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A $1.4 billion telescope project has finally gotten the go-ahead to resume construction high up on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. The state’s Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) announced Friday (Sept. 29) that it has decided to approve a construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which has been in limbo for several years. TMT broke ground in October 2014, but demonstrations the following spring halted the build. Protesters have cited concerns about the telescope project’s cultural and environmental impact; Native Hawaiians regard peaks throughout the island chain as sacred....

I didn’t need it, but it was the perfect thing for anyone who considered herself artistic and liked to make detailed drawings, I had to agree. The art supplies salesperson smiled ingratiatingly at me as our conversation morphed into a pitch I literally felt I couldn’t refuse. We had struck up a chat about art, and he somehow found a way to make an expensive pen-and-ink set seem indispensable by echoing back to me things I had said I valued in my drawings and in my tools....

The intelligence of the corvid family—a group of birds that includes crows, ravens, magpies, rooks and jackdaws—rivals that of apes and dolphins. Recent studies are revealing impressive details about crows’ social reasoning, offering hints about how our own interpersonal intelligence may have evolved. One recent focus has been on how these birds respond to the sight of human faces. For example, crows take to the skies more quickly when an approaching person looks directly at them, as opposed to when an individual nears with an averted gaze, according to a report by biologist Barbara Clucas of Humboldt State University and her colleagues in the April issue of Ethology....

Hand washing with soap significantly reduces the spread of pneumonia and diarrhea, the two leading causes of death worldwide among children younger than age five. In a study funded primarily by P&G Beauty, a division of Procter & Gamble, researchers examined 900 households in squatter settlements in Karachi, Pakistan. Although the public health benefits of clean hands are clear, whether poor communities by themselves can afford to purchase soap regularly remains uncertain....

On February 11, Abderrazak El Albani, a sedimentologist at the University of Poitiers in France, published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences containing a spectacular claim: Life on Earth began making relatively large-scale active movements some 2.1 billion years ago. That time is well within the era in which Earth’s biosphere was almost exclusively composed of single-celled organisms thought to be capable of only the most minuscule motion, and predates the generally accepted advent of large-scale biological motility by roughly 1....

In April three biohackers from a California Do-It-Yourself biology lab, BioCurious, posted a Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource their plan to bioengineer a glowing plant. They asked for $65,000. But by the close of their campaign at midnight on Thursday, June 6, they had raised a remarkable $484,013. (Meanwhile, BioCurious itself is in financial trouble.) It was the first time anyone had kick-started a genetic engineering project. The group had hit upon a new method for funding biotech, one that’s faster, cheaper and requires less expertise than traditional grants or venture capital....

As if Edward Snowden hasn’t done enough to highlight how vulnerable electronic communications are to surveillance, Google has made it clear that people who send or receive e-mail via Gmail should not expect their messages to remain private. In a 39-page motion filed in June (see below) to have a class-action data-mining lawsuit dismissed, the Web giant cites Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 Supreme Court decision that upheld the collection of electronic communications without a warrant....

It’s been a tough season for U.S. apple growers. Climate change made it worse. From late-spring frosts in western Michigan to triple-digit heat in the Pacific Northwest, apple growers saw a nearly 19 percent drop in fresh-market apple holdings in June 2021 compared with June 2020, according to recent production statistics released by the Agriculture Department. In central Washington state, the nation’s largest apple-producing region, temperatures hovered 10 or more degrees Fahrenheit above average during early summer, according to the latest USDA “Fruit and Tree Nuts Outlook....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. The holidays have been over for a while now and odds are, you probably have more than one device that is now sitting lonely on your shelf, ever since it was replaced by that shiny new phone, tablet, or computer you got as a gift. In this week’s episode, we will be dusting off those old electronics, clearing them out, and getting them ready to sell!...

