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The patient opens her eyes, but they are unfocused. She is awake yet apparently unaware of anything going on in the hospital room around her. After the accident, she lies in her bed, unresponsive, day after day. What is she thinking? Soon we may be able to communicate with such “locked-in” minds–trapped in bodies that no longer respond to their mental control. In a blitz of publicity last fall, a team of British researchers announced they had imaged the brain of one of their “vegetative” patients and discovered that she was in fact conscious and aware....

The Montreal Protocol didn’t just preserve the ozone layer, it helped save Earth from a climate change time bomb. The landmark ozone treaty was agreed 35 years ago this month, at a time when both climate and ozone science was far less developed than it is today. Yet every nation signed on, accepting binding commitments to reduce the production, consumption and emissions of chemicals responsible for thinning the ozone layer that guards the planet from the sun’s most damaging radiation....

Responding to fears of an imminent Soviet nuclear attack, in 1951 Pres. Harry Truman set up a national system enabling the president to quickly notify the public of an impending national security threat via a cross-country relay chain of AM radio stations. It used characteristic blaring warning tones and became a precursor of the Emergency Alert System still in use today. “There are certain stations across every market that listen for those tones and then retransmit the alert to other stations in their market,” says John Lawson, an emergency alert expert who has advised the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on its modern warning systems....

Nationwide Children’s Hospital, in Columbus, OH, cares for children from around the world. Its research institute is among the top 10 free-standing children’s hospitals in terms of National Institutes of Health funding. Its Center for Gene Therapy develops treatments for a variety of childhood disorders, particularly neuromuscular and neurodegenerative diseases, and collaborates with pharmaceutical companies to move potential therapies into clinical trials. What is the state of the art of gene therapy today?...

We are often living longer—far longer—than our ancestors. But we are not always more healthy. Almost a third of all people in the U.S. who reach the age of 85, for instance, will unfortunately be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, often combined with other types of dementia. Some 50 million people suffer some form of mental debilitation, according to estimates—and that will worsen in the coming decades, with the global demographic shift continuing its current aging trend....

The day the computer security community had anticipated for years finally arrived in June 2004. I and other researchers who study malicious forms of software knew that it was only a matter of time until such malware appeared on mobile phones as well. As cell phones have evolved into smartphones–able to download programs from the Internet and share software with one another through short-range Bluetooth connections, worldwide multimedia messaging service (MMS) communications and memory cards–the devices’ novel capabilities have created new vulnerabilities....

Twenty years ago you could count all the known planets in the universe on your fingers and toes and recite all their names from memory. Today you’d probably need a calculator and a spreadsheet: thousands of exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars—fill our catalogues. Astronomers are now poised to find tens of thousands more. Most of these strange new worlds are overheated, inhospitable and wildly diverse gas giants—“hot Jupiters” or “warm sub-Neptunes”—but some seem to be oversized versions of our own world—rocky, temperate “super-Earths....

There is a persistent stereotype that people with autism are individuals who lack empathy and cannot understand emotion. It’s true that many people with autism don’t show emotion in ways that people without the condition would recognize. But the notion that people with autism generally lack empathy and cannot recognize feelings is wrong. Holding such a view can distort our perception of these individuals and possibly delay effective treatments. We became skeptical of this notion several years ago....

Much of Intel’s success as a microprocessor-maker over the past four decades has come from the company’s ability to anticipate the future of technology. Since company co-founder Gordon Moore’s famous assertion in 1965 that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit would roughly double every two years, Intel’s microprocessors have grown steadily smaller, faster and cheaper, helping to give birth to personal computing and mobile devices that once existed only in the realm of science fiction....

Modern pantherine cats—such as leopards, tigers and lions—can roar because of a very specialized setup of small throat bones and ligaments that form part of their larynx, or voicebox. Now paleontologists have found similar fossilized bones that belonged to the prehistoric saber-toothed cat, Smilodon fatalis, suggesting it emitted fearsome vocalizations. Finding such small fossils is rare, but in this case was made possible by the unusual preservation in asphalt seeps at Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles....

