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A well-worn science-fiction trope imagines space travelers going into suspended animation as they head into deep space. Closer to reality are actual efforts to slow biological processes to a fraction of their normal rate by replacing blood with ice-cold saline to prevent cell death in severe trauma. But saline transfusions or other exotic measures are not ideal for ratcheting down a body’s metabolism because they risk damaging tissue. Coaxing an animal into low-power mode on its own is a better solution....

Public trust of the scientific community in the United States is as strong as ever, according to a new poll just released today by the Pew Research Center, confirming polling results dating back to the 1970s. Thirty-eight percent of those polled in Pew’s survey in the U.S. say that they have a lot of trust in scientists to do what is right for the public. Those polled also place a lot of trust in scientific institutions as compared to others in the U....

If you could hop onboard a time machine and visit the earth as it was 500 million years ago, during the Paleozoic era, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had traveled not to another time period but to another planet altogether. In essence, you would have. The continents mostly sat in the Southern Hemisphere, the oceans had vastly different configurations and currents, the Alps and the Sahara had yet to form....

SAN FRANCISCO—Several independent studies in recent years have predicted that the American Southwest and central Great Plains will experience extensive droughts in the second half of this century, and that advancing climate change will exacerbate those droughts. But a new analysis released today says the drying will be even more extreme than previously predicted—the worst in nearly 1,000 years. Some time between 2050 and 2100, extended drought conditions in both regions will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries....

It is the stuff that both science fiction and a good part of author Dan Brown’s fortune are made of—antimatter. A research group at CERN, the European lab for particle physics in Geneva, has managed for the first time to confine atoms of the stuff. Fleeting antimatter atoms have been produced in the lab for years, but until now the ability to trap the elusive atoms for detailed study has been out of reach....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Achilles & PenthesileiaMarie-Lan Nguyen (CC BY) Achilles The hero of the Trojan War, leader of the Myrmidons, slayer of Hector and Greece’s greatest warrior, who sadly came unstuck when Paris sent a flying arrow guided by Apollo, which caught him in his only weak spot, his heel....

Malaria remains one of the world’s great scourges, striking more than 500 million people every year. The groups most at risk are pregnant women and children younger than five years old. In sub-Saharan Africa, 20 percent of all childhood deaths are from malaria. Pregnant women who contract the mosquito-borne disease can develop severe anemia and give birth to underweight babies. The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 pregnant woman and 200,000 infants in Africa die from malarial infections every year....

Animals living in landscapes used intensively by people travel, on average, only half to one-third as far as animals in more remote areas do—a pattern that’s consistent across dozens of species worldwide. The finding, published today in Science1, has implications for important ecological processes linked to animal movement, such as seed transport and nutrient cycling. And it could spell trouble for the animals themselves as the climate changes. More than 100 scientists around the world shared satellite-tracking data for 803 mammals from 57 species, from impala (Aepyceros melampus) to olive baboons (Papio anubis) and grizzly bears (Ursus arctos)....

The attacks began in her early 20s; for two years now Stephanie* has been living under the pall of migraine. It usually starts with a visual disturbance called an aura—shimmering zigzag lines that move across her field of vision and gradually expand into blackness, blotting out her sight. Then comes pounding pain mainly on the left side of her head. Adding to her misery is an exquisite sensitivity to light, sound and smell that makes ordinary stimuli—even perfume—unbearable and the headache even worse....

The so-called thermohaline conveyor belt—a strong northward flow of warm water near the surface of the Atlantic balanced by a southward flow of cold water near the bottom—carries heat from warm equatorial regions to the frigid north, keeping Europe relatively balmy. The fancy term—made famous from a Hollywood disaster movie and Al Gore’s slides—is really just the Gulf Stream and other related currents. But because this circulation involves water flowing in different directions across the entire surface of the Atlantic and every layer below, it has been difficult to measure....

