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Mercury has a surface unlike any other planet’s in the solar system, instead resembling a rare type of meteorite, researchers say. The finding, based on an analysis of data from NASA’s Messenger probe, sheds new light on the formation and history of the mysterious innermost planet, scientists add. Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, is also one of the least understood, having received much less attention from scientific missions than Mars, Jupiter and Saturn....

Significantly more ice in Greenland’s glaciers may be exposed to warming ocean waters than previously thought, new research suggests. Indeed, more than half the ice sheet may be subject to the melting influence of the sea. These are the latest conclusions of a detailed mapping project exploring the topography of the seafloor and bedrock around and beneath Greenland’s glaciers. Published in their final form last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the maps draw on a variety of data sources, including satellite radar and aerial imagery, as well as special sonar data collected on ship expeditions to the front of the ice sheet....

The Obama administration announced steps today aimed at improving the coordination of U.S. biofuels policy, increasing investment in next-generation fuels and shrinking the industry’s environmental footprint. At the same time, U.S. EPA is releasing draft rules today showing that corn-based ethanol has lower “lifecycle” greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline but still fails to meet emission targets set by Congress in 2007, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said. The administration is forming a new Biofuels Interagency Working Group that will be led by the secretaries of Energy and Agriculture and the EPA administrator....

An article about women engineers, published in 1908, has a promising start: If women are attending technical schools and are not legally blocked from working in a forge or firm, why do they face so many obstacles to employment? A reader in 2020 who discovers such a socially progressive question in the archives of Scientific American anticipates a discussion of sex discrimination. Perhaps women such as Emily Warren Roebling, who took over her husband’s role as chief engineer on construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after he became bedridden, will be held up for their contributions to the field....

The statistic is hard to swallow: in the U.S., nearly one in three children under the age of 18 is overweight or obese, making being overweight the most common childhood medical condition. These youngsters are likely to become heavy adults, putting them at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other chronic ailments. In February, First Lady Michelle Obama announced a campaign to fight childhood obesity. Helping parents and schools to instill healthier habits in kids is an important strategy in this battle....

The depiction of intricate folds in loose hanging fabric is a recurring theme in the history of sculpture. From the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the 2nd century B.C., to Michelangelo’s Pietà, to Karen Lamonte’s drapery abstractions, a main challenge of artists has been to convey weightlessness and flow with such compact materials as steel and stone. The Veiled Virgin, a 19th-century work by Italian sculptor Giovanni Strazza, demonstrates the extreme of this ambition, as one of the most exquisite illustrations of marble made ethereal....

Extreme rainfall in Nigeria triggered catastrophic floods this summer that killed hundreds and displaced more than a million people. A new study finds that the influence of global warming made the downpours 80 times more probable. It’s the latest report from the international research consortium World Weather Attribution, which specializes in the links between climate change and extreme weather events. So far this year, the organization has identified the fingerprints of global warming in deadly flooding in Pakistan and extreme heat in the United Kingdom....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In Norse belief, the soul of the deceased might wind up in any one of a number of afterlife realms. There was Valhalla, the realm of Odin where the dead warriors drank, fought, and told stories, Folkvangr (’the Field of the People’), the realm of the fertility goddess Freyja, and then there was Hel, where the majority of souls went, a grey and dismal place....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The many Roman walls still visible today throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, be they defensive walls such as the Servian Wall or house and monument walls, tell us a great deal about the evolution of Roman construction techniques. Roman walls went from dry-stone and sun-dried bricks walls at the beginning of Roman civilization to walls built with a concrete core and brick facing by the beginning of the Empire....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Although the bow and crossbow were the weapons of choice for much of China’s history, the sword played its part, especially when warriors were forced to dismount and face the enemy at close quarters. Widely used from around 500 BCE, swords were first made of bronze, then iron and eventually steel, undergoing various developments in design to improve their weight, cutting edge, and durability....

JUNE 1959 SELF-REPRODUCTION— “The construction of a machine capable of building itself might be judged to be impossible and to belong to the category of perpetual-motion engines. Together with Roger Pen­rose, I have approached the problem in a radical manner, without the encumbrance of prefabricated units such as wheels and photoelectric cells. Our idea was to design and, if possible, to construct simple units or bricks with such properties that a self-reproducing machine could be built out of them....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

Last week saw revelations that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans’ phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies. But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered. Here’s what we still don’t know: Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long? It’s not entirely clear. The Guardian published a court order that directed a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone metadata – the time and duration of calls, as well as phone numbers and location data – to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis” for a three-month period....

HER PROJECT: Stabilizing a fluorescent compound WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: As the daughter of John Zoltewicz, a longtime professor of organic chemistry at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Susie Zoltewicz grew up hearing about chemical experiments. They intrigued her, and so, as a high school student in the 1980s, she decided to do an unusual thing for a teenager: spend more time with her dad than necessary. She joined his lab to work on a project to enter in science fairs and competitions....

A new color-changing ink could aid in health and environment monitoring—for example, allowing clothing that switches hues when exposed to sweat or a tapestry that shifts colors if carbon monoxide enters a room. The formulation could be printed on anything from a T-shirt to a tent. Wearable sensing devices such as smartwatches and patches use electronics to monitor heart rate, blood glucose, and more. Now researchers at Tufts University’s Silklab say their new silk-based inks can respond to, and quantify, the presence of chemicals on or around the body....

A hotly anticipated announcement regarding a possible signature of dark matter delivered some grist for the physics mill Thursday but failed to produce the blockbuster result some had predicted. In a Webcast talk from Stanford University, Jodi Cooley, a particle physicist at Southern Methodist University, presented the latest results from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search 2 (CDMS-2), a series of detectors buried deep underground in a former iron mine in northern Minnesota....

CLIMATEWIRE | Daily temperature records were broken yesterday as a punishing heat wave swept across the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Temperatures soared into the high 90s throughout much of the region, rising into the triple digits in some places. Newark, N.J., hit 100 degrees for the fifth day in a row, breaking a daily temperature record for July 24 and hitting its longest 100-plus streak since the city began keeping records in the 1930s....

The death toll from extreme fires in California is rising from an unexpected source: Firefighters are committing suicide. The stress of fighting repeated blazes and seeing bodies of those killed is taxing firefighters’ mental health, fire officials said yesterday at a joint California Senate and Assembly hearing. It’s “an invisible cost that’s rarely discussed,” Capt. Mike Feyh of the Sacramento Fire Department told state lawmakers. Last year’s record-breaking Camp Fire in Paradise, north of Sacramento, killed 86 and wiped out the town, the same day another fire killed three in Los Angeles County....

Assistive technology that helps severely paralyzed people navigate the world and communicate with others often taps into whatever abilities the disabled retain, such as blinking or moving the mouth and tongue. Now, for the first time, researchers have invented a device that allows the paralyzed to write, surf the Web and steer an electronic wheelchair—all by sniffing. Initial tests, described July 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS ), suggest that many severely paralyzed people can easily master the “sniff controller,” which offers certain advantages over other technological aids....

Today’s robots that fly, jump or roll around must refuel or recharge as does any gadget that runs out of energy. Tomorrow’s new generation of self-sustaining robots might keep going nearly forever by grazing on dead insects, rotting plant matter or even human waste. The vision of robots capable of plugging themselves into the natural world of living organisms has begun taking shape in several labs around the world, and even NASA has shown renewed interest in powering space robots with microbes....