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By Greg Roumeliotis and Ludwig Burger German drugs and crop chemicals company Bayer has won over U.S. seeds firm Monsanto with an improved takeover offer of around $66 billion, ending months of wrangling after increasing its bid for a third time. The $128 a share deal, up from Bayer’s previous offer of $127.50 a share, is the biggest of the year so far and the largest cash bid on record. The deal will create a company commanding more than a quarter of the combined world market for seeds and pesticides in the fast-consolidating farm supplies industry....

How does our brain know that “this” follows “that”? Two people meet, fall in love and live happily ever after—or sometimes not. The sequencing of events that takes place in our head—with one thing coming after another—may have something to do with so-called time cells recently discovered in the human hippocampus. The research provides evidence for how our brain knows the start and end of memories despite time gaps in the middle....

How aware are plants? This is the central question behind a fascinating new book, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. A plant, he argues, can see, smell and feel. It can mount a defense when under siege, and warn its neighbors of trouble on the way. A plant can even be said to have a memory. But does this mean that plants think — or that one can speak of a “neuroscience” of the flower?...

Blockbuster flooding events such as Hurricane Harvey grab headlines, but urban flooding is a routine—and growing—problem: in a 2018 report, 83 percent of municipal stormwater and flood managers surveyed in the U.S. reported such inundation in their areas. Although heavier downpours fueled by climate change are a factor, the expansion of pavement and other impervious surfaces is making the situation worse because it prevents the land from absorbing these torrents of water....

Diamond, with its tough-to-break carbon lattice of interlocking cubes, is traditionally considered the hardest material on Earth. Yet a rare form of diamond known as lonsdaleite—a crystal with carbon atoms arranged in flexing three-dimensional hexagons—may be even harder than its cubic cousin. To date, natural lonsdaleite has been found only in impact craters, where it has formed by the intense pressure of meteorites crashing to Earth. But now researchers say that they’ve identified lonsdaleite crystals that formed billions of years before the meteorites carrying them ever reached the planet....

People talk a lot about the merits (or not) of the prehistoric hunting-and-gathering “Paleo diet”: the idea is that eating the way we had to eat over thousands, even millions, of years would be most conducive to salubrious lives. And it makes some sense that providing the right kind of fuel for our bodies is valuable. But regardless of the exact foods in our diet, as you will learn in our cover story, it’s far more important for us to be active to be healthy....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Despite many people’s assumption to the contrary, math is undeniably artistic. It takes a tremendous amount of creative muscle and artistry to devise mathematical solutions. And, as made evident by their frequent battles between elegant symmetry and rampant chaos, the traditional fine arts are chock-full of math. Suffice it to say that math and art are intimately related....

Bone marrow continually makes blood stem cells, which turn into new blood cells to replace spent ones, but the process is not perfect: Some blood stem cells can develop into abnormal versions, although the immune system usually stamps them out. In acute myeloid leukemia, however, the immune system seems unable to recognize malformed blood cells, which proliferate quickly and become cancerous. Researchers from Stanford University recently uncovered a mechanism by which these leukemia cells elude the immune system....

By Eric HandBy invoking the effects of starlight, theorists have created a model of the behaviour of galactic electrons, casting doubt on a signal that some had hoped pointed to a detection of dark matter.Within the past two years, several experiments — in space, on the ground, and in a balloon — have reported detecting more high-energy electrons than were expected to be whirling around the galaxy. Many theorists attributed the surplus electrons as either the effect of a nearby pulsars, or, more provocatively, dark matter — the elusive stuff thought to make up as much as 85% of the matter in the Universe (see ‘Dark matter intrigue deepens’)....

GIGLIO ISLAND, Italy—When the Costa Concordia finally leaves Giglio Island sometime early next week, it will be traveling with one of the most impressive oil spill cleanup and environmental disaster response convoys ever assembled. The crippled cruiseliner has been encased in 30 uninflated flotation caissons connected under the rotting ship by giant chains and cables weighing around 30 million metric tons, which will hoist the ship up when the caissons are filled with air....

