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Two weeks after my husband had a couple of stents installed in his coronary arteries, he awoke to this headline in the New York Times: “‘Unbelievable’: Heart Stents Fail to Ease Chest Pain.” He was incredulous. For weeks before his surgery, he had felt stabbing pains in his chest any time he exerted himself. Now he felt fantastic and was back to playing his beloved Ultimate Frisbee. The headline reflected the results of a British study, published online last November in the Lancet, that used what is probably the best methodology for assessing a surgical procedure: sham surgery....

The release of a study Friday linking cancer in rats to the type of radiation emitted by cell phones presents some of the strongest implications in more than two decades of research that higher doses of such signals could be linked to tumors in laboratory animals—unsettling news for billions of mobile phone users worldwide. Still missing, however, is a clear understanding of exactly how radiofrequency (RF) radiation used by mobile phones might create cellular-level changes that could lead to cancer....

The James Webb Space Telescope plans to explore strange, new rocky worlds in unprecedented detail. The telescope’s scientific consortium has an ambitious agenda to study geology on these small planets from “50 light-years away”, they said in a statement Thursday (May 26). The work will be a big stretch for the new observatory, which should exit commissioning in a few weeks. Rocky planets are more difficult to sight than gas giants in current telescope technology, due to the smaller planets’ relative brightness next to a star, and their relatively tiny size....

Researchers have found a switch that seems to turn on a mouse’s predatory instincts. When certain parts of the rodents’ brains were stimulated with light, mice displayed a complex array of hunting activities. Predatory behaviours such as grabbing and biting are familiar to fans of nature documentaries, but the brain circuits involved remain a mystery. Previous research found that the central amygdala, an almond-shaped area of the brain involved in producing emotions including fear, was activated when rats hunt....

The medical marijuana drug Sativex, which could be approved in the United States in the coming years as a treatment for pain relief, has little potential for abuse, experts say. The British pharmaceutical company GW Pharmaceuticals is currently testing the drug, which is delivered as a mouth spray and called Sativex, in clinical trials. The company plans to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the drug as a treatment for cancer pain when the trials are completed, likely sometime in 2014, a spokesperson for GW Pharmaceuticals told MyHealthNewsDaily....

By Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. personnel working at an Army facility in Utah appeared to follow correctly all the outlined procedures to inactivate anthrax before they mistakenly shipped off live samples of the deadly bacteria, the Army’s top general said on Thursday. Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno said investigators were now reviewing the procedures themselves to determine why the bacteria was not rendered inactive. “The best I can tell there was not human error,” Odierno told reporters, cautioning that his information was based solely on preliminary reports....

The cane toads go bump in the night. I hear them banging as they misjudge where my hotel door ends and the forest begins. The force of a large toad knocking wood is substantial. But the force with which the toads, which are native to Central America, have hit Australia is even greater. Brought to Queensland in 1935 to combat beetles infesting sugarcane fields, the toads have spread out from their point of entry like the shock waves of a bomb, warty legs and oversize tongues jettisoned into every conceivable ecological crack....

A landmark federal commitment to fund the elimination of a toxic national legacy—lead drinking water pipes—promises to improve the public health outlook for millions of people across the U.S. But it also presents communities with a thorny choice between replacement pipes made of well-studied metals such as copper, steel or iron and more affordable but less-studied pipes made of plastic. Under a $15-billion allocation in last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, dedicated funding has started flowing to U....

Playing an action-packed video game nearly wipes out sex differences in a basic spatial thinking task, research reveals. In a study of college students, men were better than women at rapidly switching their attention among stimuli displayed on a computer screen, a common test of spatial ability. But after both sexes played the role of a World War II soldier in a video game for 10 hours over several weeks, women caught up to men on the spatial-attention task, as well as on an object-rotation test of more advanced spatial ability....

