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A new paper suggests that the eerie silence from outer space… No, not that silence. What was I saying? Right. A new paper suggests that the reason we haven’t found any life yet is that it’s simply all gone extinct. Astrobiologists and authors of the paper, Aditya Chopra and Charley Lineweaver, make the point that, early in their formation, planets are incredibly inhospitable to life. There are volcanoes erupting everywhere, spewing gases into an early atmosphere, there are lots of meteorites smashing into the planet, and overall, life just doesn’t have much of a chance....

What not to do When the temperature indoors drops, it can be tempting to seek out quick fixes in an effort to keep you and your family comfortable or—if the situation is dire—from freezing to death. You may consider turning on alternative heat sources that don’t rely on freshly squeezed grid juice, like an oven, a car, a generator, or indoor heaters that don’t require electricity. Unfortunately, they can also be deadly....

Light Fireworks have followed the same basic format for centuries: As a fuse inside a sky-bound shell burns down, it ignites a series of explosive charges. Little pellets called “stars” sit in clusters between them and burst aflame as they fly out into the air. Color “White fire” ruled the skies until the 1800s, when engineers first added metals and salts to their mixtures to create a rainbow of hues....

I love podcasts, you love podcasts, your grandma probably loves podcasts. Looking for some science fiction you can enjoy while your eyeballs do stuff that isn’t reading? Great. Read on. If you’re looking for some science fact podcasts instead, we’ve got you covered. Limetown Remember that time when everything on the radio wanted to be Serial? Limetown got it right. Follow a reporter as she revisits the mysterious disappearance of every inhabitant in Limetown, an idyllic little community built around a mysterious scientific research facility....

Harp stressed, however, that the paper, which appears in the journal GeoHealth, doesn’t look directly at the influences of climate change, but simply how crime totals for each month varied with the temperature for that same month. The direct influence of climate change is on their future agenda. “Though it’s easy to make a connection between our study and climate change — in fact, taking a look at that is one of our next projects — we only looked at how the year-to-year swings in temperature connected with the year-to-year swings in crime for a particular location,” Harp said....

Scientists have been trying for decades to achieve fusion. Actually doing so, though, requires overcoming an immense number of logistical challenges. Although fusion is a science that moves slowly, scientists are inching ever closer to achieving the dream. They’re splitting their efforts between two types of fusion reactors. One approach goes big and tries to trigger fusion in a room-size chamber. The other goes small and tries to do the same in a pin-size pellet....

As climate change progresses and infrastructure crumbles, such blackouts may become more common. Outages have been on the rise in recent decades, and utilities might be ill-prepared to take on the dual challenge of responding to intensifying weather events and upgrading aging facilities. The oldest American power lines date back to the 1880s, and most of today’s grid was built in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy....

A tall white man wearing a denim shirt stands in front of a stove. The camera follows his hand as it reaches into a carton of eggs, and then pans out to reveal a cast-iron skillet. Making eye contact with the camera, he points to the egg: “This is your brain.” He points to the skillet. “This is drugs.” With one muscular hand, he cracks the egg into the hot pan....

Technically speaking, the entire forest is one giant clone. Pando (which is latin for “I spread”) is a genetically male organism made up of more than 47,000 trees with identical genes and a shared root system. No one is quite sure exactly how old Pando is—researchers estimate the massive tree complex could be anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands of years old—and it is thought to be one of the largest living organisms on Earth....

Every January, fat’s in the crosshairs of health columnists, fitness magazines, and desperate Americans. This year, PopSci looks at the macronutrient beyond its most negative associations. What’s fat good for? How do we get it to go where we want it to? Where does it wander when it’s lost? This, my friends, is Fat Month. Most people assume that all body fat is made the same. We should have some of it, but not too much, and, as we enter adulthood, it basically just sits there storing energy (and building up in areas that we don’t want it to)....

