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Britons have a reputation for heavy drinking, but research from the University of Sheffield found that only about 10 percent of adults regularly consume large amounts of alcohol in one sitting, making the unhealthy behavior still common but not rampant. PANAMA Fossilized 21-million-year-old monkey teeth unearthed during expansion work on the Panama Canal are the first evidence of the mammal’s presence in North America. Most researchers previously thought New World monkeys evolved in isolation in South America before the continent connected with its northern counterpart 3....

The stunning recent announcement of neutrinos apparently exceeding the speed of light was greeted with startled wonderment followed by widespread disbelief. Although virtually every scientist on record expects this discovery to vanish once more detailed analysis takes place, dozens of researchers are exploring the question whose answer could shake the foundations of physics: What if this anomaly is real? Neutrinos are ghostly particles that only weakly interact with normal matter; trillions of neutrinos stream through our bodies every second....

Peter’s Facebook friends knew something was wrong months before he had a manic episode. He had been posting about expensive shopping trips and name-dropping celebrities he claimed to have partied with—seemingly out of character for the 26-year-old former dental student from Atlanta. When Peter (not his real name) ran away from home in April 2013, he unleashed a flurry of paranoid, all-caps status updates saying his family was out to get him....

Until recently, NASA faced a severe plutonium shortage that jeopardized future deep-space missions. In 2013 the U.S. Department of Energy announced, after a 25-year pause, that it would restart production of plutonium 238—the backbone of long-lasting nuclear batteries that have powered numerous missions since 1969. Yet the damage from the hiatus was already done. By 2021 the new effort will yield only enough of the radioactive fuel to make about two and a half nuclear battery modules a year....

1968 Riddle of Steel “Can hard steels ever be made tough and ductile? One of the properties of materials that are of greatest concern to engineers and scientists concerned with materials is fracture. The scope of fracture problems is wide, ranging from catastrophic failures of bridges, tanks, pipelines and machine parts to basic considerations such as how atoms become separated when single crystals of a metal are broken. Both calculations and experiments have shown that the metals used by engineers should be about 10 times stronger than the engineer actually finds they are....

Take a pinch of Mars, a sprinkle of Saturn’s moon Iapetus and a dash of Neptune’s moon Triton—and the recipe will yield something like Pluto. The first published scientific findings from NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew past Pluto in July, confirm that the dwarf planet does not resemble any other single world in the Solar System. Instead, its wildly varying terrain is a crazy quilt of geological patterns and textures—copied, pasted and tweaked from other planets and moons....

It may seem surprising that after being elected president, Donald Trump continued to insist that the elections were rigged. Or that he accused his predecessor of having tapped his phone—without any proof. Or that one of his advisers claimed that the inauguration ceremony had shattered the record for attendance, which clearly it had not. But that would underestimate the new and baffling phenomenon of “post-truth,” of which Trump is the most striking example....

I’m standing on a beach in Australia, toes digging into the sand, zipping up my wet suit before I dive down to the Great Barrier Reef. As I stare out at the ocean, I’m excited by memories of my previous dive at this site a decade earlier. Growing up in Ohio, I had spent my childhood reading A Day in the Life of a Marine Biologist when I wasn’t glued to the Discovery Channel....

California, here shuttle Endeavour comes, right back where it started from. NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour left Houston for the Golden State today (Sept. 20) on the second leg of its cross-country trip to Los Angeles, where the orbiter will ultimately become a museum piece. Endeavour, riding piggyback atop a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet, took off from Ellington Field in Houston at 7:03 a.m. CDT (8:03 a.m. EDT/1203 GMT) and is headed for NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Facility in Southern California later today, its final pit stop before arriving in Los Angeles on Friday....

In 2014 the driver of a truck lost his brakes on a hill in Ithaca, N.Y., and had to decide between running over construction workers and plowing into a café. The man chose the latter, and a bartender died. It was a real-life case of one of moral philosophers’ favorite thought experiments: the trolley problem. In their book Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, Columbia University professor Hod Lipson and technology journalist Melba Kurman offer it as an example of the awful dilemmas that designers of self-driving cars must prepare for....

We’ve all heard the adage: practice makes perfect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning pianist might rehearse scales before chords. A young tennis player practices the forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this “blocking,” and because it is commonsensical and easy to schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other settings....

A Scottish nurse who contracted and initially recovered from Ebola, but then suffered relapsing illness, has meningitis caused by the virus persisting in her brain, doctors treating her said on Wednesday. Pauline Cafferkey was not reinfected with the Ebola virus, doctors said, but it had remained in her body since her initial recovery and had re-emerged to cause life-threatening complications. “The virus re-emerged around the brain and around the spinal column to cause meningitis,” said Michael Jacobs, an infectious diseases consultant who has been treating Cafferkey in London....

Charles Darwin had more in common with chimpanzees than even he realized. Before he was universally known for his theory of natural selection, the young naturalist made a decision that has long been hailed as the type of behavior that fundamentally separates humans from other apes. In 1858, before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his friend Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Darwin his own theory of evolution that closely matched what Darwin had secretly been working on for more than two decades....

Every operation starts with a cut and ends when the incision is closed. And though the closing act that follows a complicated surgery may seem almost incidental, a surgeon’s choice of needles, sutures or adhesives to do the job plays a big part in how well and how quickly the patient heals. These days, there are more tools than ever at a surgeon’s disposal. The choice of which one to use is as much art as science, often boiling down to a surgeon’s personal preference, says Lee Nelson, a neurosurgeon with Boulder Neurosurgical Associates in Colorado....

Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary for science of the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, but more recently considered for an advisory post to Scott Pruitt when he was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has published a new book. Released on May 4 and entitled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, its major theme is that the science about the Earth’s climate is anything but settled....

Excerpted with permission from Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things, by M. R. O’Connor. Available from Saint Martin’s Press. Copyright © 2015.(Scientific American and Saint Martin’s Press are part of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.) The puma is a cat with many names. Catamount, cougar, mountain lion. In the southeastern United States, pumas are called panthers, and in the early 1970s there were two camps among biologists when it came to the question of whether any were still living....

With black holes, what you see is not what you get. The ring of light visible around a black hole’s silhouette originates from a radius of about 5GM/c2, where G is Newton’s constant, M is the black hole mass and c is the speed of light. This ring is larger than the event horizon of a nonspinning black hole by a factor of 2.5—or up to five with the addition of spin....

Fifty-five million years ago, when scientists believe the Earth was in a near-runaway state, dangerously overheated by greenhouse gases, the Arctic Ocean was also a very different place. It was a large lake, connected to the greater oceans by one primary opening: the Turgay Sea. When this channel closed or was blocked nearly 50 million years ago, the enclosed body of water became the perfect habitat for a small-leaved fern called Azolla....

Yoshiki Sasai is not just an ordinary tissue engineer who tries to coax stem cells to grow into fully formed bodily structures. It is true that Sasai has made his mark by taking on big projects like using stem cells to whip up a retina, cortical tissue and the cerebellum, involved with balance and movement. But his research has gone deeper by delving into the way stem cells organize themselves into complex structures under the influence of genes and the prenatal environment....

What shines brighter than the Sun, appears for only a split second and lights up Earth’s skies thousands of times each day? If you’re stumped, don’t worry—experts are too. For nearly a decade, astrophysicists have been struggling to explain perplexing millisecond chirps of radio waves pinging through the heavens. Now, several new studies are bringing researchers closer to solving the mystery by narrowing the search for the radio flashes’ origins to youthful stellar outbursts in distant galaxies....