First for anyone who doesn't know about it, NASA are planning to return its Mars samples of rock and some dust / soil to biosafety level 4 facilities (BSL-4). The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033.

This week, scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California,

Policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) have increasingly led to the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. Here we put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression, many of them in scientific environments.

Ask a hunting guide about what your first experience as a novice hunter should be and they will say a turkey. No one ever cried over eating turkey whereas a rabbit would be a bad idea for many.

A new survey in Human-Animal Interactions attempted to assess social perceptions in Singapore about ‘food animals’ versus 'friends' and 'worth fighting for', broken down as ‘Love’, ‘Save’, ‘Indifferent’ and ‘Dislike.’

In the waning hours of the year’s biggest climate change conference – COP27 – we learned of a deal to create a loss and damage fund. This is essentially a source of finance to compensate poor countries for the pain they are incurring because of climate change. An often-cited example of such suffering is the ongoing drought in the Horn of Africa region, which has put some 22 million people at risk of severe hunger.

I was astonished when I read NASA’s draft Environment Impact Statement for their mission to return samples from Mars. NASA are normally so reliable. Normally their work is well grounded in the best and most recent science, and they are also very open with the public, for instance sharing their images from Mars as soon as they receive them themselves.

But this was far from NASA’s usual standard, and full of mistakes.

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Over 200 years ago, the age of modern agriculture began with fertilizer that wouldn't give you food poisoning if traces of it remained, like manure will.

A new paper found what you would expect, and a key reason why legacy pesticides used in the organic process require nearly 600 percent more chemicals per calorie;  pests evolve as the science does.

Two years before SARS-CoV-2, the Alongshan (ALS) virus emerged in China. It was alarming because it was found to be a member of the flavivirus family along with the devastating tickborne encephalitis  (TBE) virus, which can cause inflammation of the brain and of the linings of the brain and spinal cord, and bacteria leading to the infectious Lyme disease (borreliosis). 

It was discovered after patients bitten by ticks suffered from fever and headaches, the typical symptoms of a TBE infection, but no antibodies against the TBE virus or its genetic material could be detected in the affected individuals. Instead, the researchers found a previously unknown RNA virus, the Alongshan virus.

List most planets, Earth was once a newly formed, sterile planet, so a philosophical and scientific question is, how did that change? Its randomness is the best argument for why we may be the most advanced civilization in this galaxy, if not the universe, and also the best argument for why we are not alone by now.

For the over four billion years that our terra firma has been around, meteorites have been hurtling through the atmosphere at high speeds toward its surface. and some argue that resulting debris may have included carbonaceous chondrites — a class of meteorite whose members contain significant amounts of water and small molecules, such as amino acids - and could have contributed to the evolution of life on Earth. 

A new process uses harmless viruses that eat bacteria to form microscopic beads that can safely be applied to food and other materials to rid them of harmful pathogens such as E. coli. Though tiny, each bead is about one third the width of human hair, they have millions of bacteriophages.