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He has a name, but most people just know him as “the Star Wars Kid.” In fact, he is known around the world by tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, his notoriety is for one of the most embarrassing moments in his life. In 2002, as a 15-year-old, the Star Wars Kid videotaped himself waving around a golf-ball retriever while pretending it was a lightsaber. Without the help of the expert choreographers working on the Star Wars movies, he stumbled around awkwardly in the video....

The provisional drug overdose death statistics for 2020 confirmed the addiction field’s worst fears. More people died of overdoses in the United States last year than in any other one-year period in our history. More than 93,000 people died. The increase from the previous year was also more than we’ve ever seen—up 30 percent. These data are telling us that something is wrong. In fact, they are shouting for change. It is no longer a question of “doing more” to combat our nation’s drug problems....

By Helen Thompson of Nature magazineExposure to germs in childhood is thought to help strengthen the immune system and protect children from developing allergies and asthma, but the pathways by which this occurs have been unclear. Now, researchers have identified a mechanism in mice that may explain the role of exposure to microbes in the development of asthma and ulcerative colitis, a common form of inflammatory bowel disease.In a study published online March 23 in Science, the researchers show that in mice, exposure to microbes in early life can reduce the body’s inventory of invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells, which help to fight infection but can also turn on the body, causing a range of disorders such as asthma or inflammatory bowel disease....

Good Chinese communists now trade a commodity that can neither be seen nor felt, yet is responsible for changing the climate. The country has set up seven markets for trading carbon dioxide to test whether such a market can help restrain China’s growing pollution problem. Taken together, the markets are the second largest in the world—after the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. Early results from one of the markets, in the burgeoning city of Shenzhen, are promising, including reductions of 2....

Regular readers know I’m a huge fan of cashback services, which is why they appear in the very first chapter of “The Cheapskate Rules: 21 Easy Money-Saving Tech Secrets.” (OK, last plug for a while, I swear.) If you’ve never tried one and want to see what all the fuss is about, the folks at TopCashback have crafted a sweet little offer especially for Cheapskate readers: a free-after-cashback 4GB Wintec flash drive from your local Sears store....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Rubik’s Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math’s “Simple Groups”” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. Solving the authors’ new puzzles builds on techniques developed for the study of mathematical entities called groups. One essential technique from group theory is specifying a simple, unambiguous system for writing down the elements of the group and how they combine. Writing It Down Rubik’s Cube represents a group whose elements are the moves—the twists you can make of each face of the cube—and whose combination rule might be called the “and then” operation: “make one twist and then make another....

The world’s biggest collection of Zika virus is housed in a tan concrete building, rising up from the flat campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) here in Galveston. Inside, armed guards watch the lobby, and access to certain floors requires special clearance. These safeguards are in place because other viruses, including those that cause Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), are also on the premises. Zika is not as easily spread as deadly Ebola, so the laboratories that work with the mosquito-carried virus do not require spacesuitlike protection gear....

There’s a lot of buzz right now about coconut oil being good for your brain. The primary argument is that coconut oil is rich in medium-chain triglycerides, or MCTs, which are metabolized a little differently than most types of fat. The MCTs in coconut oil break down into ketones, which can be used by brain cells for fuel. The idea is that supplying the brain with some extra fuel might make it run better....

Cosmic Dragnet The first results from the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter detector were reported in arXiv. Find out more about LUX in this related article. Taking the Hit The referenced study, which examined traumatic brain injuries in fruit flies, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Drinking from the Cool Cosmic Stream This new research on how young galaxies in the early universe grew in size was reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters....

Jet fuels derived from algae, camelina and jatropha – plants that pack an energy punch, are not eaten as food and do not displace food crops – could be approved and replacing petroleum fuels in commercial flights as early as next year, a Boeing executive said yesterday. Bill Glover, managing director of environmental strategy for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, which is leading an effort to develop, test and certify alternative jet fuels, said the technology is ready....

