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From the Book, THE AGE OF INSIGHT by Eric R. Kandel. Copyright © 2012 by Eric R. Kandel. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Our attraction to faces, and particularly to eyes, appears to be innately determined. Infants as well as adults prefer to look at eyes rather than other features of a person’s face, and both infants and adults are sensitive to gaze....

Late one evening in 1990 at the Ketambe Research Station in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park, I sat transcribing notes by the light of a kerosene lamp in my hut on the banks of the Alas River. Something was bothering me. I had come to gather data for my dissertation, documenting what and how the monkeys and apes there ate. The idea was to relate those observations to the sizes, shapes and wear patterns of their teeth....

Researchers are a step closer to understanding how Alzheimer’s disease takes shape—literally. A hallmark of Alzheimer’s is the presence of protein aggregates in the brain known as plaques. They are made up of various lengths and conformations of the beta amyloid protein. The proteins link end to end, forming long, threadlike structures called fibrils. Now Roland Riek and his colleagues at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, working with scientists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the F....

While the Sea-to-Sky highway construction has definitely ruffled some “green” feathers of Vancouver locals, the new Olympic buildings are meeting very high green standards. “Environmentally we’ve put a major focus on any of the buildings that are being built,” says Linda Coady, Vice President of Sustainability for the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, which will cost more than $2 billion Canadian in total....

Have you ever noticed that when there’s a solar or lunar eclipse, an eclipse of the other variety comes two weeks before or after? Sometimes, we’ll even get three eclipses in less than a month. Just such a situation is happening right now. We already have had a partial eclipse of the sun this month, on Friday the 13th, visible only from parts of Antarctica, Tasmania, Australia and a very narrow slice of New Zealand....

For more than a century scientists have known that individuals who are tested on material are more likely to remember it than those who simply study. But questions remain about why that is the case. Kent State University psychology researcher Katherine Rawson argues that part of the explanation is that testing gets people to come up with better keyword clues, which bridge the gap between familiar and new information—and it strengthens ties between these keywords and the newly learned information....

By Richard A. LovettEfforts to clean up the Potomac River, which forms part of the border between Maryland and Washington, D.C., have markedly improved conditions for fish and waterfowl, according to a study published September 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The finding raises hopes for success in restoring degraded tidelands and bays worldwide–including Chesapeake Bay, into which the Potomac flows.Henry Ruhl, an ocean scientist at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, UK, and Nancy Rybicki, a hydrologist and environmental scientist with the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, found a correlation between changes in the abundance of submerged aquatic vegetation and improvements in sewage treatment procedures at the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in Washington, D....

A US government plan to slash protections for one of North America’s richest and best-preserved archaeological landscapes has prompted a wave of concern among researchers. On December 4, US President Donald Trump announced that he had cut the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah from 547,000 hectares to 82,000. That removes protections for thousands of Native American cultural sites, some as many as 13,000 years old. The president’s action leaves the national monument, created last year by his predecessor, Barack Obama, in legal limbo....

Consider the possibility that an asteroid may have transformed the picture of life on Earth—but forget the dinosaurs and the massive crater, and rewind an extra 400 million years from that dramatic moment. Back then, life was primarily an oceanic affair and backbones were the latest in arrival on the anatomy scene. But unlike the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, this earlier space rock never made it to Earth....

In 2015, NASA’s Dawn space probe sent back the first images that directly revealed the presence of mysterious, bright spots on the surface of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Both scientists and the general public became fascinated with these planetoid freckles. Now, a group of scientists is using an Earth-based telescope to study the spots on Ceres and other variations on the dwarf planet’s surface....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Five years after weight loss surgery, obese patients may regain many of the pounds they initially shed, a new study from Israel suggests. While surgery remains more effective for lasting weight loss than alternatives such as dieting and exercising, said lead study author Dr. Andrei Keidar, the study findings suggest that doctors still have more to learn about which patients will get the most benefit from operations and what strategies can make the initial results stick....

Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry Jean Ziegler New Press, 2013 ($26.95) Nearly one billion people throughout the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. This shameful statistic stems not from a failure of agriculture, technology or science but from inhumane and shortsighted politics, contends Ziegler, a former special rapporteur for the United Nations. In grim detail, he explains hunger’s high human and economic costs. He also investigates hunger’s modern, geopolitical causes, drawing from recent examples such as the sanctions against Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule, in which the international community withheld food and medicine on the grounds that the supplies could be used by Iraq’s military....

California will scrutinize deliberate power shut-offs by utilities and potentially fine them $100,000 per day for rule violations, Gov. Gavin Newsom said yesterday. The California Public Utilities Commission is launching the inquiry into whether utilities are meeting new rules for advance warnings of blackouts and other parameters. The Democratic governor announced the move amid a torrent of criticism as nearly 600,000 Northern California residents remained without electricity, some for the third day....

A dozen years ago, neighborhoods around Riverside, an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, had the nation’s worst soot: Every three days, on average, the air was declared unhealthful, and people were breathing twice as many microscopic particles as deemed safe. But finally, later this year, for the first time ever, people in Riverside – and throughout the nation – will breathe air that meets an annual health standard for fine particles....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the 1999 book The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos. In addition to droids, Star Wars also features a few cyborgs, organisms with mechanical or electronic components. After Luke’s hand is cut off by Darth Vader, he receives a bionic hand in its place. In Return of the Jedi, Luke returns the favor, cutting off Vader’s hand, and we see wires coming from Vader’s wrist....

In mid-August, the head of Biocurious, one of country’s premier community biotechnology labs, very publicly quit her post. “I’m seeing lots of political maneuvering and divisive finger pointing at a time when we should be banding together to turn things around,” Kristina Hathaway wrote in a resignation letter on the lab’s message board. “It’s sad, and it’s shameful.” The first community labs opened three years ago and became embodiments of the nascent Do-It-Yourself Biology community, a grassroots movement of enthusiasts seeking to popularize biotechnology just as programmers working from their garages popularized computing in the 1970s....

A large bipedal dinosaur once known only from fossils of its long arms and a few isolated bone fragments turns out to be a hump-backed, big-bellied beast almost the size of Tyrannosaurus rex, suggest Mongolian fossils newly described in Nature. Few scientists could have imagined the behemoth’s distinctive combination of features from the smattering of bones previously in hand. “This is an entirely new body plan” for such dinosaurs, says Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK....

Powerful measles protection rests on numbers: 92 to 94 percent. That is the portion of people in a community that must be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks of a disease that killed more children around the world in 2013 than car accidents or AIDS. At that immunization level, the virus has trouble finding victims, even the unvaccinated, as shown by both direct experience and models of disease. Libya and Tanzania, for instance, have passed that bar, with vaccination rates of 99 percent....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. So far we’ve talked about the big ideas behind significant figures (things like where they come from, why they matter, and what they mean), and we’ve also talked about how to identify significant figures in a number. But we haven’t yet talked about how to actually make calculations using significant figures....

Editor’s Note: This story will be published in the November 2008 issue of Scientific American. Nothing ratchets up the perennial debate over media bias like a presidential election. But as Tim Groeling, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes, public discussions about media bias are often just “food fights,” with pundits and partisans throwing around anecdotes. Groeling is hoping to advance scientific (and public) knowledge beyond this mush with research he used to demonstrate selection bias in television networks’ decision to run or withhold the results of presidential approval polls....