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How could we have missed it? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visual scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, visual artists, architects, engineers and biologists all missed it—until 2007. The “it” in question is the leaning tower illusion, discovered by Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena Gheorghiu, all then at McGill University. In this illusion, two identical side-by-side images of the same tilted and receding object appear to be leaning at two different angles. This incredible effect was first noticed in images of the famed Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it also works with paired images of other receding objects....

More than eight decades have passed since Alexander Fleming’s discovery of a fungus that produced penicillin — a breakthrough that ultimately spawned today’s multibillion-dollar antibiotics industry. Researchers are now looking to nature with renewed vigor for other ways of fighting infection. Few new antibiotics are in development, and overuse of existing ones has created resistant strains of deadly bacteria. “We need a change from what we have,” says Stephen Baker, head of medicinal chemistry for antibacterials at Glaxo­SmithKline in College­ville, Pennsylvania....

Eh. About three months ago they agreed to bilaterally “phase down” a potent class of global warming gases known as hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs. Now they’veagreedto “to consider all the relevant issues.” Is that historic progress? Let’s Start Three Months Ago The “they” I’m referring to are President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose “historic” meeting in June culminated in an agreement to “phase down” emissions of HFCs using the framework of the Montreal Protocol....

For Frank Donobedian, sitting still is a challenge. But on this day in early January, he has been asked to do just that for three minutes. Perched on a chair in a laboratory at Stanford University in California, he presses his hands to his sides, plants his feet on the floor and tries with limited success to lock down the trembling in his limbs — a symptom of his Parkinson’s disease....

As if the magenta fish darting around Kenneth Poss’s tanks weren’t flashy enough, under ultraviolet light they morph into miniature rainbows. Poss, a cellular biologist at Duke University, and his colleagues genetically engineered this line of zebra fish to have skin that fluoresces in all colors. In fact, each skin cell can glow a unique shade to create a “bar code” that lets researchers track hundreds of cells simultaneously. In this way, they can observe in real time how individual cells respond to injuries and close wounds....

Close elections lead to vociferous accusations. History shows that the accusations enjoy a long life. It’s widely believe for example that dead people from Chicago helped elect Kennedy in 1960. Roll forward to 2004 and you will hear about the possibility of rigged paperless voting machines. Whether these stories are true or not, designing a computer-based tallying program to favor one candidate over another or to allow a secret trapdoor for tampering is all too easy....

Programs that permit the donation of good, unused drugs to the needy owe their existence to the lobbying by families of patients. It all began 10 years ago with Garry Beltz, who owns a ceiling tile cleaning business near Akron, Ohio. After his wife, Karon, died of breast cancer in 1999, he was determined that the last evidence of her disease—$6,700 worth of prescription drugs—be put to good use helping others in need....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. One of the president’s most important responsibilities is fostering science, technology and innovation in the U.S. economy. The relationship between science and policy runs in two directions: Scientific knowledge can inform policy decisions, and conversely, policies affect the course of science, technology and innovation. Historically, government spending on science has been good for the economy....

Scientists have known for decades that what we eat can change the balance of microbes in our digestive tracts. Choosing between a BLT sandwich or a yogurt parfait for lunch can increase the populations of some types of bacteria and diminish others—and as their relative numbers change, they secrete different substances, activate different genes and absorb different nutrients. And those food choices are probably a two-way street. Gut microbes have also been shown to influence diet and behavior as well as anxiety, depression, hypertension and a variety of other conditions....

On the outskirts of Seville, Spain, 600 rotating mirrors send shafts of light to a collector atop a soaring 380-foot- (115-meter-) tall tower. Its scalding 480-degree-Fahrenheit (250-degree-Celsius) steam drives a turbine generating a peak capacity of 11 megawatts (MW) of electricity for the national grid. This “power tower” is the first of nine to be built by Spanish engineering giant Abengoa Solar, which all told will produce enough electricity for 153,000 homes by 2013....

