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By Nicola Nosengo of Nature magazineIt has been a long countdown. After 25 years, several delays and more than €700 million ($924 million), the European low-cost rocket Vega is ready for lift-off next week.Vega is the smallest of three rockets owned by the European Space Agency (ESA), alongside the heavy Ariane V and the intermediate Soyuz. ESA hopes that the new launcher will tap into a market for small scientific satellites, making space research affordable for institutions such as universities....

Editor’s Note: We are reposting this essay from our June 2002 issue to accompany our coverage of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. To read the full position statement on aging and its extensive list of references, follow this link. Efforts to combat aging and extend human life date at least as far back as 3500 B.C., and self-proclaimed experts have touted anti-aging elixirs ever since. Indeed, the prospect of immortality has always had universal appeal, spurring Alexander the Great and Ponce de Leon to search for the legendary Fountain of Youth and feeding alchemists’ desire to manufacture gold (once believed to be the most potent anti-aging substance in existence)....

By Laila Kearney SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco moved to restrict the sale of plastic water bottles on city property on Tuesday, the first such action by a major U.S. municipality and the latest in a string of waste-reduction measures that included a ban on plastic grocery bags. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to begin phasing out the sale and distribution of water in single-use plastic bottles on city-owned or leased land next fall, and to ban future water bottle purchases with city funds....

Rudolph Virchow, the 19th-century German neuroscientist, physician and political activist, came of age with two dramatic events–a typhoid outbreak in 1847 and the failed revolutions of 1848. Out of those experiences came two insights for him: first, that the spread of disease has much to do with appalling living conditions, and second, that those in power have enormous means to subjugate the powerless. As Virchow summarized in his famous epigram, “Physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor....

Key concepts Bridges Forces Load Engineering Introduction Have you ever ridden in a car driving across a suspension bridge? Suspension bridges, with their tall towers, long spans and gracefully curving cables, are beautiful examples of the work of civil engineers. How do the cables and towers withstand the load of the bridge—including you and the car you’re in? Can a suspension bridge carry a greater load than a simple beam bridge that doesn’t use cables?...

When I was in fifth grade, my brother Alex started correcting my homework. This would not have been weird, except that he was in kindergarten—and autistic. His disorder, characterized by repetitive behaviors and difficulty with social interactions and communication, made it hard for him to listen to his teachers. He was often kicked out of class for not being able to sit for more than a few seconds at a time....

Whether it is the next iPhone model, a new flat TV screen, or a more fashionable collection of a favorite line of clothes, everyone tends to be very excited when big upgrades come out. Between the date of the announcement and the release date, we spend time weighing options and thinking through the potential purchase: what are the new features of the product? Is the upgrade a significantly enhanced product in comparison to the version we own?...

The market crash of 2008 that plunged the world into the economic recession from which it is still reeling had many causes. One of them was mathematics. Financial investment firms had developed such complex ways of investing their clients’ money that they came to rely on arcane formulas to judge the risks they were taking on. Yet as we learned so painfully three years ago, those formulas, or models, are only pale reflections of the real world, and sometimes they can be woefully misleading....

An ancient Greek astronomical calculator that showed the positions of the sun, Earth and the moon, and outshined any known device for 1,000 years after it, also kept track of something more mundane: when the next Olympics would take place. And its design just might have sprung from the skull of the brilliant scientist Archimedes. View a Slide Show of the Antikythera mechanism Researchers have pried these and a few other fresh secrets from the corroded bronze fragments of the Antikythera mechanism, a clockwork-like assemblage discovered in 1901 by Greek sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete....

A few years ago I was preparing to race an Ironman 70.3 in Syracuse, New York. My training was going really well, and my confidence was high. So high that I got it into my head that I may be able to qualify for the world championships. For someone like me, qualifying meant I would have to go the extra mile—the metaphorical mile, that is. So I started looking into some of the more fringe and less significant advantages I could incorporate....

Nobody lives in the global average climate. Nor are the massive grid cells favored by climate models run on today’s supercomputers as useful as they could be for planning purposes, given that they can encompass 10,000 square kilometers. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments are teaming up to financially support the development of new computer models aimed at revealing the anticipated effects of climate change at the regional level....

