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As we get older, we start to think a little bit more slowly, we are less able to multitask and our ability to remember things gets a little wobblier. This cognitive transformation is linked to a steady, widespread thinning of the cortex, the brain’s outermost layer. Yet the change is not inevitable. So-called super agers retain their good memory and thicker cortex as they age, a recent study suggests. Researchers believe that studying what makes super agers different could help unlock the secrets to healthy brain aging and improve our understanding of what happens when that process goes awry....

Scientists in the US have added a new dimension to 3D printing with a strategy that controls the chemical composition of printed features, as well as their three-dimensional position. With 3D printing systems becoming more mainstream, platforms that overcome their current limitations are increasingly relevant. Ideally, they should print different polymers close together, independently control their position and be compatible with delicate organic and biologically active materials. A team at the University of Miami led by Adam Braunschweig has designed such a system involving entirely solution-based patterning reactions for the first time....

We are not going back to the pleistocene age of the hunter-gatherers. Instead experts indicate that the world’s population will increase from approximately six billion to nine billion by 2050—all to be fed, clothed and even fueled by agricultural products. What’s more, as people rise out of poverty, higher living standards such as greater meat consumption and personal mobility will place even more demand on food crop production (wheat, rice), animal feed (corn, soybeans), fiber (wood, cotton) and fuels (sugarcane, switchgrass)....

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the backdrop, the United Nations recently held a meeting to discuss the use of autonomous weapons systems, commonly referred to as killer robots. These are essentially weapons that are programmed to find a class of targets, then select and attack a specific person or object within that class, with little human control over the decisions that are made. Russia took center stage in this discussion, in part because of its potential capabilities in this space, but also because its diplomats thwarted the effort to discuss these weapons, saying sanctions made it impossible to properly participate....

Earlier this year the AlphaGo artificial intelligence program ended humanity’s 2,500 years of supremacy at the board game go. Not content with its 3–0 victory over the world’s top player, AlphaGo creator DeepMind Technologies on Wednesday unveiled an enhanced version—AlphaGo Zero—which the company says soundly thumped its predecessor program in an AI face-off, winning all 100 games played. But perhaps even more significant than these victories is how AlphaGo Zero became so dominant....

The researchers behind the AlphaFold artificial-intelligence (AI) system have won one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes—the most lucrative awards in science. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both at DeepMind in London, were recognized for creating the tool that has predicted the 3D structures of almost every known protein on the planet. “Few discoveries so dramatically alter a field, so rapidly,” says Mohammed AlQuraishi, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York City....

How does anesthesia work? Bill Perkins, associate professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, explains: Local and general anesthetics work by blocking nerve transmission to pain centers in the central nervous system, although the exact mechanisms for general anesthetics are not well understood, despite use of such pharmacological agents for more than 150 years. Local anesthetics, such as Novocain, bind to and inhibit the function of the sodium channel in the nerve cell membrane, a type of ion channel required for the propagation of nerve impulses....

China has been celebrating its first and long-awaited Nobel prize in the sciences, but the controversy that surrounds the awarding of the prize to Tu Youyou also highlights powerful tensions within its research system. Tu, a retired scientist at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (CATCM), shared half the 2015 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for her contribution to developing the antimalarial drug artemisinin. The other half of the prize went to William Campbell from Duke University and Satoshi mura of Japan’s Kitasato University for their work on the antiparasitic drug avermectin....

It’s the first snow of winter. You step outside your front door to revel in the cold morning air, entranced by the falling flakes. Every object is still, blanketed in white. The landscape is deeply quiet. Suddenly your crotchety neighbor starts up his roaring snowblower, shattering your peace. Callous clod! Youd like to walk right over there and clobber him. But of course you dont. You step back inside, your moment of bliss ruined and your fury churning inside you....

