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Natural gases, not oil, helped jump-start the growth of microbial blooms that are consuming the various hydrocarbons spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to new research. Biogeochemist David Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues tracked at least four distinct plumes of these gaseous hydrocarbons during a June research cruise—not just the one plume reported previously by a separate team of scientists....

An African lion gazes up at a suspended wood box. Inside is a hunk of raw beef. To enjoy the snack, the lion needs to yank on a rope descending from the box, which is attached to a spring-loaded door latch. The scheme: to test the charismatic cat’s cognitive abilities. The social intelligence hypothesis posits that having to navigate a complex communal life, which involves challenges such as keeping track of who is a friend and who is an enemy, has pushed group-living animals to evolve the mental machinery required to solve and remember mental tasks such as the box puzzle....

Treating the brain with magnets went mainstream a few years ago, when the technique proved successful at relieving major depression. Now the procedure, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), shows promise for another mysterious, hard-to-treat disorder: chronic pain. Until now, pain seemed out of reach for rTMS because the regions involved in pain perception lie very deep within the brain. The other disorders helped by rTMS all involve brain areas close to the skull....

A few years back, the sun went into a lull, its activity tailing off like a rambunctious child settling down for a nap. The lull was no surprise; it is a normal part of the sun’s roughly 11-year cycle of activity, over which the number of magnetized regions known as sunspots waxes and wanes. But the sun did not snap out of its slumber as expected. The lull persisted, lingering on to become the deepest solar minimum in about 100 years before sunspots finally started increasing in number around the end of 2008....

Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing have created a mirror-image version of a protein that performs two of the most fundamental processes of life: copying DNA and transcribing it into RNA. The work is a “small step” along the way to making mirror-image life forms, says molecular biologist Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “It’s a terrific milestone,” adds his Harvard colleague George Church, who hopes one day to create an entire mirror-image cell....

The history of art conservation is almost as long as the history of art itself. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes were first restored in the mid-16th century, only decades after being painted. Water damage had caused a white potassium nitrate scale, which was treated with linseed and walnut oil. But such cosmetic solutions were sticking plasters and lacked the scientific understanding that has now revolutionised the field. Today, conservation scientists are finding innovative ways to clean and protect our cultural heritage....

Imagine you are enjoying your golden years, driving to your daily appointment for some painless brain zapping that is helping to stave off memory loss. That’s the hope of a new study, in which people who learned associations (such as a random word and an image) after transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) were better able to learn more pairings days and weeks later—with no further stimulation needed. TMS uses a magnetic coil placed on the head to increase electrical signaling a few centimeters into the brain....

Next time you are waiting for your turn at the dentist’s chair, why not let your mind wonder about something more appealing? Here’s a relevant topic: A long time ago tooth decay was a rare occurrence. Our early relatives, including the Neandertals, hardly ever had caries. In fact, we may owe our regular trips to the dentist not to unhealthy eating habits but to recent changes in the bacteria inhabiting our mouths—and maybe even to rats!...

A lone neuron in one of the brain’s key memory centers may be able to distinguish a specific person or place, negating a long-standing tenet that a group of neurons is needed to encode any memory. The single-neuron hypothesis comes from a recent study of epilepsy patients. A team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Los Angeles implanted small electrodes in the epileptics’ brains to monitor seizure activity....

Imagine you are a successful filmmaker in Hollywood. You are planning to make a big-budget action-thriller film, packed with explosions, car chases and shoot-outs. Your next step is to generate a short list of actors to consider for the lead role. What names come to mind? Most people immediately imagine the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Tom Cruise or Ryan Reynolds. In other words, male actors. This is because “action-thriller heroes” are generally associated with stereotypically male characteristics....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Surveillance used to be expensive. Even just a few years ago, tailing a person’s movements around the clock required rotating shifts of personnel devoted full-time to the task. Not any more, though. Governments can track the movements of massive numbers of people by positioning cameras to read license plates, or by setting up facial recognition systems....

