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Link: The Heart Failure Society of America’s clinical practice treatment guidelines, which cite the A-HeFT trial and direct the use of BiDil for certain groups. African American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT) Peer-reviewed Scientific Publications 1.Taylor AL, Ziesche S, Yancy C, Carson P, D’Agostino D Jr, Ferdinand K, Taylor M, Adams, K, Sabolincki M, Worcel M, Cohn JN, for the African-American Heart Failure Trial Investigators. Combination of isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine in blacks with heart failure....

A forty something middle manager quits his day job, buys a sports car and abandons his wife for a younger woman. Diagnosis? Midlife crisis. Lester Burnham in American Beauty, Walter White in Breaking Bad—examples of these desperate characters abound in popular culture, and the concept is entrenched in our collective psyche. But are people of a certain age really more likely to launch a total life reboot? It would seem so, according to scientists....

The DNA sequences of humans and chimpanzees are 98 percent identical. Yet that 2 percent difference represents at least 15 million changes in our genome since the time of our common ancestor roughly six million years ago. Now a new computational technique has identified 49 regions that have changed particularly quickly between humans and chimps, and may have revealed at least one gene critical to the development of our larger brains....

When Associated Producers, the production company behind the new documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, contacted Andrey Feuerverger, he was, to put it mildly, surprised. “This is not in the usual run of things one gets to do,” says the University of Toronto statistician, alluding to Associated Producers’ somewhat unusual request that he calculate the odds that a particular tomb in Israel is the last resting place of Jesus Christ....

When extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy hits, energy infrastructure is often the first thing to fail. In a world that must adapt to climate change, building resilience into such infrastructure may prove key. That, and a number of other activities, help make up President Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy—and new Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz is charged with tackling them all during his term. (Moniz once served as an advisor to Scientific American as well as co-author of a feature article for the magazine, “The Nuclear Option....

This is not the right time for a bigger particle accelerator. But CERN, the European physics center based in Geneva, Switzerland, has plans—big plans. The biggest particle physics facility of the world, currently running the biggest particle collider in the world, has announced it aims to build an even bigger machine, as revealed in a press conference and release today. With that, CERN has decided it wants to go ahead with the first step of a plan for the Future Circular Collider (FCC), hosted in a ring-shaped tunnel 100 kilometers, or a bit over 60 miles, in circumference....

When scientists prepare a batch of proteins to study, such as antibodies that detect cancer, they lose some of the precious product in a tangled, gummy snarl. Unwinding those proteins and then letting them refold in their proper shapes is a tedious, sometimes days-long process, and it usually salvages only some of the material. It’s as hard as, say, unboiling an egg. But now, with actual snarled proteins from boiled egg whites, Gregory Weiss’s lab can do exactly that—unboil or untangle proteins—in just minutes....

The world just passed another round-numbered climate milestone. Scientists predicted it would happen this year and lo and behold, it has. On Tuesday, the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded its first-ever carbon dioxide reading in excess of 410 parts per million (it was 410.28 ppm in case you want the full deal). Carbon dioxide hasn’t reached that height in millions of years. It’s a new atmosphere that humanity will have to contend with, one that’s trapping more heat and causing the climate to change at a quickening rate....

Conventional testing can underestimate a student’s learning ability. Sociocultural barriers, test anxiety and differences in rates of brain development can skew results. In principle, neuroscience tools that allow observation of brain activity might better characterize learning gains. But neuroscience and education have not always formed fruitful partnerships. New research that more profitably pairs the two fields suggests that when students use spatial skills in the classroom, the benefits extend beyond spatial understanding to other kinds of thinking, such as mentally deciphering a problem using words....

Editor’s note (11/16/15): Following the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 and the ensuing debate about counterterrorism efforts and encrypted communications, Scientific American is republishing the following article. Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the federal government was increasingly concerned about the widespread use of data encryption in consumer technology, implying—although not explicitly demanding—that tech companies give law enforcement easier access to cryptographically scrambled customer data. Comey’s testimony came one day after some of the world’s top cybersecurity experts and computer scientists issued a report arguing that the government’s call for special access to encrypted information is technically unfeasible and unworkably vague....