Mercury levels in bluefish caught off the U.S. Atlantic coast dropped more than 40 percent over the past four decades thanks to federal restrictions on coal emissions, according to a new study. This is good news not only for bluefish but for the entire predator fish population in the Mid-Atlantic. And it’s better news for people fond of eating the tasty fish, often served broiled or baked, as it suggests that mercury reductions due to coal-fired plant emissions crackdowns in North America have quickly led to less contamination in marine life....

Death Valley, Calif.—The dozen students and scientists spread over an area called Furnace Creek look like cyborgs in floppy hats scrabbling over the boulders. They inspect rocks with magnifying lenses held up to eyeglasses sporting miniature cameras and infrared lights, then hammer chips off them. A seasoned geologist could tease out a history of earthshaking clashes from evidence in the terrain here. A break in a steep gray slope, for instance, suggests a fault at work fracturing the landscape....

During the Vietnam War, young men considered drastic measures to dodge the draft: flee the country, fake an asthma attack or shoot off a big toe. An amputee, according to legionnaire’s legend, would be unfit to trudge across rice paddies or move fast to escape enemy fire. Even today, missing a big toe will disqualify an eager enlistee from the armed forces. The Department of Defense’s medical standards require rejecting anyone with a “current absence of a foot or any portion thereof....

Forget the insult “fathead.” We may actually owe our extraordinary smarts to the fat in our brain. A study published in Neuron in February revealed that the variety of fat molecules found in the human neocortex, the brain region responsible for advanced cognitive functions such as language, evolved at an exceptionally fast rate after the human-ape split. The researchers analyzed the concentrations of 5,713 different lipids, or fat molecules and their derivatives, present in samples of brain, kidney and muscle tissues taken from humans, chimpanzees, macaques and mice....

When Eric Vilain began his medical school rotation two decades ago, he was assigned to France’s reference center for babies with ambiguous genitalia. He watched as doctors at the Paris hospital would check an infant’s endowment and quickly decide: boy or girl. Their own discomfort and social beliefs seemed to drive the choice, the young Vilain observed with shock. “I kept asking, ‘How do you know?’ " he recalls. After all, a baby’s genitals might not match the reproductive organs inside....

Dear EarthTalk: What is “pesticide drift,” and should I be worried about it?—Nicole Kehoe, Burlington, Vt. If you live near a big farm or an otherwise frequently manicured landscape, “pesticide drift”—drifting spray and dust from pesticide applications—could be an issue for you and yours. Indeed, pesticide drift is an insidious threat to human health as well as to wildlife and ecosystems in and around agricultural and even residential areas where harsh chemicals are used to ward off pests....

Cooling Seas Humans could boost the seas’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Harvard University geoscientist Kurt House and his colleagues propose coastal treatment plants that bring in seawater and run electric current through it to extract acid. This process would raise the seawater’s alkalinity, enhancing its natural ability to absorb atmospheric CO2. Silicates in volcanic rocks could neutralize the acid. About 100 such plants could cut global carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent, the researchers say in the December 15, 2007, Environmental Science & Technology, but they caution that the alkaline seawater could kill marine life near these plants....

For the first time ever astronomers may have glimpsed light from a world in a life-friendly orbit around another star. The planet candidate remains unverified and formally unnamed, little more than a small clump of pixels on a computer screen, a potential signal surfacing from a sea of background noise. If proved genuine, the find would in most respects not be particularly remarkable: a “warm Neptune” estimated to be five to seven times larger than Earth, the kind of world that galactic census takers such as NASA’s Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite missions have revealed to be common throughout the Milky Way....

(Reuters) - A nurse in Maine vowing not to be bullied by politicians and threatening to sue the state over an Ebola quarantine she calls unscientifically sound, defied the order and left her home for a bike ride on Thursday, according to television images. Kaci Hickox left her home in Fort Kent to take a morning bicycle ride with her boyfriend, MSNBC and other networks reported. Hickox, 33, who tested negative for Ebola after returning from treating patients in West Africa, said that she plans to take the issue to court if the state did not lift the quarantine by Thursday....