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By Zoë Corbyn of Nature magazineThe discovery of what could be the youngest fossil of a dinosaur to date–from a period notorious for being free of their remains–has reignited a clash among paleontologists about what caused the animals’ extinction.It is generally accepted that the enormous asteroid that slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago led to a mass extinction. But debate has raged about whether that included non-avian dinosaurs or whether they were already on the decline due to climate change, sea-level change or volcanic activity, with the impact merely providing the final blow....

Terminally ill patients in the U.S. these days face expensive care and prolonged declines. And many hospitals lack a designated palliative care team, which focuses on patient comfort at any point in the life cycle but becomes more critical at the end. In terms of care, the solution to our medical system’s woes might be as simple as a conversation about how we die. “Many clinicians are afraid to talk about prognosis—how long a patient may have to live,” says Alexander Smith, a palliative care physician at the University of California, San Francisco....

Your brain is an energy hog. It weighs less than 2 percent of your total weight yet consumes one fifth of your body’s energy. The brain draws its fuel—oxygen and glucose—from blood delivered by a whopping 400 miles of blood vessels. Lined up end to end, all that vasculature would extend from New York City to Montreal. These blood vessels are astonishingly dynamic. They tune the flow of blood to respond to the brain’s needs from moment to moment....

The U.S. population is growing—and no one has to tell you that a lot of that growth is happening at the waist. Two thirds of adults are overweight or obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That extra baggage heightens the risk for heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. But less is known about the 17 percent of children and teens who meet the more arbitrary criteria for childhood obesity, a proportion that has tripled over the past three decades....

From Nature magazine Fatu, a female northern white rhinoceros who lives in a Kenyan conservation park, is one of just seven of her kind left in the world. But millions of her stem cells, stored in a freezer in California, might one day help boost her population’s ranks. The northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) and another animal facing extinction, the drill monkey (Mandrillus leucophaeus), have become the first endangered animals to have their cells transformed into stem cells like those found in early embryos....

El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean wreak havoc on monkey populations, either in the midst of the periodic hot and dry spells or in their chilly aftermath, according to the results of a new study. The study, published in the October 28 issue of Biology Letters, explored the correlation of El Niño years—when cyclical oceanic-atmospheric oscillations warm the tropical Pacific to above-normal temperatures, affecting global weather patterns—with fluctuations in monkey populations and the abundance of their food resources....

Together the world’s 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock—an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us requires a minimum of 1,500 calories a day, civilization will have to cultivate another Brazil’s worth of land—2.1 billion acres—if farming continues to be practiced as it is today. That much new, arable earth simply does not exist....

John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, an opera in two acts about the birth of the atom bomb, will make its New York City debut at the Metropolitan Opera tonight (October 13). Adams is one of our finest classical composers, well-known for his earlier operatic works on contemporary affairs, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. The libretto by his longtime collaborator, Peter Sellars, is drawn from the published statements by the principal characters, and from the literature they loved....

Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, is an icy bundle of contradictions. It is tiny in planetary terms—the entire moon could fit snugly inside the borders of New Mexico—and yet it hosts a level of geologic activity usually reserved for the big dogs of the solar system. From Enceladus’s south pole emanate geyserlike jets, watery plumes that spew outward from a region carved up by unusually warm gashes known as “tiger stripes”. But by all rights, the moon is losing much more energy through this geologically active region than it has to spare....

In January the state of Ohio executed the convicted rapist and murderer Dennis McGuire. As in the other 31 U.S. states with the death penalty, Ohio used an intravenously injected drug cocktail to end the inmate’s life. Yet Ohio had a problem. The state had run out of its stockpile of sodium thiopental, a once common general anesthetic and one of the key drugs in the executioner’s lethal brew. Three years ago the only U....

