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A growing number of vehicles are meeting or surpassing federal fuel economy standards, though improvements to cars outpace those to trucks, according to a new analysis by the Consumer Federation of America. The progress means automakers are on track to meet a federal target that doubles fuel efficiency in 2025 from 2012, according to the report. “American consumers are enjoying a wide range of fuel-efficient cars in every single class,” said Jack Gillis, director of public affairs for CFA....

Which Switch? Brainteaser There are three on/off switches on the ground floor of a building. Only one operates a single lightbulb on the third floor. The other two switches are not connected to anything. Put the switches in any on/off order you like. Then go to the third floor to see the bulb. Without leaving the third floor, can you figure out which switch is genuine? You get only one try....

Charlotte Figi, an eight-year-old girl from Colorado with Dravet syndrome, a rare and debilitating form of epilepsy, came into the public eye in 2013 when news broke that medical marijuana was able to do what other drugs could not: dramatically reduce her seizures. Now, new scientific research provides evidence that cannabis may be an effective treatment for a third of epilepsy patients who, like Charlotte, have a treatment-resistant form of the disease....

The virus that causes COVID-19 probably shared an ancestor with bat coronaviruses more recently than scientists had thought. But finding the direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 is very unlikely, say researchers. The full genomes of SARS-CoV-2 and several closely related bat coronaviruses suggest they shared a common ancestor several decades ago. But the viruses are known to swap chunks of RNA with each other, a process called recombination, so each section has its own evolutionary history....

By Zeeya Merali The fuzzy dividing line between light and atoms has been blurred even further. Quantum physicists have created the first Bose-Einstein condensate using photons–a feat until now suspected to be possible only for atoms. The technique could be used to increase the efficiency of solar cells and lasers.Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are a bizarre quantum phase of matter. They were first proposed in the 1920s by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, who reasoned that if certain atoms are chilled to within a fraction of absolute zero, quantum effects should take over....

Molecules that protect the body from infection may be needed for mice to socialize with their peers, according to a study published today in Nature. This double duty could help safeguard the health of animals that live in close quarters. The findings bolster an emerging link between the immune system and conditions such as autism, says lead researcher Jonathan Kipnis, professor of neuroscience at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Whether we like it or not, there is a piling up of evidence that the immune system has a major impact on brain function: The brain is not isolated from the rest of the body,” he says....

Editor’s note: The article appears in print with the title, “The Prices Are Right”. Even in the information age, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics still gathers much of its data the old-fashioned way. Workers make phone calls to find out what dentists charge for pulling teeth, and they visit stores to write down the prices of CDs and Russet potatoes. In the end, the data are accurate but take a month or so to compile and analyze....

Name: Steven Chu Title: U.S. Secretary of Energy Location: Washington, D.C. Is domestic energy indepen­dence a useful goal? It’s certainly a useful goal to strive toward energy indepen­dence. The good news is that three and a half years ago we were importing about 60 percent of our oil, and now it’s around 45 percent. We see the trend going for­ward, decreasing even more. We are already largely energy-independent in terms of electricity generation, although some electricity comes from Canada....

“Should you become a pianist?” the question comes in English. No, you mustn’t. You can’t. “Should you become a pianist?” the question echoes in Polish. Yes, you must. At all costs. These quotes are striking because we typically regard language as conveying information, not changing it. In the last decade, however, research has shown that answers to questions can depend on the language of the question. For example, when Chinese-English bilinguals were randomly assigned to answer a self-esteem questionnaire in Chinese, they received scores indicating lower self-esteem than those who answered the same questionnaire in English....

When Adrianna and Jermaine Hannon’s second child, Jayden, was 14 months old, the California couple began to worry that something was wrong. The child became preoccupied with toy cars, turning them over and rolling their wheels ceaselessly at an age when most other toddlers flit from one activity to another. Jayden would also line up cars, magazines or blocks on the floor or a table in as straight a line as he could make, never stacking objects as other kids would....