As a coniferous forest reclaims the city of Pripyat in Ukraine, hundreds of species, from butterflies to bison, roam crumbling streets and abandoned buildings. Here’s what four of them tell us about how nature adapts once we’re gone. Wild horses The Przewalski’s horse lived only in captivity until researchers turned 36 loose in the territory between 1998 and 2004. The herd has more than doubled and shows no sign of mutation, which could mean the site is a good place to introduce other critically endangered species....

The latest spelunkers in the depths of creative nomenclature are spider biologist Carlos Perafan, Fernando Perez-Miles, and William Galvis. While working in the Andes mountains, the trio discovered six species of bald-legged spiders that had never previously been seen in Colombia. According to a new study, published Thursday in the journal ZooKeys, four of the spiders had no clear genus, so the researchers invented their own. Inspired by the reportedly clone-like similarities between the members of this new group, they christened the arachnids Stormtropis, for the white-clad soldiers in Star Wars....

This arthropod, whose discovery was reported on September 8 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, probably spent its days scrabbling through the mud in search of prey. Scientists have named the creature Titanokorys gainesi, and say it offers a valuable glimpse at how some of the earliest animal ecosystems worked. “Understanding how predators got established is important [in order] to understand how..other animals evolved, including many animals that we still know today,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, the curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and coauthor of the study....

Researchers first identified the roughly 120 million-year-old specimen from Brazil as a snake in 2015, based on its skull and other skeletal features. But now, after examining the rock containing the tiny reptile, another international team of scientists concluded that it was misclassified. The ongoing debate surrounding the species, named Tetrapodophis amplectus, has implications for our understanding of the evolutionary history of snakes. It also touches on important ethical issues related to studying a fossil that was likely illegally exported from Brazil, the researchers wrote on November 18 in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology....

Today, Pratt’s work in such environments has led her to a brightly lit office at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., as the agency’s planetary protection officer. In this sparse room with a laptop and a whiteboard, she still ponders a question she faced during her years of crawling, sliding, and rappelling into harsh places to collect extremophiles: “How do you look for signs of life without inadvertently bringing life with you?...

“Moisture actually contains a certain amount of electrical charge,” says study author Jun Yao, a professor of electrical engineering. He and his colleagues relied on that fact to create a device that attracts ambient vapors to produce electricity. They’re calling it the “Air-gen.” Their results, published on Friday in the journal Nature, could represent the first steps toward a method of power production far more environmentally friendly than traditional batteries, more consistent than wind energy, and more space-efficient than solar cells....

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, south of San Francisco, is home to a large laser called LCLS, which lets scientists use X-rays to peer into molecules. “The way to think about a facility like LCLS is really as a super-resolution microscope,” says Mike Dunne, the facility’s director. Now, LCLS has just finished a major upgrade—called LCLS-II—that plunges the laser down to just a few degrees above absolute zero. Giving a particle accelerator new life A half-century ago, SLAC’s tunnel housed a particle accelerator....

The Eagle-Snatching-Baby Video Is Insane, But It’s Also FakeWhich Wine Should You Get Drunk On This Holiday? [Infographic]The Helmet That Can Save FootballGenetically Engineered Stingray-Skin Sneakers Are A Hoax And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week: What The Research Says About “Rampage Violence”8 Gifts For The Tech-Minded CookFitness Trackers Make Terrible GiftsA History Of Our ‘Best Of What’s New’ Special In An Interactive GraphicWhy Wild Animals Are Moving Into Cities, And What To Do About ItWould Arming Teachers And Students Really Have Prevented A Tragedy?...

When he thinks “grab,” a bead-sized device in his brain picks up the resulting electric blips, a desktop computer interprets them, and a zippered sleeve jolts his forearm with electric current, moving his hand. Over the last five years Ian, who never expected to control his hand again, has learned to pour from a bottle, stir with a straw, and even play Guitar Hero. He regains the use of his right arm only in the lab, however, where engineers can plug him into a computer and run through the calibration session required to remind the machine how to interpret his thoughts....