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Imagine 30% of all of the food produced in the U.S. each year, a total amount of food worth $48.3 billion. No, that’s not how much we consume over the holidays. That is how much food we throw in the trash according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Every year, rich countries waste about 222 million tons of food, which is almost the entire net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa. The production of food through agriculture uses 80% of the available water supply in the U....

Something peculiar has been happening with President Donald Trump’s popularity. In the early stages of his response to the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s approval rating soared, reaching a pinnacle not too long after he declared a national emergency. He had never been more popular among Americans, not even when he won the presidential election of 2016. This comports with a phenomenon documented by political scientist John Mueller in a 1970 paper and colloquially described as the rally round the flag effect: during times of crises, leaders enjoy greater popularity and support even among constituencies that were ambivalent or unsupportive in the past....

Fantastically detailed, visually arresting photographs of Andromeda, a spiral galaxy that lies 2.5 million light-years from Earth, have been available for years. But getting a full panorama of our own Milky Way Galaxy is considerably more difficult. Nestled in the thick of the galaxy, we are unable to see it from the outside. For astronomers trying to map out the Milky Way’s structure in detail, the exercise is a bit like trying to figure out what one’s own face looks like—without the aid of a mirror....

Blue LEDs are notoriously difficult to make, which has slowed down the production of cheap, highly efficient white LED light bulbs. Now, UK scientists think they know why. They have discovered that one of the key ingredients to create the semiconductor sandwich for blue LEDs, magnesium, may be behind the manufacturing problems. Their work could help to develop new manufacturing strategies to overcome this problem, driving down the cost of white LED lights....

Colleges and universities in the U.S. are currently being forced to make a seemingly impossible decision between in-person and remote classes this fall. As a professor, I am all too familiar with both the pros and cons of bringing college students back to campus. Students benefit from the full college experience filled with dorm living, engaging learning opportunities and social interactions. However, bringing students back to campus requires Herculean efforts by institutions to assure everyone’s safety....

Click here for a full list of our coverage of the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show. LAS VEGAS—Even the hectic pace and cramped quarters of the first day and a half of the Consumer Electronics Show (which technically were not even part of the actual conference) could not have prepared the SciAm team for the sheer magnitude and mayhem that was to go down on the official Day One. At a loss as to how exactly to organize the day, the intrepid reporters stalked much-ballyhooed wares (mostly high-definition TVs), hunted down emerging technologies (we found at least one) and happened upon a few simple, but elegant new ideas (for one, a product to increase the fuel efficiency of your car)....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination. They can forge complex paths through the jungle, build sophisticated structures, and adapt foraging patterns to fit their environment, all without orders from a centralized source. Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University, hopes to uncover the simple rules that produce complex patterns from simple individual actions. Ants in particular excel at collective search, automatically tailoring their search strategy to efficiently cover large areas of ground....

Scientists say revolutionary changes in society can limit the worst effects of climate change. None stands out as a candidate for transformation more than the energy sector. Getting to net-zero emissions there—or close to it—is the easiest way to clear a path for decarbonization in other sectors such as housing and transportation. Put another way: It doesn’t make much sense to recharge an electric vehicle through an outlet connected to a coal-fired power plant....

Newly published data reveal in greater depth the problem Sanofi Pasteur’s Dengvaxia vaccine poses to children who have never experienced a dengue infection. The findings, first revealed by the company last November, were the basis of an April decision by a World Health Association expert panel to recommend the vaccine only be given to children who have tested positive for a prior dengue infection. There is no such test at the moment....

A team of researchers is looking to handwriting rather than the ever-shrinking keyboards (that frustrate typists) in a quest to improve the way we input information to computers and cell phones. They say the key (especially for the less nimble among us) is “digital hand” technology, a glove stocked with embedded sensors that translates into digital text the electrical impulses generated by hand muscles during the act of writing—on any surface, using any pen, pencil or even a finger....

Dire wolves are iconic beasts. Thousands of these extinct Pleistocene carnivores have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. And the massive canids have even received some time in the spotlight thanks to the television series Game of Thrones. But a new study of dire wolf genetics has startled paleontologists: it found that these animals were not wolves at all, but rather the last of a dog lineage that evolved in North America....

I don’t own a scale. I don’t trust myself to have one in the house–maybe in the same way that recovered alcoholics rightfully clear their cabinets of cold medicines and mouthwash. At 5'7", I know that I usually weigh 125 pounds, and I know that is considered normal for my frame. But 22 years ago, when I was 15 years old and the same height, I weighed 67 pounds, and I thought I was grossly, repulsively obese....

Measurements of the chemical composition of Moon rocks suggest that Earth was born with its water already present, rather than having the precious liquid delivered several hundred million years later by comets or asteroids. And in finding a common origin for the water on Earth and the Moon, the results highlight a puzzle over the leading theory for the formation of Earth’s satellite. Geochemist Alberto Saal of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues built on recent studies, including their own, that have revealed a substantial amount of water in the Moon’s interior....

By certain measures, the most recent El Niño, which held sway in 2015 and 2016, was one of the three strongest on record, along with episodes in 1982–1983 and 1997–1998. Although its impacts on land were not clearly stronger than those of the other events, it appears it was the major culprit for a record increase in CO2 during its reign. “CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry did not really change from 2014 to 2016,” says climate scientist Pierre Friedlingstein at the University of Exeter in England, and an author of the 2017 carbon budget report released by the Global Carbon Project in November....

Near the dawn of the last ice age, an enormous terrestrial bird about three times the size of a modern ostrich jogged across eastern Europe, according to a fossil femur recently found in Crimea. Analysis of the femur revealed that it belonged to a brawny bird that lived about 2 million years ago; scientists dubbed it Pachystruthio dmanisensis. In life, the bird stood 11 feet (3 meters) tall and weighed more than 990 pounds (450 kilograms) — almost as much as a polar bear — making it one of the heaviest-known birds of all time, the researchers reported in a new study....

One week from today, President Trump gets his earliest opportunity to make good on his pledge to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. The president made it clear last week that his plans had not changed, telling an audience in Pittsburgh that staying in the climate pact would have the effect of “shutting down” American energy companies while allowing foreign firms to “pollute with impunity” (Climatewire, Oct. 24)....

Graphene is one popular nanomaterial. Made from single-atom-thick sheets of carbon, it is the strongest material ever tested and boasts superlative electronic properties, too. After a decade of research, it is on the verge of moving from the laboratory into commercial technologies, perhaps appearing soon as lightweight airplane parts or batteries with incredible capacities. So now might be a good time to anticipate potential risks posed by graphene, before workers are exposed to it or it gets into the water supply, says Sharon Walker, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Riverside....

Bees, birds and iguanas do it, but no one is sure why animals sleep. “Every animal studied engages in some form of sleep or sleeplike behavior,” says Steven L. Lima, a biology professor at Indiana State University and an animal sleep expert. Lima and most researchers believe sleep “has some sort of critical maintenance or restorative effect on neural tissue.” But the unconscious state has a cost: it makes animals vulnerable to predators....

My typical reading schedule now starts in the morning, as I listen to an audiobook on my smartphone while I hike with my dog. Whenever I find myself waiting in a line, I switch to reading the book in the Kindle app on my phone. When I’m doing chores around the house, I listen to the narration on our home stereo system, via my computer. Before bed, I read a little more on my iPad....

With the hollowed-out shell of their old building standing in ruins nearby, and its history-rich contents in ashes, staff and scientists of Brazil’s National Museum met Wednesday morning for the first time since Sunday’s fire to begin to piece together a future—one suddenly bereft of a vast assortment of items from Brazil’s natural and cultural heritage, which explorers and researchers had collected and preserved over the museum’s 200-year history. No one died or was injured in the fire—astonishingly, given staffers’ last-minute efforts to salvage specimens and equipment as parts of the building’s interior tumbled down around them....