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Introduced decades ago as the next step in antidepression pills, monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) soon fell out of favor. Extremely effective in some people, they caused potentially lethal blood pressure spikes in others because of interactions with food in the gut. That and the subsequent rise of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) put them on a shelf. But a new skin patch has resurrected the drugs from obscurity. The patch, Emsam, developed by Somerset Pharmaceuticals and marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, delivers an MAOI, selegiline, directly and continuously into the bloodstream, eliminating exposure to the gut and maximizing its effect in the brain....

Adapted from Do Fathers Matter? What Science Is Telling Us about the Parent We’ve Overlooked, by Paul Raeburn, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Paul Raeburn. All rights reserved. In 2011 administrators at Frayser High School in Memphis, Tenn., came to a disturbing realization. About one in five of its female students was either pregnant or had recently given birth. City officials disputed the exact figures, but they admitted that Frayser had a problem....

At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe’s First Seconds by Dan Hooper Princeton University Press, 2019 ($24.95) The first instants of the universe may seem like a blip on the cosmic time line, but this was probably the most important, formative era in history—and the most inscrutable. Scientists know precious little about what happened when the universe got its start: many cosmologists think space and time underwent an extremely rapid expansion called inflation, yet this theory raises as many questions as it answers....

FINALIST YEAR: 1963 HER FINALIST PROJECT: Measuring how many water molecules were attached to different salts WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when the National Science Foundation and other U.S. agencies began trying to improve science education in response to Sputnik, one beneficiary was Sarah Elgin. Her Salem, Ore., high school adopted the new standards and had all students do hands-on science. For Sarah and a few of her classmates, that meant projects identified by a professor at nearby Reed College in Portland, under the encouragement of Elgin’s chemistry teacher, George Birrell....

Her finalist year: 1944 Her finalist project: Growing plants with chemicals rather than soil What led to the project: Sister Julia Mary Deiters (born Rosemary Deiters) grew up in the 1930s in a family that liked to experiment. Though neither of her parents had been educated past eighth grade, her mother turned her kitchen into a culinary laboratory, testing recipe concepts on her kids before serving them to her bridge group....

Still, what’s wrong with dreaming, right? In one sense, nothing. But in another, it matters how people with a lot of money dream. Bezos, Allen and Musk all have talked about their love of science fiction as part of their inspiration for investing in space. Bezos spent his summers reading authors such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Allen so loved his boyhood science-fiction collection that when he discovered that his mother had sold his books, he had the entire collection re-created....

Many parents would like their children to master a second language, but few kids in this country do. Only 9 percent of adults in the U.S. are fluent in more than one language. In Europe that figure is closer to 50 percent. “The United States is a long way from being the multilingual society that so many of our economic competitors are,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a meeting on foreign-language education last December....

Dear EarthTalk: Aren’t environmental issues primarily about health? Detractors like to trivialize environmentalists as “tree huggers,” but the bottom line is that pollution makes us sick, right? Wouldn’t people care more if they had a better understanding of that?— Tim Douglas, Stowe, Vt. No doubt many of the ways we harm our environment come back to haunt us in the form of sickness and death. The realization that the pesticide-laced foods we eat, the smokestack-befouled air we breathe and the petrochemical-based products we use negatively affect our quality of life is a big part of the reason so many people have “gone green” in recent years....

One unintended side effect of Congress’s intense efforts to jump-start the U.S. economy is the threat of fraud. Earl Devaney, chair of a newly appointed federal watchdog agency, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, has warned that without precautionary measures, as much as 7 percent of the stimulus package will end up in the hands of bad actors. Apply Devaney’s math to the $31 billion being spent on science—by the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the Departments of Commerce and Energy, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) combined—and stimulus funds represent an unprecedented boost not only for science, but also, potentially, for science fraud....

