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Apple’s forthcoming iOS update promises to incorporate a feature called Night Shift that could help people sleep better. But what is it about smartphones that can mess with our slumber? There is a growing body of research showing that exposure to bright blue light can disrupt people’s sleep patterns, and this is exactly the kind of light produced by modern LCD displays such as those on smartphones and tablets. But Apple is hoping to help users preserve their beauty sleep....

The Hoover Dam on the border of Nevada and Arizona is 726 feet high and 1,244 feet across. But another dam in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is more impressive. Made of wood, mud, rocks and whatever other materials were available, this dam is six feet high and more than 260 feet long. And it’s more impressive because the builders had no printed plans, heavy equipment or opposable thumbs. They lacked hard hats but had hard teeth....

Correction appended. A bipartisan energy policy group called today for action on climate legislation and laid out principles for such a measure, including views that collide with the leading House climate and energy measure. The National Commission on Energy Policy’s report presents an overview of major issues – such as allowance allocations, offsets, trade and costs – that will be followed in the coming weeks by the group’s detailed recommendations and proposals....

Alexander Bardi-Spröwitz has seen more dissected ostriches than the average engineer. Twelve years ago the researcher, now at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, was attempting to design a legged robot based on bird biology. The trouble was that most biologists do not describe animal anatomy in engineering-friendly terms. “It’s not their goal to build a robot,” Bardi-Spröwitz notes. “It’s a bit frustrating for me as an engineer because I need certain types of information....

October 1964 Evolution and Creation “Biblical fundamentalists are once again in conflict with biologists, this time as a result of efforts by the National Science Foundation to raise the level of high school biology teaching. After five years of preparation and classroom testing, three new textbooks have been offered to state and other educational agencies across the nation. All were produced by a $5 million Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) project....

The upcoming atmospheric re-entry of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket body is a reminder of a much larger problem, experts say. The Long March 5B launched the core module of China’s space station into orbit on April 28. Now satellite and space debris monitoring groups are keeping a close eye on the big rocket’s core stage, which will fall to Earth in an uncontrolled manner soon. Leftover debris from its fiery fall could reach terra firma....

I have long been fascinated by the homes that animals construct. Over the years I have contemplated the nests of hundreds of different species—including ants, termites, wasps, birds, fish and mice—by poking and prodding nests in the wild, manipulating them in the laboratory and reviewing the work of other scientists. I have dug holes meters deep, trying to find the bottoms of ant nests. I have snorkeled over bluegill fish, watching them excavate and tend to their dish-shaped nests....

CLIMATEWIRE | Ominous clouds rippled overhead, and scientist Jason Box raced to reach shelter before the rain hit. Box, a glaciologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, had been camping with colleagues on the Greenland ice sheet last Friday when the weather began to turn. As the team rushed to get off the ice, Box was struck by how warm the air felt on his face. It reminded him of hot Chinook winds that sweep through Colorado in the wintertime, melting snow and ice in their path....

Long before outsiders arrived on the scene, Native Hawaiians understood their island chain’s volcanic origins. They also understood the island links were successively younger moving from northwest to southeast. In Hawaiian tradition the fire and volcano goddess Pele is thought to occupy the youngest and most active center of volcanism. Today that is Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. In the 21st century scientists are now able to put numbers to the island ages, ranging from around five million years at the oldest end up to the present day (at Kilauea)....

By Shereen Lehman (Reuters Health) - People who ate the most fiber were less likely to die of any cause during a recent study of nearly one million people. The finding might be explained by fiber’s potential to lower the risk of chronic diseases including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and several types of cancer, researchers say. Individuals should be encouraged to increase their dietary fiber intake “to potentially decrease the risk of premature death,” Yang Yang, of the Shanghai Cancer Institute in China, and colleagues write in the American Journal of Epidemiology....