The Soviet Union kicked off the Space Age 50 years ago this week by firing a basketball-size satellite called Sputnik into orbit, where its feeble “beep…beep…" would serve as a wake-up call to American dreams of preeminence and nightmares of nuclear attack. News reports honoring this week’s anniversary have made much of Soviet leaders’ seemingly paradoxical lack of enthusiasm for the historic launch, in contrast to its galvanizing effect on the American public, which saw in Sputnik evidence that a space race had begun while Uncle Sam still lingered at the starting gate....

Karen Uhlenbeck has spent most of her career as a mathematician “chipping away at problems,” she says—but occasionally she’ll have a revelation, and the solution to a quandary that has been plaguing her will finally become clear. “Those are really the high points,” she says. Those breakthroughs have come often enough that the 76-year-old will be awarded this year’s Abel Prize, a prestigious honor bestowed annually since 2003 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters....

Most people think they know what mass is, but they understand only part of the story. For instance, an elephant is clearly bulkier and weighs more than an ant. Even in the absence of gravity, the elephant would have greater mass–it would be harder to push and set in motion. Obviously the elephant is more massive because it is made of many more atoms than the ant is, but what determines the masses of the individual atoms?...

In the 25 years that John Collinge has studied neurology, he has seen hundreds of human brains. But the ones he was looking at under the microscope in January 2015 were like nothing he had seen before. He and his team of pathologists were examining the autopsied brains of four people who had once received injections of growth hormone derived from human cadavers. It turned out that some of the preparations were contaminated with a misfolded protein—a prion—that causes a rare and deadly condition called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), and all four had died in their 40s or 50s as a result....

The already buzzing field of topological physics could be about to explode. For the first time, researchers have systematically scoured through entire databases of materials in search of ones that harbour topological states—exotic phases of matter that have fascinated physicists for a decade. The results show that thousands of known materials probably have topological properties—and perhaps up to 24% of materials in all. Previously, researchers knew of just a few hundred topological materials, and only around a dozen have been studied in detail....

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the April 1990 issue of Scientific American, under the title “Mandelbrot Set-To.” We are posting it now to coincide with our reporting on a talk this week by Benoit Mandelbrot at Columbia University on fractals and financial markets. The phrasing of some references to dates has been changed, in brackets, for clarity. Who discovered the Mandelbrot set? This is not a trick question—or a trivial one....

MARCH 1957 CHILDREN AND PHYSICS—“Does a child’s first conception of velocity include comprehension of it as a function of distance and time, or is his notion more primitive and intuitive? Albert Einstein himself posed this question to me in 1928 when I was demonstrating some experiments on causality to him one day. I have since performed a very simple experiment which shows that a child does not think of velocity in terms of the distance-time relation....

Subject 046M, two years old, was seated nervously across from me at the table, his hands clasped tightly together in his lap. He appeared to have caught an incurable case of the squirms. I resisted the urge to laugh and leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. “Today we’re going to play a game with Mr. Moo.” I produced an inviting plush cow from behind my back. “Can you say hi to Mr. Moo?...

Nuclear fusion reactions sparked by beams of antimatter could be propelling ultra-fast spaceships on long journeys before the end of the century, researchers say. A fusion-powered spacecraft could reach Jupiter within four months, potentially opening up parts of the outer solar system to manned exploration, according to a 2010 NASA report. A number of hurdles would have to be overcome—particularly in the production and storage of antimatter—to make the technology feasible, but some experts imagine it could be ready to go in a half-century or so....

Research sometimes proves, with data, what we more or less already know. Exercise is good for you, and polluted air isn’t. Still, sometimes our intuitions are incorrect, and scientific findings surprise researchers, along with the rest of us. A recent example is the phenomenon of disappearing lakes in the Arctic tundra. You might think these lakes would be expanding, not vanishing. As climate change warms the tundra—melting surface snow and ice and thawing the permafrost—there should be more surface water....

Legislation to protect US chemical plants from terrorist attacks has been extended and renewed for another four years. The bipartisan measure makes a series of key changes to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. For example, it expedites the approval process for site security plans for low risk chemical facilities and also clarifies the emergency shutdown authorities. Congressman Patrick Meehan, a Republican who chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee for infrastructure protection, called the bill ‘a major breakthrough’....