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December in moscow, and the temperature drops under 15 degrees below zero. The radiators in the bar have grown cold, so I sit in a thick coat and gloves, drinking vodka while I ponder the fossil birds. The year is 2001, and the now late Evgeny N. Kurochkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences and I have just spent hours at the paleontology museum as part of our effort to survey all the avian fossils ever collected in Mongolia by joint Soviet-Mongolian expeditions....

The Wood for the Trees: One Man’s Long View of Nature By Richard Fortey. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016 Committed: The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care By Dinah Miller and Annette Hanson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016 Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians Are Paid By Miriam J. Laugesen. Harvard University Press, 2016 The Fish Market: Inside the Big-Money Battle for the Ocean and Your Dinner Plate By Lee van der Voo. St....

It seems like every week a new smartphone is introduced. Just when you think you’ve made up your mind, a new device hits the market. Manufacturers are falling over themselves to outdo each other in terms of marketing their devices’ technical specifications and features. But how much weight should be given to these specs anyway? And what’s the best way to pick a new smartphone? In this edition of Ask Maggie, I answer these questions and offer some advice on what to look for in a smartphone....

For more than three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has been breaking new ground in astronomy, cosmology and planetary science, delivering results that few if any other facilities can match—let alone exceed. No other orbital observatory has managed such consistent high performance for so many years, thanks to a series of repair and servicing missions by NASA astronauts. NASA staged five space shuttle missions to Hubble in low-Earth orbit between 1993 and 2009 to upgrade science instruments, replace failed systems and boost Hubble’s orbit, which naturally decays over time because of friction against the tenuous outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere....

Le Bourget, Paris—The nations of the world have been talking about climate change for 23 years. In all that time they have been adding inexorably to the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere and doing little to slow it. But here at the 21st United Nations climate conference, 184 countries representing more than 90 percent of global CO2 pollution are getting into detailed negotiations this week over the plans they had submitted to curb global warming....

A century ago, Albert Einstein became famous. Sure, he was already well-known among physicists. But the world at large learned his name only after November 1919, when news broke that his theory of gravity had been confirmed—to the dismay of many fans of Isaac Newton. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens” shouted the headline in the New York Times. “Einstein Theory Triumphs,” a subhead added. As the article recounted, an observation of stars near the sun during a solar eclipse found their apparent position shifted just as Einstein had predicted....

Last month, when FirstEnergy Corp. decided to close six coal-fired power plants in its home state of Ohio and two other states, the moves became instant political ammunition for Republicans, who blamed the Obama administration’s environmental regulations for the closures. Because of the regulations on toxic power plant emissions announced last month by U.S. EPA, “500 hardworking Americans in three states will lose their jobs – not to mention the countless indirect jobs,” asserted Rep....

Key concepts Physics Mass Gravity Kinetic energy Potential energy Introduction Imagine rolling two identical cans down a slope, but one is empty and the other is full. Which one will reach the bottom first? You might have learned that when dropped straight down, all objects fall at the same rate regardless of how heavy they are (neglecting air resistance). Is the same true for objects rolling down a hill? Try this activity to find out!...

Scarlet kingsnakes are chasing an evolutionary ghost. In North Carolina’s Sandhills forest, the harmless snakes have evolved to better resemble a poisonous species that vanished from the region more than 50 years ago. The scarlet kingsnake, Lampropeltis elapsoides, copies the stripe patterns of deadly coral snakes, Micrurus fulvius, so well that people use mnemonic rhymes to tell them apart, such as: “If red touches yellow, you’re a dead fellow; if red touches black, you’re all right, Jack....

The hardware in electronics has been a poor fit for the software of human flesh. Rigid circuits do not flex with pliable organs, and hard edges tear soft tissue. This problem has severely limited efforts to improve devices such as artery-clearing catheters by adding computerized control and finesse. Silicon may support the entire computer industry, but it is notoriously brittle. Yet even the most stubborn materials become flexible if you make them thin enough, says John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....

