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The 1936 film Reefer Madness developed a cult following because of its over-the-top depiction of the evils of marijuana. Getting stoned and going to a midnight showing became a ritual for many college students. The recognition that pot is not a direct route to an asylum for the criminally insane, as it was for one character in the film, fueled the hilarity for late-night moviegoers. The divergence between perception and reality has become an issue in recent years for other recreational drugs....

LONDON (Reuters)—Researchers announced the launch of two big studies in Africa on Thursday to test a new HIV vaccine and a long-acting injectable drug, fuelling hopes for better ways to protect against the virus that causes AIDS. The start of the three-year vaccine trial involving 2,600 women in southern Africa means that for the first time in more than a decade there are now two big HIV vaccine clinical trials taking place at the same time....

Two senior federal officials warned yesterday that much of the nation is unprepared for worsening natural disasters, particularly storms that intensify rapidly and leave little time for evacuation. “These storms are getting worse, they’re causing more destruction. We’re going to have less time so we can warn people,” Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said. National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham said he fears that people whose communities have been unscathed by disasters will think they are safe....

In January 2020 Scientific American was the first to report on a paper arguing that such constellations may be effectively unlawful because of environmental legislation enacted more than a half-century ago by the U.S. Congress. Subsequently Congress commissioned a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to weigh the evidence for such claims. Released earlier this month, the report suggests that regulatory action on mega constellations is increasingly likely—and shows the high-stakes international debate over satellites’ impacts on the night sky’s sanctity has only just begun....

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit today to Goma, a city in the heart of the war ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is meant to draw attention to renewed U.S. support for U.N. peacekeeping and to press thinly stretched troops deployed there to do more to protect innocent civilians. But how much more can overburdened peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere be expected to do?...

As the climate warms and some tree species shift toward cooler, more hospitable habitats, new research finds soil microbes could be playing a crucial role in determining where young trees can migrate and how well they survive when they arrive. Much like humans, whose guts and skin are teeming with microbes, the soil below plants and trees contains a unique cornucopia of microscopic creatures that help the tree take in nutrients and water....

The clickety-clack of your keyboard might be enough to spill your secrets. A team of researchers in California has successfully decoded what was typed into a computer from an audio recording. Doug Tygar of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues used a standard microphone to record 10 minutes of noise generated by computer typists. Because the sound generated by each keystroke is slightly different, the researchers were able to generate a computer program to decode what was written....

If the alarming statistics surrounding the so-called obesity epidemic have not convinced you of the dangers of a sugar-packed diet, a new study might have you thinking twice. Rats given a choice between highly sweetened water and intravenous cocaine overwhelmingly favored the tasty beverage. Their preference was just as intense whether the drink was sweetened with saccharin or sugar. This finding, reported recently by graduate student Magalie Lenoir and her colleagues at the University of Bordeaux in France, fuels growing suspicions that for some people sweets could be as pleasurable and addictive as habit-forming drugs....

Editor’s Note (10/4/18): Brazilian surfer Maya Gabeira has set the world record for the biggest wave ever ridden by a woman—a 68-foot giant along the coast of Portugal—confirmed by Guinness World Records. In August we published the article below, explaining how these monster waves form, and how champion surfers like Gabeira and the male record holder, Rodrigo Koxa, figure out how to ride (and survive) them. Sleep came fitfully to Rodrigo Koxa during the night of November 7, 2017....

Most of us know how terrible it feels to be in the throes of a breakup. Now scientists know what it looks like, too. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, and several neuroscience colleagues found some interesting correlations after scanning the brains of 10 women and five men who were still heartsick over losing a lover. The investigators positioned each jilted subject in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. When they asked the volunteers to look at a photograph of their former lover and at a neutral picture, they found that the same areas at play in new love — for example, the nucleus accumbens that governs reward — were still active when the forlorn looked at their lost love....

