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Single-parent households are a fact of life. One in four children in the U.S. lives with only one parent, usually a single mom, according to census data. Yet a child without two committed parents need not face a disadvantage because of that fact. Distilling a large body of research down to its essentials reveals a few key factors. The most important elements of child rearing are not the identity or gender of the adults involved but the quality of care coming from those people, as well as its consistency over the years....

Most people have felt depressed or anxious, even if those feelings have never become debilitating. And how many times have you heard someone say, “I’m a little OCD”? Clearly, people intuitively think that most mental illnesses have a spectrum, ranging from mild to severe. Yet most people do not know what it feels like to hallucinate—to see or hear things that are not really there—or to have delusions, persistent notions that do not match reality....

By Keith Coffman DENVER (Reuters) - The Colorado county where a three-mile-wide mudslide roared through the Grand Mesa National Forest declared an emergency on Wednesday, after dangerous conditions prompted authorities to suspend a search for three ranchers presumed dead in the disaster. The slide occurred on Sunday outside the small town of Collbran, about 200 miles west of Denver. Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey said on Tuesday that it was unlikely the men survived, and that shifting ground and water buildup behind the vast debris field has made it hazardous for crews to enter the area....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. If you prefer to order your pizza without going through all the trouble of actually speaking, Pizza Hut has just the thing for you—“the world’s first subconscious menu.” You sit down, glance through the menu, and before you say anything or even make a conscious decision, the menu has figured out which toppings you’d like on your pizza and places your order....

Three weeks before Christmas, astronomers are opening one of their presents early. Inside is a most welcome gift—a vast catalogue of more than a billion stars in and around our galaxy, the most advanced of its kind ever made. Already this new trove is being put to use, with eager astronomers poring through its data, hoping to unlock some of our galaxy’s most intriguing secrets in a way never before possible....

As we continue to face episodic COVID surges globally, the U.S. government and its Centers for Disease Control need to focus on enhancing our systems for detecting the next highly infectious variant before we are caught unprepared once more. To do this, our government needs to invest in technology and fix current systemic inefficiencies to rapidly sequence the genetic information of COVID variants so that doctors and public health officials are better able to inform the public and strategize accordingly for implementing control measures....

The Pioneer 10 and 11 deep-space probes carry a plaque for the benefit of any aliens they might run into. On it is a line drawing of a man and a woman. Will it make any sense to its intended audience? Even if extraterrestrials notice the markings and recognize them as a picture, will they apprehend the 3-D figures? Many of the artistic conventions we take for granted had to be invented, and they reflect a specific cultural (let alone planetary) context....

Miriam Rossi, a professor of chemistry at Vassar College, provides the following explanation: Both diamond and graphite are made entirely out of carbon, as is the more recently discovered buckminsterfullerene (a discrete soccer-ball-shaped molecule containing carbon 60 atoms). The way the carbon atoms are arranged in space, however, is different for the three materials, making them allotropes of carbon. The differing properties of carbon and diamond arise from their distinct crystal structures....

Jeanne Calment outlived her daughter and grandson by decades, finally succumbing to natural causes at the ripe old age of 122. Calment, who was French and died almost two decades ago, is thought to be world’s longest living person. But if subsequent advances in medicine have lulled you into thinking that you might exceed this record, think again. An analysis of global demographic data published in Nature suggests that humans have a fixed shelf life, and that the odds of someone beating Calment’s record are low—although some scientists question this interpretation....

Nearly half of the states along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts received a poor rating from an insurance industry group that evaluated building codes and enforcement in hurricane-prone areas. Texas, Mississippi and Alabama—three of the states most vulnerable to hurricanes—received three of the lowest scores out of 18 states rated by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, an industry-funded research group. Texas received 34 out of 100 possible points....

Sensors originally designed to alert pilots of single-engine planes to the location of nearby aircraft are instead finding a military role locating unseen battle threats as far away as 40 kilometers. The basic technology—the single hot-wire anemometer—has been around for decades, measuring heat dissipated by air (or fluid) movement. A new technology from Dutch acoustics firm Microflown Technologies, BV, uses two far smaller heated wires to measure individual air particles affected by sound waves....

From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. What are the biggest emerging opportunities and threats the year ahead holds for efforts to conserve biodiversity? Nearly two dozen scientists, conservation professionals and future scanners recently came together to ask and answer that question as part of an annual “horizon scan” led by Cambridge University conservation biologist William Sutherland. The group narrowed a list of 89 issues to 15 emerging or anticipated trends that have a strong potential to benefit or harm living things but are not yet on the radar for most conservationists....

As the U.S. presidential campaign has highlighted, the more a person lies, the easier it seems to become. But politics is not the only realm where dishonesty abounds. In 1996 Bernard Bradstreet, co-chief executive of the technology company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence was sentenced to jail for fraud. His initial transgressions were relatively minor: To boost quarterly accounts he allowed sales that had not quite been closed to go on the books....

SEPTEMBER 20 We often refer to a strong sexual attraction as animal magnetism, but arousal involves more than just base instinct. At the Mind Science lecture series, psychologist Stephanie Ortigue will describe how desire depends on complex mental processing. Her talk, “The Consciousness of Desire,” will reveal the brain regions associated with longing and how they are influenced by mirror neurons—brain cells that fire when we either perform or observe an action....

Economic planners often build new roads in remote areas to promote urbanization and accommodate industries such as logging. The roads, though, bring not only economic development but also, it seems, diarrhea. Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues found that remote Ecuadorian villages had nearly one third as many cases of diarrhea than their more accessible counterparts. Diarrheal disease caused by Escherichia coli, rotavirus and the parasite Giardia spreads through contaminated food, water and by person-to-person contact....

Tucked between a boiled-away desert and a giant snowball, an alien world called TRAPPIST-1e may be the only habitable planet in a newly discovered batch of seven, according to a new climate model. When researchers announced the discovery of seven planets that closely orbit the cool red star TRAPPIST-1 in February, there was a rush to learn more about the little rocky worlds and find out if any might be habitable....

One of the pleasures of Scientific American, I’ve always thought, is that it offers armchair travelers a vicarious expedition to the exciting worlds uncovered through science. I reflected on that fact recently as I sat on the tarmac, my flight 23rd in line for takeoff at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. I was reading over this issue’s articles and again became absorbed by our cover story, “The First Americans,” by Heather Pringle....

Here’s a puzzle: A child pees in the shallow end of a pool and then swims to the deep end. Which end should you avoid? Conventional wisdom holds that the deep end would be safe (until the pool’s normal circulation mixed the contaminated water throughout). But according to new research—and old observations by Charles Darwin, the grandson of the more famous Charles Darwin—it would be wise to avoid most of the child’s path through the water....

On playing fields across the country, nervous trainers stand on the sidelines, hoping none of their players will sustain a head injury. After years of denial, organizations such as the National Football League are finally beginning to recognize the dangers of concussion. Although awareness of the issue has increased enormously, diagnosis remains difficult, relying exclusively on players’ subjective reports of symptoms such as blurred vision, dizziness, headache and nausea. At least two life sciences companies are now developing blood tests that can detect concussion more reliably and objectively, and a recent study suggests such tests may eventually be game-changers....

Beginning in the 1980s, the average weight of Americans began to soar, and by 2002, 31 percent were classified as obese. Although the reasons for this epidemic remain controversial, researchers have implicated at least four developments: The first is the decrease in energy expenditure throughout the 20th century, following the introduction of automobiles and the replacement of high-energy blue-collar work by low-energy office occupations. The second is the growing affluence of Americans, who could now afford more and better food....