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Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum has a passion for insects—especially dragonflies, which he photographs in exquisite detail near his home in Connecticut. He captured this time-lapse video, below, of the metamorphosis of a common green darner dragonfly from a larval nymph. More of his photos can be found in the new large-format book Dragonflies: Magnificent Creatures of Water, Air and Land (Yale University Press, 2015), which we profile in Scientific American’s April issue....

Social insect colonies can achieve feats of astonishing complexity, like building termite hills. The lives of individual termites and the relationships between them are far from complicated, however: Each member of the group has its own strictly defined role, and unrest is virtually nonexistent as long as the queen is alive. A similar silent agreement governs the lives of mammal species such as mole rats. One pair makes babies and everybody else takes care of them, creating an incredibly stable, efficient and successful living arrangement....

I love Yellowstone National Park. I have visited countries as far east as Japan, followed the footsteps of Romans, looked up at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, experienced volcanoes from afar and close up, and touched glaciers. Yet I return to Yellowstone again and again, gazing at waterfalls and lakes but especially at the vivid rainbow colors of many of the park’s hot springs, geysers, mud pots and fumaroles. These colors draw me in....

CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the frontier of high-energy physics. The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan’s approval by an independent panel in March. Europe’s preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least €21 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab’s famed Large Hadron Collider....

By Sue-Lin Wong BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Tuesday rejected a plan by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to back out of a global climate change pact, saying a wise political leader should make policy in line with global trends, a rare comment on a foreign election. The world is moving towards balancing environmental protection and economic growth, China’s top climate change negotiator told reporters, in response to a query on how China would work with a Trump administration on climate change....

For more than 20 years scientists have known that the drugs we take, for maladies ranging from headaches to diabetes, eventually make their way into our waterways—where they can harm the ecosystem and potentially promote antibiotic resistance. But most research on pharmaceutical contaminants has been done in North America, Europe and China and has examined just a small subset of compounds. The studies also use a variety of sampling and analysis methods, making it hard to compare results....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the “Monsanto Protection Act” and why are environmentalists so upset about it?—Rita Redstone, Milwaukee The so-called Monsanto Protection Act is actually a provision (officially known as Section 735) within a recently passed Congressional spending bill, H.R. 933, which exempts biotech companies from litigation in regard to the making, selling and distribution of genetically engineered (GE) seeds and plants. President Obama signed the bill and its controversial rider into law in March 2013 much to the dismay of environmentalists....

The Pentagon’s research and development division, DARPA—the creative force behind the internet and GPS—retooled itself three years ago to create a new office dedicated to unraveling biology’s engineering secrets. The new Biological Technologies Office (BTO) has a mission to “harness the power of biological systems” and design new defense technology. Over the past year, with a budget of about $296 million, it has been exploring challenges including memory improvement, human–machine symbiosis and speeding up disease detection and response....

The recent blast in Tianjin port and other Chinese chemical plant accidents have prompted an overhaul of the country’s approach to safety amid accusations of corruption and mismanagement. On 12 August, a warehouse in Tianjin erupted in an explosive blaze that killed dozens of people, and damaged and destroyed property. The warehouse had, among other things, been storing 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate and 500 tonnes of potassium nitrate, as well as 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide and large quantities of calcium carbide....

When astronomers first peered at the cosmos in microwave light, they knew they had stumbled on a window into the universe’s earliest moments. After all, the cosmic microwave background—that hazy afterglow of the big bang released when the universe was a mere 380,000 years old—has allowed scientists to answer fundamental questions about where we came from. But microwave light has also raised an intriguing mystery closer to home. In 1996 astronomers noticed an inexplicable excess of microwaves emanating from our own galaxy....

There is an area of self-help devoted to advice on completing tasks, and the focus is generally on the positive: How to get organized, how to choose good goals, how to stay motivated, etc. Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, also wants to help you achieve your goals, but she begins with the negative. What are the psychological forces that send people off the rails? In Sidetracked, she argues that to succeed we first need to know our enemy, the often-unconscious factors that stop us from getting things done....

Extreme weather is expected to be an increasing part of our lives, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2011 alone the U.S. suffered 14 extreme weather events—from the tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., to Hurricane Irene’s flooding of the Northeast—that each caused more than $1 billion in damage. In an attempt to save more lives and livelihoods through improvements in forecasting extreme weather—as well to make preparations to cope with such events—the U....

In the mid-1980s scientists conducted a famous experiment in which they asked participants to try to avoid thinking of a white bear. Over the course of five minutes, the experimental subjects were to ring a bell if a white bear came to mind. They rang the bell more than once per minute on average. And later, when the same people were told to think of white bears, the animals came to mind more often than they did for a control group that was instructed to think about white bears from the outset....

By Bill Berkrot ORLANDO (Reuters) - Lowering blood pressure below a commonly used target dramatically reduced heart failure and risk of death in adults aged 50 and older in a large U.S. government-sponsored study, results that could lead to a change in treatment guidelines and medical practice. The data from the SPRINT trial presented on Monday had some potentially troubling side effects that researchers said need further analysis, but they felt the benefits outweighed the risk....

According to Eric K. Clemons, a professor of operations and systems management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, online ranking systems suffer from a number of inherent biases. The first is deceptively obvious: people who rate purchases have already made the purchase. Therefore, they are disposed to like the product. “I happen to love Larry Niven novels,” Clemons says. “So whenever Larry Niven has a novel out, I buy it....

In 2018, as back-to-back Hurricanes Florence and Michael threatened Chapel Hill, N.C., where I live and work, I faced a simple, binary decision like millions of others: Stay or go? Nowadays data science is the hottest thing around. Companies cannot hire enough practitioners. There are books and online courses, and many universities are launching some flavor of a data science degree or center. Classes can barely accommodate the demand. One would hope that this golden age would mean we can make better decisions....

In December 2003, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first flight of the Wright brothers, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Staying Aloft; What Does Keep Them Up There?” The point of the piece was a simple question: What keeps planes in the air? To answer it, the Times turned to John D. Anderson, Jr., curator of aerodynamics at the National Air and Space Museum and author of several textbooks in the field....

TABLE OF CONTENTS Filtering: Scientists and Hackers [Excerpt Part 1] Part 1 of the Spam book excerpt series Poisoning: The Reinvention of Spam [Excerpt Part 2] Part 2 of the Spam book excerpt series The Quantified Audience Content farms represent a “back to basics” approach to spamming reminiscent of 19th-century sweat shops The Botnets Meet the spambot ActiveAgent that crawled Web pages seeking out addresses to e-mail them preprogrammed text The Marketplace Enter the flourishing global casbah for spam supplies and malware Reprinted from Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, by Finn Brunton....

Nature often inspires engineering. Cicada wings, for example, have long tantalized researchers with their water-repellent and antimicrobial properties, which would be useful to replicate in manufactured products. But previous studies involved totally removing the wings’ surface chemicals, sometimes damaging the wings and giving an incomplete picture of how those chemicals work together with the wings’ structure. New research investigates substances coating cicada wings layer by layer, revealing a complex interplay between topography and chemistry....

A decade ago carnivore biologists identified a remote protected area in northern Laos, called Nam Et-Phou Louey, as the country’s probable last haven for wild tigers. To formally test this supposition, researchers set up camera traps in 2013 and quickly confirmed two tigers’ presence. But the success was short-lived: over their study’s four-year course, they never saw those or any other tigers again. This result, reported last October in Global Ecology and Conservation, confirms that tigers are now functionally extinct in Laos....