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Pharmaceutical giant Biogen now admits that it made a mistake back in March when it stopped a pair of trials of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug. A deep analysis of the data, released Thursday, suggests the drug, called aducanumab, did make a difference for patients who took the highest dose for the longest period of time—but only in one of two studies. Earlier results were muddied by the discontinuation of both studies after initial data suggested the drug failed to offer significant benefit and by unintended differences between the trials, which were meant to be identical....

Earthquake swarms and a region-wide rotten egg smell recently reminded Southern California residents they live next to an active volcano field, tiny though it may be. At the time, scientists said the phenomena did not reflect changes in the magma chamber below the Salton Sea. But now, researchers may need to revise estimates of the potential hazard posed by the Salton Buttes—five volcanoes at the lake’s southern tip. The buttes last erupted between 940 and 0 B....

It is hard to imagine today, but for most of humankind’s evolutionary history, multiple humanlike species shared the earth. As recently as 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens lived alongside several kindred forms, including the Neandertals and tiny Homo floresiensis. For decades scientists have debated exactly how H. sapiens originated and came to be the last human species standing. Thanks in large part to genetic studies in the 1980s, one theory emerged as the clear front-runner....

In January, when the United States proposed extending International Space Station (ISS) operations until 2024, the world was a very different place. That was before Russian military intervention in Ukraine, before US–Russian relations foundered and before Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin suggested that US astronauts use a trampoline to get themselves to orbit (see Nature http://doi.org/s4f; 2014). Rogozin also suggested last month that Russia would stop participating in the space-station program after its scheduled end date of 2020....

Around March, some of us take a kick at the snow mounded on the curb and wonder if spring is finally going to drop by. The sun sets before we go home, and the cold coops us up except for runs to the grocery store. All of this amounts to something known informally as the winter blues, because those wintry days and dead trees can put us in a glum mood....

The Great Barrier Reef’s amazing diversity of life gets a helping hand from distant underwater volcanic eruptions, a new study has found. Submarine volcanoes can spit out trillions of pieces of floating rock upon which corals and other organisms hitch a ride to the world’s largest reef, where they can thrive and multiply, according to research published this month in the journal PLoS One. Study co-author Scott Bryan, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, said these types of eruptions are rather frequent, occurring about once a decade or more, and helped form the reef in the first place, bringing in potentially billions of plants and animals....

From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. More than two dozen futurists, environmental scientists and others from around the world recently put their heads together to do a “horizon scan” of emerging trends that are getting relatively little attention but have the potential to have substantial impact on biodiversity conservation in the future. The research team, led by William Sutherland, professor of conservation biology at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, then narrowed the list down to 15 top trends poised to affect biodiversity for better or for worse in the months ahead....

Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist and research leader on human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, replies: Indeed, skeletal evidence from every inhabited continent suggests that our brains have become smaller in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years. How can we account for this seemingly scary statistic? Some of the shrinkage is very likely related to the decline in humans’ average body size during the past 10,000 years. Brain size is scaled to body size because a larger body requires a larger nervous system to service it....

Droughts, wildfires, heat waves, intense rainstorms—these are all extreme weather phenomena that occur naturally. But climate change is now increasing the frequency and magnitude of many of these events. Flooding in Paris and the Arctic heat wave are just two instances where climate change contributed to extreme weather in 2016—and there are many more examples. Yet how do scientists know that global warming influenced a specific event? Until recently, they couldn’t answer this question, but the field of “attribution science” has made immense progress in the last five years....

Mysterious paintings in one of the world’s most famous caves could mark the oldest-known depiction of a volcanic eruption. Spray-shaped images in Chauvet cave in France were painted at around the same time as nearby volcanoes spewed lava high into the sky, reports a paper published this month in PLoS ONE. Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave, in southern France, is one of the world’s oldest and most impressive cave-art sites. Discovered in 1994 and popularized in the Werner Herzog documentary ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, Chauvet contains hundreds of paintings that were made as early as 37,000 years ago....

