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Google devoted its doodle on Thursday to mark the 93rd birthday of Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made great strides in our understanding of the molecular makeup of DNA and RNA but missed out on the Nobel Prize. Born in London on July 25, 1920, Franklin showed exceptional scholastic aptitude at an early age. After studying chemistry at Cambridge, Franklin went to work as a research associate at King’s College London in the Medical Research Council’s Biophysics Unit....

Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God....

With the Hurricane Laura hitting Louisiana and Texas as an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm and wildfires menacing the western U.S., millions of Americans are facing the complex risks of a natural disaster striking in the middle of a pandemic. The steps people normally take to prepare for a severe storm or to evacuate can contradict the public health recommendations for protecting themselves and others from COVID-19. That’s what millions of people were facing as Hurricane Laura intensified in the Gulf of Mexico....

Watch out, George Lucas, there’s a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry. Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell. “This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes,” study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement....

At this year’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity....

The devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout provide ample reason to reconsider what truly constitutes national security. Such a reassessment is long overdue. Despite the trillions of dollars Congress and successive administrations have lavished on the Pentagon since the turn of the century, the massive U.S. arsenal and fighting force deployed worldwide are powerless against grave, nonmilitary threats to national security—from a raging pandemic to the fact that tens of millions of Americans breathe foul air, drink tainted water, and struggle to pay for food, housing and health care....

Japan has issued draft guidelines that allow the use of gene-editing tools in human embryos. The proposal was released by an expert panel representing the country’s health and science ministries on 28 September. Although the country regulates the use of human embryos for research, there have been no specific guidelines on using tools such as CRISPR–Cas9 to make precise modifications in their DNA until now. Tetsuya Ishii, a bioethicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, says that before the draft guidelines were issued, Japan’s position on gene editing in human embryos was neutral....

Microgravity, or very weak gravity, on the International Space Station (ISS) is what lets astronauts glide and somersault around effortlessly as they orbit Earth. It is also a useful environment for gaining insights into human health, both in terms of the impacts of long-duration spaceflight and new perspectives on diseases that afflict people on our planet. Space-based biomedical research was one of the key topics discussed last week at the ISS R&D Conference in Atlanta....

In Ungifted, Kaufman takes us on the intellectual journey that his research at Cambridge kicked off. He describes the fallibility of popular measures of brainpower, such as IQ tests, and proposes a new view of intellect. In 1921 psychologist Lewis Terman began following an elite set of students with very high IQ scores. As adults, these subjects were generally healthier and more socially adjusted than the group of students with lower IQs and boasted productive, accomplished careers....

Scientists have successfully tested a heartbeat-powered pacemaker in living pigs, whose hearts are similar to humans’ in size and function. Researchers say this is an important step toward developing battery-free implantable medical devices. Current pacemaker batteries have a life span of seven to 10 years, and replacing them entails expensive surgery. The new “symbiotic pacemaker” consists of three components: a wafer-sized generator attached to the heart that converts the organ’s mechanical energy into electrical energy; a power-management unit that has a capacitor to store that energy; and the pacemaker itself, which stimulates and regulates the heart muscle....

You’re in your office near the end of the day, preparing to head home. You log on to your computer, navigate the desktop, open a browser, sign in to your e-mail account. You read your latest messages and write a few yourself, then log out. As you’re driving home, something about the car in the next lane distracts you, but a gentle alert reminds you to pay attention to the road....

A maverick group of astronomers is proposing to radically reshape one of NASA’s most successful missions in the modern era, the New Horizons probe that flew by Pluto in 2015 and is now continuing its voyage into the depths of the outer solar system. The group’s paper describing their proposal, submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and available as a preprint, suggests that before its fuel is spent and some of the systems are shut down to conserve power, New Horizons should be repurposed as a space telescope that can take advantage of the near-lightless conditions in the outer solar system to study stars, galaxies and more....

Almost a century after scientists first heard rumours of its existence, an isolated population of orangutans on the Indonesian island of Sumatra has been confirmed as a new species—just as its habitat faces imminent threats. The population, estimated at fewer than 800 individuals, inhabits the Batang Toru forest in western Sumatra. A researcher exploring the area in the 1930s wrote of reports of an isolated orangutan population. But it wasn’t until biological anthropologist Erik Meijaard, the founder of conservation group Borneo Futures in Jakarta, discovered the paper in the mid-1990s that scientists went looking for the Batang Toru group....

You’ve probably seen QR tags thousands of times, from advertisements in the subway to coupon flyer in the mail to products in the supermarket. They look like stamp-size bar codes, a grid of small black-and-white rectangles and squares, usually with bigger black squares in the corners. A marketer’s dream-come-true, these tiny images are capable of storing and transmitting loads of data directly to the smartphones of interested customers. When a person scans a QR tag with a smartphone, the tag can do any number of things, including taking the user right to the product’s website....

Broader Broadband “Competition and the Internet” [Science Agenda] is overly simplistic when it argues that broadband in the U.S. is too expensive and too slow. Today’s most advanced applications typically require seven megabits per second of bandwidth or less, far below the capabilities of most U.S. wireline broad­band. This is presumably why a recent Fed­­eral Communications Commission survey found that 91 percent of U.S. broadband users were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their speeds, and another study found that consumers were not willing to pay much for extra speed....

In the world’s most famous thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrödinger described how a cat in a box could be in an uncertain predicament. The peculiar rules of quantum theory meant that it could be both dead and alive, until the box was opened and the cat’s state measured. Now, two physicists have devised a modern version of the paradox by replacing the cat with a physicist doing experiments—with shocking implications. Quantum theory has a long history of thought experiments, and in most cases these are used to point to weaknesses in various interpretations of quantum mechanics....

Publishing research and getting grants is highly competitive, and peer reviewers and funders reject paper and grant proposals for many reasons. But researchers who study Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities can face another barrier: gatekeepers who downplay social inequities that affect AAPIs and dismiss studying them. For instance, the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Asian American Families, the largest study of its kind, delves into mental health challenges among more than 800 Asian American families in metropolitan Chicago....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Heading a football may look effortless but many scientists have suspected it might actually harm the player’s brain. There could be real consequences—we know that brain injury is linked to an increased risk of dementia, for example. However, it has proven surprisingly difficult to find out the true impact of football heading, partly because mild brain injury is notoriously difficult to detect....

The U.S. Senate has passed Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s bill to make daylight saving time (DST) permanent across the country, which would end the practice of turning clocks forward in spring and back in autumn. For the Sunshine Protection Act to become law, the House of Representatives would need to approve it, and President Joe Biden would have to sign it, but the Senate passed the measure unanimously, signaling strong legislative support....

BISMARCK, N.D.—Donald Trump stopped in this hardscrabble Midwestern town yesterday to pitch his vision for an American future—one in which fossil fuel production explodes across public lands and Americans “share the riches.” The end result: lower taxes, fewer energy regulations and a rush of new funding for infrastructure projects. In a nearly hourlong speech marking the first major energy policy address of his campaign, the Republican presidential nominee pledged to expand oil and gas production, “cancel” the Paris global warming accord and roll back President Obama’s executive actions on climate change....