Cassini is running out of gas. So before mission managers lose control, they’ve steered the spacecraft on a no-return course into Saturn’s atmosphere, where it’s scheduled to burn up Sept. 15 at about 3:45 a.m. PDT. The move is precautionary. A dead spacecraft carrying stowaway microbes could contaminate icy Enceladus, a moon Cassini showed us has a salty ocean and the potential for life. Instead, friction from the high-speed atmospheric entry will destroy Cassini. NASA launche ...read more

They're not a good fit for calorie counters. If you’re relying on the gadget around your wrist to lose weight, you might need to rethink your game plan. A team from Stanford University recently investigated how good some leading consumer fitness trackers were at monitoring heart rate and calculating calories burned, or energy expenditure. After a group of 60 volunteers tested the fitness bands, researchers realized that while most of the devices measured heart rate well, they all fail ...read more

Bacteria That Shape Blood Vessels Researchers have discovered a surprising link between gut-dwelling bacteria and the brain’s blood vessels. Cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) are capillaries that are enlarged or deformed and thin-walled, making them vulnerable to leaks — which can lead to stroke or seizure. To study these deformities, experts genetically engineered mice to form CCMs after an injection of a specialized drug. Some rodents went on to develop abdominal infections, ...read more

A neurobiologist’s legacy: rewriting how cells operate — and how they go rogue. A model of Ben Barres’ brain sits on the windowsill behind his desk at Stanford University School of Medicine. To a casual observer, there’s nothing remarkable about the plastic lump, 3-D-printed from an MRI scan. Almost lost in the jumble of papers, coffee mugs, plaques and trophies that fill the neurobiologist’s office, it offers no hint about what Barres’ actual gray matter ...read more

War and strife have uprooted many researchers. Can their life’s work be saved? Eqbal Dauqan was excited. She had just completed her postdoctoral fellowship and was leading the new therapeutic nutrition department she’d lobbied to create at Yemen’s Al-Saeed University. Then the bombs started dropping. “Everything was damaged, our university, our home. My family had to move to a rental apartment outside the center of the city, where people were fighting and killing eac ...read more

1. Is your daily slog through a non-equilibrium system of interacting particles — how physicists define vehicular traffic — getting you down? Us too, especially when it slows for no apparent reason. 2. According to a study in the New Journal of Physics, traffic jams develop spontaneously when vehicle density exceeds a critical level, beyond which minor fluctuations in the flow of individual vehicles destabilize the whole thing. 3. In fact, even construction or an accident isn’t ...read more

This August, the sky will dim until the daytime world becomes dark. The bright disk that usually lights everything, burns skin, feeds plants and tells animals when to sleep will become a blank circle, surrounded by the shifting haze of its atmosphere. This scene will pass over the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, potentially capturing an audience even larger than the Super Bowl. And these people — including you, I hope — will likely react emotionally, not scientifically. ...read more

“It’s the first direct evidence of how the tools were used,” says Nowell. “All of a sudden, a wealth of information is unlocked.” Detecting species by protein residues on stone tools is especially important for once-marshy sites, like Shishan, which are not conducive to bone preservation.Although the Shishan excavations have yet to determine which species of hominin was at the site, Nowell’s team found that they were eating everything from Asian elephant and r ...read more

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Long before recent political turmoil across the pond came to a head, Britain made a literal break for it and physically separated from mainland Europe. Now, researchers have an idea of how the process went down some 450,000 years ago. A new study from Imperial College London and other European institutes supports the claim that before the English Channel existed, a large chalk ridge connected Britain and France. The ridge acted as a dam, holding back a lake that had formed in front of a nearby g ...read more