It is late in the evening rush hour, typical stop-and-go traffic. Finally, there is a break; the tightly packed group around you is soon cruising together at 55 mph. Suddenly, you see brake lights flare up ahead. As you prepare to brake, you glance in the rearview mirror and see an alarming sight–a car closing way too fast on your rear fender. The teenage driver looks panicked, one hand clutching the steering wheel, the other hand clenching a cell phone....

It was still winter in Minnesota when state officials first heard about turkeys on a large farm that seemed to be a bit off. Some of the birds were unusually quiet, drank and ate little and seemed to have trouble moving. Within two weeks of exhibiting this odd behavior they were dying. The cause, laboratory tests soon confirmed, was H5N2, a mixed-origin avian flu that had never been seen in the U....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you’re anything like me, you don’t exactly love doing long division. Which is exactly why I avoid it as much as I can. Of course, one way to avoid doing division the old fashioned way with paper and pen is by using a calculator. Most of the time, that’s exactly what I do....

Since 2003 scientists have known that warm-blooded animals on calorie-restricted diets had lower core body temperatures and could live longer lives. Now, researchers at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., report in tomorrow’s issue of Science that solely by lowering the core body temperature of mice, they could extend the lives of their experimental subjects by as much as 20 percent. They accomplished this feat–conferring an extra three months of life to the animals, which typically live just over two years–without varying diet....

Compared with white American researchers, black American researchers are a third less likely to have an early-career National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funded, according to an NIH-commissioned study published August 18 in Science. It’s a thorough study, experts say, but it leaves one major question unanswered: “Why?” The difference persists even among black and white scientists who went to similar graduate schools, took part in the same NIH scientist training programs, have earned the same number of grants previously and have published the same number of scientific papers....

Marijuana consumption by Colorado high school students has dipped slightly since the state first permitted recreational cannabis use by adults, a new survey showed on Monday, contrary to concerns that legalization would increase pot use by teens. The biannual poll by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment also showed the percentage of high school students indulging in marijuana in Colorado was smaller than the national average among teens. According to the department, 21....

The Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine exploded 20 years ago, but the disaster will continue for another 60 years in the form of slow deaths from cancers. The accident released a plume that dropped radioactive particles throughout the Northern Hemisphere. No one has pinned down the expected toll–estimates range from thousands to tens of thousands, revealing disagreements in the way the figures should be calculated and limitations in current knowledge about radiation damage....

Europe has launched the first satellite of what is heralded as one of the most ambitious Earth-observation programs ever. On 3 April, a Soyuz rocket dispatched into orbit the Sentinel-1A probe, the first craft of a planned constellation of six Sentinel families set to be launched by the end of the decade. Together, the satellites will offer unprecedented long-term monitoring of the planet’s land, water and atmosphere The Sentinels will be the core of the €8....

If, like me, you were an avid reader of comic books during the 60s and 70s, you’ll probably remember a small advertisement that often ran on one of the back pages. Under the words “X-RAY GOGS,” the ad showed a boy wearing a pair of glasses with lightning bolts radiating from the lenses to the boy’s upraised hand, which looked like a skeleton’s. The text below the picture asked, “Ever seen the bones in your hand?...

As children, many of us learn about the wondrous process by which a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly. The story usually begins with a very hungry caterpillar hatching from an egg. The caterpillar, or what is more scientifically termed a larva, stuffs itself with leaves, growing plumper and longer through a series of molts in which it sheds its skin. One day, the caterpillar stops eating, hangs upside down from a twig or leaf and spins itself a silky cocoon or molts into a shiny chrysalis....

In his monumental series Cosmos, astronomer Carl Sagan famously said that we humans are “made of star stuff.” Dying stars are continually filling the universe with heavy elements, and the energy of the cosmos sparked life into existence on this planet. After billions of years, plants began to harvest sunlight directly, converting solar into chemical energy, and therefore all human life feeds on the output of stars. Those same elements that streamed through the vacuum of space and coalesced in the core of Earth also, it seems, created the conditions under which life can survive....