Additional images of tidal and wave energy technologies can be found in our Extreme Tech Slideshow. Thirty feet (nine meters) below Manhattan’s East River, next to Roosevelt Island, six turbines—each 16 feet (five meters) in diameter, churning at a peak rate of 32 revolutions per minute—stand at attention on the riverbed. The turbines—which belong to New York City-based Verdant Power, Inc., —are built on a swiveling platform that keeps their nose cones facing the tide, whether it’s coming in or going out....

Scientists have been trying to grow human organs—including kidneys, livers, skin and guts—from scratch well over a decade. These “organoids” are not fully formed functional organs but miniaturized versions that help researchers model various diseases and test therapies. It may sound like B-movie pulp, but now scientists have grown a mini brain with neural activity similar to that seen in a preterm infant. Previous efforts had grown stem cells into brainlike collections of neurons, but none demonstrated brain activity mimicking the real thing until now....

NASA retired its ride to space, the space shuttle, in 2011, but its next spaceship was in the works well before then. Conceived in 2005, the Orion capsule is now set to make its first test flight, which is scheduled for December. The cone-shaped vehicle, designed to carry humans farther into space than ever before, is reminiscent of the Apollo capsules that flew astronauts to the moon, but it is a third larger....

When the ancient Incas wanted to archive tax and census records, they used a device made up of a number of strings called a quipu, which encoded the data in knots. Fast-forward several hundred years, and physicists are on their way to developing a far more sophisticated modern equivalent. Their “quipu” is a new phase of matter created within a quantum computer, their strings are atoms, and the knots are generated by patterns of laser pulses that effectively open up a second dimension of time....

The first major attempt to replicate striking evidence of the ‘cosmic dawn’—the appearance of the Universe’s first stars 180 million years after the Big Bang—has muddled the picture. Four years after radio astronomers reported finding a signature of the cosmic dawn, radio astronomer Ravi Subrahmanyan and his collaborators describe how they floated an antenna on a reservoir along the Sharavati river, in the Indian state of Karnataka, in search of that signal....

For more than 50 years microbiologists have warned against using antibiotics to fatten up farm animals. The practice, they argue, threatens human health by turning farms into breeding grounds of drug-resistant bacteria. Farmers responded that restricting antibiotics in livestock would devastate the industry and significantly raise costs to consumers. We now have empirical data that should resolve this debate. Since 1995 Denmark has enforced progressively tighter rules on the use of antibiotics in the raising of pigs, poultry and other livestock....

In the September Scientific American, devoted to human evolution, paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall discusses how a capacity for toolmaking and other cultural developments worked in conjunction with luck to foster the success of Homo sapiens. Luck came in the form of the climate shifts that served to accelerate the rate of evolution and the adaptation of beneficial traits among certain of our archaic forebears. In the video here Tattersall describes how his field has changed since he first entered it nearly 50 years ago....

We hold our physicians to high standards because they make life-or-death decisions. Yet when it comes to drug addiction, their behavior can be disturbing. Their overall rates of substance abuse are roughly on par with the rest of the population, at about 10 percent. For prescription drugs, abuse rates for doctors in several specialties are estimated to be even higher—not surprising given their access to addictive medications. One doctor, who cared for patients while surreptitiously taking large doses of prescription narcotics, wrote in the Contra Costa Times that “I held patients’ lives in my hands when I practiced medicine while high on narcotic drugs for 3½ years....

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy Dutton, 2015 ($26.95) For centuries philosophers, theologians and psychologists—including René Descartes, the Buddha and William James—have mused over the nature of the self: Is it an illusion, or is it real? If it does exist, where in the brain does it reside? Modern neuroscience has not resolved the debate but does offer tantalizing glimpses of the brain regions shaping our sense of self, argues science writer Ananthaswamy in his new book The Man Who Wasn’t There....

What’s your mental image of a scientist? Chances are you picture not only a wild-haired, bespectacled, older man in a lab coat but also someone who is more rational, objective and intelligent than other people. Yet do scientists themselves subscribe to this stereotype? That is the question researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands investigated in a study published this year in Accountability in Research. The team surveyed both scientists and highly educated nonscientists and asked them to rate the two categories of people in terms of objectivity, rationality, integrity, open-mindedness, intelligence and cooperativeness....