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NASA’s Kepler space telescope has spotted four possibly rocky alien planets orbiting the same star, and two of these newfound worlds might be capable of supporting life. The four exoplanets circle a red dwarf — a star smaller and dimmer than the sun—called K2-72, which lies 181 light-years from Earth in the Aquarius constellation. All four worlds are between 20 percent and 50 percent wider than Earth, making them good candidates to be rocky, discovery team members said....

By Krista Mahr and Jibran Ahmad KABUL/PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - A powerful earthquake struck a remote area of Afghanistan on Monday, shaking the capital Kabul and killing at least 24 people while 76 were killed in neighboring Pakistan, officials said. The death toll could climb in coming days because communications were down in much of the rugged Hindu Kush mountain range area where the quake was centered. Reports of deaths had poured in from different areas of both countries by nightfall....

In late 2019, mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic would engulf the globe, much of the world was instead concerned with a ruddy, fading point of light more than 500 light-years away. Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star easily recognizable as the right “shoulder” of the constellation Orion, had suddenly and mysteriously dimmed by more than a factor of two. Some astronomers speculated that it was on the verge of exploding as a supernova—an event otherwise predicted to occur within the next 100,000 years or so....

In desolate caves throughout Brazil live insects that copulate for days, the female’s penetrating erectile organ sticking fast in a reluctant male’s genital chamber until he offers a gift of nutritious semen. Neotrogla seems to be unique among species with reversed sex roles — with choosy males and aggressive, promiscuous females — in also having swapped anatomy, researchers report. Not all animal species have a male penis, but because the evolution of body parts usually works through slow modification of existing structures, there would need to be a good reason for a female to develop a penetrating organ, says entomologist Kazunori Yoshizawa of Hokkaido University in Japan, a co-author of the study....

Rogue fishers around the world toss explosives into the sea and scoop up bucketloads of stunned or dead fish, a practice that is illegal in many nations and can destroy coral reefs and wreak havoc on marine biodiversity. Catching perpetrators amid the vastness of the ocean has long proved almost impossible, but researchers working in Malaysia have now adapted acoustic sensors—originally used to locate urban gunfire—to pinpoint these marine blasts within tens of meters....

Yet another potential impact from global warming: It may speed Earth’s rotation. According to a computer model run by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, climate change will warm the oceans; as the water warms, it will expand, causing sea level to rise—already up 0.17 meter (nearly seven inches) over the course of the last century—shifting liquid from the ocean depths to the shallows near shore....

Movie viewers know that an actor cannot swing like a spider from a skyscraper or converse with an animated rabbit, but visual-effects artists make such scenes believable. The technique they exploit is the matte process—commonly called blue screen or green screen for films and chroma-key for television. The process, pioneered in the late 1930s, remained largely unchanged for decades. An actor was filmed onstage in front of a blue or green drape or wall, then a different background scene was filmed....

Two and a half years into the COVID pandemic, the numbers are grim. While 80 percent of people living in the richest countries on earth have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, the corresponding figure for those in the poorest countries is 18 percent. The loss of life was incalculable, literally: no one is sure how many people have died from COVID. It could be about six million, the formal death toll attributed to the virus, or nearly 15 million, as estimated by World Health Organization’s study of “excess deaths” (unusually high mortality, including deaths likely resulting from COVID but not attributed to it)....

Meteorological winter is officially over, but it felt like it ended long before its Feb. 28 expiration date. Much of the U.S. basked in relentless warm weather throughout February, turning the clock forward to spring. That follows December and January, which were both markedly warmer than normal for the majority of the country. While scientists crunch the numbers to figure out how warm the nation as a whole was this winter, early results show just how pervasive mild weather was....

NASA officials aren’t sure what triggered a leak of water into a spacewalking astronaut’s suit, causing mission controllers to abort a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk after only one hour and 32 minutes Tuesday (July 16). European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano reported “a lot of water” inside his helmet during his excursion outside the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday. Because of the potentially dangerous situation, mission controllers on the ground decided to abort the spacewalk....

A fighter pilot heads back to base after a long mission, feeling spent. A warning light flashes on the control panel. Has she noticed? If so, is she focused enough to fix the problem? Thanks to current advances in electroencephalographic (EEG) brain-wave detection technology, military commanders may not have to guess the answers to these questions much longer. They could soon be monitoring her mental state via helmet sensors, looking for signs she is concentrating on her flying and reacting to the warning light....

By Erika Check Hayden of Nature magazineIn the film Contagion, it takes just a few months for scientists to make a vaccine against a deadly virus. Yet a real US military programme that aimed to do just that is being dismantled after five years of trying.The Transformational Medical Technologies (TMT) initiative, born in the US Department of Defense in 2006, was originally conceived as a five-year, $1.5-billion project that would substantially accelerate the development of countermeasures to protect soldiers against biological attacks....

Editor’s note: In light of the recent death of Martin Gardner, we are republishing this profile from the December 1995 issue of Scientific American. The clerk at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in downtown Manhattan is not all that helpful. Having had limited success with smaller retailers, I am hoping that the computer can tell me which of Martin Gardner’s 50 or so books are available in the store’s massive inventory....

“… don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds....

The fear of ticks, and of the Lyme disease these bloodsuckers carry, is well founded: roughly 30,000 cases of Lyme are reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every year. Because most cases go unreported, the true toll is more like 300,000, the CDC estimated in August. The new figure “confirms that Lyme disease is a tremendous public health problem,” Paul Mead, the CDC’s chief of Lyme epidemiology and surveillance, said at the time....

Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought....

Eager not to be left behind when space tourism takes off, rocket engine maker XCOR Aerospace in Mojave, Calif., announced Wednesday that it will be ready to blast ordinary (albeit wealthy) Earthlings into space within two years. XCOR reps said at a press conference Wednesday that its Lynx suborbital spaceship, still in the prototype phase, will be a two-seat (one pilot, one passenger) craft that takes off like an airplane and glides back to Earth like a space shuttle....

Free live streaming by Ustream The concept of nothing is as old as zero itself. How do we grapple with the concept of nothing? From the best laboratory vacuums on Earth to the vacuum of space to what lies beyond, the idea of nothing continues to intrigue professionals and the public alike. Join Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson as he moderates the world’s leading voices in this great scientific debate, live from the LeFrak Theater of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City....

Next month, researchers in the U.K. will start to pump water nearly a kilometer up into the atmosphere, by way of a suspended hose. The experiment is the first major test of a piping system that could one day spew sulfate particles into the stratosphere at an altitude of 20 kilometers, supported by a stadium-size hydrogen balloon. The goal is geoengineering, or the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment” in the words of the Royal Society of London, which provides scientific advice to policymakers....

(Credit:Roger Cheng/CNET)Verizon Wireless subscribers who have held onto their $30-a-month unlimited data plans will soon be forced to upgrade to a new tiered offering the company plans to launch this summer, according to the Web site Fierce Wireless.Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Technology Media and Telecom conference today, Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo told investors that the company’s 3G unlimited data plans that customers were allowed to hang onto last year when Verizon switched to a tiered offering will soon go away entirely....