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Chen-Bo Zhong is an assistant professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In recent years, he’s explored a wide variety of topics, from the benefits of relying on the unconscious to generate creative insights to the reasons people often use temperature metaphors (“icy stares,” “cold shoulders,” and so on) when describing acts of social rejection. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Zhong about his latest research....

As schools and universities closed across the country, the #ClassOf2020 challenge went viral, with graduates taking to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to mark the rite of passage online. Using the hashtag, they posted photographs of themselves in cap and gown, holding their diploma and surrounded by loved ones. Millions of people shared #ClassOf2020 images, which included smiling selfies taken in graduation regalia, proud parents hugging their children, fizzing bottles of champagne and tassels flying high above caps tossed in the air....

NASA is looking at a new way of studying Mars. Starting in the 2020s, scientists who participate in the agency’s Mars missions might no longer design and build their own highly specialized payloads to explore the red planet. Instead, planetary scientists could find themselves operating much as astronomers who use large telescopes do now: applying for time to use a spacecraft built with a generic suite of scientific instruments. The proposed change is spurred by NASA’s waning influence at Mars....

For infants with cerebral palsy, crawling can be a challenge. The children, who suffer from brain damage that impairs muscle control, frequently give up trying to master moving across the floor. In turn, the brain stops building and reinforcing connections involved in developing motor skills and the ability to orient oneself in space, leading to further problems with movement later in life, says Thubi Kolobe, a physical therapist and researcher at the University of Oklahoma....

Dear EarthTalk: Apparently boxed wine (instead of bottled) is becoming all the rage for environmental reasons. What are the eco-benefits of boxed wine over bottled? —Justin J., Los Angeles, CA With more and more wineries offering organic varieties to lower their eco-footprint, it’s no surprise that they’re looking at the environmental impacts of their packaging as well. The making of conventional glass bottles (and the corks that cap them) uses significant quantities of natural resources and generates considerable pollution....

(Reuters) - Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf on Thursday signed an executive order reinstating a moratorium on new leases for oil and natural gas development in state parks and forests. The move restores the ban lifted by his predecessor, Tom Corbett, a Republican. Officials in Pennsylvania were not immediately available to say how much gas and oil energy companies produce from state forest and park land. Wolf, a Democrat, generally supports fracking, but called in his inaugural speech this month for it to be done safely with less impact on the environment....

In “Errors in the Machine,” Zaira Nazario discusses techniques to correct bugs in quantum computers faster than they can build up. As an early read-in mode (RIM) loader toggler of the PDP-5 minicomputer, which was designed for us at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario 60-odd years ago, I feel like I’ve stepped into Doctor Who’s time machine when reading Nazario’s beautiful presentation. Along these lines, is it possible to separate the entangled qubits physically so that one has two entangled quantum computers?...

Every year millions of monarch butterflies migrate from the northeastern U.S. and Canada to the mountain forests of Mexico’s central highlands. In breathtaking swarms, they seek warmer lands where milkweed grows and they can mate—an annual pilgrimage spanning upward of 2,500 miles. The new film Son of Monarchs, starring Tenoch Huerta of Narcos: Mexico fame and directed by French-Venezuelan biologist and filmmaker Alexis Gambis, is set against the backdrop of this great wildlife migration....

In an impossible figure, seemingly real objects—or parts of objects—form geometrical relations that physically cannot happen. The artist M.C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams, whereas mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle and visual scientist Dejan TodoroviTodorovi created an Elusive Arch that won him Third Prize of the 2005 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. These effects challenge our hard-earned perception that the world around us follows certain, inviolable rules....

Antimatter may seem like the stuff of science fiction—especially because scarcely any of it can be seen in our universe, despite physicists’ best theories suggesting antimatter should have arisen in equal proportion to normal matter during the big bang. But researchers do regularly produce particles of antimatter in their experiments, and they have the inklings of an explanation for its cosmic absence: Whenever antimatter and normal matter meet, they mutually annihilate in a burst of energy....

