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The Apple Watch—which arrived in April 2015 to a collective “meh”—seems to have hit its stride with the almost universally well-reviewed Series 3 released in September this year. That same month saw the arrival of Apple TV 4K, the latest edition of a digital media player and microconsole the company has been pushing for the past decade. Although far from perfect, this time around Apple TV sports some significant improvements—including support for 4K-resolution video, with a pixel count four times that of normal high-definition TV....

The attorney won. In the end, the board voted to require that eighth grade science students “describe the carbon cycle” instead. Over the past two years school board meetings around the country have erupted into shout fests over face masks, reading lists and whether to ban education about structural racism in classrooms. In Texas, a quieter political agenda played out during the lightly attended process to set science education standards—guidelines for what students should learn in each subject and grade level....

That hasn’t stopped companies from trying, though. Remote-controlled thermostats and security cameras may make sense. But in the gold rush of the first wave of “IoT” products, not everything does. Here, for example, are a few of the connected and “smart” products that may raise your eyebrows. The Internet of Toilet Paper Rolls: RollScout is a toilet paper holder that lets you know (by e-mail, text, or app) when the roll is empty....

Editor’s Note: The World Wide Web went live 20 years ago this month, on a single computer in Geneva, Switzerland. For the anniversary, the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has written an exclusive article for Scientific American. In it, he confronts various threats that could ruin the Web, and explains why preserving the basic principles that have allowed the Web to flourish is essential to preventing its destruction. While preparing the article, Berners-Lee also spoke to Scientific American about emerging Web capabilities that could change how the online and physical worlds work....

Women with endometriosis are often told they are pain-pill seekers, scam artists trying to take advantage of the health system. They are called “disruptive,” “crazy,” “faking it” and “psychosomatic.” They are told that their pain may be in their heads and to move beyond it. To stop being—well, stop being a woman. We are talking about young teens and women with endometriosis who want a diagnosis, effective treatments and compassionate care....

Groundwater pollution might have a new nemesis: trees with a boosted microbiome. Scientists recently harvested a particularly effective strain of toxin-degrading bacteria from a specific poplar tree and transferred it to others. This improved the trees’ natural ability to break down the carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE)—an industrial solvent that has leached into underground sources near waste sites across the U.S. Study results, published in September in Environmental Science & Technology, suggest such trees could be planted over areas of heavily tainted groundwater as an efficient and affordable cleanup method....

It took seven years for President Obama to get federal agencies on the same page about considering the climate impacts of proposed projects. That could be reversed for good by regulations expected to be released by the White House as early as today. The anticipated rules won’t change what has been the common practice at most federal agencies since President Trump took office three years ago—which has been to check a box on climate change while ignoring a project’s true contribution to global warming when carrying out reviews mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act....

The task force’s 90-page report on the implications of Japan’s nuclear disaster said that an accident involving damage to reactor cores and uncontrolled escape of radioactivity was “inherently unacceptable.” It called for a dozen actions to improve plant safety and redefine NRC regulations governing severe emergencies. The report was delivered to commission members and key congressional committees yesterday and will be released to the public today. “Continued operation and continued licensing activities do not pose an imminent risk to public health and safety,” the task force of NRC experts said....

Video games that simulate the experiences of combat, space travel and car theft have achieved a startling level of fluidity and detail in recent years to create increasingly realistic virtual worlds. When it comes to medicine, however, the graphics that doctors and surgeons have to work with are closer to the grainy, cartoonish images of the Atari generation than they are to the video games Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). The world’s simplest known animal is so poorly understood that it doesn’t even have a common name. Formally called Trichoplax adhaerens for the way it adheres to glassware, the amorphous blob isn’t much to look at. At just a few millimeters across, the creature resembles a squashed sandwich in which the top layer protects, the bottom layer crawls, and the slimy stuffing sticks it all together....

