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CONGRESSIONAL AMATEURS In “Put Science Back in Congress” [Science Agenda], the editors advocate for a nonbinding science advisory board to educate Congress on scientific issues. The problem, however, is much deeper. Having congressional committees such as the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology composed of nonscientists is in itself quite ridiculous. And most of the people on them don’t even want to be advised about science. They surely wouldn’t take any advice seriously....

Shakespeare wrote in his tragic play Macbeth that slumber is a “Balm of hurt minds” and “Chief nourisher in life’s feast.” In this issue’s cover story, sleep researcher Robert Stickgold explains the many ways those statements are far more than pretty turns of phrase. In fact, it is physiologically vital that we spend about a third of our lives unconscious. Dozing, Stickgold writes, is involved in a “multitude of biological processes—from the inner workings of the immune system to proper hormonal balance, to emotional and psychiatric health, to learning and memory, to the clearance of toxins from the brain....

The sun can induce cancerous DNA damage in skin cells even after it sets, according to a new study (Science 2015, DOI: 10.1126/science.1256022). An international team of scientists has found that radical species generated by ultraviolet light can cause damage to DNA long after irradiation stops. They do this with the aid of compounds derived from melanin, a pigment known to shield mammals from burns and other harmful UV effects. The melanin-assisted process creates lesions known as cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers in DNA, which can lead to mutations that cause melanoma, a type of skin cancer....

Key concepts Sound Waves Hearing From National Science Education Standards: Transfer of energy Introduction Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone so far away that you couldn’t really hear each other? Without yelling, it’s hard to have a conversation over long distances. So these days it’s nice to be able to use telephones to talk with someone—whether he or she is 100 yards or 100 miles away. Back before there were cell phones or even cordless phones, all telephones were hooked up to wires that helped to carry the sound of a person’s voice (via an electric signal)....

The world is an unpredictable place. But the brain has evolved a way to cope with the everyday uncertainties it encounters—it doesn’t present us with many of them, but instead resolves them as a realistic model of the world. The body’s central controller predicts every contingency, using its stored database of past experiences, to minimize the element of surprise. Take vision, for example: We rarely see objects in their entirety but our brains fill in the gaps to make a best guess at what we are seeing—and these predictions are usually an accurate reflection of reality....

People near Albany, N.Y., began noticing the strange bat behavior at least two years ago: Droves of the normally nocturnal mammals were seen flying around on brisk winter days when they should have been hibernating in caves for the season. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) teamed up with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to investigate and made an alarming discovery: Bat populations throughout northeastern New York State, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont had thinned by as much as 97 percent in area bat caves and emaciated survivors were found hanging near cave entrances where it is typically too cold for them to stay the entire winter....

“Could switching to Geico really save you 15 percent or more on car insurance? Was Abe Lincoln honest?” So intones the Geico commercial spokesperson, followed by faux vintage film footage of Mary Lincoln asking her husband, “Does this dress make my backside look big?” Honest Abe squirms and shifts, then hesitates and, while holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart, finally mutters, “Perhaps a bit,” causing his wife to spin on her heels and exit in a huff....

CLIMATEWIRE | Millions of acres of coastal land will be in flood zones by midcentury, potentially costing communities huge sums in lost property taxes as developed land becomes uninhabitable, an analysis released Thursday shows. Research nonprofit Climate Central conducted a unique study of sea-level rise, projecting the amount of real estate, buildings and tax revenue that hundreds of coastal counties will lose as tides encroach on developed areas. It found that an estimated 4....

At the end of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere transitioned rapidly into a new climate state. Glaciers retreated and the world warmed, and by 11,500 years ago, the planet had entered the constant summer of today’s Holocene Epoch. Right before this shift, there may have been a warning sign that the planet was hitting a tipping point into a warmer state, finds a new study published yesterday in the journal Science....

A years-long spat between asteroid hunters at NASA and multimillionaire entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold has finally made it past peer review. Since 2016, Myhrvold has argued that there are fatal flaws in the data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission to hunt space rocks. NEOWISE has spotted and studied at least 158,000 asteroids in infrared wavelengths—more than any other project in history—and its results underpin many recent asteroid studies. NASA is working to develop a follow-up space telescope that would use the same scientific approach to fulfil a mandate from the US Congress to discover nearly all of the space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth....

