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The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman Penguin Press, 2016 ($28) Science journalist Ackerman sets out to show that being called a “birdbrain” should be a compliment, not an insult. Birds’ clever social and environmental problem-solving skills, she shows, establish them among the most intelligent members of the animal kingdom. Crows frequently steal the show: for example, they craft tools, such as branching twigs perfectly pruned into solitary sticks that can retrieve meat from plastic tubes....

Key concepts Physics Air pressure Density Heat capacity Temperature Introduction A hot summer day is the perfect time to go to the beach and cool down in the brisk ocean water. But it’s not only the water that has a cooling effect at the beach. Have you ever noticed there always seems to be a cool breeze blowing from the ocean to the shore? Where does the wind come from? In this activity you will build a model of the ocean and beach to find out—so you will know why the sea breeze is blowing!...

Some people go home for the holidays hoping just to survive, burying their attention in their phones or football to avoid conflict with relatives. Yet research now suggests that is the wrong idea. Family rituals—of any form—can save a holiday, making it well worth the effort of getting everyone in the same room. In a series of studies to be published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, hundreds of online subjects described rituals they performed with their families during Christmas, New Year’s Day and Easter, from tree decoration to egg hunts....

Google’s director of privacy Alma Whitten is stepping down.(Credit:Google)It’s not uncommon for Google to be accused of violating user privacy. So, anyone in the seat of defending the Web giant’s privacy policies has a hard job. According to Forbes, Google’s current privacy director Alma Whitten is stepping down in June after three years on the job. She will be replaced by Google engineering director Lawrence You, who will take the title, “director of privacy for product and engineering....

A popular form of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which is often used to stave off the changes associated with female aging, can accelerate hearing loss. University of Rochester researchers led by Robert D. Frisina found that women who were taking a combination of estrogen and progestin had hearing deficits typically expected in women five to 10 years older. The study of 124 women between the ages of 60 and 86 points to progestin as the culprit, because the hearing of participants who took estrogen alone was unaffected by the treatment....

Tar and shingles are hardly environmentally friendly materials, so the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hopes to soon help homeowners and businesses replace the roofs over their heads with something greener. To that end, the DOE awarded Weidlinger Associates, a New York City-based structural engineering firm, a $150,000 grant earlier this month (matched by a 10-percent commitment from the state) to develop durable hybrid solar roofing panels with integrated photovoltaic cells and thermoelectric materials that harvest the sun’s energy to produce both electricity and hot water for buildings....

Some babies stay calm when something changes in their life or environment, whereas others get fussy and fidget at even the slightest deviation from the norm. Researchers do not fully understand why some children are able to cope better with stress or whether kids’ response to such situations is influenced by parenting or genes. According to a new study, it is shaped by both. Cathi Propper, a developmental psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her colleagues studied infants at several periods over their first year of life, inducing stress by separating them from their mothers....

Key concepts Physics Engineering Mechanical energy Electrical energy Wind Introduction Wind energy is becoming more and more popular across the U.S.—maybe you’ve even seen a wind farm close to where you live! In 2015 approximately 7 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. was generated by wind. So who knows, when you switch on a lamp in your house that light might be coming from wind energy! Wind energy is generated by wind turbines....

The arid badlands of ethiopia’s remote afar region have long been a favorite hunting ground for paleoanthropologists. Many hominins—the group that includes all the creatures in the human line since it branched away from that of the chimps—once called it home. The area is perhaps best known for having yielded “Lucy,” the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor known as Australopithecus afarensis. In 2006 researchers unveiled another incredible A. afarensis specimen from a site called Dikika, just four kilometers from where Lucy turned up....

JANUARY Ending January 2 Artist M. C. Escher famously created “impossible” visual illusions, such as never-ending staircases, perpetually flowing streams and off-kilter perspectives. Such illusions help to reveal how the brain creates its own reality. At the Boston Museum of Science’s Inside the Mind of M. C. Escher, visitors can explore these optical phenomena and even try their hand at re-creating an Escher. Boston www.mos.org 15 In 2007 John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues tried to explain why feeling lonely can make you physically sick—chronic loneliness can trigger changes in the activity of genes linked to diseases, such as cancer and heart disease [see “So Lonely It Hurts,” Head Lines; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2008]....

