With plastics in museums decomposing, a new effort seeks to halt the demise of materials commonly thought to be unalterable (p. 34)

Mimicking the addictive compound’s action in the brain could lead to new drugs for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia (p. 28)

The next generation of birds chooses its music (p. 22)

Even as African elephants struggle to recover from decades-old poaching, the animals face new and renewed threats today. (p. 5)

A plan to switch the Hubble Space Telescope to a backup system works, waking up the telescope after more than two weeks of silence. (p. 8)

The NASA MESSENGER spacecraft completed its second flyby of Mercury, yielding crisp new images of a large swath of the planet not seen before. (p. 8)

Astronomers have discovered the first comet that appears to be a contact binary — two chunks somehow held together by a narrow neck of material. (p. 9)

Astronomers have found, in the frozen reaches beyond Neptune, two gravitationally bound objects that compose the most widely spaced binary system known in the solar system. (p. 9)

Planetary scientists have gotten their closest look yet at polar storms on the ringed planet. These polar cyclones are big enough to engulf Earth. (p. 9)

Giant Jupiter, often thought to protect the inner planets from space debris, may sometimes acts as a sniper, hurling material toward Earth. (p. 9)

Theorem identifies cases in which infinite-choice games will have at least one Nash equilibrium. (p. 10)

Culture may turn potentially high achievers away from math, new study suggests. (p. 10)

A DNA analysis of skeletons found at a submerged Israeli site produces the earliest known evidence of human tuberculosis, now known to have existed at a 9,000-year-old farming settlement. (p. 12)

British Gulf War veterans responded to military secrecy by talking among themselves about their health problems. Through rumor, the vets collectively defined the controversial ailment known as Gulf War Syndrome, a new study suggests. (p. 12)

Fifty-five years later, new analyses of leftovers from Stanley Miller's famous 'primordial soup' experiment suggest that life could have originated near volcanoes. (p. 14)

A second case of a virgin shark birth suggests some female sharks may be able to reproduce without males. (p. 14)

Between a fifth and a third of the world’s mammal species face the threat of extinction. (p. 15)

Rocks beneath a coal mine in Colombia have yielded fossils of what could be the world's largest snake, a 12.8-meter–long behemoth that's a relative of today's boa constrictors. (p. 15)

Where stalagmites start and stop in caves could offer more precise clues about when major earthquakes have hit (and could again hit) the Midwest. (p. 16)

This summer, the area covered by Arctic sea ice dropped to its second-lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979. (p. 16)

Fossils of trees that grew in Antarctica millions of years ago suggest a growth pattern much different than modern trees. (p. 16)

Trace elements in the carbonate shells of freshwater mussels could serve as an archive of road salt pollution. (p. 16)

Seven immense coral boulders — one of them a three-story-tall, 1,200-metric-ton monster — have been found far inland on a Tongan island and may be the world's largest tsunami debris. (p. 16)

An investigation of a man who received a successful hand transplant suggests that reorganization of sensory maps in the brain following amputation can be reversed in short order. (p. 18)

Mothers-to-be impart antibodies to offspring that pay dividends later (p. 18)

Preliminary evidence suggests that children’s regular exposure to heavy air pollution can be accompanied by brain inflammation and lowered scores on intelligence tests. (p. 18)

Parkinson’s disease patients are more commonly lacking in vitamin D than Alzheimer’s patients or healthy people. (p. 18)

Scientists have discovered how a single bacterial species living in a gold mine in South Africa survives on its own. Its genome contains everything it needs to live independently. (p. 20)

A team engineers microbes to perform AND, OR, NAND and NOR logic operations. (p. 20)