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“As a doctor and recent fitness enthusiast, I love listening to your podcasts because I know you’ll only give me evidence-based information with a dash of common sense. What I’d like to know is if protein powders are safe in pregnancy and if so, which ones in particular.” Before I talk about protein powder specifically, let’s talk briefly about protein in general during pregnancy. Protein needs increase during pregnancy, along with the requirements for lots of other nutrients....

What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in the sky from billions of light years away is one of the most perplexing mysteries in astronomy. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen a flash of high-energy γ-rays that looks as if it was emitted by the same event that produced a fast radio burst (FRB)—a correlation that was predicted to help whittle down the zoo of possible explanations for the origin of FRBs....

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. This line from Herman Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha came unbidden to me during a recent weeklong visit to Drepung Monastery in southern India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama had invited the U.S.-based Mind and Life Institute to familiarize the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community living in exile in India with modern science....

By connecting laptops and smartphones to enormous, remote computing banks, cloud computing gives us access to more processing power than could ever fit in any one of those devices, along with access to all our data and documents from anywhere in the world. The Achilles’ heel is security: data that live in the cloud are vulnerable to hackers. Solutions to two of the biggest vulnerabilities may be at hand, however. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have devised a way to protect servers against memory-access pattern-analysis hacks and timing attacks....

A new lightweight substance is as strong as wood yet lacks its standard vulnerabilities to fire and water. To create the synthetic wood, scientists took a solution of polymer resin and added a pinch of chitosan, a sugar polymer derived from the shells of shrimp and crabs. They freeze-dried the solution, yielding a structure filled with tiny pores and channels supported by the chitosan. Then they heated the resin to temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius to cure it, forging strong chemical bonds....

I’ll never forget the first time I saw “piano juggling.” It was December 1989, on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. Carson’s guest played the keys of an oversized piano on the floor—by striking them with bouncing balls. Faster and faster he went, juggling downward. Beethoven’s “Für Elise” was amazing enough—but Liszt’s rapid-fire Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2? The crowd went crazy. How could anyone nail both the keys and the rhythms with perfect accuracy?...

Key concepts Astronomy Stars Physics Measurement Introduction Do you enjoy going stargazing on a warm night? Summer can be a great time to watch the stars as well as other celestial events, such as the impressive Perseids meteor shower that happens annually and peaks this year from August 10 to 13. Did you know that ancient astronomers could actually measure the distance from Earth to faraway stars? How could they do this without modern technology?...

Self-awareness is usually considered a virtue. When you are making small talk at a party, it helps to know when your story is getting boring or if you are talking too loudly. Yet being aware of the impression we give off may not benefit us as much as it does other people. In a pair of studies, psychologist Erika Carlson of the University of Toronto Mississauga had people take part in either a single, brief conversation with a stranger or multiple meetings with an acquaintance....

By Valerie Volcovici and Timothy Gardner U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump will pick an ardent opponent of President Barack Obama’s measures to stem climate change to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Trump transition team source said on Wednesday. Trump’s choice, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has enraged environmental activists, but he fits with the Republican president-elect’s promise to cut the agency back and eliminate regulation that he says is stifling oil and gas drilling....

Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup’s inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. The new findings intensify a debate about so-called “inerts” — the solvents, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pesticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. It seems like no protein is more controversial than gluten. It shows up in all kinds of diet information, health warnings, at the doctor’s office, on food labels. That little protein is everywhere. Let’s learn a little more about it. As you have probably heard if you’re at all interested in this protein, gluten is the reason why dough rises....

Elon Musk has built a formidable personal brand on futuristic visions of driverless cars and space travel. But the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Tesla CEO could soon make a very real impact in a much-nearer future—and much closer to home—simply by helping U.S. homeowners harness the power of sunlight. This summer Tesla aims to begin installing solar cell roof tiles that look and act like ordinary shingles. Tesla says the tempered glass tiles let light reach the solar cells embedded within them but can take a hit from a hailstone traveling 100 miles per hour....

The book Splat the Cat Goes to the Doctor and the nursery rhyme “This Is the Way We Brush Our Teeth” are typical examples of media that teach the essentials of health to U.S. kindergartners. But lesson plans for children, even at this age, might benefit from going beyond entreaties to brush the outside, the inside and on top (the part where you chew). The pandemic has set off a discussion about integrating teachings about public health in the K–12 curriculum as an accompaniment to lessons about personal hygiene....

Players of the science-fiction video game StarCraft II faced an unusual opponent this summer. An artificial intelligence (AI) known as AlphaStar—which was built by Google’s AI firm DeepMind—achieved a grandmaster rating after it was unleashed on the game’s European servers, placing within the top 0.15% of the region’s 90,000 players. The result, published on 30 October in Nature, shows that an AI can compete at the highest levels of StarCraft II, a massively popular online strategy game in which players compete in real time as one of three factions—the human Terran forces or the aliens Protoss and Zerg—battling against each other in a futuristic warzone....

Think of the Milky Way—or search for pictures of it online—and you’ll see images of a standard spiral galaxy viewed face-on, a sprawling pinwheel of starlight and dust containing hundreds of billions of stars. These images, however, are mostly make-believe. We know the Milky Way is a star-filled spiral galaxy in excess of 100,000 light-years wide, and we know our solar system drifts between two spiral arms at its outskirts, some 27,000 light-years from its center....

In the final year of World War I, when the German military pointed its largest artillery at Paris from a distance of 75 miles, the troops adjusted the trajectory for many factors that could be ignored with less powerful guns. In particular, a subtle influence from the rotation of the earth—the Coriolis effect or force—would have shifted all their shots by about half a mile. Decades earlier a Parisian scientist by the name of Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis had written down the equations describing that effect as a part of his 1835 paper analyzing machines with rotating parts, such as waterwheels....

From Spoonful of Medicine The recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, perpetrated by 20 year-old Adam Lanza, has intensified the discussion about how mental health is handled and documented in the US. Officials have not provided information about Lanza’s motivation and state of mind, and many are rightfully quick to point out that it is wrong to equate mental illness with the fatal sociopathic actions of a small group of individuals. The conversation about access to mental health care should, however, take into account new data showing an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teenagers in the US and Canada over the last two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe....

Researchers have known for some time that female athletes experience higher rates of concussion than their male counterparts, and also often suffer harsher symptoms and take longer to recover. But why women seem more vulnerable to such injuries has long remained a puzzle. Concussion symptoms range from headache, dizziness and confusion to memory loss, noise or light sensitivity, and irritability. Most people recover quickly but some develop problems lasting a year or more....

After several years of setbacks, gene therapy is once again yielding promising results. One area in which it is proving its potential is in restoring vision to patients who have been losing it since birth. Between 2008 and 2011 Jean Bennett, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues used gene therapy to treat blindness in 12 adults and children with Leber’s congenital amaurosis (LCA). LCA is a rare inherited eye disease that destroys vision by killing photoreceptors—light-sensitive cells in the retina at the back of the eye....

For only the third time since 1970, insured losses from extreme weather events worldwide exceeded $100 billion, according to a report yesterday by Swiss Re, the global reinsurance company. Insured losses this year from storms, floods and other dangerous events are projected to reach $101 billion, with the damage occurring overwhelmingly in the U.S., Swiss Re said. The report is preliminary and does not include last weekend’s tornadoes in Kentucky and surrounding states, which caused an estimated $3 billion in damage....