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A prominent German neuroscientist committed scientific misconduct in research in which he claimed to have developed a brain-monitoring technique able to read certain thoughts of paralysed people, Germany’s main research agency has found. The DFG’s investigation into Niels Birbaumer’s high-profile work found that data in two papers were incomplete and that the scientific analysis was flawed — although it did not comment on whether the approach was valid. In a 19 September statement, the agency, which funded some of the work, said it was imposing some of its most severe sanctions to Birbaumer, who has positions at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, Switzerland....

VIRTUAL HEALING Thank you for “The Promise of Virtual Reality” [The Science of Health], Claudia Wallis’s excellent piece on the uses of the technology in medicine. I would like to insert “medical education” as another potential tool for VR. My colleagues and I have published some research on using immersive VR to teach cardiac anatomy to medical students in the March issue of Clinical Anatomy. We found that they not only scored 24 percent higher on quizzes than non-VR students but also said they had “fun”!...

The more we learn about Mars, it seems, the icier the Red Planet appears to be. The recently departed Phoenix lander dug up water ice and even spotted falling snow from its position in the northern polar plains. And now data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris, much closer to the equator. The findings, published today in Science, come from the spacecraft’s shallow radar, or SHARAD, which is able to penetrate the surface and examine what lies beneath....

This week the Biden administration announced it would begin offering COVID booster shots to most Americans eight months after their second dose of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. Pending authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel, people will start receiving boosters on September 20. Health care workers and nursing home residents will be among the first to be eligible....

As more world leaders consider levying border taxes on climate-damaging goods, a new study looks at ways it can be done in countries—including the United States—that haven’t established a domestic market for carbon emissions. The findings are timely. European Union officials this summer set in motion plans for the world’s first carbon border tariff. U.S. lawmakers responded last month with their own border tax proposal. How these efforts play out will have a significant impact on both the international trade network and the global fight against climate change....

In this special report, we expose an insidious practice of manipultion of news in the U.S. government and elsewhere; a culture of silence that discourages scientists from speaking out about their work; and the disconnect between what scientists do and what the public hears about. Federal agencies in the U.S. are using so-called close-hold embargoes and other methods to gain control of the journalists who cover them [see “How to Spin the Science News”]....

The rat stood on its hind limbs at one end of a narrow runway. It wore a tiny black vest attached to a robotic arm that hovered above its head. Without such mechanical support, the rat would have fallen over—its spinal cord had two deep cuts, rendering its back legs useless. Rubia van den Brand, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich, stood at the other end of the runway, urging the animal to walk....

This month, in my Scientific American column, I wrote about the rise of music and art created by artificial intelligence software. What is art’s value when there’s no longer any effort involved in its creation, or scarcity to limit its ownership? It’s time to start asking these questions, because already, people are using AI software to compose music for them. I thought I’d take a listen to some examples of AI-composed pop songs to see how far along we are....

Does napping after a meal affect memory formation? —Yadhu Kumar, Konstanz, Germany Neuroendocrinologists Manfred Hallschmid and Susanne Diekelmann of the University of Lbeck in Germany reply: THE PAST two decades have yielded considerable evidence for sleep’s pivotal role in memory consolidation. The lion’s share of research has focused on the relevance of longer periods of nocturnal rest. For that reason, the duration that is actually needed for sleep’s effects on memory to become behaviorally relevant has not yet been exhaustively investigated....

As state-owned energy enterprises in China continue to have a big say in policy matters, the country’s goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions may not necessarily hit Beijing’s desired statistical target. The National Energy Administration’s recent release of a plan putting coal consumption at 3.9 billion metric tons by 2015 is regarded as a measure of China’s attempt to reduce reliance on coal. But experts in the energy industry warn that the state corporation-dominated decisionmaking process could stall the government’s ultimate goal – to shift away from coal – because the statistics that have been announced may not be accurate....

When oil and gas companies extract fuel from the earth via fracking, they routinely add biocides such as glutaraldehyde to the high-pressure water they use to fracture rock formations deep underground. These compounds are a preemptive strike against microbes that produce hydrogen sulfide, which can corrode pipelines. New research, however, calls into question the across-the-board addition of toxic biocides to water used in fracking. Jason Gaspar and Pedro Alvarez at Rice University and colleagues, including scientists at energy firm Statoil, performed numerous tests at fracking sites in the Bakken Shale Formation in the north-central U....

Most travelers staying at hotels have encountered a bathroom sign asking them to help save the environment by reusing their towels. Daily laundering makes a large hotel go through several million gallons of water a year, and detergent and energy use take a hefty toll, too. New research shows, however, that appealing to people’s green conscience is hardly the most effective way of convincing guests how best to dry off. In experiments whose results ultimately confirmed what persuasion experts long believed, a team led by Noah Goldstein, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, created two types of professional-looking signs: one with the standard environmental message and the other telling guests that most of their fellow guests had reused towels....

Superconducting Airplanes? Superconductivity may be the key to electric jet engines for lowering greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft, which contributed 9 percent of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emission in 2003. A study out of Florida A&M and Florida State Universities finds that, for small planes, superconducting turbines would be lightweight and powerful enough to run on electricity from clean-burning hydrogen fuel cells. The liquid hydrogen could also chill the superconductors....

CLIMATEWIRE | Last month ranked among the planet’s top three hottest Julys on record. The extreme temperatures came as deadly heat waves swept across Europe, killing up to 2,000 people in Portugal and Spain, and exacerbated drought-fueled wildfires in the western United States. Last month’s scorching temperatures appear to fall just between the hottest July ever recorded in 2019 and the second hottest in 2016. That technically puts it in second place....

About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a model of a room that was part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room, albeit a rather shabby one, with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on....

North Korea’s nuclear threats reached new heights when the country claimed to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb underground on Tuesday night. Regional measurements confirmed a seismic event took place in North Korea, but the estimated size of the disruption cast doubt that the secretive nation had in fact detonated a thermonuclear weapon. Such a device would be hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs Pyongyang detonated during its previous three nuclear weapon tests....

Donald Trump has said climate change is a Chinese hoax. His presidency raises the prospect of a climate denier atop the Environmental Protection Agency and an oil and gas billionaire running the Energy Department. He could pull the U.S.—and its 15 percent of all global carbon emissions—out of the Paris Agreement. This information has made his supporters happy and his detractors furious. This information also matters not one iota to the climate....

As any gambler knows, the most important decision is where to play. Some flit from table to table, machine to machine and game to game. Others prefer to settle in for the long haul. Now researchers have used those tendencies to probe the function of the human brain as it chooses between the familiar and the unknown. Nathaniel Daw and John O’Doherty of University College London and their colleagues employed slot machines and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how 14 healthy subjects decided between reaping steady profits at a given slot machine or testing the profit potential of a new one....

Dissecting a black widow spider to get its silk glands seems like a task fraught with peril. Luckily, for anyone who dares, now there is video from scientists to show you how it’s done. Research labs do not want the silk glands of these infamous spiders for some kind of bizarre trophies. Spider silks are stronger than steel, and scientists across the globe are racing to develop synthetic fibers mimicking these silks for commercial, military and industrial applications, says biochemist Craig Vierra at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif....

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush, I appeared as a guest on comedian and social commentator Dennis Miller’s television talk show on CNBC, during which he made the following comparison: John Kerry is like a wickedly smart chess player, capable of looking ahead many moves, anticipating what his opponent might do and carefully weighing all his options before arriving at a rational decision....