The World Health Organization announced Monday that it would convene an expert panel to determine whether a fast-developing outbreak caused by a new virus in China should be declared a global health emergency. The news came as China reported confirmed cases in Beijing and in Guangdong province, 14 cases in health care workers—a first—and a confirmed incident involving human-to-human spread of the new virus, known provisionally as 2019-nCoV. It is a coronavirus, from the same family as the viruses that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, which sickened more than 8,000 people globally, killing nearly 800....

In addition to being a warming hot spot, the Arctic plays a pivotal role in the movement of carbon between atmosphere, land and sea. But the degree to which Arctic regions are a carbon sink, versus a source of greenhouse gas, is still a matter of debate. Permafrost holds vast amounts of carbon long stored in cold conditions, for example, but scientists are trying to pinpoint the pace at which the carbon will be released into the atmosphere because of thawing of frozen soil....

Morality is malleable, according to much research Our judgment calls change depending on a host of factors—our mind-set, how hungry we are, whether we feel clean or dirty, the ambient air temperature, and the list goes on. Drugs that affect brain chemistry can alter moral decision making, too, a growing body of work outlined below has found. For now scientists are using these common psychiatric drugs as tools to understand the brain mechanisms underlying morality....

Timing is crucial when it comes to treating a stroke, because tissue surrounding a clot can die rapidly after blood flow is blocked in the brain. For nearly two decades the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for ischemic stroke was the clot-busting tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). Although highly successful in many patients, this treatment has some key limitations: It can only be used within a brief time window—up to four and a half hours after stroke onset—and it is not as effective in dissolving larger blood vessel blockages, which can cause more extensive brain damage....

The writers were asked to focus on how future technologies—some familiar but greatly advanced, others inconceivable in 2017—impact each passenger’s life. XPRIZE has also reserved a seat on the flight for the general public: through August 25, aspiring sci-fi writers can submit entries for a chance to fill seat 14C and have their work showcased in the anthology. Scientific American spoke with Wilson about “Iterations,” his account of passenger 13F (also known as Malcolm), who arrives in San Francisco to find that his wife has remained committed to their relationship throughout his disappearance—sort of....

By using techniques like fluorescent imaging, shown here in a mouse embryo, MSK researchers are able to learn about cells’ growth and the development of diseases, including cancer.Credit: Memorial Sloan Kettering Every day, care teams at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) treat people with cancer in the hope of destroying their disease. Behind the front lines, biologists, chemists, and other scientists doing basic research are seeking the most elemental understanding of how the human body works — and using those discoveries to improve the treatment of cancer and other diseases....

The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies’ internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts. FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI’s legal position during these discussions is that the software’s real-time interception of metadata is authorized under the Patriot Act....

Early one May morning in 1927 researcher Wilhelm Schmidt attached a mercury thermometer to his car door and drove around Vienna for three hours, recording temperatures. His resulting thermal maps showed hotter areas that coincided with “tightly built parts of the inner city” and cooler contours tracing wooded patches, grassy parks and waterways. Schmidt’s efforts were the first to map a city’s “islands” of heat in a “sea” of lower-temperature surroundings....

This week, by request from Marilyn in Massachusetts, we’ll cover fear of driving. As fellow Bay Staters, Marilyn and I know that Massachusetts drivers are not called Massholes for nothing. Indeed, of the cities with the dubious distinction of having the worst drivers in the nation, 3 of the top 5 are in Massachusetts. But no matter where you live, being scared to drive can really get in the way; indeed, if life is a highway, it’s easy for a phobia to push you into breakdown lane....

Mexico kicked off 2017 with a 20 percent spike in gasoline prices, driven in part by the phasing out of subsidies. Some consumers set fires at gas stations—a response that highlights the backlash countries can face as they stop subsidizing carbon-based fuels and start encouraging climate-friendly alternatives. Now the Mexican government and stock market are experimenting with a gentler tool for discouraging carbon emissions: cap-and-trade. Mexico, which in 2012 passed the developing world’s first climate law, is well placed to set an example for other developing economies looking to shrink their carbon footprints....