The tidy rows of gleaming solar panels at Pine Gate Renewables facility in southwestern Oregon originally sat amid the squat grasses of a former cattle pasture. But in 2017 the company started sowing the 41-acre site with a colorful riot of native wildflowers. The shift was not merely aesthetic; similar projects at a growing number of solar farms around the country aim to help reverse the worrying declines in bees, butterflies and other key pollinating species observed in recent years....

“The press of the Soviet Union has been astounding its readers with accounts of a ‘revolution’ in science and a ‘miracle’ of technology. Nikolai A. Kozyrev, an astrophysicist, was said to have wrought the revolution, with his hypothesis that the passage of time is the source of cosmic energy. The miracle was the harnessing of a ‘concentration of energy.’ Speaking for the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, three distinguished physicists joined in a public rebuke to the press for ‘cheap sensationalism’ and for placing its pages ‘at the disposal of absolutely incompetent people....

Hermann Staudinger was a pacifist, but this was one fight he was determined to win. In 1920, the German chemist proposed that polymers—a broad class of compounds that included rubber and cellulose—were made of long chains of identical small molecules linked by strong chemical bonds. Most of his colleagues thought this was arrant nonsense, and argued that polymers were merely looser aggregations of small molecules. Staudinger refused to back down, sparking feuds that spanned a decade....

The key to solving the climate change crisis is technology. To accommodate the economic aspirations of the more than five billion people in the developing countries, the size of the world economy should increase by a factor of four to six by 2050; at the same time, global emissions of greenhouse gases will have to remain steady or decline to prevent dangerous changes to the climate. After 2050, emissions will have to drop further, nearly to zero, for greenhouse gas concentrations to stabilize....

My father once advised me to try to learn something new every day. Fortunately, Scientific American always delivers. And even the most seemingly esoteric feature articles have down-to-earth details or surprising facts that help make them relevant and accessible. Consider this our invitation to this issue’s knowledge treasure hunt. Take our cover story, “The Emptiest Place in Space,” by István Szapudi. Our astronomer author probes the origin of an odd “cold spot” in the cosmic microwave background, the light that rippled from the big bang throughout the universe....

It is no mystery why poker is such a popular pastime: the dynamic card game produces drama in spades as players are locked in a complicated tango of acting and reacting that becomes increasingly tense with each escalating bet. The same elements that make poker so entertaining have also created a complex problem for artificial intelligence (AI). A study published today in Science describes an AI system called DeepStack that recently defeated professional human players in heads-up, no-limit Texas hold’em poker, an achievement that represents a leap forward in the types of problems AI systems can solve....

If we see someone attractive, we say he or she is “easy on the eyes.” Now new research suggests that beautiful faces, paintings, objects or patterns are attractive because they are easy on the mind. Previous research showed that people tend to find typical things more attractive, from watches to birds to faces. In fact, researchers found that the secret to creating an attractive face was to “average” many faces into a digital composite (right)....

Recently, thousands of migratory birds suddenly dropped dead across New Mexico. Sparrows, warblers and swallows that normally wheel across New Mexico’s iconic landscapes as they fly south for the winter instead fell lifeless across the land, weakened by extreme conditions. While scientists are still working to conclusively explain this tragedy, their initial findings clearly indicate that we are witnessing a canary in the coal mine moment—as we face down dual climate and nature crises gripping our planet....

Microsoft’s Kinect technology lets gamers kick a virtual soccer ball or ride a digital skateboard using natural movements rather than a controller. Yet it can detect and interpret only full-body motion—it is relatively clueless about interpreting the movements of smaller body parts such as fingers. Now Microsoft researchers are developing a wrist-worn sensor to control video games—along with mobile phones, tablets, computers and TVs—with a flick of the wrist or snap of the fingers....

The constellation of Earth-imaging satellites launched yesterday—28 individual sputniks, called “Doves,” each about the size of its namesake and weighing in at a svelte five kilograms—is on its way to the International Space Station. If all goes well, by the end of the month “Flock 1,” as the group is called, will distribute its nanosatellites in Earth orbit, the better to photograph the complete surface of the planet at high resolution 365 days a year....