A team of underwater archaeologists has pieced together information from declassified government documents and a shipwrecked World War II-era naval vessel to understand the secret role played by one of the most historic U.S. aircraft carriers: the USS Independence. The Independence (CVL 22) was one of 90 vessels assigned to Operation Crossroads—the atomic bomb tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands—but it was deliberately sunk, or scuttled, in 1951 and little was known about its career after the atomic bomb tests....

Florence Cassassuce, a project coordinator for a Mexican nonprofit group, should have been having the best year of her life. It was 2007, and her work on water purification in Mexico had been credited with curbing the well contamination that leads to waterborne illness. She received widespread recognition for her endeavors, having been named a CNN Hero finalist and World Bank award winner. Although Cassassuce could hardly have achieved more, she did not feel the kind of inner satisfaction that most of us think accompanies such great strides....

In this month’s Scientific American article “Gravitational-Wave Detectors Get Ready to Hunt for the Big Bang,” Ross Andersen writes about an audacious plan to use exquisitely precise measuring tools called atom interferometers to map out what the universe looked like when it was just a trillionth of a second old. Atom interferometers work by cooling down a cloud of atoms to just a few degrees above absolute zero. These atoms are so cold that all the atoms enter the same atomic state, becoming essentially indistinguishable....

It has been a tough year in spaceflight. The disintegration Sunday of an unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS) was a first for that vehicle, but not for NASA, which has now seen three of the four spacecraft that ferry supplies to orbit fail in the past eight months. In October an Antares rocket built by SpaceX rival Orbital ATK crashed and burned seconds after liftoff....

As health care workers in the U.S. gear up for the flu season, they facea paradox: on the one hand, they will have too little vaccine against the novel influenza A (H1N1) strain to protect the entire population; on the other, some people will resist the shots that are offered to them. Sadly, both problems can be traced, at least in part, to the last time “swine flu” loomed. The 1976 national vaccination campaign against a pandemic that never materialized left the public with lingering doubts about whether the inoculations harmed some recipients and spawned lawsuits that cost the federal government nearly $100 million....

The “teen brain” is often ridiculed as an oxymoron—an example of biology gone wrong. Neuroscientists have explained the risky, aggressive or just plain baffling behavior of teenagers as the product of a brain that is somehow compromised. Groundbreaking research in the past 10 years, however, shows that this view is wrong. The teen brain is not defective. It is not a half-baked adult brain, either. It has been forged by evolution to function differently from that of a child or an adult....

Scientific American Custom Media: As Surgeon General in 2000, you published the Oral Health in America report. What inspired you to address this issue? David Satcher: I grew up in a situation where we didn’t have access to oral health care, and I’ve paid a price for that throughout my life in terms of tooth decay and needing dental work. But also, there was a growing movement…pushing for a report on oral health....

Dear EarthTalk: I have a carpet made out of recycled PET bottles in my baby’s room and I started noticing a lot of the fibers on our clothes and even in my mouth! Is it dangerous for me or my baby to be in contact with and possibly ingest these fibers?—Ashley Riccaboni, via e-mail The jury is still out as to whether polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics can leach contaminants into our systems, but most reputable consumer advocates seem to think the stuff is relatively benign....

For most people, getting a flu shot ranks just below dental visits and spring cleaning on the list of annoying annual chores. If Peter Palese, Adolfo García-Sastre, and Florian Krammer have their way, it could be taken off the list entirely. Palese is the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and he and his colleagues are developing a universal flu vaccine that, he says, “would protect against all different variants of the influenza virus, and would offer long-lasting or even lifelong protection....

Bad weather forced private spaceflight company SpaceX to postpone a daring reusable rocket landing test on Monday (April 13) by at least 24 hours, a delay that also pushed back the delivery of fresh cargo to the International Space Station for NASA. SpaceX was scheduled to launch a Dragon cargo capsule Monday at 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT) from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, whose first stage would then return to Earth and try to land on the company’s “spaceport drone ship” in the Atlantic Ocean....