In this year’s NBA playoffs the Dallas Mavericks displayed an uncanny ability to come from behind and win. Uncanny because to do so implies a defiance of expectation – teams that are ahead should, obviously, have a greater chance of winning a game. However, new research from Jonah Berger and Devin Pope suggests that once we account for some basic psychological principles of motivation, the odds of winning might, in some cases, be reversed....

A few times a year, a visitor from deep space swings by Earth’s neighborhood. Usually coming in peace, these interlopers pass by close enough to be seen, then continue on their way. The uninvited guests are comets, streaky globules of ice and dust dislodged from one of their usual haunts far from the sun and planets: the Oort cloud. Named for Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who hypothesized its existence in 1950, the theorized cloud is thought to contain billions or even trillions of comets that range out a few thousand to tens of thousands of times as far from the sun as Earth is....

Think of a biological cell as a tiny programmable device that happens to be alive, and you have the basic idea behind an emerging field called synthetic biology. Instead of trying to unravel the complexities of natural biological systems, “synthetic biologists” ultimately want to build highly predictable, simple living cells from scratch, using off-the-shelf parts. No one has done that just yet, but a growing number of scientists and engineers are now taking the first steps toward manufacturing life-forms to order....

This question has attracted scientific research for more than a century. In fact, the first empirical study of this issue was published in 1835. Thus, I can offer a confident answer: not quite! At least not if creativity is assessed by productivity or by making original and valuable contributions to fields such as science and art. By that measure, output first increases in our mid-20s, climaxes around our late 30s or early 40s, and then undergoes a slow decline as we age....

Bad luck. Terrible misfortune. That’s what we think when we hear about a perfectly healthy child who suddenly dies of influenza, a virus most of us can shake off. But what if it isn’t luck? What if this kind of deadly infection turns out to be, well, genetic? Odd as that sounds, there is a growing body of research that supports the idea. Much of it has been led by Jean-Laurent Casanova, a pediatric immunologist and geneticist at the Rockefeller University....

Ceniya Harris, age nine, of Boston should be a very sick little girl. Both her parents unknowingly passed her a copy of the genetic mutation for sickle-cell disease, a debilitating and sometimes fatal blood disorder. With a double dose of the mutant gene, Ceniya’s body produces a defective kind of hemoglobin—the molecule in red blood cells that takes oxygen from the lungs and releases it into tissues throughout the body. The flawed hemoglobin molecules can deform the normally round blood cells into a crescent, or sickle, shape, leading the cells to clump together and hinder oxygen’s passage into tissues....

Researchers have pinpointed the reason that deep-water corals emit an erie glow. Scientists know that in shallow waters, the organisms light up green, using fluorescent proteins as kind of sun block. The proteins soak up harmful ultraviolet rays, re-emit green light and shield their symbiotic algae, which supply most of the corals’ energy needs through photosynthesis. In 2015, a team led by Jörg Wiedenmann at the University of Southampton, UK, found that deep-dwelling corals also fluoresce—this time in an array of vivid yellows, oranges and reds....

GPS, the Global Positioning System we rely on for guiding nuclear missiles and steering tourists to Mount Rushmore, has become a ripe target for enemy attack. In response, U.S. scientists are developing new ways to circumvent blocked GPS signals using matter waves to measure acceleration. GPS is vulnerable because the radio signals that satellites broadcast to receivers, such as those in smart phones and in cars, are so weak that even low-power jammers can easily block them....

In the beginning, all of space rang like a bell. It was the immediate aftermath of the big bang, and the universe was filled with a torrid plasma—an energetic soup of particles and radiation. Although that plasma was remarkably smooth, it wasn’t completely smooth. There were slight density and pressure gradients that pushed material around, says Lloyd Knox, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis, “and when stuff gets pushed around, those are sound waves....

Adapted from Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, by Christie Wilcox, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Bungeishunju Ltd. (Japan). Copyright © 2016 by Christie Wilcox. I don’t know if cockroaches dream, but i imagine that if they do, jewel wasps feature prominently in their nightmares. These small, solitary tropical wasps are of little concern to us humans; after all, they don’t manipulate our minds so that they can serve us up as willing, living meals to their newborns, as they do to unsuspecting cockroaches....