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President Trump on Wednesday announced that the military would no longer allow transgender people to serve, citing both “the tremendous medical costs and disruption” that would be caused by their integration into U.S. forces. But at least two studies in recent years have found that the cost of medical care for transgender service members would be minimal. A June 2016 study from the RAND Corporation estimated that there were between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender active-duty service members — out of 1....

When the 26-year-old Charles Darwin sailed into the Galápagos Islands in 1835 onboard the HMS Beagle, he took little notice of a collection of birds that are now intimately associated with his name. The naturalist, in fact, misclassified as grosbeaks some of the birds that are now known as Darwin’s finches. After Darwin returned to England, ornithologist and artist John Gould began to make illustrations of a group of preserved bird specimens brought back in the Beagle’s hold, and the artist recognized them all to be different species of finches....

Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of the Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.) Enzymes called topoisomerases are crucial for the expression of extremely long genes in neurons, according to a study published 5 September in Nature. More than one-quarter of these genes are known autism candidates, the study found. In the process of doing these analyses, the researchers stumbled on something surprising about autism genes in general: They’re three to four times longer than the average gene expressed in neurons....

An amiable joke can be much more effective than darker humor at improving mood, according to recent research from Stanford University. In the study, led by psychologist Andrea Samson and James Gross and published in February in Cognition & Emotion, 40 people in Switzerland and 37 people in the U.S. looked at photographs of upsetting things such as car accidents, corpses and dangerous animals. They were instructed to either say nothing about the images, use good-natured humor focusing on the absurdity of life or the human condition, or use mean-spirited humor....

The human brain is an extraordinarily complex network, comprising an estimated 86 billion neurons connected by 100 trillion synapses. A connectome is a comprehensive map of these links—a wiring diagram of the brain. With current technology, it is not possible to map a network of this size at the level of every neuron and synapse. Instead researchers use techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging to map connections between areas of the human brain that span several millimeters and contain many thousands of neurons....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In How to Make a Graph (Part 1), the infamous hero of our ancient Egyptian plotline, Knot Dude, taught his pyramid-building father, Papa Knot, a quick and dirty method for figuring out the corner-to-corner diagonal length of a pyramid’s base. In particular, he taught his dad the very same 4-step method for making graphs that we’re learning....

By Tiffany O’CallaghanPreliminary work in rats suggests that a hormone that promotes growth and repair in certain cells may be instrumental in the formation and retention of memories.When researchers injected the protein, insulin-like growth factor II (IGF-II), directly into the hippocampus – the region of the brain associated with episodic memory – during a particular window after learning, it seemed to both enhance memory and enable it to persist for longer....

China’s president, Xi Jinping, wants the country to be a world-class innovator by 2050. To achieve this, there are major challenges for the country to overcome — significantly, the quality of its research. Figures from the United States’ National Science Foundation showing China’s published science output surpassed that of the US in 2016 have been widely discussed, but other metrics prove celebration is premature. Data from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology suggest that, despite the rapid growth in articles authored by Chinese scholars in the Science Citation Index (SCI) over the decade to 2017, the average number of citations for each article was only 9....

Climbing concentrations of carbon dioxide make it likely that humans will have to move some gases from the atmosphere into the oceans to prevent crippling effects of climate change, the National Academies said in a major report released yesterday. It came after months of deliberation among top U.S. scientists who concluded that global efforts to reduce emissions, even if successful, “may not be enough to stabilize the climate.” The report identified six ways to capture and store carbon dioxide in the oceans, a controversial idea that the report said “will likely be needed....

When President George W. Bush unveiled his plan for a new moon shot two years ago, a lot of people worried that it was long on rhetoric and short on cash–ultimately forcing NASA to raid its science budget to pay for it. On close examination, though, the trajectory seemed reasonable. The money freed up by phasing out the space shuttle and the International Space Station was not an implausible amount to build a postshuttle spacecraft (known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV) and send it moonward by 2020....

Everything evolves. Plant and animal species adapt to their environments. Rocks, under heat or pressure, shift form. Earth revolves around a sun that traces its arc of existence through the ever changing cosmos. And with this issue, Scientific American introduces the latest design and content adjustments in its 165-year history, ready to embrace the next 165. Longtime readers will see much that is familiar in the magazine and its Web site, www....

Solutions: 1. If a fraction f take the flu shot, then the death toll is 5f + 10(1-f)(1-f) = 5f + 10f2 - 20f + 10. That is, 10f2 - 15f + 10. This value is minimized when 20f = 15 or f = 0.75. At that point, we’d have a death toll of only (5 * 0.75) + (2.5 * 0.25) = 4.375%. Notice however, that those who don’t take the vaccine have a probability of only 2....

Whitaker, a longtime medical journalist, builds a disturbing and enthralling case that long-term prescriptions for psychiatric medications damage the brain and are directly responsible for the rising rates of mental illness in the U.S. —Karen Schrock Simring, contributing editor Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace. Random House, 2014 As a child, Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, had two heroes: Walt Disney and Albert Einstein....

Physicists have created a system of two connected time crystals, which are strange quantum systems that are stuck in an endless loop to which the normal laws of thermodynamics do not apply. By connecting two time crystals together, the physicists hope to use the technology to eventually build a new kind of quantum computer. “It is a rare privilege to explore a completely novel phase of matter,” Samuli Autti, the lead scientist on the project from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email....

By Ewen Callaway Journal articles on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) ghostwritten by medical writers employed by the pharmaceutical industry serially understated the treatment’s risks and promoted unapproved uses, according to an analysis of industry documents. The analysis, published September 7 in the journal PLoS Medicine, is based on some 1,500 e-mails, contracts and other documents made public in July 2009, after The New York Times and PLoS Medicine successfully argued that their release would be in the public interest....

It was the brightest cosmic explosion ever observed, and astronomers are still hotly debating its origin and implications. But already the giant flare of December 27, 2004, produced by a bizarre star in our own Milky Way galaxy, is providing a partial solution to a 10-year-old astrophysical mystery. Such “magnetar” flares in distant galaxies may account for at least some of a particular class of gamma-ray burst that has defied explanation....

Photosynthesis is a neat trick: take light, carbon dioxide and water, and make sugar as well as oxygen as waste. This fundamental engine of life first arose in cyanobacteria, and scientists speculate that the progenitor to plant cells captured and incorporated these organisms. Millions of years of coevolution turned the once independent cyanobacteria into plastids–specialized cellular structures that are responsible for photosynthesis and have their own, highly edited genomes. Proof for this hypothesis has been lacking....

RESEARCH LEADER OF THE YEAR Woo Suk Hwang Seoul National University This Korean researcher racked up a series of important advances in embryonic stem cell technology, including the first lines of cells from patients While political debate over stem cells continues, the science has made tremendous strides during the past 18 months. In the frenzy of activity, Woo Suk Hwang has stood out for the impact his team from Seoul National University has had on the still nascent field....

In the remote, alien area of the world where the Amundsen Sea meets the coast of West Antarctica, tall, frozen cliffs loom over the water. They are the edges of massive glaciers—rivers of ice that spill into the ocean. In recent years, these icy rivers have been flowing and melting at an alarming rate, threatening to add a substantial amount of water to the sea that would eat away at global coastlines....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Beyond carrying all of our phone, text and internet communications, cyberspace is an active battleground, with cybercriminals, government agents and even military personnel probing weaknesses in corporate, national and even personal online defenses. Some of the most talented and dangerous cybercrooks and cyberwarriors come from Russia, which is a longtime meddler in other countries’ affairs....