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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Hot weather has forced dozens of commercial flights to be canceled at airports in the Southwest this summer. This flight-disrupting heat is a warning sign. Climate change is projected to have far-reaching repercussions—including sea level rise inundating cities and shifting weather patterns causing long-term declines in agricultural yields. And there is evidence that it is beginning to affect the takeoff performance of commercial aircraft, with potential effects on airline costs....

AI to the Rescue? A group of University of Chicago researchers is investigating whether artificial intelligence could be used to automatically crank out bulk reviews that are convincing enough to be effective. Their latest experiment involved developing AI-based methods to generate phony Yelp restaurant evaluations. (Yelp is a popular crowdsourced Web site that has posted more than 135 million reviews covering about 2.8 million businesses since launching in July 2004). The researchers used a machine-learning technique known as deep learning to analyze letter and word patterns used in millions of existing Yelp reviews....

When Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego erupted in June 2018, it sent a billowing hot cloud of gas, ash and rock careening down the slope of the mountain. In the many smartphone videos of the eruption, the rush of debris often looks reassuringly distant—until suddenly it’s not. How such pyroclastic flows, as they are called, can travel so quickly has long baffled volcanologists and disaster planners alike, leaving communities in volcanically active areas at risk....

After a nail-biting 27 minutes, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) first-ever interplanetary mission has successfully reached orbit around Mars. The spacecraft, dubbed Hope, launched July 19, 2020, atop a Japanese H-IIA rocket, then spent seven months trekking to the Red Planet. Today (Feb. 9), Hope needed to fire its thrusters for nearly half an hour straight to slow down enough to slip into orbit around the Red Planet, from 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph (121,000 kph to 18,000 kph)....

How should humanity progress in the next two generations? Which challenges should we engage, in what order, and with how much sacrifice (if any) of comfort and liberty? There are probably as many distinct responses to these questions as there are thoughtful people on the planet. Not all answers are equally wise, of course, but none can be definitive either. These are ultimately questions about one’s moral values and personal preferences....

In today’s competitive job market, hopeful employees want to know what qualities lead one job candidate to prevail over dozens of other capable contenders. If we consider the recent appointment of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to the highest post in the Catholic Church, then humility, servility, and meekness may top the list. Numerous anecdotes about Pope Francis’ unassuming nature have surfaced since his selection, including stories of him rejecting a chauffeur-driven car and images of him washing the feet of women....

During an argument a few months ago, my husband, John, accused me of being a bad listener. “Who, me?” I thought. “I interview people for a living—all I do is listen!” Later, after I calmed down, I remembered that John is actually a pretty reasonable and insightful guy—if he says he’s not feeling listened to, maybe it really is me. So, for a second opinion, I texted someone who has known me for a really long time: “John says I don’t listen....

When tracking a hurricane, forecasters often show a map depicting a “cone of uncertainty.” It starts as a point—the hurricane’s current position—and widens into a swath of territory the storm might cross in the upcoming days. The most likely path is along the centerline of the cone, with the probability falling off toward the edges. The problem: many people misinterpret the cone as the size of the future storm. Researchers have found that the misunderstanding can be prevented if forecasters instead show a number of possible paths....

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told matter and energy. Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus....

If you are unfortunate enough to develop acute chest pain this winter, you will probably be assessed by a clinician who will order a battery of tests to determine if your symptoms result from pneumonia, bronchitis, heart disease or something else. These tests can not only yield a precise diagnosis, they ensure you will receive the appropriate treatment for your specific illness. If, however, you are unfortunate enough to have a psychotic episode this winter, the process of arriving at a diagnosis will be quite different....

August 14, 2003, was a typical warm day in the Midwest. But shortly after 2:00 p.m. several power lines in northern Ohio, sagging under the high current they were carrying, brushed against some overgrown trees and shut down. Such a disturbance usually sets off alarms in a local utility’s control room, where human operators work with controllers in neighboring regions to reroute power flows around the injury site. On this day, however, the alarm software failed, leaving local operators unaware of the problem....

Antiretroviral (ARV) drugs have transformed HIV infection from a death sentence to a manageable chronic illness for millions worldwide. Now, scientists are testing whether ARVs can be used as microbicides, taken orally or applied vaginally as a gel or foam to prevent the transmission of the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus. If ARVs are proved as effective as microbicides, they have the potential to dramatically curb HIV infection rates. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa where women, who comprise nearly 61 percent of the adults living with HIV there, are eager for products besides condoms that they can use to protect themselves against the disease....

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded today to Daniel Shechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Shechtman discovered what are called quasicrystals, a finding that fundamentally altered the understanding of solid matter. At an announcement event today in Stockholm, Sven Lidin of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described the atoms and clusters within a quasicrystal: “It is perfectly ordered, it is infinite—and yet it never repeats itself....

To most observers, the essence of intelligence is cleverness, a versatility in solving novel problems. Bertrand Russell once wryly noted: Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. Besides commenting on the scientific fashions of 1927, Russells remark illustrates the false dichotomy usually made between random trial and error (which intuitively seems unrelated to intelligent behavior) and insight....

Before 1968 no one in the U.S. could connect anything to the AT&T telephone system unless Western Electric, AT&T’s manufacturing arm, provided it. The Federal Communication Commission’s landmark “Carterfone” decision erased that policy and ignited an explosion of communications innovations, including faxes, fast modems, PBXs, burglar alarms, answering machines and phone mobility. Although AT&T no longer owned the whole pie, the slice that it kept became part of a far larger industry....

The fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center’s collapse on 9/11, the second of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans recently put the issue of disaster preparedness back in the headlines. But despite a growing body of research and experience, the best way to be ready for the mental health effects of disasters is still unclear. “This is a field that is just coming of age,” says Barbara Lopes Cardozo, a psychiatrist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....

A nonprofit foundation based in the Netherlands has launched a prototype for one of the most ambitious sea-cleaning projects yet. The innovative idea is a floating barrier that will gather the mass of plastic bits from bottles, bags, fishing nets and other trash that sloshes around in the oceans, growing every year. Once deployed, the extremely long barrier could eliminate the need for an army of boats to haul our garbage back to shore....

What if there were a cure for type 2 diabetes, but most patients couldn’t benefit from it? This is the question that motivated Johns Hopkins University gastroenterologist Ashish Nimgaonkar and his colleagues at the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design to found Glyscend, a biotechnology startup that is trying to develop an alternative to a costly and complicated therapeutic approach for the disease. Armed with funding from Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s World Without Disease QuickFire Challenge, Glyscend is now rapidly accelerating toward clinical testing of its novel diabetes treatment....

Religious belief may seem to be a unique psychological experience, but a growing body of research shows that thinking about religion is no different from thinking about secular things­—at least from the standpoint of the brain. In the first imaging study to compare religious and nonreligious thoughts, evaluating the truth of either type of statement was found to involve the same regions of the brain. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used functional MRI to evaluate brain activity in 15 devout Christians and 15 nonbelievers as the volunteers assessed the truth or falsity of a series of statements, some of which were religious (“angels exist”) and others nonreligious (“Alexander the Great was a very famous military ruler”)....

A version of an iconic experiment to confirm quantum theory has for the first time used the light of distant stars to bolster the case for a phenomenon that Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance”. Einstein disliked the notion that objects can share a mysterious connection across any distance of space, and scientists have spent the past 50 years trying to make sure that their results showing this quantum effect could not have been caused by more intuitive explanations....