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By Steve Quinn JUNEAU, Alaska (Reuters) - Two fast-spreading Alaska wildfires have forced a series of evacuations, destroyed up to 45 homes and forced authorities to restrict traffic on a major highway connecting two of the state’s largest cities, state officials said on Monday. As many as 200 firefighters have been battling a 6,500-acre fire about 40 miles (64 km) north of Anchorage since Sunday afternoon. About 137 miles (220km) south of Anchorage, crews are fighting a much smaller, but equally dangerous blaze that threatens nearly 200 homes....

What if this life is just a computer simulation running on some intellectually superior alien’s console? Something about this idea is tantalizing to people (evidenced by the success of The Matrix films) and has special appeal for our readers. It’s hooked physicists, philosophers, computer scientists and engineers, too, as author Anil Ananthaswamy writes in this edition’s cover feature [“Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50”]. What is it, exactly, that is so enticing about this possibility?...

Digital cameras may soon get disabled via security systems that temporarily blind them. The process exploits a property of the image sensors used by digital cameras— namely, that they are retroreflective, sending light back directly to its origin rather than scattering it. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology developed a prototype that uses light beams and cameras to scan areas for retroreflective dots matching sensors in shape. It then flashes a beam directly at those sensors, overwhelming them....

A brain and a crisp sheet of office paper may seem to have little in common. But if someone crumples the paper into a ball, they’re holding the solution to one of the most longstanding mysteries of brain development, according to a study published July 2 in Science. As it turns out, the growing mammalian brain folds just like any sheet of office paper, governed by a single mathematical function. The “brilliant study” represents a significant advance in scientists’ understanding of how the brain develops, says neurologist Arnold Kriegstein of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not part of the study....

The resemblance is uncanny, but no, these aren’t Starfleet logos emblazoned on planet Vulcan. Perhaps fittingly, though, this nasa Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image shows a section of an active dune field on Mars. Strong winds blowing in a single direction resulted in massive piles of basaltic sand about 200 meters wide and 20 meters tall that formed crescent-shaped “barchan dunes.” The imaging method—infrared shifted color—portrays them with a blue tint, but to the naked eye they would actually appear as neutral gray mounds sitting on the Red Planet’s signature colored backdrop....

It seemed like a textbook case of depression. The patient, a male in his late 30s, was in counseling for marital difficulties. He was socially withdrawn and had started drinking heavily. His speech and movements were slow. Yet even as he fought back tears in a session with his psychiatrist, Natasha Thomas, he could not describe how he felt. “When he would cry, I’d ask, ‘How are you feeling?’ and he would shrug,” Thomas says....

Fish that have been exposed to a common anti-anxiety drug are more active and have better chances of survival than unexposed fish, researchers report in Environmental Research Letters. The results suggest that standard methods for assessing the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals in waterways might miss some of the drugs’ effects because they focus exclusively on harms, according to the authors. In the study, researchers led by Jonatan Klaminder at Umeå University in Sweden exposed Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis) to oxazepam, one of a widely used class of anti-anxiety drugs called benzodiazepines....

Nearly a century after James Truslow Adams coined the phrase, the “American dream” has become a staple of presidential campaign speeches. Kicking off her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton told supporters that “we need to do a better job of getting our economy growing again and producing results and renewing the American dream.” Marco Rubio lamented that “too many Americans are starting to doubt” that it is still possible to achieve the American dream, and Ted Cruz asked his supporters to “imagine a legal immigration system that welcomes and celebrates those who come to achieve the American dream....

Viruses are finely tuned to their hosts, but mutations can and have produced strains that can jump from animals into humans. Sara Sawyer, a virologist at the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder, spoke to Nature about what a virus must do to make the leap between species, and describes a worrying discovery her laboratory has made regarding a future threat. How do animal viruses infect humans? Most animal viruses cannot infect humans—we ingest viruses all the time, and most of them pass straight through....

Clown fishes live their entire adult lives nestled in the protective arms of a single sea anemone on a coral reef. Between birth and adulthood, however, the fishes have to complete a treacherous journey. After hatching, a larva—a tiny, partially formed version of an adult fish—swims out of the reef to the open Pacific to finish developing, presumably away from predators. After maturing for 11 to 14 days, the juvenile is ready to swim back to the reef and select an anemone to call home....