Tomorrow’s gourmet menus could feature items prepared with complex cooking techniques and intricate presentation—all at the push of a button. Columbia University mechanical engineers have designed a 3-D printer that can simultaneously produce and cook dishes with details at the millimeter scale. The proof-of-concept design, described in npj Science of Food, combines a multiwavelength laser cooker, roughly the size of five smartphones stacked together, with a microwave-oven-sized food printer. As the device’s robotic arm deposits fine layers of chicken puree, a high-powered beam zigzags over them and cooks the meat—with literally laser-focused precision....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Quick, what’s 54 / 3? How about 324 / 6? Wait, don’t go searching for your calculator or smart phone—believe it or not, you can do these problems and countless others quickly and easily in your head. In Part 1 of our mental division series, we learned the first 3 tips to becoming a mental division maestro....

Can a next-generation NASA space telescope take pictures of other Earth-like planets? Astronomers have long dreamed of such pictures, which would allow them to study worlds beyond our solar system for signs of habitability and life. But for as long as astronomers have dreamed, the technology to make it happen has seemed many decades away. Now, however, a growing number of experts think NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) could take snapshots of other “Earths”—and soon....

Next winter, there may be a new drug for people who contract influenza—one that appears to be able to shut down infection quickly and, unlike anything else on the market, can be taken as a single dose. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday said that it would give the drug, baloxavir marboxil, a priority review, and approval has the potential to upend the way influenza is treated. Baloxavir marboxil has already been licensed in Japan, where it is sold by Shionogi & Co....

A banana-killing fungus that has been laying waste to crops in Asia and Australia for decades is now in the Americas, which produce the majority of the world’s banana exports. Colombia declared a national emergency on 8 August after laboratory results confirmed the presence of the fungus, known as Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4), within its borders. This marks the first confirmation of TR4 in the Americas. The Colombia Agricultural Institute (ICA), a federal agency tasked with overseeing agricultural health in the country, says that about 175 hectares have been affected so far....

In 1952, at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, theoretical physicists Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam brainstormed ways to use the MANIAC, one of the world’s first supercomputers, to solve scientific problems. At the time, problems were solved by performing either laboratory experiments or mathematical calculations by hand. Fermi, Pasta and Ulam wanted to use their new problem-solving tool—computer simulation—to virtually zoom in on a system and observe atomistic interactions at the molecular level, with a realism that was not possible before....

The fossil of a shrewlike animal uncovered a decade ago in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert set off one of the most extensive probes ever into the origins of placental mammals, the vast majority of all living mammals (which excludes marsupials and egg-layers, like the platypus). “Of course you’re excited when you find something well preserved from the Cretaceous [period 145 million to 65 million years ago],” says John Wible, curator of mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and senior author of a new report that concludes placental mammals originated around 65 million years ago, between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods when dinosaurs disappeared....

Frank was stuck, his life going nowhere fast. It was not for a lack of effort: a well-educated man in his early 40s, he had tried several forms of psychotherapy to get back on track after impulsively quitting his high-paid but life-sucking commercial real estate job years earlier. But month after month, immobilized, Frank* watched his bank balance dwindle, and he became severely depressed. When I first saw him in my private office for a psychiatric evaluation a decade ago, Frank clearly met criteria for major depression, with low mood, poor sleep, feelings of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts....

Perchlorate, a hazardous chemical in rocket fuel, has been found at potentially dangerous levels in powdered infant formula, according to a study (pdf) by a group of U.S. Centers for Disease Control scientists. The study, published last month by The Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, has intensified the years-long debate about whether or how the federal government should regulate perchlorate in the nation’s drinking water. According to the CDC, perchlorate exposure can damage the thyroid, which can hinder brain development among infants....

Genome-edited food made with CRISPR–Cas9 technology is being sold on the open market for the first time. Since September, the Sicilian Rouge tomatoes, which are genetically edited to contain high amounts of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), have been sold direct to consumers in Japan by Tokyo-based Sanatech Seed. The company claims oral intake of GABA can help support lower blood pressure and promote relaxation. In Japan, dietary supplements and foods enriched for GABA are popular among the public, says Hiroshi Ezura, chief technology officer at Sanatech and a plant molecular biologist at the University of Tsukuba....