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Many of the 1.5 million children in the U.S. whose parents divorce every year feel as if their worlds are falling apart. Divorcing parents are usually very concerned about the welfare of their children during this troublesome process. Some parents are so worried that they remain in unhappy marriages, believing it will protect their offspring from the trauma of divorce. Yet parents who split have reasons for hope. Researchers have found that only a relatively small percentage of children experience serious problems in the wake of divorce or, later, as adults....

Name: Jill McDermott Title: Ph.D. candidate, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Location: Woods Hole, Mass. Where will you be sailing? We’ll sail onboard the research vessel Atlantis to the Mid-Cayman Spreading Center, which harbors the world’s deepest chain of volcanoes. It’s south of the Cay­man Islands and west of Jamaica and Cuba. We first visited the site two years ago with a submarine called Nereus, and we found evidence of three new hydro­thermal vents....

A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the energy of its previous runs, are too inconclusive to be sure—many physicists warned that the wiggle could just as easily represent a statistical fluke....

When World War I began, the relatively few English women who had medical degrees were effectively blocked from practicing in prominent hospitals and were relegated to low-paying and low-profile positions. Doctors Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray were therefore astonished when, in 1915, the British Army requested that they assemble a 1,000-bed military hospital in London. Journalist Moore eloquently brings to life the story of the two women who fought for women’s rights and set up Endell Street Hospital—nicknamed the Suffragettes’ Hospital and staffed entirely by women....

What’s in store for humanity? It is becoming clear that we will use our growing technological powers to transform not only the world around us but ourselves, too. Many forms of human enhancement are already routine–sports medicine, psychotropic mood drugs, wakefulness and alertness enhancers, cosmetic surgery, drugs for sexual performance. Much more will become possible in coming decades. Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution joins several recent titles that attempt to make sense of the radical future possibilities for our species....

An old saying posits that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If the $60-billion dieting industry is any indication, our society is steps away from a straitjacket. Despite copious evidence that most diets fail in the long term (beyond two years), many people repeatedly attempt to shrink their bodies, and the majority end up heavier than when they started. As Daniel Engber details in this issue, science is no closer to understanding why weight loss from dieting doesn’t stick....

FEBRUARY 1959 SOVIET STUDENTS— “When Premier Khru­shchev recently called upon Soviet educators to strengthen ties between the schools and ‘life,’ [Yakov B.] Zel’dovich and [Andrei] Sakharov wrote a long letter to Pravda on the training of scientists-to-be at the secondary-school level. Their thesis is that boys and girls with mathematical or scientific talent spend too many years in ordinary schools in view of the fact that mathematicians and theoretical physicists are often most productive in their early twenties....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

After 12 weeks of the trial, Gretchen had felt her sexual desire return. Touching herself unleashed erotic sensations and vivid sexual fantasies. Eventually she could make love to her husband again and experienced an orgasm for the first time in almost three years. But that was not because of testosterone, it turned out. Gretchen was among the half of the women who had received a placebo patch—with no testosterone in it at all....

Excerpted from The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Copyright © April 16, 2013, North Point Press. Food as a battery—that is what we would like you now to consider. But before we get to the full expression of that proposal, we need to review exactly how batteries function, so you can appreciate the beauty, and potential innovation, made possible by thinking through this metaphor....

Ever since their discovery more than a decade ago, enigmatic flashes of radio waves have puzzled astronomers. These “fast radio bursts” (FRBs) pop up with startling frequency and intensity all across the sky, each emerging from unknown faraway extragalactic sources and packing the power output of up to hundreds of millions of suns into just a few fleeting milliseconds. Now researchers are closing in on their origins. A team studying one particular FRB some three billion light-years from Earth—known as FRB 121102, the only ever seen to repeat—has found it is engulfed by an extremely strong magnetic field....

There are experimental sciences, and then there are historical and observational sciences. The experimental sciences, like chemistry and physics, are easy to spot. When stuff blows up or systems don’t work right, you’ve got yourself an experiment. Historical and observational sciences can be a little tougher to get a handle on. The researchers in these fields must adopt the Yogi Berra stance—“You can observe a lot just by watching”—and then interpret reality....

As the U.S. government draws up plans to use surveillance drones in domestic airspace, opposition to what many consider an unwarranted and significant invasion of privacy is mounting across the country, from rural Virginia to techopolis Seattle. Although officials debate anti-drone legislation at federal, state and local levels, one man is fighting back with high-tech apparel. A New York City privacy advocate-turned-urban-guerilla fashion designer is selling garments designed to make their wearers invisible to infrared surveillance cameras, particularly those on drones....

Sea of Tranquility Emily St. John Mandel Knopf, 2022 ($25) Peel away the speculative skin of Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel—the time travel, the moon colonies, the Möbius strip of a plot that, against all odds, holds together until the very last page—and what’s left is something much more vulnerable: a story about grief. In this moment of unbearable negative space, of sputtering pandemic disruptions and mind-numbing stasis, Mandel has written a eulogy for our half-lived years....

The estimated gap between proposed global emission cuts and scientifically advisable emissions levels has widened, thanks to stronger-than-expected growth from key developing countries and more accurate carbon accounting. In its “Emissions Gap Report 2012,” the U.N. Environment Programme estimates that, should countries follow through on their most stringent international pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world will still emit 8 gigatons above the 2020 limit scientists say is needed to prevent runaway global warming....

When we look back at the COVID pandemic, what will hindsight tell us? Will we remember the turn of the decade as the year that finally brought real change to pandemic preparedness, or will our eventual return to “normal” stymie our progress? Although epidemiologists have long warned about the potential for global pandemics, their admonitions have largely gone unheeded. However, industrialized animal farming practices, increased human-animal contact, globalization, decreasing biodiversity and other factors all point to the likelihood of another zoonotic disease (one transmitted from animals to humans) with pandemic potential ....

By Mo Costandi, Nature magazineIt sounds like every student’s dream: research published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information while we snooze.Anat Arzi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and her colleagues used a simple form of learning called classical conditioning to teach 55 healthy participants to associate odours with sounds as they slept.They repeatedly exposed the sleeping participants to pleasant odours, such as deodorant and shampoo, and unpleasant odours such as rotting fish and meat, and played a specific sound to accompany each scent....

Hackers can make you feel powerless. Here are several ways to protect yourself (and your technology) from those who seek to infiltrate it: Strong and Different Passwords Let’s start off with the basics: do not use the same password for all of your accounts, and make sure that your passwords are complex. In the past, I’ve talked about using services and programs such as lastpass and keypass in order to manage passwords....

Psychology has taken some hits in recent years—most famously in the form of the “replication crisis.” Multiple failures to reproduce high-profile findings prompted a reexamination of methods that can inadvertently generate apparently significant findings that are actually just statistical artifacts. Now a new challenge has arisen to a series of renowned psychological studies that purported to provide a window into how the brain processes internal representations of our physical “self.” The questioning of this research comes from an unlikely quarter: the study of hypnosis....

By Reuters Staff (Reuters) - The Ice Bucket Challenge that went viral two years ago, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, has helped identify a new gene behind the neurodegenerative disease ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, researchers say. The challenge involved people pouring ice-cold water over their heads, posting video on social media, and donating funds for research on the condition. Celebrities including Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Ellen DeGeneres, Benedict Cumberbatch and former U....