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A replacement for the ordinary transistor may make it to market by the end of this decade, an event that will herald a radical redesign of traditional computer architectures. The memristor, the subject of much study over the last six years, could become the basic building block for an array of new devices—from the sensors and memory chips being built into the “Internet of Things” (connected, sensor-embedded devices) to the giant computers used for big data applications by scientists, engineers and Wall Street....

In July 2008 retired steelworker Brian Thomas and his wife, Christine, drove their camper van to a small seaside village in Wales. Disturbed by men on motorbikes performing loud stunts, the couple relocated to the parking lot of a nearby inn. Later that night Thomas dreamed that one of the bikers had broken into the van. As he slept, he confused his wife with the imaginary biker and strangled her to death....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. A Whole New Dimension to Space In everyday life the number of dimensions refers to the minimum number of measurements required to specify the position of an object, such as latitude, longitude and altitude. Implicit in this definition is that space is smooth and obeys the laws of classical physics....

Belief in global warming appears to be fractured along gender lines, with more women than men accepting the scientific consensus on climate change, new research finds. An analysis of eight years of data from Gallup’s annual environmental poll found that greater numbers of women tend to believe the body of science on climate change and be concerned about how warming will affect the planet. The study is the first to home in on the gender divide in climate change belief, according to author Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University....

Scientists have long known that people perceive scents differently. But emerging evidence from several large-scale studies shows that the variation is larger than previously known. It turns out that people differ in how they perceive many if not all odors, and most of us have at least one scent we cannot detect at all. “Everybody’s olfactory world is a unique, private world,” says Andreas Keller, a geneticist at the Rockefeller University....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. U.S. military officials were recently caught off guard by revelations that servicemembers’ digital fitness trackers were storing the locations of their workouts—including at or near military bases and clandestine sites around the world. But this threat is not limited to Fitbits and similar devices. My group’s recent research has shown how mobile phones can also track their users through stores and cities and around the world—even when users turn off their phones’ location-tracking services....

View slideshow here North America’s passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet and, most recently, dusky seaside sparrow have disappeared. Driven to extinction by hunting or habitat loss, the list of dead birds is relatively short (and one species, the ivory-billed woodpecker, may actually still exist). But the list may grow longer if efforts are not made to halt habitat loss and global warming, according to the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy....

AUSTIN, Texas — The hidden side of the universe is now a bit more illuminated thanks to the largest map yet of dark matter, the strange substance thought to inhabit much of space. Scientists have created the largest scale rendering of dark matter across the universe, revealing a picture of the invisible stuff thought to represent 98 percent of all matter in the universe. Dark matter has never been directly detected, but its presence is felt through its gravitational pull on normal matter....

Brain science draws legions of eager students to the field and countless millions in dollars, euros and renminbi to fund research. These endeavors, however, have not yielded major improvements in treating patients who suffer from psychiatric disorders for decades. The languid pace of translating research into therapies stems from the inherent difficulties in understanding mental illness. “Psychiatry deals with brains interacting with the world and with other brains, so we’re not just considering a brain’s function but its function in complex situations,” says Quentin Huys of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (E....

A “megadrought” gripping the western United States is the worst one in 500 years, scientists say. And it’s the first to be influenced by human-caused climate change. A study published this week in the journal Science investigates the occurrence of megadroughts in western North America over the last 1,200 years. While a megadrought has no strict scientific definition, most studies classify them as severe droughts typically lasting a couple of decades at least—longer than any drought event that occurred during the 20th century....

One day the sun will fail. The fuel powering its nuclear fusion will run out, the sky will grow cold and, if Earth survives at all, humankind will be plunged into perpetual winter. To stay alive, our descendants will need to make alternative arrangements. They will first exhaust the resources of Earth, then the solar system, and eventually all the stars in all the galaxies in the visible universe. With nothing left to burn, they will surely cast their gaze on the only remaining store of energy: black holes....

The deadliest and most common type of brain cancer has a strange bedfellow: cytomegalovirus, a kind of herpes present in about 80 percent of the U.S. population. Now scientists are exploiting this coincidence to treat the cancer with a vaccine that targets the virus and slows tumor regrowth. In 2002 scientists showed that cytomegalovirus, or CMV, was active in the brain tumors but not the surrounding healthy tissue of all 27 patients they tested who had glioblastoma multiforme....

Floods and tornadoes kill more people in the United States than lightning does, a study finds. In fact, lightning strikes have been the third-leading cause of storm-related deaths since 2006 and may soon drop to fourth place, below hurricanes, said study author William Roeder, a meteorologist in Rockledge, Fla. Only 28 lightning deaths have been reported so far in 2012. Lightning accounted for 20.1 percent of storm deaths between 1982 and 2011, Roeder found, while hurricanes took another 17....

Environmentalists want the Supreme Court to reconsider its unprecedented decision 2 ½ years ago to stay the Clean Power Plan. Attorneys for a coalition of green groups Friday asked Chief Justice John Roberts to force opponents of the plan to explain why the stay should continue. The Supreme Court halted implementation of the rule in February 2016 on a 5-4 vote; it was the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s last action on the court....

Beginning in about January of this year, when the first COVID-19 vaccines started becoming available to essential workers and then, within the next few months, to most all adults, friends of mine with young children started asking me: “When will my kids be able to get it?” As the months rolled on, I tried to give them the best guess I could, based on our latest reporting, and by picking my colleagues’ brains at Scientific American and other publications....

What if your car knew what you were going to do before you did it? What if, say, the car slowed down by itself in an emergency in response to your reaction, even before you had a chance to hit the brakes? Such technology could shave precious instants off of response times, possibly averting collisions and saving lives. A group of German scientists have now shown that such a predictive system is possible, if not yet practical....

More than three months after a powerful earthquake and 14-meter-high tsunami struck Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains flooded with a salty mix of ocean and fresh water that is contaminated with the radioactive residue of three reactors and four spent fuel pools’ worth of nuclear fuel. Every day an additional 500 metric tons of seawater is poured onto the still hot nuclear fuel in the stricken reactors and fuel pools....

People often say that “failure is the mother of success.” This cliché might have some truth to it, but it does not tell us how to actually turn a loss into a win, says Emmanuel Manalo, a professor of educational psychology at Kyoto University in Japan. As a result, he says, “we know we shouldn’t give up when we fail—but in reality, we do.” Manalo and Manu Kapur, a professor of learning sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, put together a special issue of the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity last December on benefiting from failure....

Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium later. Researchers report that 15th-century buildings in Iran feature tiles arranged in a so-called quasicrystal, which is symmetric but does not repeat itself regularly. “Here is evidence it [the pattern] was being used, if not understood, 500 years ahead of when we had any idea what was going on with [it] in the West,” says physics graduate student Peter J....

Nobel Prize winner C. V. Raman discovered in the 1920s that bombarding a substance with light excites its molecules and scatters the light in a signature pattern that can be analyzed like a fingerprint. Today Raman spectrometers are used in a variety of settings, but they tend to be large and expensive. A team led by physicist Manfred Fink of the University of Texas at Austin is developing a smaller, less expensive model that may improve earthquake detection and bring down the cost of some medical tests....