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MINING HASN’T CHANGED MUCH SINCE THE Bronze Age: to extract valuable metal from an ore, apply heat and a chemical agent such as charcoal. But this technique requires a lot of energy, which means that it is too expensive for ores with lower metal concentrations. Miners are increasingly turning to bacteria that can extract metals from such low-grade ores, cheaply and at ambient temperatures. Using the bacteria, a mining firm can extract up to 85 percent of a metal from ores with a metal concentration of less than 1 percent by simply seeding a waste heap with microbes and irrigating it with diluted acid....

When Amanda Gardner, an educator with two decades of experience, helped to start a new charter elementary and middle school outside of Seattle last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children insisted that these conspiracy fantasies were true. Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the issue....

Fishing boats have dragged nets across the seafloor in pursuit of bottom-feeding fish and crustaceans since the Middle Ages. In recent decades, motorized fishing fleets, powered by government subsidies, have taken heavier nets deeper and farther offshore. The annual haul from international waters in 2010 was reported to be worth more than $600 million. To see how bottom trawling is changing the ocean’s bottom, ecologist Antonio Pusceddu of the Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, and his team took seafloor sediment samples at trawled and untouched sites off Spain’s northeastern coast between 500 and 2,000 meters below the surface....

A note from the Editor in Chief: Scientific American is celebrating its 166th year. Given its history as the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., it’s probably no surprise that it has touched the lives and career paths of many readers—including the scientists who write articles for us and whose work we cover. So, as often happens, when I met Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, while we were serving as judges for the Google Science Fair, we got to chatting about Scientific American....

At the beginning of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a list of top 10 threats to Global Health. These threats ranged from climate change and non-communicable diseases, to antimicrobial resistance and vaccine hesitancy. The list also included HIV, dengue, weak primary care, fragile and vulnerable settings (e.g. regions with drought and conflict), Ebola, and threat of a global influenza pandemic. One underlying theme is the relevance of human behavior to many, if not all, of these threats....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s happening with wild populations of cheetahs, the fastest land animals on Earth? – Eduardo Ramirez, Braintree, MA Due to its plight in recent decades, the cheetah, which can reach speeds of 70 miles per hour, is considered one of the world’s most endangered species by the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). A hundred years ago some 100,000 wild cheetahs inhabited 44 or more countries throughout Africa and Asia....

Most people strictly adhere to moral rules—such as “thou shall not kill”—even when breaking them leads to a better outcome, such as sacrificing one person to save five. Is it just a bug in our ethical processing? New research points to one function of such rule following: we are more likely to trust those who abide by simple principles. In philosophical terminology, maximizing outcomes is called utilitarian, whereas prioritizing rights and duties is deontological....

Now that you are fully stocked up on toilet paper, you must be wondering what to do with the cardboard tubes inside the rolls. This is your opportunity to put your hoarded supplies to good use by blowing the minds of your socially distanced friends and family. So grab some leftover toilet paper tubes, a pair of scissors and a mirror for an experiment that will change your perspective. In the photograph, an arrow and its reflection point away from each other....

August 1961 Polymers and Manufacturing “Seven years have now passed since our laboratory in the Politecnico di Milano discovered ‘stereospecific’ catalytic processes for creating ‘stereoregular’ polymers from simple asymmetric hydrocarbon molecules such as those of propylene. The new stereoregular poly­prop­y­lene polymers produced by our methods, and by similar methods successfully developed by others, have been in large-scale production in the U.S. since early this year, following the completion last year of three major plants....

In a paper that deftly bridges the divide between the humanities and the sciences—C. P. Snow’s much-vaunted two cultures—researchers from the MIT Media Lab document the underlying dynamics of collective attention and memory, traced as a bi-exponential curve (a steep drop followed by a slow decline over time). The paper published on December 10 in Nature Human Behavior begins with a quotation from one of Pablo Neruda’s most famous poems, “Poema 20,” contrasting the vivid but often short-lived emotion of intense romantic love and its gradual fading from memory as the years pass: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long....

