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In the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, the workaholic editor of a fashion magazine called Runway, and Anne Hathaway plays her deliberately unfashionable assistant, Andy. Miranda senses Andy’s disdain for her world of designer skirts and belts and shoes, and at one point she icily confronts her assistant for her arrogance: “You see that droopy sweater you’re wearing?” she asks. “That blue was on a dress Cameron Diaz wore on the cover of Runway—shredded chiffon by James Holt....

The mummy of an Incan child who was sacrificed to the gods more than 500 years ago belonged to a previously unknown offshoot of an ancient Native American lineage, new research finds. The child, a 7-year-old who was found frozen in the highest reaches of the Andes in Argentina, was part of a genetic lineage that arose when humans were beginning to cross the Bering Strait or first migrating into the Americas, the researchers found....

Key Concepts Chemistry Food Science Solution Temperature Starch Introduction Have you ever seen “bubble tea” and wondered what the boba spheres in this drink are—and how they are made? Bubble tea or “boba tea” is a sweetened drink made of flavored tea, milk and bubbles. The translucent, squishy bubbles called boba are very easy to make. You only need three ingredients: tapioca flour, water and brown sugar. The secret lies in one detail: the temperature of the water....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Ancient and quaint seem the days of witch crazes, demon scares and tulip manias. Instances of mass hysteria may strike you as rare events in modern advanced societies. But such outbreaks are products of their times. They’re still around today, just in different guises. Aided and abetted by its status as an internet meme, the myth of an evil, supernatural Slenderman has been panicking adolescents since 2009, even culminating in an attempted murder by proxy....

Swedish records stretching back to 1751 have allowed a couple of statisticians to put to the test competing arguments about why fewer male babies are born in times of stress. Previous research into the ratio of male to female infants after events ranging from London’s killer smog in the 1950s to the earthquake that rocked Kobe, Japan, in 1995, showed this to be the case. Some scientists argued that a pregnant woman’s stress response affects all male fetuses, damaging them for life....

A decade ago the great worry about nanotechnology was that it could quite literally destroy the planet. As Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy warned in his essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” self-assembling nanobots could potentially spread out of our control (Mis-)programmed to replicate ad infinitum, these subsentient bots would spread across the landscape as a gray goo of devastation, consuming the earth and every unlucky creature who called it home....

As microchips have grown smaller and more powerful, they have infiltrated virtually every corner of society, from smartphones to medical devices to the controls that regulate rail lines, power grids and water treatment facilities. Computer security experts have been warning that these embedded computers are highly vulnerable to attack because they are increasingly networked with other computers and because they have virtually no defenses protecting their firmware, programs that are hardwired onto the chip....

Man in the moon: Will high-def exaggerate my crags? The first ever high-definition video images of the lunar surface were released this week by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). Sponsored by the two organizations, the HDTV-equipped spacecraft Kaguya entered lunar orbit last month and went on to shoot a combined eight minutes of crisp video (available here) from a distance of around 60 miles (100 kilometers), offering a panoramic view of the moon’s northern topography....

One 50-year-old has the nimble metabolism of a teenager, while another’s is so creaky he developed type 2 diabetes—though his immune system is that of a man 25 years his junior. Or one 70-year-old has the immune system of a Gen Xer while another’s is so decrepit she can’t gin up an antibody response to flu vaccines—but her high-performing liver clears out alcohol so fast she can sip Negronis all night without getting tipsy....

Saturn’s rings are such a spectacle that you can see them through even a modest telescope. Made mostly of water ice, the rings contain countless particles, large and small, that orbit the planet in a thin plane. For decades scientists have known that gravitational tugs from Saturn’s many moons imprint patterns on the rings. Now they have discovered a new ring sculptor: oscillations of the planet itself, which promise insight into the interior of the solar system’s second-largest planet....

SpaceX’s robotic Dragon resupply spacecraft has arrived at the International Space Station after a two-day orbital chase. NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, commander of the station’s current Expedition 42, grappled Dragon using the orbiting outpost’s huge robotic arm at 5:54 a.m. EST (1054 GMT) on Monday (Jan. 12). The capsule was installed on the Earth-facing port of the station’s Harmony module three hours later. The astronauts can now begin offloading the 5,200 pounds (2,360 kilograms) of food, spare parts and scientific experiments that Dragon brought up on this mission, the fifth of 12 unmanned cargo flights SpaceX plans to fly to the space station under a $1....

Among scientists, there are tentative signs of a psychedelics renaissance. After decades of stigma, impressive research is showing the power of these substances to help sufferers of depression and addiction, or to comfort patients with a terminal cancer diagnosis, struggling to face their own end. This is the fascinating territory that the journalist Michael Pollan explores with his new book, “How to Change Your Mind.” Pollan dives into brain science, the history of psychedelics (and our tortured attitudes towards them) but his larger subject is the nature of human consciousness....

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is long gone working on secret new projects, and apparently the return to the creative process has inspired a must-share idea he thinks can solve one-time competitor Facebook’s revenue-generating woes. Stone said that after finally learning to love Facebook – he needs to use it to communicate with his new co-workers – he believes the social network should offer people a choice to pay $10 a month to avoid ads....

If you’ve turned on the TV lately at all, you are likely either obsessed with the news coverage on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa–and are contemplating living in a bubble so you’ll never have contact with another human being again–or you are so sick of hearing about it that you are finding yourself watching more episodes of “The Kardashians” than ever before, simply to banish thoughts of deadly viruses that wreak havoc on entire villages....

What if you were asked to describe images you saw in an inkblot or to invent a story for an ambiguous illustration–say, of a middle-aged man looking away from a woman who was grabbing his arm? To comply, you would draw on your own emotions, experiences, memories and imagination. You would, in short, project yourself into the images. Once you did that, many practicing psychologists would assert, trained evaluators could mine your musings to reach conclusions about your personality traits, unconscious needs and overall mental health....

Moss frozen on an Antarctic island for more than 1,500 years was brought back to life in a British laboratory, researchers report. The verdant growth marks the first time a plant has been resurrected after such a long freeze, the researchers said. “This is the very first instance we have of any plant or animal surviving [being frozen] for more than a couple of decades,” said study co-author Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey....

As a young mathematician in the 1950s, Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was … trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled. One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution....

BOULDER, Colo.—There is a new space sheriff in town for alien-hunting U.S. scientists: Lisa Pratt, NASA’s latest “planetary protection officer,” an astrobiologist from Indiana University who entered the role in early February. Although not exactly the lawless wild west, the search for extraterrestrial life remains so speculative that meaningful regulations are few and far between. One exception is the proviso, codified in international law, to avoid potentially harmful interplanetary exchanges of biological material that could spark virulent epidemics on Earth or wipe out fragile alien biospheres....

China is making a bid to use its Ebola vaccine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s a move that could further complicate efforts to test a crowded field of vaccines and therapies in the context of a waning outbreak. The head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Gao Fu, is reported to have said that a team of experts will travel to the DRC on Friday, bringing with them an unspecified number of doses of vaccine....

Last December world leaders met in Copenhagen to add more hot air to the climate debate. That is because although the impacts humanity would like to avoid—fire, flood and drought, for starters—are pretty clear, the right strategy to halt global warming is not. Despite decades of effort, scientists do not know what “number”—in terms of temperature or concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—constitutes a danger. When it comes to defining the climate’s sensitivity to forcings such as rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, “we don’t know much more than we did in 1975,” says climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who first defined the term “climate sensitivity” in the 1970s....