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Josh Klein used to work on vaccine development for HIV, but these days he focuses on a different biochemical conundrum: making cakes moist and fluffy. He insists he’s still making a difference. As director of biochemistry research at Hampton Creek Foods in San Francisco, Klein is on a mission to systematically identify and replicate every single culinary function of chicken eggs—using plant proteins. Although Hampton Creek’s founder, Josh Tetrick, is a vegan, his goal is not to convert others....

In the wild, chimpanzees have been known to hunt together, particularly when conditions dictate that a solo hunter will not be successful. Yet this does not prove that our nearest living relatives understand cooperation the same way that we do: such group hunts may simply be the product of independent and simultaneous actions by many individuals with little comprehension of the need for coordinated action to ensure success. A new study, however, shows for the first time that chimpanzees understand when cooperation is needed and how to go about securing it effectively....

All parents struggle to find the right balance between encouragement and discipline when it comes to raising their kids. This past winter Yale University law professor Amy Chua drew roars of protest when she asserted in her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, that successful parenting entails controlling most aspects of a child’s life, from prohibiting playdates and sleepovers to screaming at children for getting grades lower than an A....

“Imagine a world in which every work of genius was stripped away, a world without great literature, art, philosophy, science or even technology. We would be living in a very barren world, huddling in some cave, shivering in the cold.” So began a recent exchange with psychologist Dean Keith Simonton on the merits of studying genius. Few of us can be the best, I argued, playing devil’s advocate, so why bother with the topic?...

Jonathan Cotliar knew he was ahead of the curve four years ago when he joined Science 37, a company that supports virtual clinical trials conducted mostly online. The firm in Los Angeles, California, was growing slowly before March, receiving about a dozen calls a week from potential clients. But since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Science 37 has been running at fever pitch. Cotliar, the company’s chief medical officer, says Science 37 now receives hundreds of enquiries every week from potential clients, such as pharmaceutical companies, medical centres and even individual investigators....

The discovery of wobbling “hotspots” circling the drain of a massive black hole offers exciting new evidence for the behemoth that lies at our galaxy’s center—and the study leader shares how 13 years of observations have finally paid off. The new study, involving the work of by Avery Broderick, an astronomer from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, revealed three flares, or visual hotspots, emanating from the Milky Way’s central black hole, also known as Sagittarius A*....

In this issue’s cover story, Jason G. Goldman covers a massive research study of 20,000 individuals in England that found that 120 minutes spent in nature every week proffered marked benefits in health and mental wellness (see “The Nature Cure”). While the scale of such an undertaking makes the work significant, the results are likely to be met by some societies with little surprise. Take Denmark, where for more than half a century families have sent their children as young as three years old to so-called forest kindergarten to forgo classroom curriculum and play and explore each day outdoors, no matter the weather....

Too often toxic coal ash, a byproduct of coal-fired power, ends up in poor, minority communities. U.S. civil rights officials are launching a deeper look at federal environmental policy to find out why. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a hearing next week on environmental justice and the Environmental Protection Agency. The focus is the impact of coal ash, a toxic waste product of burning coal that often contains harmful metals such as lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium....

Automobile companies seem eager to claim that they have the most fuel-efficient vehicles, but they can’t all be tops. Data from the U.S. government show that car fleets from Japanese firms Toyota and Honda have consistently been above the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that manufacturers are supposed to meet (small graphs below). Historically, the big U.S. makers—GM, Ford and Chrysler—have hewn close to the standard. Firms such as Porsche that focus on high performance tend to fall short....

As President Barack Obama approaches the end of his second term, he must find himself wondering (along with countless pundits) about his legacy. The results of a recent study suggest that the question of how long he will be remembered can be addressed scientifically. The rate at which the majority of the population forgets about presidents—and other cultural icons and events—follows a predictable pattern, according to Henry Roediger, principal investigator of the Memory Lab at Washington University in St....

It’s finally adrift. When the Larsen C Ice Shelf calved yesterday, it sent one of the largest icebergs ever recorded slipping into a sea frosted with smaller chunks of ice. It marked the end of a decadeslong splintering first seen by satellites in the 1960s. The crack stayed small for years until, in 2014, it began racing across the Antarctic ice. The massive iceberg holds twice as much water used in the United States every year....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. The media frenzy is starting to settle after the tragic suicide of Robin Williams. Some of the coverage, I was happy to see, was sensitive and compassionate, while some was just plain irresponsible, sensationalistic, and full of specific details—all of which can put vulnerable people at risk, and perpetuate misinformation....

Scientists just activated the world’s biggest “brain”: a supercomputer with a million processing cores and 1,200 interconnected circuit boards that together operate like a human brain. Ten years in the making, it is the world’s largest neuromorphic computer—a type of computer that mimics the firing of neurons—scientists announced on Nov. 2. Dubbed Spiking Neural Network Architecture, or SpiNNaker, the computer powerhouse is located at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and it “rethinks the way conventional computers work,” project member Steve Furber, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, said in a statement....

As a young mathematician in the 1950s, the late Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was … trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled. One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution....

After more than a half-century of supporting breakthrough scientific work—and providing a scenic backdrop for Contact, GoldenEye and other blockbuster Hollywood films—the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is going dark. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the observatory, announced on November 19 that it will begin the process of planning for “controlled decommissioning” of the 305-meter telescope. Over the past several months the instrument has suffered two catastrophic failures of cables that support its 900-ton (817-metric-ton) central receiving platform....

The first U.S. attempt to bring asteroid dust back to Earth has hit a surprise hurdle. The near-Earth asteroid Bennu is rockier and expelling more debris than expected, according to results from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Bennu. The findings could threaten NASA’s plan to scoop up a sample from the asteroid’s surface next year. The U.S.$800-million mission is not the only one in the process of scoping out an asteroid....

From the Pentagon to the General Services Administration, President-elect Joe Biden has embedded climate-minded officials throughout his sprawling transition team. Climate experts, former Obama administration officials and green activists abound among the teams managing the transition for EPA; the Energy, Interior and Agriculture departments; and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Unlike past transitions, officials with significant climate or clean energy experience also pop up in departments like State, Defense, Treasury and Justice....

Tracking eye movements lets scientists figure out what we pay attention to in a scene. When people blink during such experiments, those few milliseconds are usually discarded as junk data. A new study finds that blinking might reveal important information, too. It turns out that the more we blink, the less focused is our attention. In kids with autism, blink patterns appear to offer clues about how they engage with the world around them....

The microbes that inhabit our bodies are intimately involved in human health and disease yet we still know relatively little about them. A new major census of these tiny symbionts has revealed that they are an even more diverse bunch than was once presumed. We have long focused on single bacteria as sources of disease (E. coli or streptococcus, for example). But we have now been learning that, for the most part, these trillions of microbes that make their homes in and on us do an excellent job keeping us healthy (crowding out harmful microbes) and sated (breaking down a lot of the food we ingest)....

AS COMPUTER SCIENTISTS try and figure out how to manage an increasingly complex digital world, they are increasingly turning for inspiration to Mother Nature. “Life runs on sunlight and information,” says Janine Benyus, president of the Biomimicry Institute in Missoula, Mont. A species is constantly evolving to find the optimal way to survive in a particular habitat. “Organisms really do lend themselves to people looking for novel ways to solve information-processing problems,” she says....