The 20 amino acids that make up the building blocks of a protein contain chemical bonds that vibrate at different frequencies. Markus Buehler, a materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coded that information, along with the intricate folding patterns of proteins, so that it could be represented as musical properties such as volume, speed and concurrent melodies (known in music theory as counterpoint). The researchers then took their work a major step further....

The field scabious is a multipetaled blue–sometimes purple–ball of a flower. It provides sustenance to a host of pollinators, but one bee–the scabious bee, or Andrena hattorfiana–relies exclusively on the plant’s bounty to feed her young. Such specialized matches are common for bees, whose size, shape, range and even breeding schedule can be influenced by the lifestyle of the paired plant. Now a new study shows that such bees and the plants that sustain them are declining in tandem–for reasons unknown....

President Biden is proposing an unprecedented program that would provide $358 million next year to help low-income people buy flood insurance and fortify their properties against flood damage. The program is included in the $6 trillion fiscal 2022 budget that Biden released Friday. It would mark one of the first times the federal government has targeted low-income property owners with flood assistance. Biden’s plan could address a major problem the United States faces as climate change intensifies flood damage: Millions of people do not have flood insurance and suffer huge financial losses when their homes are flooded....

Dear EarthTalk: Why are bed bugs a big issue right now? Where do they come from and what real harm do they do? Are there non-toxic ways of dealing with them? —Harper H., Newburyport, MA Bed bugs, tiny little rust-colored insects of the Cimicidae family, live by feeding on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded hosts. They get their name from their favorite habitat: mattresses (they like sofas and other cushy furniture, too)....

It will take years before there are enough electric cars and gas–electric hybrids on the road to put much of a dent in the output of the electrical grid. But once they do roll out en masse, these vehicles (and their drivers) will have to be smart about when they recharge so that utilities can avoid spikes in grid demand and drivers can avoid spikes in their electric bills. This puts carmakers and utility companies on the spot to develop a uniform technology that lets cars communicate with the grid, and vice versa....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Most living organisms—animals, plants, fungi, and even some types of bacteria—have an internal clock, a circadian clock that orchestrates the biochemical, physiological and behavioral functions in each cell according to a 24-hour day-night cycle. This clock regulates sleeping and waking, hormone levels, body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure, among hundreds of other factors....

To understand the 4.5 billion years of the earth’s past and predict what may happen to the planet and its inhabitants in the future, scientists across different disciplines think about divisions of geologic time such as epochs. These chapters of the earth’s history are associated with major climatic changes and the arrival or disappearance of species in the fossil record. The most recent epoch, the Holocene, began at the end of the last ice age, approximately 12,000 years ago....

Imbibing just a handful of beers a week is associated with long-term changes to a person’s brain, a new study finds — although the functional meaning of these changes is unclear. Why it matters: While it’s widely accepted that drinking too much is bad for you, conventional wisdom — and the government’s dietary guidelines — says that alcohol can be consumed in moderation. The US government defines that as one drink a day for women and two for men....

The FDA approved a new medicine Friday to reduce the complications associated with sickle cell disease, a rare blood disorder. The drug, Endari, is made by privately held Emmaus Medical and is the first new treatment for sickle cell disease to secure FDA approval in almost 20 years. However, the active ingredient in Endari—L-glutamine—is an old chemical that can be purchased over the counter, which could complicate Emmaus’s ability to obtain insurance coverage....

Adhering to social distancing guidelines, I placed the bag on the doorknob, knocked three times loudly, and quickly stepped back six feet Nothing. I knocked once again and placed my ear by the door. The faint sound of footsteps informed me that “Mr. Roberts” (a pseudonym) was making his way to the door, hindered by the shuffling gait caused by his Parkinson’s disease. He opened the door and thanked me for the meal, but as usual, did not opt to say goodbye immediately....