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I am thinking of the Medicated Americans, those 11 percent of women and 5 percent of men who are taking antidepressants. It is Sunday night. The Medicated American—let’s call her Julie, and let’s place her in Winterset, Iowa—is getting ready for bed. Monday morning and its attendant pressures—the rush to get out of the house, the long commute, the bustle of the office—loom. She opens the cabinet of the bathroom vanity, removes a medicine bottle and taps a pill into her palm....

At one in the morning on December 13, 1989, I was awakened in my bunk onboard the scientific drillship JOIDES Resolution by sounds of celebration in the adjoining cabin. Because I had to relieve the watch at four anyway, I stumbled next door to join the party. The paleontologists in our expedition had just reported to my cochief scientist, Yves Lancelot, now at the CNRS Center of Oceanology of Marseille in France, that microfossils of the Jurassic period had been recovered from the hole in the floor of the western Pacific Ocean that we were drilling more than three miles below us....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineA desert may need no defining, but desertification is not so easy to pin down. Although the loss of soil nutrients and moisture threatens roughly a third of the world’s land area, imperiling farming and biodiversity, scientists lack a clear definition of it or agreed standards to measure its causes and progression. That absence has hampered global efforts to tackle these problems under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)–unable to track the impact of their funding, donors are reluctant to invest....

In the case of traumatic brain injury—such as the bullet wound sustained by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Saturday’s assault outside a Tucson supermarket that killed six people and wounded 13 others—doctors sometimes induce a coma. This effective shutdown of brain function naturally occurs only in cases of extreme trauma, so why would doctors seek to mimic it in patients, as they have with the congresswoman, already suffering from head wounds and other issues?...

Every day we make decisions that have important implications for our happiness and how we live our lives. Whether we are studying for an exam, preparing for a job interview, or deciding on the best outfit for a first blind date, these very different situations have something in common: They happen at a certain time of day, a time we often can choose or control. When making decisions, we often don’t consider how the time of day might affect our choices....

Just as dog owners often don’t realize their canine friends are too heavy, they may have a blind spot about another threat. Surprisingly, the lowly penny can become a lethal weapon against dogs—specifically pennies minted after 1982. Although all pennies are equal in value—one cent, no matter what year it is— their compositions are not. Pennies that were produced between 1962 and 1982 are predominantly copper (95 percent), whereas pennies churned out in 1982 and after are mostly zinc (97....

Losing weight has never been an easy endeavor, as anyone who has ever tried knows. Among the challenges: changing ingrained habits that led to the weight gain. Everyone attributes his or her success to different strategies and programs, be it Weight Watchers, gastric bypass surgery or sheer willpower, but all tend to agree that eating less and moving more are at the heart of any successful effort. But what makes one person able to put that simple formula into action, whereas another fails in the attempt?...

Astronauts—not cinematographers—captured the stunning visuals in the new IMAX movie, A Beautiful Planet: gorgeous views of Earth shot from the International Space Station (ISS), often with parts of the station visible in the frame. Sweeping vistas of continents at night—when webs of light reveal a human presence that is almost impossible to detect during the day—contrast with inside scenes of an ISS that is crammed with equipment but somehow looks almost homey, as described by the narrating astronauts....

It has been four decades since Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne completed the work for which he became celebrated, but that fertile contribution to number theory has now earned him the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. Click here for a video interview with Pierre Deligne, courtesy of SimonsFoundation.org Given annually by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and named after the famous Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, the prize is worth 6 million Norwegian kroner (about US$1 million)....

At this very instant, in backyards and forests across the eastern U.S., one of nature’s greatest spectacles is underway. Although it may lack the epic majesty of the wildebeest migration in the Serengeti or the serene beauty of cherry blossom season in Japan, this event is no less awe-inspiring. I’m talking about the emergence of the Brood X cicadas. Every 17 years the billions of constituents of Brood X tunnel up from their subterranean lairs to spend their final days partying in the sun....

Key concepts Engineering Robot Anatomy Gripping Introduction The human hand is pretty amazing. You can do things such as pick up a pencil, use a video game controller or climb a jungle gym without giving it much thought. Building a artificial hand that can do all those things quite a challenge! In this project you will try to build a simple artificial gripper that can pick up small objects. Background The human hand has five fingers, each with multiple joints....

By Will Boggs MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Calcium supplementation of more than 800 mg/day is associated with an increased prevalence of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), especially in older individuals, according to a cross-sectional study of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data. “Our group had previously found an association between high levels of calcium supplementation and self-reported glaucoma, so it was interesting to also find an association between high levels of calcium supplementation and AMD,” Caitlin L....

When Bugs Bunny uttered his famous catchphrase, “What’s up, doc,” he was often chomping on a carrot, though he wasn’t inquiring about the health benefits of the vegetable. New findings suggest that they would have had a lot to talk about: results from a recent rat study indicate that a naturally occurring compound in carrots reduces the risk of developing cancer by a third. The compound falcarinol helps protect carrots from fungal diseases....

By 2015, China will emit nearly 50 percent more greenhouse gases than the United States, a top Chinese energy researcher said yesterday. Ye Qi, a professor of environmental policy at Tsinghua University and director of the Climate Policy Initiative, both in Beijing, said China has made enormous strides over the past five years in both reducing energy intensity and developing renewable energy capacity. But, he said, China’s overall energy use has skyrocketed along with its growth, keeping renewable sources just a sliver of the country’s overall share....

In 2016, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, started a historic plunge into new businesses. The British-Dutch-controlled company began spending $2 billion a year on joint ventures that had little or nothing to do with oil and gas. One of its new companies sells biofuels made from sugar cane in Brazil. Another built an advanced demonstration project in Bangalore, India, that makes biofuels from agricultural wastes....

The consensus is clear: mean parents make mean kids—and the victims of mean kids. Several recent studies confirm an association between strict parenting styles and children’s likelihood of both being a bully and being bullied. Some work also points to a more surprising association—permissive or neglectful parenting might create bullies, too. In one such study, researchers at the University of Washington and Arizona State University conducted a retrospective study of 419 college students and found that parental authoritativeness—in which parents are warm and caring but set rules for the sake of their child’s safety—lowered kids’ risk of being bullied....

EL YUNQUE RAINFOREST, Puerto Rico—Yellow cables marked “danger” carry 480 volts of electricity through the rainforest. The cables reach into a circular metal scaffold that holds six large space heaters. The heaters, pointed at the forest floor, are not working. At the control center building half a mile away, Tana Wood, a biologist with the Forest Service, examines the junction box. “Something needs to be reset,” she says and pulls a switch, which triggers a mechanical roar from behind the shed....

Douglas E. Vetter, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Tufts University Sackler School of Biomedical Sciences, sounds out an answer to this query. The hammer, anvil and stirrup—also known as the malleus, incus, and stapes, respectively, and collectively, as “middle ear ossicles”—are the smallest bones in the human body. Found in the middle ear, they are a part of the auditory system between the eardrum and the cochlea (the spiral-shaped conduit housing hair cells that are involved in transmitting sound to the brain)....

Tens of thousands of people around the world receive organ transplants every year. Although the medical know-how for transplanting organs has expanded rapidly, the number of donated organs has lagged. Global figures are hard to come by, but an average of 16 people in Europe and 22 in the U.S. die every day while waiting for a replacement heart, liver or other organ. Moreover, the gap between the number of people who need a new organ and the number of organs available for donation keeps widening....

NOT PICTURING IT Memory fades with age, and now imagination seems to disappear with it, too. Harvard University researchers asked volunteers in their 20s and those around 70 to construct within three minutes a future event using as much detail as possible. The younger adults created significatly richer scenarios. The results, presented in the January Psychological Science, support the notion that picturing what is to come requires the ability to recall past experiences and piece them together to form a coherent scenario....