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The incredibly sensitive LUX dark-matter detector, buried under a mile of rock, has come up empty on its 20-month search for dark matter — further narrowing down the possible characteristics of the strange substance. Researchers presented the results today (July 21) at the 11th Identification of Dark Matter Conference (IDM2016) in Sheffield, U.K., which gathers together researchers seeking to understand dark matter, the mysterious material that appears to make up more than four-fifths of the universe’s mass, but which scientists have not observed directly....

As his 12-year run as mayor of New York City ends, Michael Bloomberg leaves behind a legacy of aggressive measures designed to improve the health of the city’s residents. His administration built bike lanes, plastered anti–soda ads on subways, funded produce sellers and undertook scores of other innovative—some say, heavy-handed—initiatives, many of which were widely imitated by other municipalities. “It’s remarkable the number of things they’ve been able to do,” says Ryan Demmer, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University....

A recurring red herring in the current presidential campaign is the verity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Although the president has made this document public, and records of his 1961 birth in Honolulu have been corroborated by newspaper announcements, a vocal segment of the population continues to insist that Obama’s birth certificate proving U.S. citizenship is a fraud, making him legally ineligible to be president. A Politico survey found that a majority of voters in the 2011 Republican primary shared this clearly false belief....

Wendy writes: “I read that drinking sparkling water increases hunger hormones, making you eat more. Is this true?” First, they took away our soda. Too much sugar! Then, it turned out that diet soda might be just as bad. Despite being sugar- and calorie-free, the artificial sweeteners may affect our intestinal bacteria in ways that promote weight gain. And now they’re coming for our plain sparkling water, too? Will they stop at nothing?...

Giraffe numbers have declined by as much as 40 percent since the 1980s in a “silent extinction” driven by illegal hunting and an expansion of farmland in Africa, the Red List of endangered species reported on Thursday. Populations of the world’s tallest land creature fell to about 98,000 from an estimated 152,000-163,000 in 1985, according to the List compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The Red List rated the giraffe “vulnerable” to extinction on current trends for the first time, against a previous rating of “least concern”....

It is the ultimate paradox of American health care: going to the hospital can kill you. Every year nearly two million hospital-acquired infections claim roughly 100,000 lives and add $45 billion in costs; that is as many lives and dollars as taken by AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined. And with antibiotic resistance rising steadily, those numbers promise to climb even higher. Even more staggering than the numbers is that most of these infections are preventable....

Key concepts Filtration Aquifers Permeable and impermeable soil Groundwater Introduction Have you ever noticed the claim on a bottle of water that it contains “spring water”? More than half of the bottled water sold in the U.S. is labeled this way, but only a fraction of this water actually flowed naturally from a spring. Most is from groundwater that is sucked up by pumps (which are installed near a spring). In 2014 this was about 22....

Stanford University scientists triggered visual hallucinations in mice by activating a few brain cells with a light signal. The researchers only had to stimulate neurons to make a mouse behave as if it perceived things that weren’t there—implying that the brain may be more malleable than previously thought. So few cells were involved in implanting the visual image in the mouse’s brain that “it raised the question: Why are we not walking around hallucinating all the time?...

As COVID-19 has ripped through communities, children have often been spared the worst of the disease’s impacts. But the spectre of long COVID developing in children is forcing researchers to reconsider the cost of the pandemic for younger people. The question is particularly relevant as the proportion of infections that are in young people rises in countries where many adults are now vaccinated—and as debates about the benefits of vaccinating children intensify....

“We have reached out into the universe and pulled back an anomaly,” write Jan C. Bernauer and Randolf Pohl in our cover story, “The Proton Radius Puzzle.” “And so we have a great chance to learn something new.” Their task was a straightforward one: measure the radius of a proton. After using two complementary techniques to get precise measurements, however, the answers they got were not the same. And the values were not just slightly different; they were different by more than five times the uncertainty in either measurement....

In between the thousands of bright galaxies that populate many Hubble Space Telescope photos of the distant cosmos are empty dark spots—tantalizing patches that could be chock-full of more galaxies if only we could see them. Now, astronomers have taken another look at those empty patches and spotted faint light streaming from stars formed only 500 million years after the Big Bang. The new results (pdf) suggest this light came from some of the first galaxies ever formed, which could be 10 times more numerous than previously thought....

On the evening of Sunday, January 20, the most stunning celestial light show over the continental U.S. will actually be a shadow—the Earth’s, in fact, sweeping across the nearside of the moon in a total lunar eclipse. For a shadow, it will be quite bright: Before a potential audience of nearly three billion people, the moon will gradually transform into a glowing copper-colored orb, tinted by sunlight bouncing off and passing through the air in our planet’s dense atmosphere....

On May 31 the Department of Homeland Security announced their 2006 antiterrorism funding grants to U.S. cities. The New York Hall of Science. The New York Academy of Sciences. The New York Academy of Medicine. Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Mount Sinai School of Medicine. New York University School of Medicine. State University of New York Downstate Medical Center College of Medicine....

Deception runs like a red thread throughout all of human history. It sustains literature, from Homers wily Odysseus to the biggest pop novels of today. Go to a movie, and odds are that the plot will revolve around deceit in some shape or form. Perhaps we find such stories so enthralling because lying pervades human life. Lying is a skill that wells up from deep within us, and we use it with abandon....

As the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was reminded in May, arriving first has its rewards, but they come with the risks of venturing into uncharted territory. This past spring the Federal Aviation Administration banned pilots and air traffic controllers from taking the company’s popular smoking-cessation aid, varenicline, which is sold in the U.S. as Chantix. Amid 6.5 million prescriptions written worldwide since 2006, the drug had spawned highly publicized reports of acute psychiatric episodes that included seizures, psychosis and suicidal depression....

Larry Webster has been working at Mount Wilson Observatory outside Los Angeles for more than 30 years, doing everything from keeping toilets flushing and adjusting mirrors to mapping sunspots. In September 2006, the 51-year-old solar observer came into work looking more like he was 90. He was dehydrated, jaundiced and had lost a lot of weight. Although he spent a month in and out of emergency rooms for symptoms of nausea and vomiting, doctors were uncertain what had caused his illness....

Scientific American has featured countless contributions from notable scientist-authors in its 167-year history. Among them, nearly 150 Nobel Prize winners have written for the magazine, contributing more than 200 articles altogether. In the July issue, we featured 12 excerpts of those articles written by past winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics to coincide with the 62nd annual Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany, which this year focuses on physics....

“Make sure you stop at the grocery store, not Burger King,” Jama bond instructed her husband on his cell phone as he made an ice-cube run one night in 2012. “Their ice cubes melt too fast.” Bond, then 38 and nearly nine months pregnant, needed bags of ice to keep the water cold in the tub at her feet, which were red, swollen and painful. She had learned to cover them with trash bags so the ice water would not damage her skin....

On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth. The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was described in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons....

Dear EarthTalk: The three-year anniversary of the 2010 BP oil spill just passed. What do green groups think of the progress since in restoring the region?—Mary Johannson, New York City When an undersea oil well blew out 50 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010 and caused an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig above it (killing 11 workers), no one knew that an even bigger disaster was yet to come....