You and I will play a game that bears a family resemblance to the board game “Mastermind.” I think of a five binary-digit secret number, for example, 10101. You are allowed to ask about bit sequences of length five. Such a question is called a “bit question”. My responses will report how many bits in your guess have their correct value in the correct place. For instance, if your bit question is 10110 and my secret is 10101, then three of your bits (the first three, though I won’t tell you that) are in the correct place with their correct value....

SAN FRANCISCO—The heavy rainstorms that flooded parts of northern California this past week were caused by an “atmospheric river”—a long, narrow conveyor belt of rainstorms that stream in from the Pacific Ocean. Meteorologists were able to predict the storms five days in advance, thanks to a new network of weather sensors recently installed in the state. Although the network is only partially complete, when it is finished in 2014 it should allow forecasters to predict upcoming storms and floods with much greater precision, and could provide a model warning system for flooding on continental west coasts worldwide....

The U.S. has long enjoyed a preeminent position in the world of science. The nation does more research, publishes more articles that are cited by more scientists and wins more Nobel Prizes than any other. It has also long been the chief destination for scientists and engineers from other countries—many U.S. Nobel laureates are foreign-born. What explains the strong productivity of the U.S. workforce, and what makes the U.S. so attractive to the foreign-born and foreign-educated?...

By Mitra TajHUARAZ, Peru (Reuters) - In its heyday, the Pastoruri glacier in central Peru, drew daily throngs of tourists packed into dozens of double-decker buses 16,000-feet (5,0000-meters) high into the Andes to ski, build snowmen and scale its dizzying peaks.It was so bright with ice and snow that sunglasses were mandatory.But in less than 20 years, including at least 10 of the hottest on record, Pastoruri has shrunk in half, and now spans just a third of a square mile (0....

RADIATION COMPARED The slug of depleted uranium (DU) that we prepared and that ABC News smuggled past portal monitors is shown below. It is a good substitute for testing whether the monitors could detect highly enriched uranium (HEU) because the radiation signal from uncontaminated DU, when shielded inside a cargo container, is actually greater than that from uncontaminated HEU. Calculated Dose Rate (microrad/hour) Two centimeters away, when wrapped in three millimeters of lead: DU: 1,500 HEU: 100 Calculated Dose Rate (microrad/hour) Two meters away, for same samples: DU: 1....

Best known for its stunning rings, Saturn also boasts a fleet of 62 moons—ranging from giant Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, to one as small as the ocean liner Titanic. Now astronomers may be witnessing something they have never seen before: the birth of a moon out of the same rings that make Saturn such a spectacle. “The discovery was accidental,” says Carl Murray, a planetary scientist at Queen Mary, University of London....

In X-Men: First Class, the latest film about the popular comic book superheroes, one of the mutant characters goes by the nickname Darwin because he has the power of “reactive evolution.” He instantly adapts to any threat: toss him in water and he sprouts gills; hit him with a club and his skin turns to armored plates. Biology mavens in the audience may object that this form of evolution is more or less the opposite of what Charles Darwin proposed with his theory of natural selection....

A century ago the debut of propeller-driven aircraft kicked off a global aerospace technology boom that continues to this day. But since the emergence of the jet aircraft engine during World War II, research into propeller-powered flight has often taken a backseat to the turbofan technology that carries jetliners faster and farther. Speed and range come at a cost, however, and both rising fuel prices and increased demand for regional air travel have changed the economics of flight over the past 10 years....

The year is 1906. a small, nattily dressed man walks over to the giant Diplodocus skeleton in the entrance hall of the British Museum of Natural History. He gently lifts one of the dinosaur’s huge toe bones out of its iron mount, flips it over and carefully slips it back into place. Later he would note in correspondence to a colleague that his effort was not appreciated. The museum officials should have known better....

By Caroline Humer and Chris Prentice The U.S. government issued new dietary guidelines Thursday, saying Americans should curb their intake of sugar and saturated fat to less than 10 percent of daily calories, in the latest blow to a sugar industry that has faced heightened criticism by health advocates. The push to encourage Americans to eat less added sugar as they consume more fruit and vegetables marks a shift, as the U....