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Colin Ellard is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo and the director of the university’s Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments, which is devoted to studies of the psychology of space, especially as it pertains to architecture, planning and design. He is also the author of You Are Here, a new book about the emerging psychology of direction. Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook chatted with him about the surprising ways we misunderstand the world around us....

A promising technique to prevent mothers from passing on devastating mitochondrial diseases was thrown a biological curve ball this week: A paper published Wednesday in Nature shows that such diseases can come back to sicken a child, even when 99 percent of the mother’s own mitochondria are eliminated. Mitochondria are the tiny power plants that provide the energy every cell needs to function. When a large percentage of these organelles malfunction, cells cannot do their jobs—and everything from weakness to death can result....

Imagine a mask made when you die that could preserve your face for millions of years. In a way, this is what happened to some of our planet’s oldest known animals. Encased in “death masks” made of the mineral pyrite (“fool’s gold”), these soft-bodied organisms avoided rot and decay long enough to make it into the fossil record, paleontologists say. The creatures are known to have thrived around the world roughly 575 million to 541 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period....

As far as sea squirts and their close relatives go, the genus Oikopleura represents a decidedly strange group of organisms, both from the standpoint of physical attributes and genetics. It belongs to a larger group of invertebrate animals that are closely related to all vertebrates: the tunicates. But unlike most others in that group, it does not undergo metamorphosis from a free-swimming larva to a fixed-to-the-bottom, or sessile, adult. Instead it lives its entire life as a tiny free-swimming creature, and it does so inside a balloon made up of a transparent sheet of cellulose, the main constituent of plants’ cell walls....

The findings suggest that researchers who study infectious diseases can improve their predictions of where coronaviruses are likely to leap from animals to people by looking at the geographical distribution of different bat species and the behavior of the viruses that they carry. “It’s time to stop being reactive,” says Simon Anthony, a virologist at Columbia University in New York City and lead author of the study published today in Virus Evolution1....

One day last spring Frank Drake returned to the observatory at Green Bank, W.Va., to repeat a search he first conducted there in 1960 as a 30-year-old astronomer. Green Bank has the largest steerable telescope in the world—a 100-meter-wide radio dish. Drake wanted to aim it at the same two sunlike stars he had observed 50 years ago, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, each a bit more than 10 light-years from Earth, to see if he could detect radio transmissions from any civilizations that might exist on planets orbiting either of the two stars....

Since time immemorial, humans have looked to the heavens above to make sense of life below, right here on Earth. What else is out there among all the countless galaxies, stars and planets? Are we truly alone in the universe? Such questions are crucial for establishing humanity’s cosmic context and have inspired a variety of speculative answers from a wide range of philosophical and scientific traditions. Buddhists believe in different Buddhas living in different worlds....

From all your research, does it seem like the discovery of extraterrestrial life is likely to have a dramatic effect on people’s religious beliefs? I can’t think of anything that would be bigger. I think at bottom most people have this idea that we humans are pretty special creatures and that God is paying attention to us. If we find somebody else, then there are lots of somebodies, most likely. And if there are lots of somebodies, that somehow would seem to make us less important....

Forget the therapist’s couch. Some psychiatrists may soon be talking to their clients over the phone. And scientists testing the treatment method say patients like it. Gregory E. Simon and his colleagues at the Group Health Cooperative in Seattle followed 600 patients who were just beginning treatment with antidepressants. Over six months, counselors provided a third of the participants with eight phone therapy sessions lasting 30 to 40 minutes each. Another third received three brief calls intended to monitor their medication use....

For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. “The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did,” says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong. In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building....

Diamonds have long been available in pairs—say, mounted in a nice set of earrings. Now physicists have managed to entangle the quantum states of two diamonds separated by 15 centimeters. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon by which two or more objects share an unseen link bridging the space between them—a hypothetical pair of entangled dice, for instance, would always land on matching numbers, even if they were rolled in different places simultaneously....

When Tufts University developmental biologist Michael Levin proposed tweaking cells’ electrical signals to create new patterns of growth, he encountered some resistance. “People thought it was nuts,” Levin says. That’s because although all cells have electric potentials (defined as the amount of energy required to move a given electrical unit against an electrical field), and these potentials clearly relate to cellular properties—the assumption in most cases was that the electric potential related primarily to cellular maintenance or “housekeeping....

After the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami crippled Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, worry about the unfolding nuclear accident quickly commandeered international headlines. Even after the situation was brought under relative control over subsequent days and weeks, public concern hung on the threat of radiation almost more than it did than on the tsunami and earthquake themselves, which had killed more than 15,850 people and displaced at least 340,000 more....

DNA acquired from breeding with Neanderthals may explain why people of European descent respond differently to infection than those of African descent, two studies suggest. The findings might also offer insight into why people of African descent are more prone to autoimmune diseases caused by an overactive immune system. In a paper published on October 20 in Cell, geneticist Luis Barreiro of the University of Montreal in Canada and his colleagues collected blood samples from 80 African Americans and 95 people of European descent....

Normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, right? Not so. There is no baseline for humans, and even if there was, it would be closer to 97.7 °F. Temperature also varies across the day, peaking in late afternoon and bottoming out in early morning. It is slightly higher for women than for men as well. For two decades research has debunked the benchmark, set way back in 1868, yet it persists....

Sometimes when scientists study things, they come up with results they didn’t expect, can’t explain, and may secretly wish they’d never sought. A new journal article looking at whether getting a flu shot during pregnancy increases a woman’s risk of miscarrying may be one such case. The article reports that at least in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 influenza seasons, pregnant women who were vaccinated against flu may have been at a higher risk of suffering a miscarriage — but only if they had also received a flu shot in the previous year as well....

The same techniques that generate images of smoke, clouds and fantastic beasts in movies can render neurons and brain structures in fine-grained detail. Two projects presented yesterday at the 2017 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., gave attendees a sampling of what these powerful technologies can do. “These are the same rendering techniques that are used to make graphics for ‘Harry Potter’ movies,” says Tyler Ard, a neuroscientist in Arthur Toga’s lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles....

Doctors have been treating the symptoms of most diseases, and not the source, for centuries. They have cut out tumors, unclogged arteries, injected insulin and soothed fevers—and have been unable to touch the biological code within cells that tells them to grow malignantly, pass along abnormal nerve signals, take in too much or too little energy, and swell with inflammation. The code is the DNA molecule in each cell that tells it what to do and when, and it triggers dreaded diseases when it goes wrong....

Ernest Hemingway, Nobel laureate in literature, wrote A Farewell to Arms. David Hemenway, professor of health policy at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, wishes CDC personnel could just mention arms. “Researchers, staff at the Centers for Disease Control, are afraid to say the word ‘guns’ or ‘firearms,’” Hemenway said on February 17 at a session on gun-violence research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)....

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart....