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A large, UK-based study of genetics and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been suspended, following criticism that it failed to properly consult the autism community about the goals of the research. Concerns about the study include fears that its data could potentially be misused by other researchers seeking to ‘cure’ or eradicate ASD. The Spectrum 10K study is led by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Cambridge, UK....

Stargazers have yet to lay eyes on any of the nearly 240 planets detected outside our solar system. These so-called exoplanets are too faint for current telescopes to distinguish from the stars they orbit*; instead astronomers rely on indirect methods to infer their existence. Yet popular news accounts, supplied by space agency press services, overflow with bold, almost photo-realistic images of distant worlds. Naturally, people can get confused. When San Francisco artist Lynette Cook painted a particularly striking image of a newly discovered planet passing in front of the star HD 209458 for a 1999 NASA press release, she received e-mail asking what kind of amazing image processing software she had used....

What’s cooler than being cool? Brine-cold. When salt-rich water leaks out of sea ice, it sinks into the sea and can occasionally create an eerie finger of ice called a brinicle. New research explains how these strange fingers of ice form and how the salty water within sea ice could have been a prime environment in which life may have evolved. The study, published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Langmuir, suggests that brinicles form in the same way as hydrothermal vents, except in reverse....

Scientific American presents The Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Have you ever watched the show Survivorman? Or any of the numerous other shows of that ilk? I must admit I went through a phase a few years ago that involved a fair bit of survival expert program binging. Not only were the shows entertaining, but I learned a few things that could come in handy someday....

By Jon Herskovitz (Reuters) - Utility crews worked on Thursday to restore power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the U.S. Northeast after a snow and ice storm slammed the region, but flights began returning to normal after thousands of delays or cancellations. The latest in a series of winter blasts dumped up to a foot of snow on Wednesday and early Thursday on the Eastern Seaboard from Maryland to Maine....

A monkey picks up a potato-sized rock in his tiny hands, raises it above his head and smashes it down with all his might on another stone embedded in the ground. As the creature enthusiastically bashes away, over and over, flakes fly off the rock he is wielding. They are sharp enough to cut meat or plant material, but the monkey does not pay much attention to the flakes, save to place one on the embedded rock and attempt to smash it, too....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Infants who get a taste of eggs and peanuts starting when they’re as young as 4 months old may have a lower risk of developing allergies to those foods than babies who try them later, a research review suggests. With eggs, giving babies that first spoonful between 4 and 6 months was associated with 46 percent lower odds of egg allergies than waiting to introduce this food later....

Our tech lives are full of pain points, but at least the world’s tech geniuses seem committed to solving them. Today who complains about the things that bugged us a decade ago, such as heavy laptops, slow cellular Internet, the inability to do e-mail in planes? It was only a matter of time before those geniuses started tackling one of the longest-running pain points in history: passwords. We’re supposed to create a long, complex, unguessable password—capital and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, with a few Arabic letters thrown in if possible....

Nowadays detectives can use DNA analysis to help catch a killer. But what happens when a crime scene has been exposed to the elements for thousands of years? DNA does not always stay intact that long—so for a paleontologist trying to figure out what kind of predator killed a long-dead fossil animal, the case often goes cold. But a new method promises to help researchers identify these ancient killers. It relies on the fact that when a predator gulps down the bones of its prey—say, when a swooping owl snatches and eats a small rodent in the night—the diner’s stomach juices leave behind microscopic etchings on the surface of the victim’s bones....

CLIMATE GEOENGINEERING I believe that in “A Hacker’s Guide to Planet Cooling” [Science Agenda], the editors support the wrong approach to fixing our climate woes when they argue for experiments involving geoengineering methods such as fertilizing the ocean with iron to stimulate plankton growth. Iron fertilization seems a bad idea: it alters the food chain and water chemistry, whereas the sequestration of carbon dioxide is only temporary. An “all hands on deck” approach will most certainly be warranted, but I find geoengineering and similar heavy-handed or fanciful solutions to climate change counterintuitive....