When the Moon’s shadow races across the continental United States on August 21, researchers will be waiting — in planes, on mountaintops and at other carefully chosen vantage points along the roughly 110-kilometre-wide path of totality. Thanks to the sheer number of observers, solar physicists hope to learn more from this latest total solar eclipse than from any previous such event, and to use that knowledge to develop tools for next time....

NASA has unveiled the lineup of 13 small satellites that will hitchhike on the first deep-space test flight of its new megarocket, a list that includes satellites destined to probe the moon, investigate deep space radiation and even fly out to examine an asteroid. While the microsatellites, called cubesats, have been deployed into orbits close to Earth before, and launched from the International Space Station, the low-cost research units have never before ventured this far away to do research, NASA officials said from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama....

In recent weeks, companies developing cell-based fish and shellfish have been drawing attention as they tout their offerings and expand their businesses globally. San Diego-based BlueNalu will introduce lab-made finfish to Europe through a collaboration announced in September with British frozen food distributor Nomad Foods. The same month, Hong Kong-based Avant Meats inked a deal with Singapore’s Bioprocessing Technology Institute to improve the economics of its cultivated fish production. In June, Wildtype opened a tasting room adjacent to its San Francisco pilot plant, where it has been offering bites of lab-grown, sushi-grade salmon....

One of the more enduring ideas in psychology, dating back to the time of William James a little more than a century ago, is the notion that human behavior is not the product of a single process, but rather reflects the interaction of different specialized subsystems. These systems, the idea goes, usually interact seamlessly to determine behavior, but at times they may compete. The end result is that the brain sometimes argues with itself, as these distinct systems come to different conclusions about what we should do....

A mass grave in a Chinese lakebed contains the extremely well-preserved fossils of dinosaurs, mammals and early birds, but the cause of the animals’ death has long puzzled scientists. Now, an analysis of the fossils and the sediments that entombed them suggests that an explosive eruption — like the one that destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii — scorched and buried the animals. “What we’re talking about in this case is literal charring, like somebody got put in the grill,” said George Harlow, a mineralogist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the researchers of the study detailed today (Feb....

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck late on Monday off the coast of El Salvador and Nicaragua and was felt across Central America, killing at least one person, but there were no immediate reports of major damage. El Salvador’s emergency services urged people living near the coast to move inland after placing a tsunami alert in effect. Nonetheless, they said via their Twitter account that coastal areas appeared calm....

Old age brings with it a host of physical woes, and among the most common is hearing loss. Forty percent of Americans older than 65 suffer from hearing loss, and by 2030 some 65 million Americans will be hard of hearing. Now joint work by researchers at the universities of Wisconsin, Florida, Washington and Tokyo has uncovered the mechanism behind age-related hearing loss, and with the help of simple chemicals, they have managed to keep old mice hearing as well as young pups....

The emergence of stronger and rainier thunderstorms that are able to quickly spawn tornadoes is posing problems for meteorologists. Storm experts assembled here last week for a gathering of journalists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) described these storms as intensifying, but too small to be forecast by computer models. They often develop too quickly to give more than an hour of warning. Even then, forecasters can sometimes give only a blurry picture of where the storms will hit....

Men may wage wars in part to spread their seed. In a recent report in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Chinese researchers argue that alongside revenge and resource acquisition, mating is a key motivator for taking up arms. Expos­ing heterosexual men to images of attractive women increased their professed support for international aggression. Pictures of flags did not have the same effect, and men did not associate attractive women with aggression against males in general or with peaceful resolution to trade conflicts....

Whispers of a Successor Maggie McKee Read more about the search for supersymmetry here. Salt Swap Joseph Bennington-Castro A toxic chemical in solar cells poses a health hazard, but new research says the compound can be exchanged for a safer and cheaper chemical. Dried Up Dina Fine Maron If you can handle staring at your computer for a bit longer, check out this study on dry eyes and screen time. An Origin Story Clara Moskowitz A new simulation models the genesis of the Pillars of Creation and sheds light on star formation....