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Roboticists often copy nature, crafting humanoid robots for household chores, worm-style machines for crawling through tunnels and four-legged contraptions that look like cheetahs for running and leaping. But they usually design an animal-like robot body first and then train an AI to control it. In living creatures, though, the body and brain evolve together to tackle complex tasks. So some researchers are borrowing a page from nature’s playbook to design intelligent, adaptive robots....

By Dan Whitcomb LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Firefighters made progress on Thursday against a wildfire driven by Santa Ana winds that has charred more than 1,000 acres of drought-parched scrubland east of Los Angeles, threatening a wealthy community in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. The fire, which erupted on Wednesday morning at the Etiwanda Preserve north of the community of Rancho Cucamonga about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, was only about 10 percent contained as of Thursday morning....

In many places all over the world, a mask has become mandatory to slow down the spread of SARS-CoV-2. People wear one on the bus or train, during shopping trips or at doctor’s appointments. How does that practice change basic communication? Does a face covering impair social interaction? Facial expression and emotion researcher Ursula Hess, deputy dean for international affairs at the faculty of life sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin, provides some answers in this interview with Scientific American’s German-language sister publication Spektrum der Wissenschaft....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Officials investigating a huge explosion at a warehouse in Tianjin in China have discovered a store of 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide – more than 70 times the legal limit allowed. Cyanide has a particularly unpleasant reputation and finding it at a major disaster site is far from welcome. However, if officials act fast they should be able to limit its damaging effects....

Late summer in Egypt, around 2525 B.C., and the Nile is flooding. To a worker named Merrer, the deluge means it is time to bring stone to the site of Pharaoh Khufu’s pyramid. The journey from the quarry in Tura southeast of the port at Giza is just eight miles. But the heavy cargo of gleaming white limestone, which will form the outer layer of the monument, makes the crafts difficult to maneuver....

The ancestors of humans and sea slugs diverged more than a half billion years ago, but scientists have now unexpectedly found genes that are remarkably similar in the brains of both. These findings could help shed light on the evolution of the brain in the animal kingdom and the mechanisms of human disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. The sea slug Aplysia californica, a red, green or brown hermaphrodite that can grow up to 16 inches long, has the biggest brain cells, or neurons, in the animal kingdom, at up to a millimeter long....

MARIETTE DiCHRISTINA is editor in chief and senior vice president of Scientific American. She has been a journalist for more than 25 years. JOHN HOUTZ is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His books include The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hampton Press, 2002). JULIA CAMERON is an award-winning poet, playwright and filmmaker. Her book The Artist’s Way (Tarcher, 2002) has sold almost four million copies worldwide. She is also co-author of It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again (TarcherPerigee, 2016)....

Improving weather forecasts, predicting sea-level rise, and understanding ecosystem change top a new list of priorities for future US Earth-observing satellites. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released the much-anticipated report on 5 January. It is likely to shape the future of Earth-science missions at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Geological Survey for the next decade. More immediately, it provides scientists and agency leaders with ammunition to argue for Earth-observing research at a time when the White House and some members of Congress are looking to slash it....

A vaccine that protects against the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) has been shown to be effective in camels, a new study finds. The vaccine, which was developed by German scientists, reduces the amount of the virus found in the camels infected with the disease, according to the study. Camels are considered the primary host for the virus, said the study, published today (Dec. 17) in the journal Science....

Midterm elections are almost here. Most of the conversation concerns Congress and governorships, but some of the most critical and underappreciated races affect people’s day-to-day lives. Positions like township supervisor, school board member or county commissioner are some of the more than 500,000 state and municipal offices in the United States that oversee complex policy, including on science-related issues including climate change, health care and reproductive choice. State-level positions spend $3....

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its March 2012 National Overview report, confirming that March was more than just a month of scattered warmth–it shattered records across the U.S., becoming the only month ever recorded, except for January 2006, that had surpassed its record by such a large margin. According to NOAA, the average temperature across the U.S. was 8.6 degrees above the 20th century average. However, the report did not just reveal that certain parts of the U....

A strain of poliovirus that can sometimes cause paralysis has cropped up in the sewers of London and may be spreading among closely-linked individuals in the north and east regions of the city, the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) warned Wednesday (June 22). The UKHSA has launched an investigation to understand the scope of this spread and flag any suspected cases. In general, the virus poses an “extremely low” risk to the general public, but it does have the potential to spread in areas with patchy vaccine coverage, the agency advised....

Most people think of illness in a binary way: a patient is either sick or well. But scientists have found a more nuanced reality. “Looking beneath the data in medical records, at health information across millions of patients, we have found a large spectrum of disease and disease risk that can inform individualized treatment plans in a more sophisticated and tailored way than the ‘one size fits all’ paradigm of today,” says Eric Schadt, the founder and CEO of Sema4, a patient-centered predictive health company....

By Heidi LedfordWhen an obesity drug that he had helped to invent came up before a panel of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisers last week, physiologist Michael Cowley couldn’t bear to watch. “It’s like watching your favourite team,” says Cowley, director of the Monash Obesity and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia. “You worry that if you pay too much attention they’ll lose.“Many thought that Cowley’s drug, Contrave, didn’t stand a chance....

Computers generated a great deal of excitement in the 1950s when they began to beat humans at checkers and to prove math theorems. In the 1960s the hope grew that scientists might soon be able to replicate the human brain in hardware and software and that “artificial intelligence” would soon match human performance on any task. In 1967 Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who died earlier this year, proclaimed that the challenge of AI would be solved within a generation....

Key concepts Lens Magnifying glass Optics Light Introduction Have you ever studied an everyday object through a magnifying glass—and been amazed at what you could see? Or have you ever noticed, for example in a swimming pool, that an object that is sticking out of the water looks different just above and just below the surface? In this activity you will learn a little bit more about both of these observations....

Rex Tillerson, US president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the post of secretary of state, says that the United States should remain part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. “It’s important that the US maintain its seat at the table,” Tillerson told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during his confirmation hearing on January 11. The threat of global warming is real and “requires a global response”, he added. “No one country is going to solve this on its own....

A Halloween festival in Seoul, South Korea, resulted in a deadly crush on October 29. That Saturday night, tens of thousands of people converged on Itaewon—a district of the city that is known for its nightlife—until the crowd was so compact in many areas that people were unable to move. The tight conditions led to a dangerous surge of people through the sloping streets of Itaewon—especially one narrow alleyway. More than 150 people died, and more than 170 were injured....

Why do two things I like to eat sometimes taste so bad when eaten together? —R. Lange, Houston Biosciences professor Tim Jacob, who studies smell and taste at Cardiff University in Wales, mixes up an answer: Among the five tastes, salty, sweet and umami (meaty or savory) are appetitive, driving us toward essential nutrients, whereas bitter and sour are aversive, alerting us to potentially harmful substances. Mixing the aversive with the appetitive sends conflicting information to the brain, and confusion is what the senses are trying to avoid as they supply you with useful, lifesaving information....

While wildfires are commonplace in the world’s largest rainforest, scientists say last August alone saw about three times as many blazes as the previous year. In total, tens of thousands of fires were recorded across the region in 2019, according to Brazilian data. The fires smoldered for weeks, propelling thick plumes of smoke into the air—and pumping tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the process. This kind of devastation is likely to worsen in the coming decades, scientists say....