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By Monya Baker of Nature magazineThe first company to test a human embryonic stem-cell product in patients has become the first big player to bail out of the field. Last week’s move shook investor confidence and raised questions about whether the company had overreached itself, as well as underscoring just how difficult novel therapies are to develop.Geron, based in Menlo Park, California, announced on November 14 that it would cease work on its stem-cell-therapy programmes to focus on its anti-cancer portfolio....

Some wines, like those aged in toasted oak barrels, taste great with a hint of smoke. But too much can spoil the flavor. As the climate warms and wildfires grow more frequent and intense, pollution from them can drift into vineyards and get absorbed by the plants—imparting a foul, ashy taste known in the industry as “smoke taint.” Bushfires between 2006 and 2007 ruined around $60 million to $70 million worth of wine in the Australian state of Victoria alone....

The measles outbreak hopscotching across seven states may have started near Dumbo the Flying Elephant. Or maybe it began during a Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Then again, a hapless individual may have breathed in aerosolized measles virus last December during a shared Indiana Jones Adventure ride. No one knows exactly what triggered this Disney-linked measles outbreak, but officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it was most likely thanks to an overseas traveler visiting Disneyland Park in California late last year while infectious....

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is more than just a giant barred spiral harboring hundreds of billions of stars. It’s also the hub of a gargantuan empire that stretches over more than a million light-years and rules some two dozen lesser galaxies, which revolve around it the way moons orbit a giant planet. Of all our galaxy’s many satellites, none compares with the Magellanic Clouds, which look like fragments of glowing mist torn from the Milky Way....

December 1962 Silent Spring “Book Review, by LaMont C. Cole: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. Houghton Mifflin Company ($5). As an ecologist I am glad this provocative book has been written. That is not to say I consider it a fair and impartial appraisal of all the evidence. On the contrary, it is a highly partisan selection of examples and interpretations that support the author’s thesis. The fact remains that the extreme opposite has been impressed on the public by skilled professional molders of public opinion....

Tropical fish tanks in restaurants, hospitals and homes evoke feelings of tranquility and beauty. They even lower stress levels prior to medical procedures and encourage Alzheimer’s patients to eat sufficiently. But what’s good for humans may be bad for the sea. Most tropical fish sold in pet stores come from reefs in Indonesia and the Philippines, where fishermen stun the colorful dwellers with squirts of sodium cyanide. The potent nerve toxin causes the fish to float up out of the reefs so they can be easily scooped up, but it can also injure or kill them as well as trigger coral bleaching....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Daily life in ancient Mesopotamia cannot be described in the same way one would describe life in ancient Rome or Greece. Mesopotamia was never a single, unified civilization, not even under the Akkadian Empire of Sargon of Akkad (the Great, r. 2334-2279 BCE). The region was comprised of many ethnicities and kingdoms that differed significantly from each other....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The forest is a habitat for people, animals, and plants, a provider of invaluable resources, and an ally in the fight against climate change. The greatest beneficiary of the forest is humanity – but it is also its greatest threat. Over the centuries, the relationship between humans and the forest has evolved and changed across time and space....

From Nature magazine Not all prototypes make it out of the laboratory, but the ‘artificial leaf’ is so elegant that its design seems to beg for commercial production. Described in Science last year by a team led by Dan Nocera at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the catalyst-coated wafer is a silicon version of a photosynthesizing leaf: it turns sunlight into storable fuel by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen....

Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, body awareness (formally, proprioception): six of the widely recognized senses in our bodies that help tell us about the world around us. Yet we have other senses as well. And now meet our surprising latest detector: the immune system. What’s that you say? The anatomy textbooks show that the brain and the immune system are almost completely isolated from each other? I thought so, too. But, as usual, researchers probing the world have turned up some fresh insights about how things work....

Follow Highway 70 through central Kansas on a hot summer’s day and you’ll invariably see this: a flat sea of cornstalks, stretching from horizon to horizon as far as the eye can see. It was not always so. The High Plains region of the United States – a subregion of the Great Plains stretching from the Midwest to the Rockies – encompasses some of the most productive agricultural land in the country, but 200 years ago it was arid grassland....

Genetically, children are a blend of code from both of their parents. But for the first nine months of development, a fetus gets just about everything else from its mother. The two individuals’ systems are so intertwined that even after birth, material from a fetus can linger in the mother’s body for decades. The process means major changes for both mother and child. Beginning about three months into pregnancy, the growing fetus and enlarging uterus become visible as a small belly bump....

People hoping to glimpse lions, cheetahs, elephants and other megafauna in their natural environment must journey to Africa’s wildlife reserves. But if one group of ecologists and conservationists gets its way, safari-goers could soon head for the Great Plains of the U.S. instead. In a report published today in the journal Nature, Josh Donlan of Cornell University and his colleagues propose replacing the large carnivores and herbivores that disappeared from North America 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch....

NASA’s budget is $16.8 billion, about 0.6 percent of the total federal budget. Three fifths goes to human spaceflight, a third to science (for the planetary probes as well as space telescopes to explore the broader universe) and the rest to aeronautics. The agency projects the new moon shot will run about $100 billion over the next decade. The Apollo program cost about the same. This money comes from phasing out the shuttle and space station....

“Fossil First: Ancient Human Relative May Have Buried Its Dead” (Reuters). “Why Did Homo naledi Bury Its Dead?” (NOVA Next). These are just two of the many hyped headlines that appeared last September in response to a paper purporting the discovery, in a cave in South Africa, of a new species by paleoanthropologist Lee R. Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. There were reasons for skepticism from the get-go....

To break free from an atom, the negatively charged electron typically has to absorb a high-energy photon, such as that from the ultraviolet (UV) or x-ray spectrum. The electron then gets excited enough to overcome the electrostatic attraction holding it to the positively charged nucleus and escapes, a process called ionization. A German-Dutch team has for the first time provided direct proof of an alternative mechanism. Powerful electric fields from a laser pulse can momentarily weaken the electrostatic bonds and enable the electron to quantum-mechanically tunnel away from the atom....

A hallucinogenic drug derived from magic mushrooms could be useful in treating depression, the first safety study of this approach has concluded. Researchers from Imperial College London gave 12 people psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms. All had been clinically depressed for a significant amount of time—on average 17.8 years. None of the patients had responded to standard medications, such as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), or had electroconvulsive therapy....

Some 2.7 billion years ago, in what is now Omdraaisvlei farm near Prieska, South Africa, a brief storm dropped rain on a layer of ash from a recent volcanic eruption. The raindrops, which formed tiny craters, were buried by more ash and, over aeons, that ash hardened into rock. Closer to the present, other rainstorms eroded the rock, exposing a fossil record of raindrops from the Archean era. Researchers are now studying these fossilized raindrops to learn more about early Earth’s atmosphere....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—SpaceX may try to make history with its next launch later this month, returning its rocket to a landing pad rather than an ocean-based platform, a NASA official said today (Dec. 1). Carol Scott, who works technical integration for SpaceX within NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station today that SpaceX’s first attempt at a land-based rocket landing may be coming sooner than the public expects....

Astronomers announced yesterday that they have discovered what is believed to be the first dark galaxy ever detected, a starless mass of spinning matter located some 50 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The initial sighting of this invisible object came in 2000, from radio wave observations made using the Lovell telescope in Cheshire, England, which sketched a cloud of hydrogen atoms a million times the mass of the sun rotating in the Virgo cluster....