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) is preparing to introduce legislation that would pause federal regulations on climate change in exchange for an escalating tax on carbon emissions, according to draft legislation obtained by E&E News. The move, which comes as Curbelo defends his congressional seat in South Florida, is a rare effort by a Republican to address global temperature increases by reducing greenhouse gases. It’s also causing strife within his party. Curbelo is trying to line up co-sponsors before the legislation’s public release next week, but GOP opponents are already targeting it as anathema to Republican principles on economic growth....

Editor’s Note: This story was originally printed in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American. We’re reposting it because of new research out today by author Zhong Lin Wang. The watchmaker in the 1920s who devised the self-winding wristwatch was on to a great idea: mechanically harvesting energy from the wearer’s moving arm and putting it to work rewinding the watch spring. Today we are beginning to create extremely small energy harvesters that can supply electrical power to the tiny world of nanoscale devices, where things are measured in billionths of a meter....

Epilepsy affects some 2.7 million Americans—more than Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) combined. More than half of patients can achieve seizure control with treatment, yet almost a third of people with epilepsy have a refractory form of the disease that does not respond well to existing antiepileptic drugs. Nor are these patients typically helped by the one implanted device—Cyberonics’ Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS)—that has had U....

Editor’s Note: Douglas Hofstadter gave permission to Scientific American to post this essay in light of the death of Martin Gardner, who wrote the magazine’s “Mathematical Games” column for 25 years and published more than 70 books. Gardner died May 22, at 95. I’ve been trying to reconstruct how I first encountered Martin Gardner. It may have happened in 1959, when at age 14 I happened to visit the home of a boy a couple of years older than myself, who I thought was extremely smart (and indeed he was—he later became a well-known mathematician on the Princeton faculty)....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Despite Michael Atiyah’s many accolades—he is a winner of both the Fields and the Abel prizes for mathematics; a past president of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific society in the world (and a past president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh); a former master of Trinity College, Cambridge; a knight and a member of the royal Order of Merit; and essentially Britain’s mathematical pope—he is nonetheless perhaps most aptly described as a matchmaker....

It’s an exciting time to be an organ transplant physician. Just two weeks ago, doctors in Baltimore reported completing the first successful transfer of a pig heart into a living human patient. Now pig kidneys might be just around the corner. In late September 2021 a team of researchers transplanted a gene-edited pig’s two kidneys into the body of a person who had undergone brain death (the irreversible loss of all brain function) in a procedure designed to fully simulate clinical transplantation....

UNITED NATIONS – A scientific panel issued a report to U.N. member states yesterday indicating that the health of the globe’s oceans may be in much worse shape than is widely appreciated. A combination of factors are threatening a new mass extinction event in the oceans similar to earlier extinctions recorded in the paleontological data, warns a group of marine biologists and climatologists who met recently at Oxford University to share research....

For the first time ever, a private company has permission to land on the moon. The U.S. government has officially approved the planned 2017 robotic lunar landing of California-based Moon Express, which aims to fly commercial missions to Earth’s nearest neighbor and help exploit its resources, company representatives announced today (Aug. 3). “This is not only a milestone, but really a threshold for the entire commercial space industry,” Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards told Space....

On a sweltering summer day in 2010, a construction worker in the southeastern Chinese city of Ganzhou was digging the foundation for a building when his backhoe smashed into something hard. Climbing down to see what it was, he probably expected the worst—impenetrable bedrock, an old water main or some other nuisance that would inevitably delay completion of the sprawling industrial park his crew was racing to finish. But when the dirt and smoke cleared, a very different culprit came into focus: bones—lots of them, some enormous....

In 1996 scientists announced the astonishing news that they’d discovered what they believed might be signs of ancient life inside a meteorite from Mars. In 2014 astrophysicists declared that they’d found direct evidence at last for the “inflationary universe” theory, first proposed in the 1980s. What these assertions had in common was that they were based on research by highly qualified, credentialed scientists—and also that the “discoveries” turned out to be wrong....