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This story is a supplement to the feature “Why Migraines Strike” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Whether headache is initiated by the brain stem, by the cortex or by the subcortex remains an active debate. SCENARIO 1: BLAME THE CORTEX In this view, cortical spreading depression, caused by hypersensitive neurons in the cortex, induces both aura and pain. In patients without aura, a wave of neuronal hyperexcitability resembling cortical spreading depression might take place in subcortical regions....

Ray Allen’s pregame routine never changes. A nap from 11:30am to 1:00pm, chicken and white rice for lunch at 2:30, a stretch in the gym at 3:45, a quick head shave, then practice shots at 4:30. The same amount of shots must be made from the same spots every day – the baselines and elbows of the court, ending with the top of the key. Similar examples of peculiar rituals and regimented routines in athletics abound....

The first stem cell therapy targeting a major brain disorder, chronic stroke, could begin clinical trials this year if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the request filed in December by stem cell firm ReNeuron in Guildford, England. This latest treatment suggests stem cell therapies are growing not only in number but in ambition. Chronic stroke, in which patients suffer from permanent infirmity, is the leading cause of adult disability in the developed world....

Women have too long been an afterthought: denied equal opportunity at home and in society and ignored by science. Recent decades brought progress toward some measure of parity in the realms of economics, politics, education and health care, but yawning gaps remain, and some are growing, threatening to undermine everyone’s well-being. As the World Economic Forum put it in its 2018 report on gender disparities, “More than ever, societies cannot afford to lose out on the skills, ideas and perspectives of half of humanity to realize the promise of a more prosperous and human-centric future that well-governed innovation and technology can bring....

The telephone rings. A man hurries through his apartment, picks up the handset and says hello. Yet the ringing continues–because the sound came from the mans pet parrot. The owner shoots the bird a nasty glare as he hangs up, mutters about being fooled again and stalks out of the room. Scenes like this, used in cartoons and comedies, are based on the fascinating ability of parrots to closely mimic common sounds and human voices....

Modern science has introduced the world to plenty of strange ideas, but surely one of the strangest is the fate of a massive star that has reached the end of its life. Having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it starts collapsing catastrophically. Modest stars like the sun also collapse, but they stabilize again at a smaller size....

If you made a New Year’s resolution a few weeks ago, you probably decided to get fit or lose weight – two goals that pretty unavoidably involve a pledge to eat less. Perhaps you’ve stuck with it so far, through some combination of brute will, guilt, and the deployment of winning slogans at spots of greatest temptation. But unless you’re one of the rare successful long-term dieters, your assault on adiposity will be short lived....

Update August 24: The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization on August 23 to treat COVID-19 with convalescent plasma. US President Donald Trump has called on COVID-19 survivors to donate their blood plasma as a treatment for the disease, saying that “it’s had tremendous response so far”. Meanwhile, rumours have been swirling that US drug regulators are grappling with whether to give the plasma to more people by authorizing it as an emergency therapy....

Spring is the season for flashy mates, at least for finches. It is only later in the year that the females choose based on genetic diversity, according to new research from two scientists at the University of Arizona. Their 10-year study of a colony of 12,000 finches in Montana has revealed the seasonal dynamics of finch attraction and thereby resolved an evolutionary conundrum. Previous research had shown that female birds go for the most resplendent mates; in the case of finches, this means the males with the reddest breast....

Scientists can now say with confidence whether heat waves, such as the one that struck Russia in 2010 and caused 55,000 deaths, are linked to climate change. But when it comes to storms like Typhoon Haiyan, which battered the Philippines last year, their methods hit a brick wall of uncertainty. The findings are included in a sweeping report the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released last week that tries to answer the question often posed after a nasty spell of weather....

Red is a powerful color. It’s the color of Cupid and the Devil, the color of love and hate. It brings to mind hot-blooded anger and Scarlet Letter shame. It means luck in China, where bridal wear is red, mourning in parts of Africa and sex in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Some of the hue’s significance has a biological basis. Many humans get red in the face from increased blood flow when they are angry....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The unparalleled motion and manipulation abilities of soft-bodied animals such as the octopus have intrigued biologists for many years. How can an animal that has no bones transform its tentacles from a soft state to a one stiff enough to catch and even kill prey? A group of scientists and engineers has attempted to answer this question in order to replicate the abilities of an octopus tentacle in a robotic surgical tool....

Physiologist Alessandro Cellerino has always been an aquarium enthusiast, but fish were not originally part of his research plan. One afternoon in 2000, hanging out in a tank-filled cellar in Canossa, Italy, with breeder Stefano Valdesalici, Cellerino idly asked him which fish were the shortest-lived. Valdesalici pointed to a tank with brightly speckled African turquoise killifish: “They don’t make it any longer than three months.” “Are you kidding?” asked Cellerino, who works at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy....

Countries’ collective pledges toward a new international climate change agreement put the goal of averting catastrophic warming within sight, a sweeping new U.N. report out today finds. If all nations fully implement their targets, about 4 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions will be eliminated from the atmosphere by 2030, according to the report. The level of emissions produced by every person on Earth will also dip about 9 percent by that year....

Scientists with the Mexican government announced Wednesday the discovery of three new chambers at the end of a tunnel under the ancient city of Teotihuacan. The tunnel was discovered in 2003 beneath the popular tourist destination just outside today’s Mexico City and is among the most important finds in the lost city’s history. In a press briefing at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, Mexican archeologists say that the new rooms contained thousands of objects, including carved statues, rubber balls, jade from Guatemala and a wooden box of shells....

Since its launch in 1999, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has been studying the heavens through short-wavelength x-ray light, the best window for sighting colossal black holes, galaxy clusters and the remnants of violent supernovae. The telescope captures the position, energy and arrival time of each x-ray photon that reaches its detector. That ability, in combination with its uniquely sharp imaging quality and capacity to see x-ray light over a broad range of energies, has revolutionized our view of the x-ray universe....

Frank Drake, the eminent radio astronomer who performed the first search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) around other stars in 1960, died on Friday at his home near Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 92 years old. His daughter, science journalist Nadia Drake, shared the news on her website. “A titan in life,” she wrote, “Dad leaves a titanic absence.” “Frank founded an entire field,” says astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) at the University of California, Berkeley....

From the moment he was handed to me in the delivery room, Alex, my firstborn, seemed not happy to be here. His eyes were bottomless, his expression grave. He spent his first three months writhing and screaming inconsolably, the word “colic” wholly insufficient to describe our collective suffering. It wasn’t until his brother, Sammy, arrived that I realized just how different Alex was compared with other babies. Sammy cried only when he was hungry or wet....

Transforming Mars into a life-friendly world doesn’t have to be a herculean planet-wide effort. Humanity could make patches of the Red Planet habitable relatively cheaply and efficiently by placing thin layers of silica aerogel on or above the Martian surface, a new study suggests. The insulating aerogel would warm the ground enough to melt water ice and would also block harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, potentially creating an environment where plants and other photosynthetic life could flourish....

A strong solar storm recently sparked a global aurora on Mars that was more than 25 times brighter than any ever seen before on the Red Planet, researchers say. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter and Curiosity rover both observed effects from the event on Sept. 11, 2017. Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument measured radiation levels on the Martian surface that were more than double any previously recorded, agency officials said....