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Society always sustained itself locally, until the industrial revolution, when an inexorable march began toward bigger, centralized economies. In Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben says relentless growth is now ruining the globe; maintenance of wealth and resources, instead of expansion, must be society’s new driver, or it will perish. Here staff editor Mark Fischetti questions his assertions. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Your basic message is that humankind must give up growth as its modus operandi....

Anyone who has spent even a little time with an autistic boy or girl soon becomes familiar with the behaviors that set these children apart: lack of eye contact, trouble verbalizing, overreacting or underreacting to activities around them, difficulty in expressing their feelings and in understanding the emotions of others. But how do parents and doctors know if a baby, who is too immature to be gauged on any of these traits, has autism?...

At the heart of a galaxy 3.5 billion light-years away, a black hole may be careening at an insane speed around another one 10 times its size. With less than the length of our solar system separating them, this possible binary black hole system looks to be the closest pair ever spotted, suggesting the two black holes might be on a collision course that would unleash ripples throughout the fabric of spacetime and help researchers understand how galaxies combine....

Imagine a mesh that instead of letting water in repelled it so much that a life preserver made from it would support a horse. Scientists at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China created such a mesh out of copper wires 200 microns thick and pores about that size or smaller. They dunked the lattice first in silver nitrate solution and then in acid, which deposited the silver onto the copper as leaflike structures seven microns high....

Tujiza Uwituze worked hard and ranked near the top of her class in her Rwandan secondary school, but her education was poor by international standards. She had instructors who made her memorize and regurgitate information, and the school she attended had no computers for her to use. As a result, Uwituze’s English is imperfect, and her computer skills are weak. She lives with a great-uncle in Kigali and has $75 in savings....

The top U.S. nuclear regulator, Gregory Jaczko, gave a dire assessment of Japan’s nuclear crisis yesterday, saying that lethal radiation from uncovered spent fuel above one of the reactors could force emergency workers to abandon their fight to prevent meltdowns of damaged reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said his staff in Tokyo had been told by Japanese utility officials that cooling water that normally covers spent fuel was nearly or totally gone from an uncovered concrete pool above reactor Unit 4....

Two treaties that would govern most of the world’s trade—and change how nations across the globe use scientific evidence to craft regulations—inched closer to fruition this week. On May 22, the US Senate approved legislation that could speed up approval of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Public attention has focused on the economic impact of the treaties: TTIP is between the United States and the European Union (EU) and the TPP is between a variety of North American and Asian nations (including the United States, Mexico, Japan, Australia and Malaysia, but not China or India) whose economies together account for around 60% of the world’s gross domestic product....

“Despite widespread expectations of yet another increase, our analysis shows that in fact CO2 emissions, carbon emissions last year, stopped growing,” Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said in a video posted to Twitter. After noting more work needed to be done, he expressed hope that “we all remember 2019 as a definitive peak in global emissions." Climate analysts are less sanguine. IEA’s findings supported a trend found in other recent reports: that a sharp drop in coal generation was responsible for lower emissions in the United States and Europe—and that everywhere else the picture looked bleak....

Our brand-new family budget is my best friend—and my nemesis. It has allowed me to work less so I can have time to pick up our kindergartner from school and cook dinners for my family, which I love. But it also forces me to go without things that I want, which I don’t love. In fact, I hate it. I’ve been spoiled too long by a professional job, a two-income marriage, and our collective culture of credit cards and mass consumption....

Mental imagery might help you “find a happy place” in more ways than one: it can actually hasten recovery from surgery, according to two recent studies. In the first study, people who had undergone surgery to repair the anterior cruciate ligament of the knee (ACL) were randomly assigned to one of two groups. All participants received standard rehabilitation during the six months after surgery, but one group also practiced guided imagery while recovering....