Listening to my 14-year-old daughter explain her writing assignment the other night, I was surprised to learn we both had similar homework. I was about to start this letter to introduce the current issue and its cover story, “The Amazing Teen Brain,” by psychiatrist Jay N. Giedd. Her essay was going to analyze the reasons behind the rash behavior of the famous star-crossed young lovers in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. As she explained, “Teenagers’ brains are not fully developed yet, so they have a problem with impulse control....

Nora Ephron’s final act played out in Manhattan on June 26 where the 71-year-old writer and movie director died from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia (AML), one of the most common types of leukemia among adults. AML is a cancer caused when abnormal cells grow inside bone marrow and interfere with the production of healthy blood cells. The marrow eventually stops working correctly, leaving a person with an increased risk of bleeding and infections....

“Have you ever seen a six-month old baby with exaggerated startle response?” One of my colleagues who works on our telephone counseling service was calling me for advice on how to respond to several distraught mothers asking her how to help their babies who had started showing such distressing symptoms of trauma during the recent bombing. Our telephone service was back and responding to callers on the third day of the attacks on Gaza, though of course with certain difficulties....

Many seemingly unrelated scientific techniques, from NMR spectroscopy to medical MRI and timekeeping using atomic clocks, rely on measuring atomic spin – the way an atom’s nucleus and electrons rotate around each other. The limit on how accurate these measurements can be is set by the inherent fuzziness of quantum mechanics. However, physicists in Spain have demonstrated that this limit is much less severe than previously believed, measuring two crucial quantities simultaneously with unprecedented precision....

All eyes are on a meeting today to determine whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will grant an emergency use authorization (EUA) for a COVID vaccine. Several promising candidates have been developed at a breakneck pace. The FDA published guidance in June and October laying out the criteria a vaccine must meet for an EUA. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer (in partnership with the German firm BioNTech) applied for one for its vaccine on November 20....

Four years into its travels across Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover faces an un­expected challenge: wending its way safely among dozens of dark streaks that could indicate water seeping from the red planet’s hillsides. Although scientists might love to investigate the streaks at close range, strict international rules prohibit Curiosity from touching any part of Mars that could host liquid water, to prevent contamination. But as the rover begins climbing the mountain Aeolis Mons next month, it will probably pass within a few kilometres of a dark streak that grew and shifted between February and July 2012 in ways suggestive of flowing water....

Most of the shapes found in nature cannot be described mathematically using classical geometry. Rather than simple straight lines, cones or circles, natural shapes, such as a coastline or the billows of a cloud, often reveal more angles the closer you view them. Such is the nature of fractals, writes former physics teacher and mathematics enthusiast Linton in this visually absorbing collection. Magnified fractal shapes and their components are often self-similar, meaning the whole has roughly the same shape as its smaller pieces—think of the repeating pattern of branches on a tree or the fronds of a fern....

By Nina ChestneyLONDON (Reuters) - Global spending to combat climate change fell last year and remains far below the level needed to prevent its most dangerous effects, a report by the Climate Policy Initiative said on Tuesday.Investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency and adaptation to climate change totaled $359 billion, $5 billion less than in 2011, as an economic slowdown hit state and private-sector budgets.The International Energy Agency estimated last year that $5 trillion of investment in clean energy alone was needed by 2020 to keep a rise in global temperatures to within 2 degrees Celsius (3....

The ice shelves that stretch out from the edges of Antarctica are under attack from “upside-down rivers” of warm water. Research published yesterday in the journal Science Advances describes a worrying process of glacial erosion that scientists believe future models must account for. The chain of events begins when layers of ice slide off the edge of glaciers into the ocean. This process of separation involves jagged slipping and sliding that leaves craggy indents on the underside of the ice sheets called “basal channels,” according to Karen Alley of the College of Wooster, an author of the study....