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Two weeks ago, Scientific American asked for your help in grading the presidential candidates on their answers to 20 questions about various aspects of scientific endeavor. The questions were refined by a group of scientific institutions representing more than 10 million scientists and engineers, with nonprofit organization ScienceDebate.org as the facilitator. We received nearly two dozen responses from readers, most of whom not only evaluated the candidates’ responses but provided detailed explanations for their ratings....

Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease specialist, was standing with a group of physicians outside the doors of the intensive care unit at Plainview Hospital on Long Island, N.Y., in late February. Layered in protective gowns, masks, and gloves and standing six feet apart to maintain social distancing, the doctors swapped stories about their COVID-19 patients. Griffin brought up a disturbing trend: Many of his patients seemed on their way to recovery but then relapsed into severe respiratory distress....

How has the human brain evolved over the years? —Emma Schachner, Salt Lake City John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, answers: Humans are known for sporting big brains. On average, the size of primates’ brains is nearly double what is expected for mammals of the same body size. Across nearly seven million years, the human brain has tripled in size, with most of this growth occurring in the past two million years....

Dear EarthTalk: I want to start an organic vegetable garden in my yard and I would like to know how to combine crops to make better use of time and space. – Val Thomason, Denton, TX Most commercial farms concentrate on growing a few select crops to supply a wide variety of customers, but gardening at home is a different story entirely. Most backyard food gardeners are looking to augment their family’s diet with a variety of seasonal fruits, vegetables and herbs throughout the growing season....

HUMANITY’S GROUND ZERO A massive new genetic study may have zeroed in on humanity’s starting point. By analyzing genetic sequences from 121 populations in Africa, 60 non-African populations and four African-American populations, researchers traced Africans back to 14 ancestral clusters originating at 12.5 degrees east latitude and 17.5 degrees south longitude, near the border of modern-day Angola and Namibia. Besides offering a far more specific understanding of human migrations, the study, in the May 22 Science, also promotes a better understanding of health and disease in many of these populations....

See what’s new in tech with our on-the-ground reports from the 2013 International CES, the annual industry showcase for the latest and greatest additions to the world of consumer technology. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Preview: Apps Replace Operating Systems Qualcomm Kicks Off CES with Superfast Snapdragon Mobile Processors (Endorsed by NASCAR, Big Bird and Captain Kirk) Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking’s Speech as His Condition Deteriorates 10 Technologies That Turned Our Heads: 2013 CES in Pictures [Slide Show]...

By Philip Ball A pianist plays a series of notes, and the woman echoes them on a computerized music system. The woman then goes on to play a simple improvised melody over a looped backing track. It doesn’t sound like much of a musical challenge – except that the woman is paralyzed after a stroke, and can make only eye, facial and slight head movements. She is making the music purely by thinking....

Editor’s Note (9/4/20): Six months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, this story is being republished as a reminder of the many things scientists have learned about the disease and how it spreads. We’re in a terrifying and confusing pandemic, with new and sometimes conflicting information about COVID-19 emerging all the time. In the early days, a lot of public health advice was based on what we knew about previous disease outbreaks....

Key concepts Technology Cybersecurity Internet safety Privacy Introduction Do you have your own email or other online account? If so, you probably use a password to log in. How did you pick your password? Is it something that might be easy for someone else to guess, like the name of your pet? This fun activity will teach you about password security and how to pick a good password. Background Imagine a suitcase lock with three number wheels on it....

Faced with a changing world order and buffeted by a slew of political crises and terrorist attacks, the historically civilian European Union is bolstering its military capabilities. And that means making its first major investment in military research. On 1 December, the European Parliament approved a €25-million ($26-million) fund dedicated to military research. It will form part of a proposed broader European Defense Fund, aimed at making military innovation more efficient and enlarging Europe’s industrial defense base....

The Changing Arctic Landscape by Ken D. Tape. University of Alaska Press, 2010 Photographer Ken D. Tape pairs old and new images of sites in northern Alaska to document the impact of climate change on the Arctic. EXCERPT The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 Every year malaria infects more than 500 million people; every 30 seconds someone dies from it....

Reprinted from Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain, by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga. Copyright © 2013, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Used with permission of the publisher The MIT Press. See a previous excerpt on the famous Borges story, Funes the Memorious. Technological innovations developed at UCLA (mostly having to do with the design of the electrodes) have resulted in recordings that allow us to see the activity of individual neurons in the human brain....

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — Made In Space just took another step toward its goal of building telescopes and other large structures off Earth. A 3D printer built by the California-based company churned out multiple polymer-alloy objects — the largest of which was a 33.5-inch-long (85 centimeters) beam — during a 24-day test inside a thermal vacuum chamber (TVAC) here in Silicon Valley at NASA’s Ames Research Center in June. The milestone marks the first time a 3D printer has created “extended structures” in a space-like environment, Made In Space representatives said here Thursday (Aug....

The Ponzi scheme has been a recurring fixture of economic life in rich and poor nations at least since the 19th century, creating a few millionaires and ruining the lives of millions. Yet most people have only a vague idea of what they are, which may explain why so many continue to fall for their strange and almost mystical allure. This topic, of course, has acquired a certain urgency because of the recent global financial crisis and headlines about the Bernard Madoff scandal, the biggest ever Ponzi scam, which occurred at the height of the turmoil....

The Justice Department yesterday filed a multibillion-dollar civil lawsuit against Volkswagen and five of its subsidiaries, including Audi and Porsche, related to the VW software that allowed its diesels to pass emission tests but release an unsafe amount of harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) when driven under real-world conditions. The department requested that the court enforce injunctions to stop the sale of Volkswagens in the United States and levy financial damages against the company of potentially more than $100,000 per vehicle....

Ed Rybicki, a virologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, answers: Tracing the origins of viruses is difficult because they don’t leave fossils and because of the tricks they use to make copies of themselves within the cells they’ve invaded. Some viruses even have the ability to stitch their own genes into those of the cells they infect, which means studying their ancestry requires untangling it from the history of their hosts and other organisms....

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Volume 205, Number 6 of Scientific American in December 1961. People who travel abroad seem to enjoy sending back reports on what people are like in various countries they visit. A variety of national stereotypes is part and parcel of popular knowledge. Italians are said to be “volatile,” Germans “hard-working,” the Dutch “clean,” the Swiss “neat,” the English “reserved,” and so on. The habit of making generalizations about national groups is not a modern invention....

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (There is a “very low risk” of further international spread of Zika virus as result of the Olympic Games to be held in Brazil, the heart of the current outbreak linked to birth defects, World Health Organization experts said on Tuesday. The WHO’s Emergency Committee on Zika reaffirmed its previous advice that there should be “no general restrictions on travel and trade with countries, areas and/or territories” with Zika transmission including cities in Brazil hosting the Olympics that start on Aug....

An admitted affair has crumbled the career of CIA Director David Petraeus, prompting the evergreen question: Why do people with so much to lose risk it all for sex? In the last few years alone, several public figures, from former Rep. Anthony Weiner to action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have admitted to straying from their marital vows. In Petraeus’ case, a miscalculation of risk may have contributed to the decision to cheat, psychologists say....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As a major U.N. climate conference gets underway on Oct. 31, 2021, you’ll be hearing a lot of technical terms tossed around: mitigation, carbon neutral, sustainable development. The language can feel overwhelming. “It sounds like you’re talking over people,” one person said of the terminology during a recent study colleagues and I conducted through the USC Dornsife Public Exchange....