launch controllers were unable to chill one of the four main engines to the temperatures needed to handle its super-cold propellant....

With genetic scientific advances reported almost daily, it sometimes seems as if we are merely waiting for researchers to discover the gene at fault for every human disease. The complex genetic basis of many common diseases, however, complicates prediction, diagnosis and treatment. The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC), a constellation of more than 50 British research groups, took on the mammoth challenge of ferreting out the causes of diseases in which multiple genes are implicated....

The harassment started with intimate questions about her love life and sexualized comments about her body. At first, she even joined in the banter, trading insults with her mostly male colleagues. She was already uncomfortable, then colleagues started joking about selling her into prostitution. Pornographic photos began to appear in her private workspace. When she walked unaccompanied through the nearby town, catcalls and the groping hands of local men followed. At work, she felt only marginally safer....

Ferns are weird. They’re green and leafy like other forest plants, but they reproduce more like mushrooms do—by releasing clouds of spores. Many species don’t require a partner for fertilization, unlike most of their seed-bearing cousins. Recent studies estimate ferns split from seed-bearing plants about 400 million years ago. And fern genomes are bafflingly large. Despite ferns’ unique physiology and their relationship to seed plants, however, these strange genomes have been largely neglected by researchers....

As beautiful as sunsets are on Earth, imagine a double sunset with stars of different colors, casting moving shadows of orange and red. For years the two of us wondered if paired, or “binary,” stars could support planets. Could worlds like the fictional Tatooine from Star Wars, where the sky is lit with the glow of two different suns, really exist? Astronomers had reason to think such systems might exist, yet some theorists disagreed....

An early version of Senate climate legislation obtained today by E&E confirms that Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) largely plan to follow the path their Democratic colleagues pursued in the House-passed climate bill. But the 684-page Senate draft bill diverges from the House measure in its push for a 2020 emissions target of 20 percent, compared with the House’s bill’s 17 percent limit. Both the House-passed bill, H....

It is well established that the brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body’s total haul. Until now, most scientists believed that it used the bulk of that energy to fuel electrical impulses that neurons employ to communicate with one another. Turns out, though, that is only part of the story. A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA indicates that two thirds of the brain’s energy budget is used to help neurons or nerve cells “fire’’ or send signals....

The time of day of your surgery could have long-term impacts on your health. That’s according to researchers who looked at the way circadian rhythm—the body’s internal clock—affects the outcomes of a patient recovering from a complex heart procedure. Patients who underwent open-heart surgery in the afternoon experienced better health outcomes compared to those who got operated on in the morning, study authors found after six years of observing nearly 600 patients who underwent heart valve replacement....

Note: This story, originally published in our April 1960 issue of Scientific American, is being made available as a supplement to the April 2010 issue 50, 100, 150 Years Ago feature. The State of Israel has undertaken to create a new agriculture in an old and damaged land. The 20th century Israelites did not find their promised land “Rowing with milk and honey,” as their forebears did 3,300 years ago. They came to a land of encroaching sand dunes along a once-verdant coast, of malarial swamps and naked limestone hills from which an estimated three feet of topsoil had been scoured, sorted and spread as sterile overwash upon the plains or swept out to sea in Rood waters that time after time turned the beautiful blue of the Mediterranean to a dirty brown as far as the horizon....

By Shereen Lehman (Reuters Health) - Living with a smoker can be like breathing the air in the world’s most polluted cities, according to a new study from Scotland. “The message is pretty simple really - smoking in your home leads to really poor air quality and results in concentrations of fine particles, that you can’t see, that would cause real concern to us if they were found outside,” said lead author Sean Semple, of the Scottish Center for Indoor Air at the University of Aberdeen....

From tasteless carrots to sunburned apples, a new report by two University of Melbourne researchers paints a challenging picture for Australia’s agricultural sector and the impacts of climate change in the decades to come. Through the examination of 55 food commodities and a breakdown of the ways each of the country’s multiple climate regions will be affected by climate change, the study concludes the quality of beef, chicken and even kangaroo will suffer....

The high cost of health care is no secret. Revamping clinical psychology could be one way to make the system more efficient—while also helping psychologists better serve their patients, according to a recent report from the Association for Psychological Science. The report details an accreditation system that has been in development for two years, which will certify training programs that focus on scientifically validated treatments and instruct their students in the scientific method....

A legislative effort to extend California’s climate change policies past 2020 is proving more difficult than policymakers had bargained for. A top aide to Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said yesterday that he is committed to cementing the state’s climate goals in law or by voter approval but that it might not happen until 2018. “Let’s be clear: We are going to extend our climate goals and cap-and-trade program—one way or another,” Nancy McFadden, Brown’s executive secretary, said in a statement on Twitter....

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its first report in 1990 predicted that temperatures would warm by 0.5 degree Fahrenheit (0.3 degree Celsius) per decade if no efforts were made to restrain greenhouse gas emissions. But the panel of scientists and other experts was wrong: By 2001, the group estimated that average temperatures would increase by 2.7 to 8.1 degrees F (1.5 to 4.5 degrees C) in the 21st century, and they raised the lower end to 3....

Typically, when someone places a bet—be it on a sporting event, obscure trivia or where the ball in a roulette wheel will land—he or she is fully aware of the decision to do so. And now scientists at Oxford University in England have discovered that they can better determine if decisions in general are conscious (or subconscious) by having subjects literally gamble on, well, their decisions. The researchers, reporting in this week’s Nature Neuroscience, found that study participants were reluctant to wager big bucks unless they were confident in their choices, indicating that they knew full well what they were doing....

In a 1783 paper English scholar John Michell envisioned a voracious cosmic monster: a star that was massive enough that its gravity would swallow light. He speculated that many such behemoths might exist, detectable only by their gravitational effects. Two centuries later, in 1967, American physicist John Wheeler gave the idea an evocative name: black hole. Just a few years afterward, in 1974, British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking taught us that black holes aren’t so black after all: they emit radiation and will eventually evaporate....

When public health officials fret about the soaring incidence of diabetes in the U.S. and worldwide, they are generally referring to type 2 diabetes. About 90 percent of the nearly 350 million people around the world who have diabetes suffer from the type 2 form of the illness, which mostly starts causing problems in the 40s and 50s and is tied to the stress that extra pounds place on the body’s ability to regulate blood glucose....

For the past two decades archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Bristol in England has been studying our closest cousins, the Neandertals, who occupied Eurasia for more than 200,000 years before mysteriously disappearing some 28,000 years ago. Experts in this field have long debated just how similar Neandertal cognition was to our own. Occupying center stage in this controversy are a handful of Neandertal sites that contain cultural remains indicative of symbol use—including jewelry—a defining element of modern human behavior....

This week, the University of California, Berkeley will mail saliva sample kits to every incoming freshman and transfer student. Students can choose to use the kits to submit their DNA for genetic analysis, as part of an orientation program on the topic of personalized medicine. But U.C. Berkeley isn’t the only university offering its students genetic testing. Stanford University’s summer session started two weeks ago, including a class on personal genomics that gives medical and graduate students the chance to sequence their genotypes and study the results....