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One of the most basic field research techniques in bird conservation is counting birds and their nests. Tallying songbirds in a suburban garden is one thing; spotting seabirds is another. Seabirds, which reflect the health of their marine ecosystems, often build their nests in inaccessible areas—wedged into vertical cliffs or on remote islands battered by intense waves. Many lay their eggs in burrows more than a meter deep to protect them from weather....

Decades of international collaborative research, much of it funded or conducted by governments including that of the United States, enabled the rapid development of highly effective COVID mRNA vaccines. The substantial public contribution to this scientific triumph has, however, not persuaded governments to treat the vaccines as global public goods—resulting in starkly inequitable distribution that should be remembered as an epic failure for humanity. Vaccines have been available for almost two years, yet only 20 percent of people in low-income countries have had a first shot....

Charles Darwin described bees’ ability to build perfect honeycombs as “the most wonderful of all known instincts.” Each hexagonal cell is so precisely constructed and so neatly arrayed that a comb is a visual treat. Now new research into how honeybees incorporate different cell sizes into a flawless-looking grid—and seamlessly merge combs built from multiple directions at once—reveals remarkable adaptability. Adjacent honey storage cells are typically uniform in size, but bees must build some larger cells for rearing drones and smaller ones for workers....

The short video, which Musk posted on Instagram, shows the Falcon 9 rocket first stage touching down on the drone ship as planned, but then falling over to hit the deck and explode. Musk has said one of the four landing legs on the rocket failed to latch securely, leading to the fall. The rocket landing occured after SpaceX successfully launched the Jason-3 satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California....

In the 1990s researchers announced a series of discoveries that would upend a bedrock tenet of neuroscience. For decades the mature brain was understood to be incapable of growing new neurons. Once an individual reached adulthood, the thinking went, the brain began losing neurons rather than gaining them. But evidence was building that the adult brain could, in fact, generate new neurons. In one particularly striking experiment with mice, scientists found that simply running on a wheel led to the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus, a brain structure that is associated with memory....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Earlier this month CIA Director Mike Pompeo suggested “the North Koreans have a long history of being proliferators and sharing their knowledge, their technology, their capacities around the world.” My research has shown that North Korea is more than willing to breach sanctions to earn cash. A checkered history Over the years North Korea has earned millions of dollars from the export of arms and missiles, and its involvement in other illicit activities such as smuggling drugs, endangered wildlife products and counterfeit goods....

The beautiful spinning pinwheel of the Andromeda galaxy, our celestial neighbor, poses a mystery. The breakneck speed of its rotation cannot be explained by applying the known laws of physics to the disk’s visible matter. By rights, the gravity generated by the galaxy’s apparent mass should cause the stars in the periphery to move more slowly than they actually do. If the visible matter was all there was, Andromeda, and nearly all such quickly rotating galaxies, simply should not exist....

The average wait times in U.S. emergency rooms top two hours, leaving both clinicians and patients to feel the pain of an overburdened system. Many a parent has endured those hours with a distressed child, triaged out for lack of urgency only to be sent home with unneeded antibiotics for a garden-variety viral infection. With the money and time that visits to the ER and urgent care soak up, the chance to revisit old-fashioned physician house calls holds a strong appeal....

Twenty-five years ago the word “Turing” tingled with mystery for the few who knew it. Readers of Douglas Hofstadter learned that Alan Turing belonged with Gdel in exploring minds and logic and knew also of “the Turing test” for artificial intelligence. But others were aware of Turing as a British figure, a Cambridge mathematician, emerging in connection with the huge World War II operation to break the Enigma ciphers. His crucial importance in the battle of the Atlantic was still shrouded by state secrecy....

Alison Preston of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Learning and Memory explains: A short-term memory’s conversion to a long-term memory requires changes within the brain that protect the memory from interference from competing stimuli or disruption from injury or disease. This time-dependent process, whereby experiences achieve a permanent record in our memory, is called consolidation. The cellular and molecular portions of memory consolidation typically take place within the first minutes or hours of learning and result in changes to neurons (nerve cells) or sets of neurons....

