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I recently had the pleasure to revisit Warsaw, Poland, and St. Petersburg, Russia, two decades after the start of market reforms in which I had participated as an economic adviser. Both cities, proud and venerable capitals, had surmounted the tumul­tuous collapse of the Soviet era. Shops were full; architectural treasures glistened; local and international tourists abounded. Yet the differences were also apparent. Warsaw has enjoyed a building boom, with impressive new business towers going up despite the economic slowdown in western Europe....

OUR PERCEPTION of the world depends, to a surprising degree, on intelligent guesswork by the brain. An oval-shaped white image exciting your retina could be produced by an egg, a perfectly circular, flat tilted disk, or an infinite number of intermediate shapes each angled to the right degree. Yet your brain “homes in” instantly on the correct answer. It does this by using certain unconscious assumptions about the statistics of the natural world—suppositions that can be revealed by visual illusions....

More than 22,000 people were reported dead and 41,000 more were missing after a cyclone tore through the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar late Friday night and early Saturday morning. Over 10 hours, winds traveling up to 150 miles per hour struck Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, and dumped 20 inches of rain on the harbortown, formerly known as Rangoon. According to published reports, the country’s foreign minister fears the final death toll may rise as high as 50,000....

Do we inhabit the best of all possible worlds? German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz thought so, writing in 1710 that our planet, warts and all, must be the most optimal one imaginable. Leibniz’s idea was roundly scorned as unscientific wishful thinking, most notably by French author Voltaire in his magnum opus, Candide. Yet Leibniz might find sympathy from at least one group of scientists—the astronomers who have for decades treated Earth as a golden standard as they search for worlds beyond our own solar system....

Edited by Dava Sobel Should I walk the Planck length between my heart and yours, drown in the liquid abyss of space-time deep within my sea dreams that scope and chart macro geometries of love by star arc in night sky, heaven’s whirls of light and elemental fire would still shimmer through unfathomed depth and distance to mark in micro beats of time our bodies’ magnetic needs. In bottomless dark we flicker into being, instant inflation of nothing into something’s minute entanglements forever trading quantum places, to fuse and emanate our invisible human essence in and out to infinitude....

By Reuters Television & Darren Schuettler Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has congratulated a group of Australian students who reproduced the active ingredient for a life-saving, anti-parasitic drug at the center of a drug-price controversy involving his former company. The students from Sydney Grammar School drew global media attention this week after they said they had produced the drug Daraprim for about $2 a dose, a fraction of the current list price of $750 per dose....

You might be forgiven for thinking our understanding of classical physics had reached its peak in the four centuries since Isaac Newton devised his eponymous laws of motion. But surprising new research shows there are still secrets waiting to be found, hidden in plain sight—or, at least in this case, within earshot. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a group of scientists has theorized that sound waves possess mass, meaning sounds would be directly affected by gravity....

We encounter statistics every day, but it is not always easy to interpret them appropriately. During her doctoral thesis work in the abstract field of number theory, Dutch mathematician Ionica Smeets noticed that it was very difficult for laypeople to find understandable scientific explanations of statistics. So she decided to change that. Now Smeets authors books, writes for newspapers and speaks about her field on television. She is widely known in her home country of the Netherlands, where she mediates between science and the public as a professor of science communication at Leiden University....

An atom, molecule or Bacterium placed at the focal point of the world’s most powerful x-ray laser doesn’t stand a chance. Up to a trillion high-energy photons, moving in unison, sweep through the matter, heating it to more than one million degrees Celsius—hot as the solar corona—in less than a trillionth of a second. When a pulse of such extreme radiation hits neon atoms, all 10 electrons boil off each atom, and the denuded nuclei explode away from their similarly ionized neighbors....

Black people, and Black women in particular, face considerable health challenges. Compared with their rates in other racial groups, chronic cardiovascular, inflammatory and metabolic risk factors have been found to be elevated in Black women, even after controlling for behaviors such as smoking, physical exercise or dietary variables. Black women have also been identified as the subgroup with the highest body mass index (BMI) in the U.S., with four out of five classified as either “overweight” or “obese....

What are you going to do after you read this story? You may not know that yet, but your brain probably does. A new study shows that patterns of brain activity can reveal which choice a person is going to make long before he or she is aware of it. A team led by John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin scanned the brains of volunteers who held a button in each hand and were told to push one of the buttons whenever they wanted to....

Liberals might be more likely than conservatives to check out what you are looking at, according to a study published online November 4 in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Experiments show that people take longer to notice when an object appears if they have first seen a face looking in the other direction. Now a team of psychologists and poli­tical scientists at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln report that whereas liberals do just that, conservatives do not....

Whenever I smell the pages of a brand new book, I am reminded of all the late night reading I did as a kid. I can even feel the soft fabric on the arms of my favorite reading chair and sense the quiet of a house where everyone else is asleep. The stresses of the day start to give way a bit to feelings of calm and focus. We have an armchair in my daughter’s room very similar to my childhood reading chair, but sitting in it doesn’t quite conjure up those memories as effectively as that new book smell....

The impact of climate change on storms might be uncertain, but their growing damage is not. Hurricanes like Maria, now barreling toward Puerto Rico, could inflict much larger losses around the world as coastlines bristle with future development. A series of recent studies by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) predicts there will be mostly financial benefits from mitigating climate change. But some risks are unlikely to be reduced, including the financial exposure from future storms resembling Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria....

We face a real crisis in science education in America. Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee, chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology, has warned that countries such as China and India will trample the U.S. economy in the near future without major improvements in teaching. Indeed, our schools are falling behind. In the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)—a respected measure of achievement around the globe—the average science score of U....

“Do you want to hear the most epic story ever?” So begins The Zoomable Universe (October 2017, Scientific American/FSG), a new book from astrophysicist Caleb Scharf and artist Ron Miller that is a tour of, well, almost everything. The “epic story” is the tale of how atoms made in the immediate aftermath of the big bang 13.8 billion years ago came together from the hearts of distant, long-dead suns scattered across our galaxy to coalesce into our familiar Earth—into toadstools, trilobites, trees and, of course, dear reader, into you....

To save energy and tackle pollution, the aviation industry is taking some surprising aerodynamic cues from birds. Aircraft manufacturing giant Airbus is developing a system, called fello’fly, in which two commercial planes mimic migrating birds by traveling in tandem with one close behind the other. The company says this arrangement could enable the follower aircraft to reduce its fuel requirements by as much as 10 percent per trip. Fello’fly was inspired by the way some birds, notably geese, often fly in formation to save energy....

A U.S. District Court judge’s recent decision to invalidate patents on two genes commonly tested to determine risk for breast and ovarian cancers is an important step toward removing legal hurdles that have slowed the development of new genetic testing technology, according to a team of Duke University researchers. Although Judge Robert Sweet’s March 31 ruling does not sit well with some biotech companies and universities, Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) researchers say that broad patent claims such as those made by Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation do more to block competition and discourage promising new technologies than to spur innovation....

For many of us, family life is a multispecies affair—and although we don’t get to choose our relatives, we do get to pick our pets. What makes us identify with and select one type of animal over another? We explored this and several other aspects of pet ownership in Scientific American MIND’s recent online survey. We were gratified that more than 2,000 readers took the time to respond. If one thing is clear from the results, it’s that the answer is complex....

The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest structure humans have ever put into space. In fact, it’s so large that it wasn’t launched in its entirety. It was sent up in pieces, and then constructed in orbit. The ISS is also estimated to be the most expensive man-made object ever built. Its hefty price tag exceeds $100 billion. So, who uses the Space Station and for what? How big is it, and can we see it from down here on Earth?...