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Terrible lizards. that’s what the word “Dinosaurs” means. yet dinosaurs are not true lizards, and they are not necessarily terrible either. What they are is endlessly fascinating—and still able to surprise us. Paleontologists have overturned one misconception after another: As it turns out, dinosaurs were not necessarily sluggish and cold-blooded. Many dinosaurs had feathered skins long before the origin of birds. And not all dinosaurs were enormous: some were less than a foot long....

Editor’s Note: This is an expanded version of the Q&A that will appear in the November 2010 issue of Scientific American. Name: Greg Graffin Title: Lead singer for the punk rock band Bad Religion; Lecturer in life sciences and paleontology at U.C.L.A. Location: Ithaca, N.Y., and Los Angeles How are evolution and punk rock related? The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. It’s a process of collective discovery....

NEW YORK—Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite? If only. The creepy critters have become such a nuisance here that the city council is mulling legislation that would establish a bedbug task force, ban the sale of used mattresses, train exterminators, and regulate mattress disposal. Just how infested is Gotham? According to the New York Daily News, there were 22,218 complaints to the city’s 311 hotline about infestations of the blood-sucking hemipterans, a 34 percent jump since this time last year....

We recognize words as pictures As your eyes scan these words, your brain seems to derive their meaning instantaneously. How are we able to recognize and interpret marks on a page so rapidly? A small new study confirms that a specialized brain area recognizes printed words as pictures rather than by their meaning. Researchers led by neuroscientist Maximilian Riesenhuber of Georgetown University Medical Center scanned the brains of 12 subjects with functional MRI....

Man has become the dominant species now in Africa as well as on the rest of the planet. This truism would scarcely need statement were it not a development of the last halfcentury, of the last quarter-century and even of the last decade. In Africa many races, nations and communities of men exist within the whole range from hunter and food gatherer to the urban dweller sealed off from nature by pavement, plumbing and prophylaxis....

When commercial fishers set off to trap blue crabs, they bring along buckets of small, frozen baitfish such as menhaden. They stuff the fish into the traps and lower them into the sea. The stinky, slowly rotting fish carcasses decay underwater, temping the prized crabs to crawl inside the traps. But catching large quantities of the tiny fish for bait could have grave ecological ramifications. A wide range of predators such as humpback whales, seals and dolphins eat the small prey....

AT&T isn’t going to let T-Mobile steal all of the spotlight when it comes to big shake-ups to its plans. The Dallas telecommunications provider unveiled AT&T Next, a new program for customers that allows them to pay for their own smartphones in monthly installments, and enables an annual upgrade to a smartphone or tablet. Related stories Nokia’s anemic U.S. sales a low point amid weak Q2 results Verizon unveils Edge, its own pricey early upgrade plan AT&T moves in on Verizon’s ‘most reliable network’ claim AT&T teams up with SiriusXM to bring mobile services to Nissan AT&T’s Next plan doesn’t add up...

“There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the Internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year. And as that increases to 10,000 and 100,000 and beyond, for longer and longer durations, we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries materialize out of thin air.” So says Stanford University lecturer Balaji Srinivasan in an article published online by Wired in November 2013....

How much do we really know about what so-called self-driving vehicles can and cannot do? The fatal traffic accident involving a Tesla Motors car that crashed while using its Autopilot feature offers a stark reminder that such drivers are in uncharted territory—and of the steep cost of that uncertainty. The sensor systems that enable Tesla’s hands-free driving are the result of decades of advances in computer vision and machine learning. Yet the failure of Autopilot—built into 70,000 Tesla vehicles worldwide since October 2014—to help avoid the May 7 collision that killed the car’s sole occupant demonstrates how far the technology has to go before fully autonomous vehicles can truly arrive....

Around 15,000 years ago, the Earth’s climate was in turmoil. Carbon dioxide concentrations were rapidly rising in the atmosphere. Sea levels were rising across the globe. The Northern Hemisphere was heating up. At the same time, the area around Antarctica began to cool down. And as it cooled, a perplexing trend emerged: Atmospheric CO2 stopped climbing. For a period of nearly 2,000 years, CO2 levels stayed constant at about 240 parts per million....

