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In an unintentionally hilarious video clip, primatologist Frans de Waal narrates an experiment conducted in his laboratory at Emory University involving capuchin monkeys. One monkey exchanges a rock for a cucumber slice, which he gleefully ingests. But after seeing another monkey receive a much tastier grape for a rock, he angrily hurls it back at the experimenter when he is again offered a cucumber slice. He rattles the cage wall, slaps the floor and looks seriously peeved at this blatant injustice....

The case of the uncooperative soil is closed—for the moment, at least. NASA scientists announced yesterday that the Phoenix Mars Lander had succeeded in getting a stubborn pile of dirt to fall through a metal sieve into the first of eight ovens designed to analyze the soil’s chemical composition. Mission controllers had tried half a dozen times since the soil was scooped up and dumped onto the instrument deck last Friday to dislodge the sample by vibrating the metal screen above oven number four....

An Antarctic ice shelf that is twice the size of Hawaii is at “imminent risk” of collapse and needs to be monitored carefully, a new study finds. The ice shelf—Larsen C—is located in roughly the same geography as the Larsen A and B ice shelves, which disintegrated in 1995 and 2002, respectively. Larsen C covers 19,300 square miles and is the largest shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. If it melts, it could significantly raise global sea levels, said Paul Holland, the lead author of the study and a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey....

The Nature Conservancy has released a new mapping tool designed to show the potential impact that thousands of offshore wind turbines along the East Coast could have on whales and other marine life. The tool, the first of its kind for the coastal area between Maine and North Carolina, was created to support the use of offshore wind power, but also to “protect the places that fish and whales congregate.” Officials at the conservancy, which has over 1 million members including 400 staff scientists, acknowledged during a virtual press conference that there are still “gaps” in understanding how wind turbines may change fish behavior....

Scientists have discovered yet another marker on the trail toward the putative Planet Nine. That clue is 2015 TG387, a newfound object in the far outer solar system, way beyond Pluto. The orbit of 2015 TG387 shares peculiarities with those of other extremely farflung bodies, which appear to have been shaped by the gravity of a very large object in that distant, frigid realm—the hypothesized Planet Nine, also known as Planet X....

A lesser-known consequence of having a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is the acidification of water. Oceans naturally absorb the greenhouse gas; in fact, they take in roughly one third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. When CO2 dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, the same substance found in carbonated beverages. New research now suggests that seawater might be growing acidic more quickly than climate change models have predicted....

By Zeeya Merali of Nature magazineA one-way system for light rays could allow optical computer chips to overtake their standard electronic counterparts. The new device should eventually help to improve the speed of data processing and ease Internet traffic.Optical, or photonic, chips use light rather than an electrical current to carry information. State-of-the-art optical chips already transfer data at rates of around 10 gigabits per second–more than 100 times faster than the best electronic chips, says Liang Feng, an electrical engineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena....

One lesson in the 9/11 attacks eight years ago was the importance of police officers, firefighters and other first responders being able to communicate with one another. Many died because they did not get the call to evacuate from the World Trade Center towers that were about to collapse. To tackle this problem, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will begin a pilot program this month to test multiband radios designed to let responders communicate across a number of different radio frequencies....

By Declan Butler of Nature magazine Europe has never been particularly fond of genetically modified (GM) foods, but a startling research paper published last week looks set to harden public and political opposition even further, despite a torrent of skepticism from scientists about the work. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, looked for adverse health effects in rats fed NK603 maize (corn), developed by biotech company Monsanto to resist the herbicide glyphosate and approved for animal and human consumption in the European Union, United States and other countries....

The human heart possesses stem cells but cannot regenerate after injury, instead replacing damaged muscle with scar tissue. Our powerlessness to mend an ailing heart is the primary cause of death in the developed world. In May cardiologist Mark T. Keating of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues accomplished the long-sought goal of enticing adult mammal heart muscle cells to multiply, the first step on the road to heart-repair therapies. In 2002 Keating discovered that zebra fish could regrow up to a fifth of their hearts within two months without scarring following removal of 20 percent of the muscle from the lower chamber....