Talk about a raw deal: deadly parasitic wasps ruin the lives of adolescent spiders by taking over their minds, forcing them to become hermits and then eating them alive. A remarkable species of social spider lives in parts of Latin America, in colonies of thousands. Anelosimus eximius spiders dwell in basket-shaped webs up to 25 feet wide attached to vegetation near the jungle floor, where they protect their eggs and raise broods cooperatively....

Research in Motion’s rolling global outages could be a major body blow for a company looking to get off the mat. In fact, the timing of these outages is simply brutal.RIM tweets about BlackBerry outages.(Credit:Twitter; screenshot by Larry Dignan/ZDNet)Here are the moving parts:RIM is trying to convince folks to buy its BlackBerry 7 devices and has an iPhone 4S launch as well as a bevy of Android phones hitting the market....

SpaceX just flew a full-size prototype of its Starship Mars-colonizing spacecraft for the first time ever. The Starship SN5 test vehicle took to the skies for about 40 seconds this afternoon (Aug. 4) at SpaceX’s facilities near the South Texas village of Boca Chica, performing a small hop that could end up being a big step toward human exploration of the Red Planet. “Mars is looking real,” Musk tweeted shortly after today’s test flight....

Beginning in May and appearing to slow down by the end of July, juvenile songbirds from the mid-Atlantic to the Midwest fell ill with odd symptoms and died. Scientists were baffled by the mass mortality event. Months later they still do not know what killed the birds. Suspects include pathogens that the victims could have contracted by consuming Brood X cicadas and environmental toxins to which the young birds were particularly vulnerable....

The universe is a complex and intricate place. We can move easily through air and yet not through a wall. The sun transmutes one element to another, bathing our planet in warmth and light. Radio waves have carried a man’s voice to Earth from the surface of the moon, whereas gamma rays can inflict fatal damage on our DNA. On the face of it, these disparate phenomena have nothing to do with one another, but physicists have uncovered a handful of principles that fuse into a theory of sublime simplicity to explain all this and much more....

Our closest star remains an enigma. Every 11 years or so its activity crescendos, creating flares and coronal mass ejections—the plasma-spewing eruptions that shower Earth with charged particles and beautiful auroral displays—but then it decrescendos. The so-called solar maximum fades toward solar minimum, and the sun’s surface grows eerily quiet. Scientists have studied this ebb and flow for centuries, but only began understanding its effects on our planet at the dawn of the space age in the mid-20th century....

Soon electronic chauffeurs will take us wherever we want to go, whenever we want, in complete safety—as long as we do not need to make any left turns across traffic. Changing road surfaces are a problem, too. So are snow and ice. It will be crucial to avoid traffic cops, crossing guards and emergency vehicles. And in an urban environment where pedestrians are likely to run out in front of the car, we should probably just walk or take the subway....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. 56-year-old Frank came to see me in the clinic with his wife who said she had to “drag” him to my office. Frank has been tired all the time for the past 2 months and just can’t seem get motivated enough to get out of the house. Frank says that he just “hates the doctor’s office,” which is why he hasn’t been to one in over a decade....

The odd shapes of Saturn’s inner moons, which resemble objects ranging from ravioli to potatoes, may be due to mergers of tiny moonlets, a new study finds. The new finding may help to explain how moons in general may form, researchers said in a new paper describing the work. The Cassini spacecraft, which studied the ringed planet up close for 13 years, revealed that unlike Earth’s spherical moon, the small moons closest to Saturn had strange, irregular shapes....

Climate scientists have a surprising habit: They often underplay the climate threat. In 2007 a team led by Stefan Rahmstorf compared actual observations with projections made by theoretical models for three key climate variables: atmospheric carbon dioxide, global average temperature and sea-level rise. While the projections got CO2 levels right, they were low for real temperature and sea-level rise. In 2008 Roger Pielke, Jr., found that sea-level rise was greater than forecast in two of three prior Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports....