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The father of modern rocketry Werhner von Braun once said, “It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are qualified to make a rocket.” Well, he never made one from an effervescent tablet and a film canister. The Alka-Rocket, as it’s known, is a mainstay of science classrooms and a stellar example of the Newtonian physics that guide larger rockets. In modern rockets, such as the Space X Falcon 9 or the Saturn V, the propulsion system is powered by a fast, exothermic reaction between a liquid fuel (usually hydrogen, methane or hydrazine) and oxidizer (usually oxygen or nitrogen tetroxide)....

EPA’s proposed replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan could lead to increases in carbon emissions in 2030 compared with having no climate rule in place at all, a new study has found. The proposed Affordable Clean Energy rule’s focus on cutting emissions through efficiency improvements could cause emissions to increase at 28 percent of regulated power plants, as more efficient plants run more frequently and states delay retirement of older, dirtier plants, according to the study....

In 1961 Stanley Milgram embarked on a research program that would change psychology forever. Fueled by a desire to understand how ordinary Germans had managed to participate in the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram decided to investigate when and why people obey authority. To do so, he developed an ingenious experimental paradigm that revealed the surprising degree to which ordinary individuals are willing to inflict pain on others. Half a century later Milgram’s obedience studies still resonate....

The expansion of the digital universe is accelerating, according to a study by IDC, an information and technology analysis firm, and EMC Corporation, a data management company. Powering this growth is the conversion of analog images, television broadcasts and voice calls to digital formats, as well as the storing and sharing of such files. Number of bits in a byte: 8 Number of gigabytes in an exabyte: 1 billion Exabytes of data created, captured and copied in 2006: 161 Equivalent data in stacks of books stretching from the earth to the sun: 12 Exabytes expected to be made in: 2007: 255 2010: 988 Available storage capacity today, in exabytes: 246 Number of bits stored on one square inch of a disk drive in: 1956: 2,000 2007: 100 billion SOURCE: The Expanding Digital Universe, IDC White Paper, March 2007...

It sounds like an oxymoron but low-fat yogurt may be more fattening than you think—at least for some people under some conditions. That is just one of the counterintuitive ideas behind new research to study the effects of a physiological condition known as insulin resistance in driving weight gain and obesity. Depending on what investigators find, some pretty conventional beliefs about what ultimately is fueling the current global epidemic of obesity—calories or carbohydrates—may need a bit of readjusting....

In 1995 I was driving around Ann Arbor, Mich., one rainy day when I became fixated on my wind-shield wipers. I was then an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. In the preceding years I had done several studies of what is known in industry as “design for assembly.” The goal of such a study is to reduce the number of parts in any given machine, thus reducing manufacturing and assembly costs....

In 1985 scientists inserted genetic information into tobacco plants that enabled them to produce a crystal that was toxic to butterflies, moths and other insect pests. Derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, the Bt toxin has since been engineered into crops from corn to cotton, because it is lethal to pests yet seemingly harmless to other insects and animals, including people. Now a new review of 42 field experiments indicates that fields planted with Bt crops have more insects and other critters than those treated with broad-spectrum insecticides....

Although voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) technology provides computer users with a free alternative to traditional phone service, a new company is offering Internet telephony that does not require a computer. Going back to basics, Palo Alto, Calif.–based ooma, Inc. last week introduced a routing device that enables consumers to make free calls within the U.S. using conventional landline phones. Ooma relies on a peer to peer networking model to ensure that every call is treated as a local one by routing it over the Internet from one ooma hub to another owned by an ooma customer in the area code being called....

Late Sunday afternoon, less than a mile from the White House, the U.S. will witness something that it has not seen in 22 years: the opening of an International AIDS Conference. The meeting, which this year is expected to draw about 25,000 scientists, activists and celebrities, has been held abroad for two decades because in 1987 the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a measure preventing anyone with known HIV infection from entering the country....

Figure 1. The health equity challenge. Health equity is achieved when everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their full health potential regardless of social position or other socially determined circumstances, which means addressing social determinants of health, such as income and education levels, food insecurity, housing stability, racism and gender discrimination. Achieving health equity requires multi-sector collaborations between industry, health research and care delivery systems, government and community partners working together to address health disparities and inequities that disproportionately impact disadvantaged and underserved communities and patients....

After interminable delays and tens of billions of dollars in spending, NASA’s Statue of Liberty–size Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket is at last nearing its inaugural launch. Taking place as early as August 29, the launch will use the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds of thrust (39.1 million newtons) to send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft and accompanying service module into lunar orbit. Dubbed Artemis I, this mission will be the biggest milestone yet in NASA’s Artemis program—a project to send humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than a half-century....

Nonfiction Homage to the Bloodsuckers A crash course in the overlooked world of parasites Parasites: The Inside Story by Scott L. Gardner Judy Diamond and Gabor Rácz Illustrated by Brenda Lee Princeton University Press, 2022 ($29.95) Growing up on a farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Scott L. Gardner would comb the rolling hills for carcasses of mice, pheasants and other expired wildlife. It was not those larger animals that intrigued the young naturalist, though, but the smaller life-forms nestled inside their organs and flesh....

A dark horse candidate for the super powerful quantum computer of the future has now passed an important milestone. Researchers have made the first direct measurement showing they can forge a crucial quantum link between currents flowing through ultracold, superconducting wires. Quantum computers would take advantage of a particle or other quantum system’s ability to exist simultaneously in two states–namely, a superposition of 0 and 1. Combining many such quantum bits, or qubits, into a working quantum computer would allow its operators to perform feats impossible even on today’s supercomputers, such as breaking gold-standard encryption schemes or conducting complex searches quickly....

YOUR BRAIN ON GOOGLE “The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for Our Memories,” by Daniel M. Wegner and Adrian F. Ward, discusses studies indicating that the Internet has changed the way humans have traditionally allocated remembering certain facts to others and our sense of self. I worry that the Internet-induced high “cognitive self-esteem”—the sense of being smart or good at remembering—the authors report might discourage students from taking the care to patiently learn about profound concepts....

Researchers in China have reported editing the genes of human embryos to try to make them resistant to HIV infection. Their paper—which used CRISPR-editing tools in non-viable embryos that were destroyed after three days—is only the second published claim of gene editing in human embryos. In April 2015, a different China-based team announced that they had modified a gene linked to a blood disease in human embryos (which were also not viable, and so could not have resulted in a live birth)....

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying a new U.S.-Russian crew to the International Space Station failed during its ascent Thursday (Oct. 11), sending its crew capsule falling back toward Earth in a ballistic re-entry, NASA officials said. A search-and-rescue team has reached the landing site, both crewmembers are in good condition and have left the Soyuz capsule as of 6:10 a.m. EDT, NASA spokesperson Brandi Dean said during live television commentary. Russian space agency Roscosmos has released photographs of both astronauts being checked over after their abrupt landing....

On a clear day, anyone flying over Greenland on the route between North America and Europe can look down and see the bright blue patches of melted water atop the flat, blindingly white expanse of the ice sheet that covers the island, the second largest chunk of ice on Earth. Scientists have long known this meltwater flows in streams along the ice sheet’s surface before disappearing down chutes that take it tumbling to the bottom of the ice sheet, where the ice scrapes against bedrock....

Temperature extremes have been known to have an ill effect on populations’ health and mortality rates. Heat stroke can cause organ failure, and cold weather has been linked to increased hospitalization and death rates. Little firm data exists, however, to draw exacting predictions about how a change in the weather can influence the risk of cardiovascular problems. A new study reveals that even seemingly tiny daily temperature drops have a sizable impact on the number of heart attacks in a large geographic area....

The trickle of discoveries has become a torrent. Little more than two decades after the first planets were found orbiting other stars, improved instruments on the ground and in space have sent the count soaring: it is now past 2,000. The finds include ‘hot Jupiters’, ‘super-Earths’ and other bodies with no counterpart in our Solar System — and have forced astronomers to radically rethink their theories of how planetary systems form and evolve....

Humans are off the scale. Modern human brains are about threefold larger than those of our earliest hominin ancestors and living great ape relatives. Across animals, brain size is tightly correlated with body size. But humans are the extreme outlier when gauged against this typical scaling relation. The average adult human brain is roughly three pounds, which is approximately 2 percent of body size. But it consumes an outsized 20 percent of the body’s energy budget because of high levels of electrical activity by neurons and the metabolic fuel it takes to transmit chemical signals from one brain cell to the next....