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Gavriil Ilizarov, an orthopedic surgeon from Russia, is credited with inventing the external fixator—a limb-lengthening device that manually pulls apart bone to increase a patient’s height. For those suffering from polio, congenital limb defects or dwarfism, the new technology meant freedom from scoliosis and wheelchairs. The external fixator procedure was designed to decrease the severity of limb-length discrepancies and increase range of motion. Still, adding centimeters isn’t easy. Ilizarov’s 1954 mechanism, which is still used, often causes a significant amount of pain....

Pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal jump-started the search for a “components catalogue” of the human brain towards the end of the 19th century. His intricate drawings of brain cells, complete with their weblike connections, still appear in many textbooks. Looking for brain parts is driven by more than curiosity. Before the generations-long endeavor of deciphering the brain can proceed, neuroscientists need to first identify its multitude of component parts and then figure out what each one does....

Atlantic Coast communities face higher flood risk this fall as unusually high tides push seawater into low-lying coastal areas, threatening tens of millions of people and billions of dollars in infrastructure. Officials with NOAA confirmed that this year’s “king tides,” which occur between September and November, are contributing to increased “sunny-day flooding” from Florida to Maine as rising seas overtake beaches and shorelines, a condition attributable to climate change. In the Florida Keys, the effects of a dayslong king tide in September have lingered for more than six weeks, exacerbating concerns about inundated roads, fouled drinking water and salt from seawater damaging cars....

Nicotine has undergone an image overhaul, at least biomedically. In the past few years researchers have found that the substance can alleviate symptoms of ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Just how nicotine battles these foes, however, has remained unclear. Now, by studying sepsis, Luis Ulloa of North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., has evidence elucidating nicotine’s biochemical pathways that could lead to more potent anti-inflammatory drugs....

In the struggle against widespread obesity that begins in early childhood, new research indicates that schools may be the best place to start a solution. Australian researchers examined 55 interventions in previous studies and concluded that school-based programs were key in getting kids to healthy weights, and there was little evidence that these programs would have a negative effect on young students’ self-images. “Obesity prevention programs in general are not harming children,” said lead author Elizabeth Waters, chair of child public health at the Melbourne School of Population Health....

The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic. At least 20 people have died in the uprising, driven by the sudden collapse of financial institutions, low wages and mistrust of national leaders. Rising temperatures are seen by some experts as an underlying condition for the economic hardships that led to the unrest. A severe drought, mismanaged water resources and dust storms diminished Iran’s economy in recent years, according to experts who study the region....

Climate change has yet to diminish crop yields in the U.S. corn belt but scientists expect drought to become more common due to global warming in coming years. That could impact everything from the price of food to the price of fuel planet-wide. As a result, for the last several years agribusiness giants like Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta have been pursuing genetic modification to enable the corn plant to thrive even without enough rain....

Editor’s Note (7/23/20): This article has been retracted at the author’s request on July 23, 2020. The sponsorship and full scope of the supplement were not made clear to him during the editing process. Nature Outlook’s editorial guidelines and processes are being reviewed in light of this. We are grateful to the author for bringing this to our attention. Credit: John Hopkins Medicine In the mid-nineteenth century, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach reviewed a monograph on the influence of food chemicals on the make-up and function of the body....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Recently Americans heard some fantastic-sounding news: A federally appointed panel of experts announced that we can stop worrying about cholesterol. Even more surprising, the news is true—sort of. Every five years the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is legally required to publish a new revision of a government document called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans....

In 2015, Lisa Mol stared at a series of satellite images, distraught. The before-and-after pictures showed how the Islamist terrorist group ISIS had damaged the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra with explosives and bulldozers. An oasis in the desert, Palmyra had been a cultural meeting place in the first and second centuries AD, and contained the fingerprints of many civilizations. “Seeing that deliberate destruction pushed me into taking action,” says Mol, a geomorphologist at the University of the West of England in Bristol....

In the almost four billion years since life on earth oozed into existence, evolution has generated some marvelous metamorphoses. One of the most spectacular is surely that which produced terrestrial creatures bearing limbs, fingers and toes from water-bound fish with fins. Today this group, the tetrapods, encompasses everything from birds and their dinosaur ancestors to lizards, snakes, turtles, frogs and mammals, including us. Some of these animals have modified or lost their limbs, but their common ancestor had them–two in front and two in back, where fins once flicked instead....

Data from dozens of UK health-care workers suggest a tantalizing possibility: that some people can clear a nascent SARS-CoV-2 infection from their bodies so quickly that they never test positive for the virus nor even produce antibodies against it. The data also suggest that such resistance is conferred by immune players called memory T cells—possibly those produced after exposure to coronaviruses that cause the common cold. “I’ve never seen anything like that....

Nature rounds up reaction from researchers to Donald Trump’s election as the next US president. Trump, a Republican, had trailed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in polls leading up to the 8 November election day, but pulled out a surprising victory. Some foreign researchers working in the United States started thinking about leaving the country. @NatureNews this is terrifying for science, research, education, and the future of our planet. I guess it’s time for me to go back to Europe — María E....

Astronomers have found evidence for the existence of the monster stars long thought to have populated the early Universe. Weighing in at hundreds of times the mass of the Sun, such stars would have been the first to fuse primordial hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, leaving behind a chemical signature that the researchers have now found in an ancient, second-generation star. Little is known about the Universe’s first stars, which would have formed out of clouds of hydrogen, helium and a tiny amount of lithium in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang....

In my Scientific American column this month I wrote about the first study to compare driver distraction while voice texting (using Siri on the iPhone or Vlingo on Android) with texting manually. (You can download the study (pdf). To my surprise and alarm the study found no difference in safety. Whether you text by speaking or by looking at the screen and typing, your response time is twice as long as it would be if you were not interacting with your gadget....

For almost a century physics has been fractured. On one side of the fault line lies Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which posits that gravity results from massive objects bending space and time, like a bowling ball would warp a trampoline. Across the divide is quantum physics, the ruler of particles, in which events are random and it is quite natural for an electron to be in two places at once....

To a chef, the sounds of lip smacking, slurping and swallowing are the highest form of flattery. But to someone with a certain type of misophonia, these same sounds can be torturous. Brain scans are now helping scientists start to understand why. People with misophonia experience strong discomfort, annoyance or disgust when they hear particular triggers. These can include chewing, swallowing, slurping, throat clearing, coughing and even audible breathing. Researchers previously thought this reaction might be caused by the brain overactively processing certain sounds....

Many people today associate mistletoe with holiday kisses. But for centuries the plant was known more for its remarkable stickiness; ancient Greeks and Romans used gooey mistletoe berries for applications ranging from bird traps to skin ulcer ointment. Now biochemists are investigating whether mistletoe’s clinginess can provide a natural alternative to synthetic glues. For the parasitic mistletoe plant, stickiness is essential. Inside each berry are seeds coated in a mucuslike substance called viscin....

From Nature magazine A new round of exploratory oil drilling is due to begin in the Arctic this July. Oil companies are no doubt dreaming of a northern oil rush, while environmentalists face nightmares of devastating spills. The oil giant Shell has been granted permission by the US government to drill two exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea and three in the Chukchi Sea, both north of Alaska, this year — between 15 July and late September....

On September 8, a NASA spacecraft is set to launch on a seven-year mission to retrieve rocks and dust from a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. Those samples could help scientists to better understand the origins of the Solar System’s planets—and, perhaps, of life itself. Called OSIRIS-REx, the mission comes as a handful of companies pursue controversial plans to mine asteroids, in search of rare minerals or even fuel for extended space missions....