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Seeing doesn’t always take eyes. The brittlestar Ophiocoma wendtii, a relative of starfish, can scan the sea floor, thanks to light-sensitive cells scattered across its skin, rather than by using eye-like structures, a study suggests. The research, published on January 24 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, upends a long-standing hypothesis about how Ophiocoma sees its surroundings. Although it has no brain, this reef-dwelling animal—consisting of five arms joined to a central disk—can detect light and move away from it....

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? —Yoda, Jedi master As both the midget in the country of Brobdingnag and the giant on the island of Lilliput, Lemuel Gulliver—the protagonist of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—experienced firsthand that size is relative. As we cast a neuroscientific light on this classic book, it seems clear to us that Swift, a satirist, essayist and poet, knew a few things about the mind, too....

In the wee hours of the medieval night, a monk begins to wheeze and cry in fear. His brothers call in the healer, who brings what comfort he can. Asthma is a beast of the nighttime, the healer knows. But in this hypothetical scenario, which might have played out in thousands of darkened bedrooms and dormitories down the years, all the men can do is wait for the symptoms to pass....

This week’s episode was inspired by Tech Talker listeners Mike and Bill. In a previous podcast, I talked about switches, routers, hubs, and bridges. In that episode I mentioned why having a wired home network would be extremely useful. Say you wanted to stream movies, home videos, share files, or back up all of your computers to your home network. Well, you can do that. Mike and Bill both wanted to know more....

The official end of winter in the Southern Hemisphere has brought a glimmer of hope on the pandemic front. According to the World Health Organization, countries ranging from Chile to Australia to South Africa experienced one of the mildest flu seasons on record. In a typical year, Australia registers anywhere between 80,000 and 250,000 laboratory-confirmed cases; this year, the figure barely inched above 20,000, leading government officials to confirm the “minimal impact on society due to influenza circulation in the 2020 season....

TOMSK, RUSSIA—After a half century of neglect, a search for better drugs and diagnostics to treat tuberculosis (TB) is underway. But progress is slow, and the breakthroughs that will help reduce the global burden of TB remain years away. The modern diagnostics lab under construction in this Siberian capital is a good example. It will shorten the time it takes to identify a case of multidrug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis from two to three months to two or three weeks by using liquid media instead of solid media to grow individuals’ samples of M....

FINE-TUNING FEELINGS The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—And How You Can Change Them by Richard J. Davidson and Sharon Begley. Hudson Street Press, 2012 ($25.95) Not so long ago scientists downplayed emotions as cognitive flotsam, the product of primitive brain structures that derail logic and reasoning in more evolutionarily sophisticated regions of the cortex. Dramatic advances in brain imaging, however, are challenging that perspective....

Astronomers Relegate Pluto to Dwarf Status After a week of contentious public and private debate, a small cluster of astronomers voted to demote Pluto from its planetary status. The world wept, and we wept with you. Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers Dubbed Tiktaalik roseae, this large, predatory fish bears a number of features found in the four-limbed creatures that eventually gave rise to all amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals....

NASA is considering whether to rename its flagship astronomical observatory, given reports alleging that James Webb, after whom it is named, was involved in persecuting gay and lesbian people during his career in government. Keeping his name on the US$8.8-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—set to launch later this year—would glorify bigotry and anti-LGBT+ sentiment, say some astronomers. But others say there is not yet enough evidence against Webb, who was head of NASA from 1961 to 1968, and they are withholding judgement until the agency has finished an internal investigation....

The United Nations is poised to release the most confident and comprehensive assessment yet of global warming, including detailed estimates of how continued greenhouse-gas emissions will increase Earth’s sea levels and drive extreme weather in the coming years. Compiled by more than 200 scientists and approved by government representatives from 195 countries, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will leave little doubt that humans are altering the way the planet functions — and that things will get much worse if governments do not take drastic action, say climate researchers interviewed by Nature....

