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SO THESE TWO GUYS walk into a bar. No—this is a true story! One is a neuroscientist (yours truly), and the other is a writer for Scientific American Mind. (We’ll call him Bill.) We are at the recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta. A gentle bear of a man comes over, licking suds from his lips and praising the local brew with an authoritative German accent. As he raises his glass to the light to inspect the beer’s clarity, I think to myself, “This is my chance....

Turkey has set its eyes on the stars. Its President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has signed an executive order to form the country’s first official space agency. Scientists have welcomed the move and hope it will provide jobs and reduce brain drain even as they wonder about the feasibility of its ambitious goals. The agency is expected to develop technologies for rocket launches and space exploration, as well as to coordinate the space-related activities of the country’s other space-research centres, according to the order, signed on 13 December....

Mate is a traditional South American beverage drink that is brewed from the leaves and stems of the yerba mate plant, a tree that belongs to the holly family. It’s widely consumed in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, where the mate tree is indigenous. You’ll also find mate as an ingredient in energy drinks or in the herbal tea section of your local health food store. Fun fact: Technically, the word tea only applies to the leaves of the Camilla Sinensis or tea plant....

On Sunday, September 16, the sun did not rise above the horizon in the Arctic. Nevertheless enough of the sun’s heat had poured over the North Pole during the summer months to cause the largest loss of Arctic sea ice cover since satellite records began in the 1970s. The record low 3.41 million square kilometers of ice shattered the previous low—4.17 million square kilometers—set in 2007. All told, since 1979, the Arctic sea ice minimum extent has shrunk by more than 50 percent—and even greater amounts of ice have been lost in the corresponding thinning of the ice, according to the U....

Half a century after the US government sounded an influential alarm about the health dangers of smoking, the global rate of adults who smoke has declined and millions of smoking deaths have been prevented, report a batch of studies released today. “Tobacco control has been an extremely successful public health achievement,” says biostatistican Theodore Holford of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who is first author of one of the papers published today....

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote to approve the American Rescue Plan, the final step toward sending COVID-19 legislation to President Biden’s desk. As the Biden administration works with states and cities to implement the bill over the coming months, they shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to combat the pandemic’s companion public health crisis: gun violence. National progress on firearm safety has long proved elusive. But there are evidence-based strategies that can address the types of gun violence coronavirus has exacerbated—and President Biden should press states and cities to use funding from the American Rescue Plan to implement them....

Millions of galaxies shine in the night sky, most made visible by the combined light of their billions of stars. In a few, however, a pointlike region in the central core dwarfs the brightness of the rest of the galaxy. The details of such galactic dynamos are too small to be resolved even with the Hubble Space Telescope. Fortunately, debris from these colossal explosions–in the form of hot gas glowing at temperatures well in excess of a million degrees–sometimes appears outside the compact core, on scales that can be seen directly from Earth....

More than a month after the Philae spacecraft bounced to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, European Space Agency scientists still have not been able to figure out where it came to rest. The probe landed off-kilter on November 12. Knowing where Philae now lies is crucial to understand whether enough sunlight will reach its solar panels to recharge and awaken the dormant lander. The angle of sunlight will change in the coming months as the comet approaches the Sun....

In the space of four months Colorado goes from one extreme to another. If you’ve been following the news, you may have heard that over a period of about six days earlier this month, Colorado was visited by torrential rains. How torrential? Well, take Boulder, Colorado, for instance: as of last week, it had received more than 17 inches of rainfall in September [pdf] — that’s the most ever recorded for that city in a single month since record-keeping began in the 1890s....

LAS VEGAS—Facebook on Monday took a step into preventive medicine, rolling out a new tool to encourage users to get flu shots as well as appropriate cancer screenings and heart health tests. But the success of the new product may depend on whether the social media giant can regain consumers’ trust. The company is asking people to use its site to make and record decisions about their health care—such as logging completion of a cholesterol test—at a time when it is trying to contain the fallout from months of controversy around privacy, sharing of user data, and misinformation....

People with the inflammatory condition Crohn’s disease may have a higher level of a certain fungus in their gut, a new study finds. Scientists have known that gut bacteria may contribute to the development of Crohn’s, but the new study finds that this fungus may also play a role in the condition. The findings could lead to new treatments for people with the disease, who may have such symptoms as severe abdominal pain, weight loss, fatigue and diarrhea....

An investigational Alzheimer’s treatment from Eli Lilly failed to slow the progression of the memory-destroying disease in a late-stage trial, marking another setback in a field that has long bedeviled the drug industry. The injected therapy, called solanezumab, didn’t meaningfully beat a placebo in a study on more than 2,100 patients with mild to moderate forms of Alzheimer’s, Lilly said. This marks the third time Lilly’s treatment has missed the mark in a late-stage trial, and the company has abandoned any plans to submit it for Food and Drug Administration approval....

Negotiations over denuclearization of North Korea collapsed this morning after North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un insisted the United States lift all economic sanctions in return for any nuclear disarmament. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that talks with North Korea will soon resume, according to the Associated Press. However, before the Trump administration announced the lack of agreement, U.S. negotiators had already backed off the demand that Kim and his government allow access and transparency to the international community concerning their nuclear weapons program....

For the first time in decades the annual number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. is expected to surpass the annual count of automobile fatalities. In 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, the two were on par: motor vehicles killed 33,804 people, and firearms killed 33,636, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Firearm deaths and injuries have grown to pose a major public health problem, says Stephen Teret, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Law and the Public’s Health....

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? What is this ineffable, subjective stuff—this thing, substance, process, energy, soul, whatever—that you experience as the sounds and sights of life, as pain or as pleasure, as anger or as the nagging feeling at the back of your head that maybe you’re not meant for this job after all. The question of the nature of consciousness is at the heart of the ancient mind-body problem. How does subjective consciousness relate to the objective universe, to matter and energy?...

Centenarians—those who live past age 100—may help researchers find the key to living longer, healthier lives. The reason, say scientists who study this elite group: centenarians may possess genes that protect them from disease into old age. One in every 10,000 individuals in the U.S. reaches the age of 100. There are currently an estimated 60,000 centenarians in the U.S. with up to 70 beyond the age of 110. For the past decade, researchers have marveled at these folks who often live independently—and free of major disabilities—well into their 90s, if not longer....

Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Available on iPad, print, and digital formats. ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT • The Keystone XL pipeline is the only economical way to distribute oil from the Canadian tar sands to the U....

There is no shortage of theories about what may have happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Some depict the flight crew of the Boeing 777-200ER into heroes battling and eventually succumbing to an onboard fire. Others paint them as hijackers and kidnappers stealing off with a commercial aircraft and hundreds of hostages. Veracity of such speculation aside, they all point to one problem—the futility of tracking transoceanic aircraft across international borders when their data transmission systems and transponders cease to function....

First we detected them. Then we proved they came from space. Next we located the cosmic birthplace of one of them. Now we have located that of another—bringing humanity closer than ever to solving yet another mystery of the universe. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have, since their discovery a decade ago, confused and befuddled astronomers. These strange blasts of radio waves appear in the sky from all directions, and their origins remain mostly unknown....

A powerful signal has been spotted coming from the vicinity of a sunlike star, and now astronomers are trying to figure out what it means. In May 2015, researchers using a radio telescope in Russia detected a candidate SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal that seems to originate from HD 164595, a star system that lies about 94 light-years from Earth, the website Centauri Dreams reported over the weekend. The astronomers have not yet published a study about the detection; they plan to discuss it next month at the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, according to Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster, who wrote that one of the team members forwarded him the IAC presentation....