A mere 100 facilities, out of 20,000, produced one third of U.S. industry’s toxic air pollution in 2014. Another 100 released one third of industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, among 7,000 installations that discharge the gas. And according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity that created the rankings, 22 “super-polluter” sites appeared on both lists (noted below). Many are coal-fired power plants, and some rank high because they are very large....

Parents anticipate sex differences from the first prenatal ultrasound but then seem amazed when their son goes gaga over trucks or their daughter will wear nothing but pink. Boys and girls are obviously different, and in many cases the gaps between them seem stark. But stereotypes do not always hold up to scientific scrutiny. Are boys really more aggressive and girls really more empathetic—or do we just see what we expect in them?...

Andrew Bryant, a therapist based in Tacoma, Washington, felt helpless the first time climate change came up in his office. It was 2016, and a client was agonizing over whether to have a baby. His partner wanted one, but the young man couldn’t stop envisioning this hypothetical child growing up in an apocalyptic, climate-changed world. Bryant was used to guiding people through their relationship conflicts, anxieties about the future, and life-changing decisions....

On Valentine’s Day, Indonesia’s Mount Kelud blew its top and coated villages up to 500 kilometers away with ash. At the same time, the eruption injected a small but consequential amount of sulfur dioxide 28 kilometers up into the stratosphere. Tiny droplets of sulfuric acid then reflected away incoming sunlight, helping to cool the planet. Such “small” eruptions—along with others at places like Manam, Soufrière Hills, Jebel at Tair and Eyjafjallajökull, to name a few of the 17 between 2000 and 2012—have helped slow the pace of global warming, according to work published in Nature Geoscience....

Think back to years past. When you were a kid, you most likely had more friends than you do now. There were probably a lot of children on the playground you considered a friend, but not all of these friendships were very deep. As you grew up, your friendship circle most likely grew smaller. Instead of having many superficial relationships, you now have just a few really important friendships. This is normal....

Third in a three-part series. KANGERLUSSUAQ, Greenland—In her knitted ski hat, parka and hiking boots, Åsa Rennermalm doesn’t look like an accountant—or a plumber. But the Rutgers University hydrologist draws on both disciplines as she works at the southwestern edge of Greenland’s vast ice sheet. She’s spent the past four years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: When Greenland’s ice melts, where does the water go? “Satellites show the surface of the ice is melting and the volume of ice is decreasing,” Rennermalm says....

It’s tempting to listen to women’s magazines and believe female orgasms are a small pleasure to make up for periods and pregnancy, what they might call the raw end of Darwin’s deal. But a study published Monday shows that as mammals developed from solitary creatures to societal ones, ovulation became more automatic, and both the orgasm and the clitoris lost their reproductive roles. Why it matters: In some mammals, sex stimulates hormone release and is required for ovulation....

The minute Michael Dawson-Haggerty burst into my office, clad in a blackened lime-green welding jacket and wearing a big smile, I knew he and his partner had won. Their test: weld a metal space frame for a Humvee—a military vehicle ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan—faster than a team of experts with decades of experience. This was Dawson-Haggerty’s first professional job—he had just completed his master’s degree and joined the engineering staff at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute—and it is fair to say that he had been a little nervous as he got started....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Boston Dynamic’s dog-like SpotMini robot is to go on sale in 2019. This cute and uncannily realistic canine-bot is just one of many robots that are inspired by the natural world. Human engineers increasingly look to living systems for clues to a good design, whether it be emulating an insect brain’s ability to navigate or building robots with bacterial stomachs that produce electricity....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has an electric car problem. Federal law requires that new cars be sold with a label that includes the vehicle’s fuel efficiency as measured in miles per gallon. Yet beginning next year, gallons will start to give way to watts, prompting the EPA to redesign their window stickers. In an attempt to smooth the transition, the EPA has adopted a new unit called miles per gallon of gasoline-equivalent (MPGe)....