Neuroscientist Stefan Schneider of the German Sport University Cologne looks for answers in a research station in Antarctica. Interview by Anna von Hopffgarten. Hopffgarten: Humans are drawn ever farther into space, and flying to Mars may become possible in our lifetime. A trip to the Red Planet is now estimated to take about eight months each way, with a minimum stay of a year on the planet surface. What challenges would a mission like this pose for the psychological well-being of astronauts?...

This morning I caught my lonely reflection in my hallway mirror: my work-appropriate blouse fitted down to where the view of my computer’s Webcam ends, then heavily stretched over my rounded stomach—the bottom few inches of my belly protruding over baggy sweatpants below. I’m nine months pregnant, but the world hasn’t seen me. On June 28, 2020, in the thick of COVID lockdown, I found out I was expecting my first child....

We may now have direct evidence that planets can survive unscathed the violent churn that attends their host star’s death. Astronomers have spotted signs of an intact giant planet circling a superdense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, a new study reports. The white dwarf in question, called WD 1856, is part of a three-star system that lies about 80 light-years from Earth. The newly detected, Jupiter-size exoplanet candidate, WD 1856 b, is about seven times larger than the white dwarf and zips around it once every 34 hours....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The U.S. Supreme Court opens its new session on Oct. 3, 2022, with a high-profile case that could fundamentally alter the federal government’s ability to address water pollution. Sackett v. EPA turns on a question that courts and regulators have struggled to answer for several decades: Which wetlands and bodies of water can the federal government regulate under the 1972 Clean Water Act?...

You don’t remember it, but you woke up at least 100 times last night. These spontaneous arousals, lasting less than 15 seconds each, occur roughly every five minutes and don’t seem to affect how well-rested you feel. They are unrelated to waking up from a bad dream or your partner tossing and turning. Instead, they seem to be linked to some internal biological mechanism. Frequently waking up throughout the night may have protected early humans from predators by increasing their awareness of their surroundings during sleep....

Editor’s note: This story is part of a four-part series that Anne Casselman, a freelance writer and regular contributor to Scientific American, reported in early June during a rare opportunity to conduct field reporting on grizzly bears in Heiltsuk First Nation traditional territory in British Columbia. For a first-person acocunt of her experience there, click here. HEILTSUK TRADITIONAL TERRITORY, British Columbia—“Remember, if she charges, don’t run,” Doug Brown, researcher and field station manager for Raincoast Conservation Foundation and member of the Heiltsuk First Nation, tells me as we climb out of the boat at the head of one of the countless inlets found in Heiltsuk Traditional Territory along British Columbia’s central coast....

Dr. Eric Coe jumped at the chance to help test a COVID-19 vaccine. At his urging, so did his girlfriend, his son and his daughter-in-law. All received shots last week at a clinical research site in central Florida. “My main purpose in doing this was so I could spend more time with my family and grandchildren,” Coe said, noting that he’s seen them only outside and from a distance since March....

Editor’s Note: Thist story was originally published in the May 1998 edition of Scientific American. We are posting it in light of recent news involving Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Months before El Niño– driven storms battered the Pacific Coast of the U.S., the financial world was making its own preparations for aberrant weather. Beginning last year, an investor could buy or sell a contract whose value depended entirely on fluctuations in temperature or accumulations of rain, hail or snow....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. How much the world achieved at the Glasgow climate talks – and what happens now – depends in large part on where you live. In island nations that are losing their homes to sea level rise, and in other highly vulnerable countries, there were bitter pills to swallow after global commitments to cut emissions fell far short of the goal to keep global warming to 1....

When children first learn to read, they painstakingly sound out every letter—C-A-T—before mentally stringing them together and connecting the result to a word and its meaning. With practice, however, we begin to recognize words on sight. In fact, our brain compiles a visual dictionary that is housed in the rear temporal lobe, adjacent to the area that recognizes faces, according to a new study published in Neuroimage. This dictionary eventually supersedes the responsibilities of the brain’s phonics center, the researchers say, and is critical to becoming an advanced reader....