A river’s colors hold clues to what flows in its water, from soft-green algae to yellow-brown mud. Human eyes might miss subtle shifts in these shadings, but satellites can detect them—and researchers can use them to track large-scale changes and potentially spot signs of trouble. A team led by University of Pittsburgh environmental scientist John R. Gardner analyzed 234,727 satellite images, covering 67,000 miles of U.S. rivers over 35 years, for a study published in Geophysical Research Letters....

As the world’s scientists debate whether there’s a realistic way to avoid catastrophic warming, a big new experiment supports advocates who say one path runs through forests. An international team of more than 60 researchers spent eight years determining what kind of forest is best at removing carbon from the air. They planted more than 150,000 trees into plots with between one and 16 species. By the end of the experiment, the most diverse plots had amassed over twice as much carbon as the plots with a single species — an average of 32 tons per hectare compared with 12 tons....

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of five features on carbon capture and storage, running daily from April 6 to April 10, 2009. The Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee oil field, better known as SACROC, near Snyder, Tex., has slurped 140 million metric tons of liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) since 1972—80 million metric tons of which has stayed trapped in the reservoir. Pumping all that CO2 down has meant pumping more oil out....

Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, a professor of electrical engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, devotes nearly all of his time to building extremely tiny devices. “You make things very small, you get rapid results,” he says. So in 2010, when he set out to develop an abundant, renewable power source that could be used in extremely remote places for machines that might purify water or diagnose disease, it was inevitable that he would start small....

Dear EarthTalk: The collective impact of all the iPhones and other devices we buy, use and then discard must be mind-boggling at this point. Has anyone quantified this and what can we do to start reducing waste from such items? — Jacques Chevalier, Boston, MA With a record four million pre-orders for Apple’s best-selling iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, it’s more evident than ever that consumers want the latest in smartphone technology at their fingertips....

IMAGINE the original job interview. The first one ever, back on the prehistoric savannas of eastern Africa or maybe in an early agrarian society in the Fertile Crescent. A member of an unknown settlement may have wandered in and offered some irresistible service—lion-wrangling expertise, perhaps, or Herculean strength in the field. Unlike in a modern job interview, early humans had no rsums, LinkedIn profiles or letters of recommendation to guide them....

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a mathematical formula that divides a person’s weight by the square of their height to arrive at a number that falls into one of these bodyweight categories: Beyond assigning one of these categories, a high BMI can be also an indicator of high body fat and therefore can be used to screen for certain weight levels that could lead to health problems. Even though it is often used as one, it is not a true diagnostic of body fatness or of an individual’s overall health....

On August 14, 2003, at least 50 million people lost the ability to cool their homes, refrigerate food, light offices, compute and commute, along with the myriad other necessities electricity provides in the modern world. A failed power line in Ohio set off a cascade of events that triggered the largest blackout in North American history and crippled much of the northeastern U.S. for two days. In the year following the disaster the U....

John Fetterman, a Democratic candidate in a highly watched Pennsylvania Senate race against television personality Mehmet Oz, known as Dr. Oz, suffered an ischemic stroke—the obstruction of a vessel that supplies blood to a part of the brain—in May. The blockage causes brain cells to be starved of essential oxygen and nutrients. Within minutes, the cells start to die. Five months later Fetterman sat down for an interview with NBC News where he used closed captioning technology to help manage the auditory processing issues caused by the stroke....

JULY 1956 PEEKING INTO ATOMS–“Today the most backward schoolboy knows that atoms are real. He even knows what they look like. The picture of a little round nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons is practically the trademark of our time. In 1951 the author began to think about a new way of examining nuclei. The idea was to shoot very high-speed electrons at them and see how the electrons were deflected, or, as the physicist says, scattered....

It may sound like a headline from the Onion, but researchers have broken a molecule apart by, well, tugging on it. The team speculates that the technique may lead to materials that respond to mechanical stress by repairing themselves. Technically, the researchers let ultrasound do the pulling for them. Looking for new ways to trigger chemical reactions, they decided to crack open a molecule called benzocyclobutene, which consists of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon fused to a square....