Microplastics pollution is everywhere. From your toothbrush and your drinking glass to the packaging on your food and the protective case on your phone, think about all of the times in just a day that you use plastic. Since we began mass producing plastics in the 1940s, somewhere around 8.3 billion tons of plastic has been produced and, as of an estimate done in 2015, 6.3 billion tons—so, near 80%—of that has been tossed into landfills....

In Augusta, Maine, an old paper mill that operated for more than a century will be turned into a new hotel and conference center. In Chicago, soil and ground water polluted with dry-cleaning solvents will be cleaned up to make room for a new library in a poor neighborhood. On an Indian reservation in Arizona, a contaminated tanning factory will be turned into a new industrial park, perhaps one that makes solar panels....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In a matter of hours, the NHS was effectively placed on lockdown with computer systems being held ransom and further machines powered down to prevent the spread of malware. Critical patient information has been inaccessible and several hospitals urged people to avoid accident and emergency departments, except in cases of real emergencies. Ransomware is the form of computer malware that has infected the NHS....

The revolutionary planet-hunting activities of NASA’s prolific Kepler space telescope have come to an end. NASA has given up hope of restoring the Kepler spacecraft to full health and is now attempting to determine what the observatory can accomplish in its compromised state, agency officials announced today (Aug. 15). “We are now moving on to the next phase of Kepler’s mission, because that’s what the data requires us to do,” Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, told reporters during a press conference today....

At first, it took a long time—up to a day—to make the cells cry. But, with experience and a little prodding, the researchers eventually made them weep in only half an hour. The tearful cultures, reported in Cell Stem Cell on 16 March, are the first tear-gland ‘organoids’—three-dimensional assemblages of cells that are designed to resemble miniature versions of organs. Organoids of the glands that produce tears could be used to study and eventually treat disorders that cause dry eyes, including an autoimmune condition called Sjögren’s syndrome....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Watt’s book, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind–or Destroy It. Cold, dark, silent. Close to death. Buried in the depths of a collapsed, illegal coal mine, Meng Xianchen and Meng Xianyou knew they had been given up for dead. The rescue effort had been abandoned. The two brothers could no longer hear the sound of mechanical diggers, drills and spades above their heads....

Fossil discoveries provide a thrilling, though only partial, picture of creatures that lived long ago. In this captivating collection of drawings and paintings, artist Gurche extrapolates the soft-tissue anatomy of various hominin specimens from their fossils, based on years of examining the relations of bone and tissue in modern apes and humans. Gurche aims for realism and never alters anatomy but lets art into his drawings in other ways—for example, an image of a Homo neanderthalensis skeleton that faithfully captures the bones’ arrangement exactly as they were discovered is overlaid with whimsical blue and magenta orbs representing the sediment in which the fossil was found....

Microscopic machines that swim through the bloodstream to deliver drugs or perform minor surgeries have been a dream of scientists for decades. In the past 15 years researchers have created micro-engine variants that rely on chemical reactions, magnetism or vibration for thrust—but they often motor around erratically. The main challenge is guiding them to where they are needed, says University of Hong Kong chemist Jinyao Tang. Tang and his team have made progress on that front with a micro swimmer that can be smoothly and precisely steered with the help of light....

Caenorhabditis elegans would make an ace fighter pilot. That’s because the roughly one-millimeter-long roundworm, a type of nematode that is widely used in biological studies, is remarkably adept at tolerating acceleration. Human pilots lose consciousness when they pull only 4 or 5 g’s (1 g is the force of gravity at Earth’s surface), but C. elegans emerges unscathed from 400,000 g’s, new research shows. This is an important benchmark; rocks have been theorized to experience similar forces when blasted off planet surfaces and into space by volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts....

My cousin Guillermo Cassinello Toscano was on the train that derailed in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, last week when it went around a bend at twice the speed limit. Cassinello heard a loud vibration and then a powerful bump and then found himself surrounded by bloody bodies in wagon number nine. Shaking, he escaped the wreckage through either a door or a hole in the train—he cannot recall—then sat amid the smoke and debris next to the track and began to cry....