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We all like to think that being kind, responsible, and fair will lead to a happy life. But what if we’re wrong? What if nice guys really do finish last? A new study published in Nature Human Behavior suggests that those who value economic equity, at their brain’s core, are more likely to be depressed. Those who prefer everything for themselves tend to be happier. According to the model of “social value orientation,” humans can be placed into three rough categories, based on their reactions to economic inequity....

After screening nearly 1,300 chemical compounds, scientists have identified a number of drugs in use today that may in stop the growth of neural stem cells, including cancerous populations. The finding, reported in this week’s issue of Nature Chemical Biology, opens up the possibility of using drugs already available to battle brain tumors, which kill an estimated 13,000 people in the U.S. yearly. “A lot of the receptors for those drugs were thought to be exclusively expressed in mature cells in the central nervous system,” says study co-author Peter Dirks, a neurosurgeon and researcher at The Hospital for Sick Children’s Brain Tumor Research Center in Toronto, “They may have the same function on stem cells as they do on the mature cells,” which makes them candidates for treating brain cancer....

Our growing list of sounds on Mars now includes lasers. NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun using its rock-zapping SuperCam instrument on the Red Planet, mission team members announced today (March 10). SuperCam is equipped with a microphone, which has picked up the gentle whoosh of the Martian wind as well as the not-so-gentle snaps generated by the laser when it hits a rock target. “These recordings have demonstrated that our microphone is not only functioning well, but we also have a very high-quality signal for our scientific studies,” SuperCam team member Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France, said during a live webcast today....

Your eyes are exquisite light detectors, determining the intensity, color and spatial distribution of the rays incident on them. The human retina has more “pixels” than a consumer digital camera, containing about six million color-sensing cone cells and more than 100 million of the rod cells responsible for vision in the dark. And eyes are highly sensitive: a dark-adapted rod cell can fire off a signal to the brain on absorbing a single particle of light, or photon, the smallest quantum unit of an electromagnetic wave....

It is hard to imagine today, but for most of humankind’s evolutionary history, multiple humanlike species shared the earth. As recently as 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens lived alongside several kindred forms, including the Neandertals and tiny Homo floresiensis. For decades scientists have debated exactly how H. sapiens originated and came to be the last human species standing. Thanks in large part to genetic studies in the 1980s, one theory emerged as the clear front-runner....

Nearly 20 U.S. states have started implementing former president Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which places limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in an effort to reduce the impacts of climate change. The plan has been in legal limbo for the past year. Yet scientists have now calculated another outcome of the policy: harm to crop yields if the plan is scrubbed. Along with carbon pollution, coal-fired power plants spew pollutants that form ground-level ozone, or what we know as smog....

Anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental disorders in the U.S. But a simple diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder may not capture the specifics of what bothers some people. A subgroup of anxiety sufferers may experience extreme distress when confronting the inherent uncertainties that turn up in any life circumstance, whether helping a relative with a severe illness or choosing a new route to work that is safe and easy to navigate....

Eshel Ben-Jacob is interested not only in the genomes of the bacteria he studies but also in their personalities. He compares many to Hollywood celebrities. “On the one hand, we admire them, but on the other hand, we think that they are stupid,” says Ben-Jacob, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel. In December, though, he and his colleagues published a paper in the journal BMC Genomics reporting that a species of soil bacteria he discovered in the mid-1990s, Paenibacillus vortex, is surprisingly smart by microbial standards....

Melissa Creary was three years old when she was diagnosed with sickle cell disease. The genetic condition, which affects more than 100,000 people in the U.S., is caused by a mutation that distorts red blood cells into sickle-shaped crescents that can get stuck in blood vessels and trigger episodes of agonizing pain. People in the thick of an episode have described the sensation as something akin to broken glass flowing through their veins....

A mere half a degree could spell the difference between the Arctic being ice-free once a decade and once a century; between coral reefs being almost entirely wiped out and up to 30 percent hanging on; and between a third of the world’s population being exposed to extreme heat waves and a tenth. These alternate futures were laid out last week in a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that explores the possibility of limiting global temperature rise to 1....

Do you consider yourself to be emotionally intelligent? Are you empathic, able to read other people’s feelings even when they try to hide or swallow them? Or do friends rib you about your social cluelessness? Do people see you as spiritually grounded, emotionally balanced, a rock? Or do they say youre repressed, tactless, juvenile? If you werent in good touch with your own emotional inner world, how would you ever know?...

A menagerie of immune cells and proteins defend the human body, and a relatively obscure member of this crew is getting new attention as a possible target for treating COVID-19. Neutrophils make up more than half of our white blood cells and are often the first to arrive at the scene of infection. But historically they have been understudied relative to virus-fighting T cells and antibody-producing B cells. Neutrophils attack invaders in several ways—usually by gobbling the intruders up or rallying other immune cells to the fight....

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England today announced they would jointly start a new branch of science: the science of the Web. In one decade the World Wide Web has exploded into 14 billion pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life. The network has grown in a grassroots way, based on a handful of pervasive protocols and aloof guidance from the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum based at M....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Divaby Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific Americanand Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Nutrition Diva listener Vicky asked me to do a show on soil-based organisms, beneficial bugs that some people believe to be even more helpful than the friendly bacteria that you’ll find in probiotic foods like yogurt. There’s been an explosion of research into the human gut and the trillions of bugs that call it home....

For most people, boredom is a passing, nearly trivial feeling that lifts as soon as your number is called, a task is completed or a lecture ends. But boredom has a darker side: Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance. Despite boredom’s ubiquity and pathological associations, psychologists have yet to pin down what, exactly, it is....

We are eating ourselves out of house and home. Recently, in the September 24 issue of Nature, Johan Rockström and his colleagues proposed 10 “planetary boundaries” to define safe limits of human activity. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) Those limits include caps on greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, the global conversion of land cover to cropland, and other mega-impacts on the earth’s ecosystems. Yet humanity has already exceeded several of them and is on a trajectory to exceed most of the others....

Southeast Louisiana could pay a heavy price for simultaneous climate disasters occurring along the Gulf Coast this weekend. Tropical Storm Barry, expected to dump as much as 20 inches of rain across southeast Louisiana, will churn slowly over an already swollen Mississippi River Basin by tomorrow afternoon, forecasters and experts say. The rainfall, combined with the storm’s still unknown path inland, will define whether the Lower Mississippi River experiences a major flood or a catastrophic one, experts say....

Pollution from industry, agricultural runoff, pharmaceuticals and other sources contaminates water around the world, and detecting it can be expensive and time-consuming. Now researchers have developed a quick, potentially inexpensive way to test for at least 16 dangerous contaminants, including lead, copper and antibiotics, according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology. The test takes cues from bacteria, which are especially adept at reacting to specific contaminants. “Nature has been solving this problem for billions of years,” says study co-author Julius Lucks, a chemical and biological engineer at Northwestern University....

On the dusty horizon, two troops of elephants emerge 100 yards apart and walk toward each other. The beasts trumpet loudly, flap their ears and turn in circles. They seem to know one another–the whole event appears to be a family reunion. Anyone who travels the African savanna is apt to have witnessed such a meeting. In her decades of fieldwork, Joyce H. Poole, research director for the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya, has watched similar encounters many times....

We may be able to keep our gut in check after all. That’s the tantalizing finding from a new study published today that reveals a way that mice—and potentially humans—can control the makeup and behavior of their gut microbiome. Such a prospect upends the popular notion that the complex ecosystem of germs residing in our guts essentially acts as our puppet master, altering brain biochemistry even as it tends to our immune system, wards off infection and helps us break down our supersized burger and fries....