The Internet may not consume nearly as much environmentally unfriendly fossil fuel as airplanes or automobiles, but the growth of cloud-based services offered by Apple, Netflix and others is forcing data centers to provide greater speed and more storage capacity. All of this size and speed comes at a price. Data centers generate a lot of heat that has to be whisked away by power-hungry air- and liquid-cooling systems to keep the Internet’s engines from burning themselves out....

How does the sense of smell work? Today two competing camps of scientists are at war over this very question. And the more controversial theory has received important new experimental confirmation. At issue is whether our noses use delicate quantum mechanisms for sensing the vibrations of odor molecules, aka odorants. Spectroscopes in chemistry and forensics laboratories do this all the time; the machines bounce infrared light off mystery materials to reveal the telltale vibrations that the light provokes....

Out of nowhere, NASA satellites recently spotted a huge, flat mass of unidentified material floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and heading toward Australia’s eastern coast—home to the Great Barrier Reef. Aerial scans and a few boats have since confirmed that the conglomeration, 58 square miles in area, is pumice coughed up by an undersea volcano. Such pumice rafts, as they are known, appear occasionally around the world—perhaps once or twice a decade, and always as a surprise....

EVEN AS THE U.S. EXPLORES THE COMPLEX CHALLENGES OF global warming, air pollution remains widespread and dangerous. Millions of Americans live in areas that have recognized air pollution problems. Grave health effects—including death—are all too common. And the threat is not just to people: dirty air sickens and kills plants and animals and creates ugly haze that obscures spectacular views. Five policy changes could make the air we breathe cleaner and healthier....

An extremely dense celestial object thousands of light-years away is serving as a natural nuclear physics experiment, providing clues to processes that cannot be reproduced in the lab. Astrophysicists look to neutron stars, extraordinarily compact remnants of massive stars, to find out how matter behaves at the highest densities that it can withstand. When a star collapses to a neutron star, what remains is an object that squeezes more mass than is contained in the entire solar system into a sphere the diameter of a midsize city....

Infinitesimal radioactive isotopes can be carried along on the breeze, landing unseen on the ground, clothes and skin. These tiny products of nuclear reactions are capable of causing large-scale bodily damage if they make it inside through inhalation, ingestion or even a cut. And many fear that such isotopes spewed from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are traveling inter-continentally—and in higher quantities than Japanese officials are reporting. This invisible threat has spurred people as far from Japan as the U....

When you think of old age – of people over the age of 65 years – what immediately comes to mind? If you were to answer memory problems, slowing down, poorer ability to make decisions, and the like, then you’d be conveying a view of aging that is rooted in reality. Decades of research document substantial age-related declines in many cognitive functions – such as memory, attention, language, and even our ability to reason and problem solve....

Dear EarthTalk: I am a retailer and have had customers ask whether the plastic bags in wine boxes are BPA free or not. What can I tell them?—Chris Tod, via e-mail The short answer is: “It depends.” A fairly recent innovation in wine packaging, the so-called Bag-in-Box (BIB) dispenser makes use of a plastic bag with a nozzle surrounded by a corrugated cardboard box. The whole package sits easily on a shelf and usually features a built-in spout for easy pouring and resealing....

NASA just can’t quit Kepler. On 15 August, the agency ann­ounced that it would stop trying to revive the failed reaction wheels that gave the planet-hunting telescope its precise pointing ability. That essentially brings an end to the main goal of the 4-year-old mission, which has found 3,548 candidate planets by looking for tiny dips in starlight that indicate a planet’s passage, or transit, across that star. But the agency left room for hope: two weeks earlier, it had asked astronomers to submit ideas by 3 September on how the hobbled spacecraft might still perform good science....

Two years ago you could scarcely open a newspaper without reading about health care, and you might be forgiven for thinking (or hoping) that the debate was over. Yet the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law in March 2010 offers more concrete plans for reforming the health insurance system than for reforming the health care system. It will change how we pay for health care but not how much we pay—and that is a problem....