DENVER — Boneyard beaches littered with dead tilapia line the shores of California’s Salton Sea. Thousands of fish die here every year, suffocated when winds stir up low-oxygen water from the lake depths. A fascinating and foul discovery on the skeleton-clad shores recently revealed the fate of the rest of the fish remains. Their flesh drops to the lake floor, where anaerobic bacteria transforms it into adipocere, also known as corpse wax, researchers from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania reported here Monday (Oct....

Sunday’s NASCAR race was bittersweet for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR). After dominating the early part of the 200-lap Good Sam RV Insurance 500 at Pennsylvania’s Pocono Raceway, only one of JGR’s drivers—Kyle Busch—managed to finish in the top 10, thanks to a long rain delay and problems in the pits. Yet even more important than Busch’s second-place finish (and the 15th- and 26th-place finishes of teammates Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano, respectively) was the absence of engine problems that have plagued JGR all season....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Want to move your slide presentation on? Just raise an eyebrow and let your SmartWig flip to the next graph on your behalf. Well, not yet perhaps, but this is one of the ideas behind Sony’s surprising plan to market a wig-based interface, apparently as an alternative to the Google Glass. Its an attempt to get a piece of the wearable-technology market, through which firms are competing over new cyborg, hybrid, computery devices....

In conventional mental health care, the therapist—such as a psychologist or counsellor—develops an ongoing relationship with the client that is characterized by trust, empathy, and support. Regardless of the type of therapy being used, the longstanding consensus among researchers is that this relationship can be healing in itself; when therapists actively listen, indicate understanding, communicate effectively, and present a warm, approachable demeanor, clients not only report better experiences, but also show improved health outcomes....

On December 26, 2004, a series of devastating waves attacked coastlines all around the Indian Ocean, taking the largest toll of any tsunami ever recorded. The surges decimated entire cities and villages, killing more than 225,000 people within a matter of hours and leaving at least a million homeless. This shocking disaster underscored an important fact: as populations boom in coastal regions worldwide, tsunamis pose a greater risk than ever before....

DAKAR, Senegal – Just two seasons exist here: the rainy and the dry. At the best of times, the temperamental rains come for three or four months and turn dusty plains into green pastures, forests and fields. But in the late 1960s, the rains came later and ended earlier. A drought started. Crops failed across the region; freshwater rivers turned to saltwater. In the Sahel, a semi-arid belt across West Africa south of the Sahara Desert, at least 100,000 people perished and millions of cattle died for want of pasture....

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists in China uploaded the virus’s genetic sequence (the blueprint for its production) to genetic databases. A Swiss group then synthesized the entire genome and produced the virus from it—essentially teleporting the virus into their laboratory for study without having to wait for physical samples. Such speed is one example of how whole-genome printing is advancing medicine and other endeavors. Whole-genome synthesis is an extension of the booming field of synthetic biology....

Getting up close and personal with a furry tarantula is probably the very last thing someone with a spider phobia would opt for, but the encounter may be the ticket to busting the brain’s resistance to arachnids. A tried-and-true exposure therapy, this one lasting just hours, changed activity in the brain’s fear regions just minutes after the session was complete, researchers found. “Before treatment, some of these participants wouldn’t walk on grass for fear of spiders or would stay out of their home or dorm room for days if they thought a spider was present,” said lead study author Katherina Hauner, postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement....

Coal plants aren’t the only power generators coming under scrutiny for their greenhouse gas emissions these days. A new natural-gas-fired power plant in Massachusetts was cleared for construction last week, but only after agreeing to ratchet down its carbon output each year until it goes offline in 2050. The agreement resolves a legal battle that began in 2012, when the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) challenged the construction of the Salem Harbor natural gas facility on the basis that it violated Massachusetts’ climate policy....

A bear that roamed what is now China about six million years ago is the oldest bamboo-eating panda ancestor yet found—and it had the same stubby pseudo thumbs that jut from the wrists of today’s pandas alongside their five fingers. Fossils of the new species suggest such “thumbs,” which helped the animals grip and strip bamboo, maintained their peculiar shape to facilitate the beast’s four-legged locomotion. The fossils, found in the province of Yunnan and described in Scientific Reports, also push back the date that pandas’ ancestors likely transitioned from eating meat to chomping bamboo—from two million to six million years ago....