The era of reusable rockets is poised for liftoff. As of December 7, the aerospace company SpaceX had reported six successful landings — two on land and four at sea — of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The August 14 launch of one of the rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida delivered […]

For pregnant women infected with Zika virus in the first trimester, the future is foreboding. Nearly 11 percent of U.S. women likely exposed to Zika in the early weeks of or just before pregnancy had babies or fetuses with birth defects, researchers report online December 13 in JAMA. The new study offers the first results […]

Humans are really good at picking out faces. Our brains are so good at this that we even see faces in places they don’t exist — like Jesus on toast. Flip a face upside down, though, and the brain needs an extra moment to determine that, yes, that’s a face. This is known as the […]

These findings would have rocked the scientific world, if only the evidence had been more convincing. New Planet 9 cluesA giant planet lurking at the outskirts of the solar system could explain the odd orbits of far-flung hunks of icy debris (SN: 2/20/16, p. 6). If the planet exists, its average distance from the sun […]

Tenth moon of Saturn The first natural satellite in the solar system to be discovered since artificial satellites were launched has been found circling Saturn. Dr. Audouin Dollfus of the Observatory of Physical Astronomy at Meudon, France, spotted Saturn’s tenth satellite on three photographs taken in mid-December when the planet’s rings were seen edge-on from […]

Zoom in on a soap bubble just before it bursts and brilliant, complex patterns emerge. Shimmery rainbows appear in thicker portions of the soap film, while clusters of dark spots appear in the thinnest regions. The thickness of the soap film determines the color seen. Light rays that reflect off of the top and bottom […]

NEW ORLEANS — The self-cleaning marvel known as earwax may turn the dust particles it traps into agents of their own disposal. Earwax, secreted in the ear canal, protects ears from building up dunes of debris from particles wafting through the air. The wax creates a sticky particle-trapper inside the canal, explained Zac Zachow January […]

The asteroid strike (or was it the roiling volcanoes?) that triggered dino doomsday 66 million years ago also brought an avian apocalypse. Birds had evolved by then, but only some had what it took to survive. Biologists now generally accept birds as a kind of dinosaur, just as people are a kind of mammal. Much […]

WASHINGTON — Scientists have spotted a quintet of record-breaking blazars. The five gamma-ray blazars — supremely bright galaxies that host supermassive black holes — are the most distant ever spotted, at more than 11.7 billion light-years away. As a gamma-ray blazar’s black hole swallows up matter, bright jets shoot out of the galaxy at close […]

Cone snails are normally stealthy hunters, but they become clumsy and unfocused in water with increased levels of carbon dioxide. Oceans absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, those in the oceans do too, changing the chemistry of the seawater. Cone snails (Conus marmoreus) that spent several weeks in water dosed to […]