At the end of each ice age, the ocean exhales carbon dioxide. Scientists believe this explains the difference in atmospheric CO2 concentrations between ice ages, which have lower concentrations of carbon dioxide, and warmer, more CO2-saturated periods like the one we’re living in now. What causes that carbon dioxide to exit the ocean when an ice age ends, though, is still a puzzle oceanographers are trying to decipher. The leading hypothesis now is that it wasn’t primarily ocean circulation but a change in the location or strength of winds in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica that forced upwelling of deep ocean water, which then released CO2 to the atmosphere....

LONDON – Today is World Environment Day, and to mark it, the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Resources Institute are releasing a paper calling for concerted action to reduce food loss and waste. UNEP and WRI estimate that one-third of all food produced annually worldwide, worth about $1 trillion, gets either lost or wasted. Converting this to calories, they say, it means one-quarter of all calories intended for human consumption are never eaten....

COVID has posed a threat to body—and mind—for all people on the planet—the essence of the Greek-rooted coupling of πᾶν (pan) plus δῆμος (demos) to form the now too-familiar noun. Yet there has been no incisive examination to date of the pandemic’s psychological toll on a global basis. It is difficult to determine increases in cases of depression and anxiety because of a lack of data. No good numbers exist for many countries and even whole continents (Africa and South America)....

Archaeologists need a new theory for the colonization of the Americas. Plant and animal DNA buried under two Canadian lakes squashes the idea that the first Americans travelled through an ice-free corridor that extended from Alaska to Montana. The analysis, published online in Nature on August 10 and led by palaeo­geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, suggests that the passageway became habitable 12,600 years ago. That’s nearly 1,000 years after the formation of the Clovis culture—once thought to be the first Americans—and even longer after other, pre-Clovis cultures settled the continents (see ‘American trail’)....

As nature’s own solar cells, plants convert sunlight into energy via photosynthesis. New details are emerging about how the process is able to exploit the strange behavior of quantum systems, which could lead to entirely novel approaches to capturing usable light from the sun. All photosynthetic organisms use protein-based “antennas” in their cells to capture incoming light, convert it to energy and direct that energy to reaction centers—critical trigger molecules that release electrons and get the chemical conversion rolling....

GRASP CEILING In raising the question “How Much Can We Know?” [The Biggest Questions in Science], Marcelo Gleiser focuses on human consciousness and the extent to which we can “make sense of the world.” He misses the larger issue: our brains evolved to help us survive and reproduce, not to understand the cosmos. It may not be a question of whether the universe is stranger than we understand but whether it is stranger than we can understand....

With genetic scientific advances reported almost daily, it sometimes seems as if we are merely waiting for researchers to discover the gene at fault for every human disease. The complex genetic basis of many common diseases, however, complicates prediction, diagnosis and treatment. The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC), a constellation of more than 50 British research groups, took on the mammoth challenge of ferreting out the causes of diseases in which multiple genes are implicated....

You can lead a lab rat to sugar water, but you can’t make him drink—especially if there’s booze around. New research published Thursday in Science may offer insights into why some humans who drink alcohol develop an addiction whereas most do not. After caffeine, alcohol is the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world. For the majority of people the occasional happy hour beer or Bloody Mary brunch is where it stops....

A museum show of sumptuous treasures from a ninth-century shipwreck is being denounced by researchers, who say that commercial salvage of the artefacts irreversibly damaged the wreck’s scientific value. On 6 February, the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology sent a letter of opposition to the Asia Society, the non-profit group that is mounting the show of Chinese Tang-dynasty porcelains, gold vessels and other objects from the wreck at its New York City museum....

The observatory, called the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), opened its telescope eye in California in 2017. Scanning the entire sky every two days, the observatory looks for the temporary brightening or sudden appearance of objects that remain visible only briefly. It hunts for supernova explosions of dying stars and asteroids passing close to Earth. A new review of its observations going back to 2019, the year when SpaceX began launching its ambitious Starlink megaconstellation, has revealed that a considerable percentage of the telescope’s views has streaks in it caused by the satellites as they passed overhead....