A “full hybrid” like the Toyota Prius saves gasoline in several ways. When the car stops–at a light or in traffic–the engine shuts off, and the batteries and electric motor run the vehicle’s systems. When it is time to proceed, the motor propels the vehicle until efficient engine operation is possible, from 10 to 40 miles per hour. During hard acceleration or at higher speeds, the motor and engine operate together; a computer controller adjusts gear ratios between them so the transmission works at maximum efficiency, saving fuel....

Echolocation is probably most associated with bats and dolphins. These animals emit bursts of sounds and listen to the echoes that bounce back to detect objects in their environment and to perceive properties of the objects (e.g. location, size, material). Bats, for example, can tell the distance of objects with high precision using the time delay between emission and echo, and are able to determine a difference in distance as small as one centimeter....

As COVID-19 began infiltrating Boston hospitals in March of 2020, I was a fourth-year medical student finishing my last clinical rotation. Back when the efficacy of wearing masks was under debate, I was instructed to follow patients coming into the emergency room for complaints that weren’t respiratory in nature. On my way to each shift, I watched as the provisional testing area grew like a pregnant belly in the hospital lobby, gaining more official-looking opaque windows to shield all the activity within....

By Eric M. Johnson SEATTLE (Reuters) - Magma levels are slowly rebuilding inside Mount St. Helens, a volcano in Washington state that erupted in 1980 and killed 57 people, although there was no sign of an impending eruption, U.S. scientists said. The roughly 8,300-foot volcano erupted in an explosion of hot ash and gas on May 18, 1980, spewing debris over some 230 square miles and causing more than a billion dollars in property damage....

To illustrate a social trend that amounted to a spectacular crime drop in the Big Apple throughout the 1990s and 2000s—as described by Franklin E. Zimring in the August 2011 issue of Scientific American, we mapped two decades of New York Police Department crime statistics precinct by precinct. In the first map below, we combined data on the six most serious crime categories into one index. The other maps (click to unroll) illustrate the incidence of each type of crime....

Over the past four years of the Trump administration, thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents, stuck in squalid tent camps on our southern border, and made victims of violence, trafficking and exploitation during their journey and in U.S. custody. These traumatic experiences inflicted grievous psychological damage that can have lifelong consequences. The children also lost opportunities to learn, explore and play—things we value for our own children. Our punitive immigration policies have harmed a generation of children, and we must act immediately to change this....

One of the pleasures people can get out of stargazing is noticing and enjoying the various colors that stars display in dark skies. These hues offer direct visual evidence of how stellar temperatures vary. A good many of the summer luminaries — such as brilliant Vega which this week stands nearly overhead at around midnight — are bluish-white, but we can easily find other, contrasting colors there as well. Look at reddish Antares, which is due south at around 10 p....

Most people associate the term “subliminal conditioning” with dystopian sci-fi tales, but a recent study has used the technique to alter responses to pain. The findings suggest that information that does not register consciously teaches our brain more than scientists previously suspected. The results also offer a novel way to think about the placebo effect. Our perception of pain can depend on expectations, which explains placebo pain relief—and placebo’s evil twin, the nocebo effect (if we think something will really hurt, it can hurt more than it should)....

Today, vanilla is so well-known that its very name means “common.” But for centuries, vanilla was a rare, New World flavor enjoyed mainly by European elites. That changed in 1841 thanks to a 12-year-old boy wielding a tiny stick. Edmond Albius was an enslaved worker in the French colony of Réunion who, after close inspection of the vanilla orchid Vanilla planifolia, figured out how to hand-pollinate its flower to produce vanilla beans....

Where did we come from? How did we get here? Are we alone? At its core, astronomy is the science tasked with addressing these existential questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be human. And for more than a quarter century one observatory more than any other has brought us closer to answers: The Hubble Space Telescope. Stationed in low Earth orbit above the starlight-scattering atmosphere, Hubble’s 2....