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People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea....

More than 15 years ago, a man who was only 20 years old had a massive stroke when a major artery supplying his brain stem burst. The incident left him unable to control his limbs or any muscles related to speech. With a device that relied on his head motions to control a keyboard, he could produce about five words a minute, one character at a time. The typical rate when someone is speaking fluidly can be up to 200 words a minute....

Excerpted with permission, Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia, by Michael Buckley. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2014. (Scientific American is part of Macmillan Publishers.) AUGUST 2005: My introduction to the tremendous power of the rivers of Tibet comes via a rafting ride on the Drigung River, a few hours’ drive from Lhasa. This is a baptism fueled by pure adrenaline, a baptism that raises lots of questions—and gets me going on research....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the early 2000s, the idea of giving legal rights to nature was on the fringes of environmental legal theory and public consciousness. Today, New Zealand’s Whanganui River is a person under domestic law, and India’s Ganges River was recently granted human rights. In Ecuador, the Constitution enshrines nature’s “right to integral respect”. What on earth does this all mean?...

On a sun-parched patch of land in Rehovot, Israel, two neuroscientists peer into the darkness of a 200-metre-long tunnel of their own design. The fabric panels of the snaking structure shimmer in the heat, while, inside, a study subject is navigating its dim length. Finally, out of the blackness bursts a bat, which executes a mid-air backflip to land upside down, hanging at the tunnel’s entrance. Nachum Ulanovsky, the study leader, looks affectionately at the creature as his graduate student offers it a piece of banana—a reward for the valuable data it has just added to their latest study of how brains navigate....

When the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), the world’s governing body for soccer, proclaimed that the 2022 World Cup in Qatar would be “a fully carbon-neutral event,” the collective chortle that emerged from environmentalists could have powered a wind farm. The environmental nonprofit Carbon Market Watch blasted what it called FIFA’s “creative accounting” and issued a report charging that World Cup organizers’ stated goal “to reach carbon neutrality before the tournament kicks off” was fanciful at best....

A large and international meeting on the ethics of human-genome editing is poised to begin— and researchers are curious about how perceived differences in attitudes will play out. “We’re hoping to sort of take the temperature of the world,” says David Baltimore, the virologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who is chairing the International Summit on Human Gene Editing. It runs December 1–3 in Washington DC. Jointly organized by the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society, the meeting is expected to draw representatives from more than 20 countries, including India, Sweden and Nigeria....

Genes that help harmful germs thrive in the warmth of the human body apparently arose from DNA that enables microbes to survive in superheated deep-sea vents. Scientists at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology compared the genomes of two deep-sea bacteria with those of Helicobacter, responsible for ulcers, and Campylobacter, the leading food-borne cause of diarrhea. According to the researchers, genes that likely help deep-sea bacteria maintain symbiotic relationships with other vent-dwelling organisms assist their gut-dwelling relatives in evading immune systems....

What Causes the Brain to Have Slow Processing Speed, and How Can the Rate Be Improved?—Heather Walker, via email Geoffrey A. Kerchner, assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, responds: To a brain scientist, processing speed means just that: the rate at which a human can take in a bit of new information, reach some judgment on it and then formulate a response. Studies suggest that the speed of information processing changes with age along an inverted U-shaped curve, such that our thinking speeds up from childhood to adolescence, maintains a period of relative stability leading up to middle age, and finally, in late middle age and onward, declines slowly but steadily....

Your favorite coffee shop is crowded with harried people, and you are standing shoulder to shoulder in a slow-moving line. Each jostling shift of the crowd aggravates your severe social anxiety. You start gasping for air; your heart quickens and you want to run. But you force yourself to stay. You manage that feat only because you are not actually there. You are living this experience through your avatar, an animation that represents you in a virtual environment....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

Does your workplace provide incentives to attend the gym? Offer support to quit smoking? Mandate completing a health assessment? It seems that everywhere you turn, businesses are investing resources into trying to improve the health of their workers. Some of the largest drivers of high healthcare spending in the US are related to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, smoking-related health issues, diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. US workers spend nearly one-third of their time in the workplaces....

It’s not often that a figure in a scientific paper can make you wince with pain. But it’s impossible to look at figure 1a in Michele De Luca’s 2017 Nature paper and not feel a sympathetic twinge at the sight of a young boy, Hassan, covered from head to toe with red-raw wounds1. The son of Syrian refugees who fled to Germany, Hassan was born with junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB) — a condition caused by a genetic fault in one of three genes (LAMA3, LAMB3 and LAMC2) encoding subunits of the laminin-332 protein, which binds the surface of the skin to the underlying layers....

China is making progress in creating a new line of launchers for advancing its space station plans, as well as bolstering its capability to land robots — and possibly humans — on the moon. Earlier this year, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation announced it had successfully conducted a 200-second test firing with the Long March 5 rocket’s 120-ton-thrust liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene engine. The engine is far more powerful than the 75-ton-thrust engines of the rockets used to launch China’s piloted Shenzhou spacecraft....

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Beijing man is seeking to divorce his wife after she took their son to a tropical island province to escape the capital’s notorious smog, saying the long-distance relationship had destroyed their marriage, state media said on Thursday. The man, identified only by his family name of Wang, married his wife in 2008 and had a son two years later, the Beijing Times reported, in a story widely picked up by other Chinese media outlets online, including Xinhua news agency....

During Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate — the first in a two-night event viewed as the de facto launch of the primary season — health policies, ranging from “Medicare for All” to efforts to curb skyrocketing drug prices, were among the key issues the 10 hopeful candidates onstage used to help differentiate themselves from the pack. Health care dominated early, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) using questions about the economy to take aim at pharmaceutical and insurance companies....

DENVER — Some 150 million years ago, a two-legged dinosaur walking across a mudflat pulled a bit of a vaudevillian pratfall — and left a permanent record of its stumble. A series of tracks in the Oklahoma panhandle near where the state borders Colorado and New Mexico reveal where a dinosaur slipped and caught itself before continuing on. The klutzy dinosaur was a theropod, according to research presented Oct. 28 here at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America....

In the not too distant future each of us will be able to colonize our gut with genetically modified “smart” bacteria that detect and stamp out disease at the earliest possible moment. This scenario may sound like the premise for a sci-fi flick, but it is a very real possibility. Microbiome engineering holds great promise because of advances in the field of synthetic biology, which strives to create and rewire biological organisms so they perform desired tasks....

NEW YORK – A modestly successful outcome from the latest round of international climate change negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, has proponents breathing a huge sigh of relief. After last year’s raucous session in Copenhagen, Denmark, most governments and activists were put on the defensive to prove that multilateral action on global warming was even possible. They now feel vindicated. But even as optimism strengthens ahead of the next year’s major conference in South Africa, one famous prognosticator says it’s still more likely that we’ll see a repeat of Copenhagen’s performance toward the end of 2011....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Let us start, in the spirit of steampunk, by imagining a new and different past. One that is just a little different to that which we currently have. So welcome to the year 1867. The Victorian age is at its zenith and a new, powerful and monied middle class is looking for things to do with their cash....