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La Dame D’Esprit: A Biography of The Marquise Du Châtelet by Judith P. Zinsser Viking, 2006 Out of The Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women To Physics edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams Cambridge University Press, 2006 During the past 40 years, study after study has addressed why more women do not become scientists. The question is most apt for physics. Advanced physics degrees awarded to women have always lagged, hitting a nadir at under 5 percent from the 1950s to the 1970s....

On Antarctica’s Ross Island, a short drive from the US McMurdo research station, high-tech radar antennas and other atmospheric instruments gaze skyward, gathering detailed measurements of West Antarctic clouds. Remarkably, these are the first such data to be gathered in five decades—even though weather patterns in the region can influence those half a world away. The US$5-million project, known as the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement West Antarctic Radiation Experiment (AWARE), began to observe the skies near McMurdo in November and will run until early 2017....

As you might guess, scientists do not have a complete answer to this question, and the partial answer is complicated. The advantages offered by tablets or, more generally, electronic textbooks seem legion: they are portable; publishers can easily update the content; students can get immediate feedback; and the text can be supplemented with videos and audio—imagine not just reading about the Battle of Britain but seeing a newsreel as well. Unfortunately, there are downsides, too....

As the new coronavirus continues to burn through populations, studies are beginning to shed light on its impact on infants. And so far the findings have been promising for parents and researchers alike. The initial data suggest that infants make up a small fraction of people who have tested positive for COVID-19. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in April reported 398 infections in children under one year of age—roughly 0....

For the first time ever, astronomers have directly observed planets in the process of being born. Scientists have photographed a gas-giant exoplanet forming around a young star called LkCa 15, which lies about 450 light-years from Earth. “It’s exciting, because it’s the first time that we’ve been able to image forming planets directly,” study lead author Stephanie Sallum, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. “It gives us a system to follow up in the future, in depth, to really understand the details of how planets form....

We humans emerged not long ago from evolution’s forge as a clever animal adept at hunting and gathering, with intellectual gifts that knew no bounds. Our journey since has taken us to the threshold of nature’s deepest mysteries. Who are we, what can we do and where are we headed? WHO WE ARE What Sleep Crime Tells Us About Consciousness Aspiration Makes Us Human Will We Continue to Get Smarter? The Flynn Effect Says Yes...

Drone aircraft flying in loose formation through the brown cloud that forms over the Indian subcontinent have revealed that the nearly two-mile thick haze exacerbates atmospheric warming by 50 percent. This means the soot in the cloud more than cancels out any cooling from its fellow aerosols—and causes as much warming as carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas. Atmospheric physicist Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of San Diego and his colleagues flew 18 missions with three unmanned aircraft from a base on the island of Hanimaadhoo in the Indian Ocean....

Robert G. Edwards might not be a household name, but the innovation he pioneered along with Patrick Steptoe certainly is. In vitro fertilization (IVF), the process whereby human eggs are fertilized outside of the body and the resulting embryos implanted in a woman’s womb, led to the 1978 birth of Louise Brown—the world’s first “test tube baby.” To date, an estimated five million children worldwide have been born using this innovation....

As executives and doctors at several of America’s largest nonprofit health systems, we’ve seen the pandemic’s toll up close. From intubating patients and comforting family members to preparing food and disposing of PPE waste, our colleagues have been on the front lines of our country’s response to COVID-19, often risking their own safety to combat the virus. That’s what hospitals and health care professionals do: We use our expertise to fight for our patients’ safety, well-being and lives....

Editor’s Note (5/25/22): This article is being republished in the wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., that killed at least 19 children and two teachers. It was the deadliest such attack since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, and occurred less than two weeks after a deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 10 Black people in an act of domestic terrorism. If a shooter uses a semiautomatic rifle instead of another type of gun, it appears to roughly double the chances of victims being wounded and killed....

To glimpse the oldest light in the universe, simply tune an old television between channels: some of the tiny specks dancing on the screen result from the antenna being bombarded relentlessly by photons that were emitted shortly after the big bang, some 13.8 billion years ago. These photons fly uniformly through space from all directions, with an average temperature of 2.7 kelvins (−455 degrees Fahrenheit), composing a cloud of radiation called the cosmic microwave background (CMB)....

One month after Superstorm Sandy hit the northeastern United States, causing tens of billions of dollars in damages to property and infrastructure and claiming the lives of more than 100 people, leading urban planners, academics and government scientists worry that the event will dim into memory and the havoc and devastation it created will be overshadowed by society’s attempt to return to normal. Furthermore, they say, ignoring questions about how to reduce the region’s vulnerability to rising sea levels and more frequent, intense storms will ensure that in the decades to come, the region will continue to experience massive infrastructure collapse and possibly more fatalities....

India is poised to contend with China as the globe’s top consumer of coal, with 455 power plants preparing to come online, a prominent environmental research group has concluded. The coal plants in India’s pipeline – almost 100 more than China is preparing to build – would deliver 519,396 megawatts of installed generating capacity. That is only slightly less than pending new capacity in China, which remains the undisputed king of coal consumption....

There’s some moderately good news and bad news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the new superbug that has been generating concern in the United States and elsewhere. First the bad: Another human case of the bug, known as mcr-1, has been found in the United States, bringing the total domestic cases so far to four. The moderately good news: Investigations into two of those cases failed to turn up any evidence the bug spread to contacts of the people who were carrying it....

BAD MEMORIES I noticed an ambiguity between two articles in your January/February issue: “A Feeling for the Past,” by Ingfei Chen, and “Trying to Forget,” by Ingrid Wickelgren. The first article states that “older adults favored the happy images: half of the images the elders correctly recalled were positive and slightly more than a quarter were negative …. older adults appear to actively manage their emotions by paying less attention to negative things....

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.] How did you get interested in machine intelligence and speech recognition? I was watching Knight Rider, the television series from the ’80s, as a child, and I was very much attached to the idea that machines should be talking with humans to the level at which they can understand emotion. Are you optimistic about further breakthroughs? In machine learning and artificial intelligence, we’ve always seen a sort of pattern....

SAN FRANCISCO—Personal computers, cellphones, self-driving cars—Gordon Moore predicted the invention of all these technologies half a century ago in a 1965 article for Electronics magazine. The enabling force behind those inventions would be computing power, and Moore laid out how he thought computing power would evolve over the coming decade. Last week the tech world celebrated his prediction here because it has held true with uncanny accuracy—for the past 50 years....

CLIMATEWIRE | When Maria Regalado Garcia tried to wash the dishes in her California home one recent morning, only a trickle of water emerged from the kitchen faucet. Other taps in her Tooleville house in rural Tulare County ran similarly dry. The lack of water meant Garcia, 85, couldn’t brush her teeth properly or fill a swamp cooler that pumps out chilled air — a necessity with temperatures topping 100 degrees in her central California town....

Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed a church historian as the country’s new science and education minister. On August 19, the president announced that Olga Vasilyeva would succeed the current science minister, Dmitry Livanov, who will become presidential envoy on trade and economic relations with Ukraine, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. During his 4-year term as minister, Livanov oversaw a radical overhaul of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia’s main basic research organization....

Every month in Advances we showcase an intriguing science-related image called “What Is It?” We have shown you the mouth of a tick and even Martian dunes. Now we would like to see what you’ve got. If you have taken a photo that you think shows some interesting science, we invite you to submit it. SA editors will consider them for an upcoming issue of Scientific American or an online slide show....