Four-year-old Elliott experiences a different world than most of us do. He can smell a freshly peeled banana from across a room. The hum of a running blender hurts his ears. He abhors the feeling of moisturizing lotion on his skin and washes his hands only in ice-cold water. He loves the taste of lemon juice. According to his occupational therapist, Elliott (whose name has been changed to protect his privacy) has sensory processing disorder....

One of astronomy’s most renowned telescopes—the 305-metre-wide radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico—is permanently closing. Engineers cannot find a safe way to repair it after two cables supporting the structure suddenly and catastrophically broke, one in August and one in early November. It is the end of one of the most iconic and scientifically productive telescopes in the history of astronomy—and scientists are mourning its loss. “I don’t know what to say,” says Robert Kerr, a former director of the observatory....

One of humankind’s most intimate blood-sucking roommates, the bed bug, is notoriously resistant to the pesticides used against it. Now researchers have pinpointed the genes responsible for this resistance. The finding highlights how ineffective our current chemical arsenal has become, and could help researchers design pesticides better able to destroy the pests. In the past 15 years bed bug infestations have spiked in the U.S., perhaps due to increased travel. Once the insect hitchhikers enter a new area, they spread readily: A single fertilized female can infest an entire apartment building....

President-elect Barack Obama today named his picks to run the nation’s energy and environment policy in a move that shows a strong commitment to getting climate change under control and exploring alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. As expected, Obama selected New Jersey’s former environmental chief Lisa Jackson, 46, as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the first African-American to head the EPA. Nobel-laureate Stephen Chu, physicist and director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, was chosen as energy secretary....

Like great art, great thought experiments have implications unintended by their creators. Take philosopher John Searle’s Chinese room experiment. Searle concocted it to convince us that computers don’t really “think” as we do; they manipulate symbols mindlessly, without understanding what they are doing. Searle meant to make a point about the limits of machine cognition. Recently, however, the Chinese room experiment has goaded me into dwelling on the limits of human cognition....

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who just don’t seem all that sharp. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess....

An analysis of isotopes in Arctic basalts indicates that the rocks may originate from a reservoir of ancient mantle that has avoided being recycled in the planet’s active interior since Earth’s infancy. The survival of such primitive samples from shortly after the formation of Earth, some 4.5 billion years ago, could provide important clues to the planet’s composition and early geophysical history. “We think we’ve found pretty strong evidence for the survival of a reservoir in the Earth’s mantle that is pretty close to the age of the Earth,” says geochemist Matthew Jackson of Boston University, lead author of the new study in the August 12 Nature....

By Richard A. LovettOn 27 February, at 3:34 in the morning, Chile was rocked by a magnitude-8.8 earthquake. It was the fifth-largest earthquake since 1900, releasing about 500 times the energy of the magnitude-7.0 quake that hit Haiti on 12 January. Although both countries were devastated, the destruction was worse in Haiti, where an estimated 230,000 people were killed. In Chile the death toll reported on 28 February was 708, although that figure is expected to increase....

In my laboratory at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, my colleagues and I took Gerti, a Eurasian magpie, out of her home cage, covered her head with a cloth, and placed a small yellow paper sticker on the black plumage of her throat, which she could not see. Then we placed her into a test cage with a large mirror, left her alone and went to the neighboring room to observe her through a monitor....

For the first time anywhere, an ape has received the same basic rights as her human captors. The female orangutan, whose home is the Buenos Aires Zoo, was the beneficiary on December 18 of the decision by a high-level Argentine criminal appeals court. The ruling will change forever the life of this hybrid of two orangutan species—one from Borneo, the other from Sumatra—and may ultimately spur the nascent movement to set free other animals living in captivity....

A vaccine originally intended to prevent cervical cancer in girls should be given to boys as well, an advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today (Oct. 25). The panel voted to recommend the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine be given to boys ages 11 to 12. The vaccine is already recommended for girls of this age. The rationale behind the recommendation is that the vaccine prevents genital warts and anal cancers in males, both of which can be caused by HPV....