An ambitious supercomputer calculation has brought good and bad news for physicists hunting the ‘axion’—a hypothetical particle that is considered a leading candidate for dark matter. The result shows that the axion, if it exists, could be at least ten times heavier than previously thought. If true, that’s a useful clue on how to find the particle. But it also suggests that an experiment that has been hunting the axion for two decades might be unlikely to find it, because the detector was designed to search for a lighter version....

Chances are, you or someone you know has had a run-in with bed bugs. It might have happened in a scrupulously clean bedroom. Or maybe it was a hotel room, office or college dorm. In the February issue of Scientific American entomologist Kenneth Haynes of the University of Kentucky explains how, after a lengthy absence, bed bugs are staging a comeback. The good news is scientists are intensively studying these insects, and their insights suggest novel ways of detecting the bugs and eradicating infestations....

The construction industry consumes truckloads of basic materials, the manufacture of which consumes massive quantities of energy, producing prodigious emissions of greenhouse gases. If materials scientists and entrepreneurs can devise materials that can be fabricated with less energy, climate change could be slowed and many new manufacturing jobs could be created, fulfilling a much-anticipated promise of clean-tech innovation. The U.S., which lost millions of manufacturing jobs in recent decades, is in a strong position to capitalize on greener construction materials if research and funding are focused soon, according to panelists who spoke Wednesday at the GoingGreen conference in Sausalito, Calif....

By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada is set to badly miss a 2020 target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, in part because of its failure to regulate the booming oil and gas sector, Parliament’s environmental watchdog said on Tuesday. The scathing report by Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand will add to the political challenges faced by the right-leaning Conservative government, which polls show could lose power in an election set for 2015....

Carbon, the building block of life, is thought to have formed mainly inside the cores of stars. But a new experiment is testing another idea: some of it may have been forged during supernova blasts or the collisions of neutron stars. To make a nucleus of carbon-12—the most common form of the element, with six protons and six neutrons—a rare process must occur: three helium-4 nuclei (also called alpha particles and containing two protons and two neutrons each) need to come together, reach a unique excited state and combine to form carbon....

By Nicola JonesJust a few key aspects of climate change could wipe out up to half of the annual gain in the standard of living for the average European household by 2080.The European Union has seen economic welfare–a measure of prosperity–grow by an average of around 2 percent each year. But the climate of the 2080s is likely to cut that by at least 0.2-1 percentage points, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at just five impacts of climate change....

A few years ago a single mother who had recently moved to town came to my office asking me to prescribe the stimulant drug Adderall for her sixth-grade son. The boy had been taking the medication for several years, and his mother had liked its effects: it made homework time easier and improved her son’s grades. At the time of this visit, the boy was off the medication, and I conducted a series of cognitive and behavioral tests on him....

Editors’ note, 7/8/09: This article was adapted for Scientific American Mind magazine from the Mind Matters article, “Do Parents Matter?”, which was published online at ScientificAmerican.com on April 9, 2009. In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less—at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children—than is typically assumed....

There’s an illness that has been documented by poets for centuries. Its symptoms include a flushed face, increased heart rate, appetite loss, restlessness and daydreaming. It’s spring fever, that wonderfully amorphous disease we all recognize come April and May. “Spring fever is not a definitive diagnostic category,” says Michael Terman, director of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center. “But I would say it begins as a rapid and yet unpredictable fluctuating mood and energy state that contrasts with the relative low [of the] winter months that precede it....

The Japanese freshwater eel (Anguilla japonica) has more to offer biologists than a tasty sushi snack. Its muscle fibers produce the first fluorescent protein identified in a vertebrate, researchers report in Cell. Fluorescent proteins are as standard a tool for cell biologists as wrenches are for mechanics. They do not produce light themselves, but glow when illuminated. The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the discovery and development of such molecules, which are used to tag proteins or to track how genes are expressed....