Presidential candidates snatch the most attention during election seasons, and science usually gets scant mention. Science and technology, however, underpin some of the biggest problems facing the U.S., which is why Scientific American partnered with ScienceDebate.org to ask Pres. Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney to talk about 14 top challenges facing the country that are ultimately rooted in science. But even the most science-savvy chief executive needs scientifically literate partners in Congress to implement sound initiatives....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The pattern of El Niño has changed dramatically in recent years, according to the first seasonal record distinguishing different types of El Niño events over the last 400 years. A new category of El Niño has become far more prevalent in the last few decades than at any time in the past four centuries....

Cannabis—marijuana—is the world’s most commonly used illicit drug. Polls suggest that one in eight U.S. adults smoke it, and more than 40 percent of them have tried the drug at some point in their lifetime. A majority of states allow some form of medical marijuana use, and nine states and Washington, D.C., have now legalized recreational use. Although the substance is illegal under U.S. federal law, in 2013 the Justice Department under President Barack Obama guided U....

In the run-up to the final rollout of its Clean Power Plan, U.S. EPA has consistently promoted energy efficiency efforts as a cheap, easy and financially advantageous way to meet the rule’s ambitious goal of reducing the power sector’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent. “When you look at energy efficiency, it is the best approach to actually address the challenge of carbon pollution in a way that is tremendously cost-effective,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in April at a panel hosted by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute....

U.S. EPA’s “secret science” plan could reduce the health benefits that come along with controlling carbon emissions, scrambling previous calculations that gave weight to saving lives and avoiding heart attacks. The most immediate consequence of the potential policy—which would prevent the agency from using some scientific studies in its rulemaking—could fall on EPA’s efforts to rewrite the Clean Power Plan, according to proponents and critics of EPA’s proposal. If enacted, the plan could sharply curtail the incorporation of public health studies that show the risks from breathing air pollutants as federal regulators draft rules for power plants....

U.S. A hiker found two rusted, unexploded bombs from 1935 on the Mauna Loa volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. The bombs had been intended to help divert lava flow during an eruption. FRANCE Researchers report dinosaur footprints up to 1.25 meters long on the roof of a cave in France, likely coming from a type of titanosaur. Geologic processes buried and shifted the shoreline footprints to the cave’s roof, 500 meters deep....

GILLETTE, Wyo.—Just weeks before the biggest mass layoffs in Powder River Basin history, it was business as usual at the Eagle Butte mine several miles north of town. A truck the size of a small house ambled past every five minutes, brimming with 200 tons of inky black coal. The coal was dumped onto a slow-moving conveyor belt and carried to be pulverized into fist-sized chunks. It was then put into a series of silos to be distributed into rail cars....

Limb regeneration remains the stuff of science fiction for humans, but an accidental discovery provides a new window into what it would take for people to grow lost limbs with newtlike flair. The finding emerged from research into a gene that can turn back the clock on human cells. Young animals are able to recover from tissue damage much better than adults and can even regenerate tissues in the womb. In recent years researchers have eyed a gene called Lin28a, which is active early in life but silenced in most mature tissues....

New York’s landmark climate bill, which commits America’s third-largest state to effectively eliminating greenhouse emissions by midcentury, ranks among U.S. climate hawks’ greatest political victories. The bill’s passage earlier this year was the result of a multiyear push by climate activists in Albany. It happened after Democrats swept Republicans out of the majority in the state Senate during last fall’s midterm elections. But if enacting the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act was a heavy lift, actually meeting its goals will be even more difficult....

Faced with a national epidemic of opioid-related overdoses, a cadre of police organizations have adopted a promising new approach focused on addiction as an illness rather than a crime. But just as the ANGEL program—which uses cops to steer addicts to treatment rather than jail—has begun to expand to hundreds of police departments with White House support, advocates worry that it could run into obstacles under the incoming Trump administration. They fear that President-elect Donald Trump will favor a return to a “war on drugs” model that focuses on prosecution rather than treatment....