What is blue, sweet and juicy and may help ward off those nagging memory lapses? If you guessed blueberries, you would be right. Americans apparently cannot get enough of the delicious fruit. In 2008, the latest year that data are available, per capita blueberry consumption in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 12.3 ounces, roughly the size of one standard supermarket carton—an increase from 9.2 ounces in 2007. Whether we are eating more blueberries because they are good for us or just taste good is anyone’s guess, but now there is even more reason to load up the shopping cart with plump Vaccinium cyanococcus: they may protect our brain....

Since the election, I’ve heard from many listeners concerned about our country’s fate. And the anxiety specialty center where I work has seen a big uptick in patients worried about the next four years. But even if you support the current administration, the combative, chaotic state of the nation isn’t great for anyone’s well-being. The Savvy Psychologist aims to help you be happier and healthier no matter your political stripes. Regardless of your political leanings, if you get a stomachache every time you scroll through the news, you probably don’t feel particularly happy, and all the stress definitely isn’t healthy....

This year, as hurricanes race into the warming coastal waters of the U.S., an array of seagoing robots will be waiting for them. The torpedo-shaped machines will be positioned in what amounts to no man’s land, places where no ships or humans might survive and where space satellites can’t gauge the potency of storm action. But for the stubby-winged and narwhal-horned “Slocum ocean glider,” this is the world it was made for....

Key concepts Physics Wavelength Frequency Energy Introduction Have you ever bitten into a microwaved snack, and the first bite is scalding hot but the second bite is still frozen? If you’ve experienced this, then you know microwaves have hot and cold spots. This is why they usually have a rotating tray to ensure that your food is evenly cooked. In this activity you’ll use marshmallows to map where the hot and cold spots are in your microwave....

Concerns about vaccine safety have led up to 40 percent of parents in the U.S. to delay or refuse some vaccines for their children in hopes of avoiding rare reactions. Barriers to health care access can also cause immunization delays. But delaying some vaccines, in addition to leaving children unprotected from disease longer, can actually increase the risk of fever-related seizures, according to a new study. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annually updates its recommended childhood immunization schedule, the only schedule endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical organizations....

In March 2006, on the occasion of the release of Chicken Little on DVD, Disney convened a panel to put an end to the long-standing riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The verdict was unanimous. “The first chicken must have differed from its parents by some genetic change [that] caused this bird to be the first ever to fulfill our criteria for truly being a chicken,” said John Brookfield, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nottingham in England....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Archaeology reveals that humans started wearing clothes some 170,000 years ago, very close to the second-to-last ice age. Even now, though, most modern humans wear clothes that are only barely different from those earliest garments. But that’s about to change as flexible electronics are increasingly woven into what are being called “smart fabrics.” Many of these are already available for purchase, such as leggings that provide gentle vibrations for easier yoga, T-shirts that track player performance and sports bras that monitor heart rate....

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the country’s first drug derived from marijuana, a medication that treats two rare and devastating forms of epilepsy. The drug, GW Pharmaceuticals’ Epidiolex, is made of cannabidiol, or CBD, a component of marijuana that does not give users a high. It is given as an oil, and in clinical trials, it was shown to reduce the number of seizures by about 40 percent in patients with Dravet or Lennox-Gastaut syndromes....

When adults claim to have suddenly recalled painful events from their childhood, are those memories likely to be accurate? This question is the basis of the “memory wars” that have roiled psychology for decades. And the validity of buried trauma turns up as a point of contention in court cases and in television and movie story lines. Warnings about the reliability of a forgotten traumatic event that is later recalled—known formally as a delayed memory—have been endorsed by leading mental health organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA)....

When I first decided to write about forgiveness for this end-of-year column, I was thinking about the holidays and how a little extra forgiveness among friends and family could make this season merrier. But as I delved into the rich well of research, it dawned on me how much our larger human family needs forgiveness right now. The past 12 months have seen more than their fair share of tragedy and injustice: violence between citizens and police, terror attacks, divisive elections....