Scientists have known for years that human medications, from anti-inflammatories to the hormones in birth-control pills, are ending up in waterways and affecting fish and other aquatic organisms. But researchers are only beginning to compile the many effects that those drugs seem to be having. And it isn’t good news for the fish. One such drug, fluoxetine, is the active ingredient in the antidepressant Prozac. Like some other pharmaceuticals, fluoxetine is excreted in the urine of people taking it, and reaches lakes and waterways through sewage-treatment plants that are unequipped to remove it....

When you see or hear a reference to “the 1 percent,” most people think of socioeconomic status—the people with the top 1 percent of wealth or income in the United States, which is how the term is commonly used in our culture. Not us, though. What we think of is the fact that the whole spectrum of reproductive problems in males are increasing by about 1 percent per year in Western countries....

For decades we’ve been hearing about the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption. Drinking a lot of alcohol is obviously not good for you. But some analyses show that people who drink a little alcohol seem to live longer and be healthier than those who don’t drink at all. The Correlation Between Alcohol and Longevity There are several possible explanations for this. The correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and longevity might have nothing to do with alcohol....

“You don’t feel like you’re hurting yourself when you’re cutting. You feel like this is the only way to take care of yourself,” a young woman we will call Alice told journalist Marilee Strong for her 1998 book, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain. As with many adolescents and young adults, Alice habitually harmed herself by cutting her arms and wrists. Such behavior has long puzzled laypeople and scientists alike....

Windswept from cloud to cloud until they flutter to Earth, snowflakes assume a seemingly endless variety of shapes. Some have the perfect symmetry of a six-pointed star, some are hexagons adorned with hollow columns, whereas others resemble needles, prisms or the branches of a Christmas tree. Scientists as far back as Johannes Kepler have pondered the mystery of snowflakes: Their formation requires subtle physics that to this day is not well understood....

Audio of Google Duplex booking a women’s haircut. Courtesy of Google The Duplex saga also highlights the intricacies of human conversation, along with the difficulties of replicating real-time speech in a machine mimicking a natural voice. Google trained the voice assistant by feeding its artificial neural network data from phone conversations—including the audio itself, but also contextual information such as the time of day and purpose of the call. This machine-learning process is similar in some ways to teaching AI to recognize and reproduce images, another ability that has aroused ethical and privacy concerns....

Carolyn feels great these days. she exercises. She’s socially active. She spends as much time with her four grandchildren as possible. But it wasn’t always that way. A retired radiology film librarian from Pittsburgh, she began feeling apathetic and isolated seven years ago. “I’d just lost my mother, and my two sons had moved away,” recalls Carolyn, now 75. She also struggled with excess weight, diabetes and chronic lung disease. She was grieving, eating a worrisome amount of junk food and slipping into what looked a lot like depression....

When should you schedule that meeting—or find a new job? Is it time to start dating again? What’s the secret to an afternoon that drags just a little bit less? Every day we face questions of timing, but we have no guiding principles to answer them. In his new book, When, best-selling author Daniel Pink takes a comprehensive look at the psychology behind questions like these, offering practical advice on how to shape your day, your year, and your life....

Developing drugs can be hit or miss, but now a tiny, DNA-based sensor may help streamline the task. Acting as a “fluorescent nanoantenna,” the sensor could flag in real time if a prospective drug is binding to its target or reveal other cellular activity. Cells use protein molecules to communicate with one another and trigger functions throughout the body. When such a message comes into contact with a cell’s surface protein, one of the molecules involved changes shape like a lock opened by a key, prompting a reaction....

There are billions of trillions of stars spattered across a vast universe, most of which we will never be able to see. Of the ones we can, many are long dead, their light only now reaching us after traveling for eons through space. These ancient twinkles allow us to glimpse the universe as it looked billions of years ago, helping us read the timeline of its evolution. The most familiar star to us, our main-sequence yellow dwarf sun, naturally seems “typical” to us whereas others might seem more alien....