The mental health of prominent women has faced particularly egregious public backbiting and scrutiny. This spring millions of online viewers tuned in to a multiweek defamation trial between Amber Heard and her former husband Johnny Depp. The trial was used as fodder in social media posts that sought to portray Heard as “unstable,” and it included direct speculation on her mental health by a forensic psychologist called by Depp’s team. The outcome of the case did not matter....

For obese people who sit for most of the day, replacing some sitting time with standing, slow walking or slow cycling reduces average blood sugar across the day and into the night, a small study finds. “Anything you can do to bring down glucose readings throughout the day is a good thing,” said senior author Glenn Gaesser of the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion at Arizona State University in Phoenix....

Higher natural gas prices during the first half of 2013 prompted electric utilities to curtail their use of gas-fired generators by 14 percent, according to findings published yesterday by the Department of Energy. Much of that lost gas generation was made up with coal, which has witnessed a modest recovery since late 2011 and early 2012, when record-low gas prices prompted many utilities to ramp down their coal-fired boilers in favor of gas, which burns more cleanly and emits far less carbon dioxide than coal....

Studying psychedelics was taboo for decades, but in recent years drugs such as psilocybin—the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”—have shown promise in clinical trials for treating conditions from depression to nicotine addiction. Growing the mushrooms can take months and is not practical for pharmaceutical production, however, and chemically synthesizing psilocybin is a costly and intensive process. Now scientists have successfully engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to produce the mind-bending drug. The modified microbes generated up to 1....

Thousands of popular headlines over the past couple of decades have touted the supposed health benefits of chocolate—particularly dark chocolate (in moderation, of course). But every single one of the major studies on which those claims are based actually failed to prove any such connection. They weren’t designed to—they are observational studies, whose main purpose is to identify interesting ideas that warrant closer, more rigorous investigation without wasting too much time and energy....

Many people dream in color. Some also read and hear in color. In people with synesthesia, different senses blend in a variety of ways—one person might see the numeral four as bright yellow, and another might taste cucumbers when she hears words beginning with the letter “F.” And because synesthetes are aware of connections among parts of the brain that to most people seem distinct, they may help scientists map the mind’s higher cognitive functions....

Medical & Biotech The Unlikely Story of Cancer’s Most Promising New Therapy CAR-T cell therapy uses a patient’s own cells to fight blood cancers. How a simple idea was terribly complex to realize. November 1, 2018 Medical & Biotech CAR-T 2.0: Safer, Armored, More Controlled Three innovative spins on CAR-T cell therapy promise more benefits and reduced damage from cellular cancer treatments. November 1, 2018 Medical & Biotech The CAR-T Conundrum For all their potential, CAR-T cell cancer therapies face significant obstacles....

Few physicists have had the privilege of bringing a new elementary particle into the world. When Wolfgang Pauli hit on the idea of the neutrino in 1930, however, internal misgivings tempered his response. “I have done a terrible thing,” Pauli later told his colleagues. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.” The neutrino is indeed elusive—its ghostly nature allows it to slip through almost all physical barriers, including the materials that physicists use in their particle detectors....

Among the many reasons I chose to pursue physics was the desire to do something that would have a permanent impact. If I was going to invest so much time, energy and commitment, I wanted it to be for something with a claim to longevity and truth. Like most people, I thought of scientific advances as ideas that stand the test of time. My friend Anna Christina Büchmann studied English in college whereas I majored in physics....

In February 1964 Roberto Gilbert Elizalde, a Mayo Clinic–trained surgeon in Guayaquil, Ecuador, found the ideal candidate for a radical procedure being developed in his laboratory. Julio Luna was a 28-year-old sailor who had lost his right hand in a grenade explosion. Gilbert Elizalde, inspired by the successful transplantation of a kidney harvested from a cadaver in the U.S., intended to replace Luna’s missing appendage with a donor’s. For nine long hours Gilbert Elizalde and his team worked to prepare Luna’s injured limb before skillfully marrying his bones, tendons, blood vessels, muscles, and skin with the forearm of a laborer who had died from a bleeding stomach ulcer....