The prospect of slipping into a robotic exoskeleton that could enhance strength, keep the body active while recovering from an injury or even serve as a prosthetic limb has great appeal. Unlike the svelt body armor donned by Iron Man, however, most exoskeletons to date have looked more like clunky spare parts cobbled together. Japan’s CYBERDYNE, Inc. is hoping to change that with a sleek, white exoskeleton now in the works that it says can augment the body’s own strength or do the work of ailing (or missing) limbs....

Cities around the globe are expanding. Woodlands, farms and deserts are being paved over with roads, a transformation that is virtually irreversible—and one that can have profound consequences for global warming, depending on how sprawling the streetscapes are. Researchers have now found that city and suburban streets around the world have become less connected over the past four decades, encouraging modes of transportation that are less climate-friendly. The new study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, differed from previous papers in its approach to measuring urban sprawl....

In 2004 a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists who had been excavating a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores announced that they had unearthed something extraordinary: a partial skeleton of an adult human female who would have stood just over a meter tall and who had a brain a third as large as our own. The specimen, known to scientists as LB1, quickly received a fanciful nickname—the hobbit, after writer J....

Key concepts Physics Adhesion Van der Waals forces Wetting Introduction You might have heard of the Apollo 13 lunar mission or seen the movie about the amazing survival of the spacecraft’s crew after an explosion crippled the ship on its journey to the moon. What you might not know is that duct tape helped save the astronauts’ lives! After the main ship was disabled by an explosion, NASA had to figure out a way to keep the three crew members alive in a tiny lunar lander that was only meant to hold two people....

The King Pedro IV Square in Lisbon, Portugal, better known as the Rossio, regales visitors with a delightful exemplar of the traditional pavement called calçada portuguesa. Originally cobbled in 1848, the dizzying light and dark undulations symbolize the sea voyages of Portuguese navigators and predate 20th-century designs by Op Art creators such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, while inducing similar perceptions of flowing motion. But does the vibrant pattern stand in the way of safety?...

When asked why eating lots of fruits and vegetables can improve health, many people will point to the antioxidants in these foods. That reasoning is logical because major diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes involve cell damage caused by chemicals called free radicals that antioxidants neutralize. As a neuroscientist working to understand what goes wrong in the brain, I have long been aware that free radicals disrupt and sometimes kill neurons....

Uber Technologies Inc. yesterday pledged to use only electric vehicles by 2030 in the United States, Canada and Europe, and by 2040 in the rest of the world. The splashy climate announcement aligned Uber with rival Lyft Inc., which vowed to reach 100% EVs by 2030 in late June (Climatewire, June 22). It raised questions, however, about the feasibility of both companies’ commitments, according to experts who study clean transportation. On a Zoom call with reporters yesterday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi framed the goal as a response to the coronavirus pandemic....

It’s high noon, and the 112–degree summer heat—up from a decade ago—stalks Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. By late afternoon, dark clouds threaten, and monsoon winds beat the earth into a mass of swirling sand. Thick walls of surface soil blind drivers on the Interstate. Some health experts believe new weather conditions—hotter temperatures and more intense dust storms fueled by global warming—are creating a perfect storm for the transmission of coccidioidomycosis, also known as valley fever, a fungal disease endemic to the southwestern United States....

The COVID-19 pandemic not only threatens Black communities; it also threatens the Black health care workforce that often serves them. As a physician, I notice workforce discrepancies by race throughout the health professions. In an increasingly diversifying country, we need more Black physicians because they are more likely to work in underserved communities and work on research topics relevant to the health of Black communities, and because Black patients have better outcomes when they see Black physicians....

Imagine a world in which this magazine never existed. In that version of existence, the chief resident at New York’s biggest hospital is a homeopath, I’m selling aluminum siding and right now you’re reading the Daily Racing Form. This musing has been a very small exercise in what’s called alternate history, or alt history, defined in its Wikipedia entry as “a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which one or more historical events unfolds differently from how it did in reality....