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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology brain sciences department and, separately, a group of some 200 neuroscientists from around the world have written letters to The New York Times claiming that a book excerpt in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine this week contains important errors, misinterpretations of scientific disputes, and unfair characterizations of an MIT neuroscientist who did groundbreaking research on human memory. In particular, the excerpt contains a 36-volley verbatim exchange between author Luke Dittrich and MIT’s Suzanne Corkin in which she says that key documents from historic experiments were “shredded....

Sources of Vitamin D Vitamins D3 and D2 occur naturally in some foods, and both versions of the vitamin are added to certain “fortified” products. Foods provide relatively small doses of D compared with amounts made by the skin in response to UVB light. (IU = international units.) Cod-liver oil (1 tbsp): 1,360 IU D3 Cooked tuna, sardines, mackerel or salmon (3–3.5 oz): 200–360 IU D3 Shiitake mushrooms (fresh, 3.5 oz): 100 IU D2 (dried, 3....

I’ve been hard on American medicine. Americans are overtested, overdiagnosed and overtreated, I’ve argued, because physicians and hospitals in our capitalist culture care more about profits than patients. In 2019, I touted Medical Nihilism by philosopher Jacob Stegenga. Most medical interventions work poorly, if at all, Stegenga contends, and many do more harm than good; we should therefore resort to tests and treatments far more sparingly. Stegenga’s diagnosis and prescription seemed sensible to me....

Dear EarthTalk: I heard of an effort to save what are being called “BioGems.” What are BioGems, and what is being done about them?—Larry Dibner, Tallahassee, Fla. “BioGems,” a term created by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), describe the most endangered natural treasures around the Americas. NRDC selects special places in our hemisphere that face an imminent threat of destruction, from pristine coastlines that could become industrial ports to ancient forests that could be stripped of trees to unspoiled wildlife habitats that could be sacrificed to oil and gas drilling....

The routine use of 130 different medical screenings, tests and treatments are often unnecessary and should be scaled back, according to 25 medical specialty organizations. The medical societies jointly released lists of tests and therapies patients should question in their campaign, Choosing Wisely. The initiative of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation is aimed at reducing unnecessary interventions that waste money and can actually do more harm than good....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Quantum Computing with Ions” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Entanglement: Spooky Action At a Distance The “ambiguous cube” (a) is like an ion in a superposition state—a measurement of the ion will lock it into one of two definite states (0 or 1). When two ions are in an entangled superposition (b), a measurement will force both ions into the same state (either 0 or 1) even though there is no physical connection between them....

Life may not be fair, but humans have a strong bias for fairness. In experiments, humans will generally reject or punish a partner who offers noticeably less than half of a shared reward, even if they wind up empty-handed. Chimps, it turns out, are not so picky and will (rationally, an economist might add) take whatever they can get, according to an October 2007 Science paper. So what could explain this difference between our closest living relatives and us?...

On a bright December morning, five student teams gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida to launch rockets powered only by effervescent tablets. As finalists in the second-annual Alka-Rocket Challenge, the undergraduate students came from around the country to compete for a chance to set the news Guinness World Record title and a prize of $30,000, courtesy of the sponsor Bayer. The teams launched their rockets one after the next, each one reliant only on 100 crushed effervescent tablets for propulsion....

In the forest in Mandena, Madagascar, banana-leafed Ravenala trees crowd out the sun, their electric blue seed pods dotting the leaf litter and white sand below. When night falls, gray mouse lemurs emerge from tree hollow dens to feed on insects, flowers and fruit. During the rainy season, pools of water form where screw pines’ pom-pom-like clusters of long leaves meet their trunks, the base of each leaf forming a reservoir just large enough to nurture small schools of tadpoles to maturity before the puddles dry out every April....

By Sharon Levy of Nature magazineBees thrum among bright red blossoms on a spring day on Mount Diablo, near San Francisco Bay. Alexandra Harmon-Threatt, a young ecologist just finishing her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, lovingly identifies an array of native pollinators. She points out three species of bumblebee, each with a unique pattern of black and yellow stripes. There are bee-flies, members of the fly family covered in soft brown fur, which look and act like bees....

Sometimes neuroscientist Greg Dunn finds his field tedious. Working at a lab bench can make you forget how beautifully ornate the human brain is, he says. To reinspire himself, his colleagues and the public, Dunn makes art. Most recently he made an eight- by 11-foot gilded engraving of the human brain. Titled “Self Reflected,” the piece maps Dunn’s illustrations of neurons and axons via algorithmically guided microetchings. As LEDs scan across the surface, they reflect off the varying depths and angles of the gold leaf grooves to make each neurological pathway shimmer like it is truly alive with electrical firings....

Wildfires are getting larger, burning hotter and becoming increasingly unpredictable, devastating plant and animal species. Now, researchers are studying how these blazes affect the tiniest of forest organisms—including bacteria and fungi—and finding that some microbes thrive after an intense wildfire. A study posted last week on the preprint server bioRxiv reports that populations of several bacterial and fungal species increased after severe wildfires in the boreal forests of the Northwest Territories and Alberta in Canada....

The secret to making something break less is to make it break more—at least at a microscopic level. When something brittle such as glass shatters, the only molecules involved in the breakage are the ones along the surface of the shards; inside individual fragments, the material is virtually unaffected. To reduce brittleness, researchers design materials that distribute stress below the surface, which prevents cracks from propagating and keeps the object from breaking up in the first place....

In the words of the great ecologist E. O. Wilson, ants are among the “little things that run the world.” It turns out they even help clean the streets of New York City. Over a period of six days, a team from North Carolina State University dropped hot dogs, cookies and potato chips around a 150-block section of New York City to study how much food-waste scavengers could eat in 24 hours....

Nearly two months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the people who operate one of the world’s pre-eminent radio telescopes—at the Arecibo Observatory, on the northwestern part of the island—are still without reliable water, electricity and phone service at their homes. But their jobs seem to be safe. The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds about two-thirds of the observatory’s annual US$12-million budget, has decided to continue operating it in collaboration with as-yet-to-be-decided partners....

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five features on carbon capture and storage, running daily from April 6 to April 10, 2009. Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-megawatt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility—a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers—represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuel....

Inside a third-floor office a few blocks from the Hudson River in Yonkers, N.Y., a small biotechnology company called ContraFect prepares to test a remarkable new way to kill bacteria in humans. Antibiotics, after many years of use and overuse, have lost their edge against rapidly evolving bacteria, with everything from staph infections to tuberculosis becoming more devastating, deadly and difficult to treat. Whereas traditional antibiotics have mostly been derived from chemicals produced by soil bacteria and fungi, ContraFect has found an alternative in bacteriophages: viruses that infect bacteria and hijack their internal machinery....

In recent years, scientists and policymakers have focused on controlling climate pollutants other than carbon dioxide as a potential way to curb global warming in the short term. Curbing emissions of methane and soot, also called black carbon, could limit short-term global warming, the idea goes, because these substances have a strong effect on global temperatures in the short term. Plus, at least politically, such short-lived climate pollutants are often seen as easier to control than carbon dioxide....

Which of these two narratives most closely matches your political perspective? Once upon a time people lived in societies that were unequal and oppressive, where the rich got richer and the poor got exploited. Chattel slavery, child labor, economic inequality, racism, sexism and discriminations of all types abounded until the liberal tradition of fairness, justice, care and equality brought about a free and fair society. And now conservatives want to turn back the clock in the name of greed and God....

PROFILE NAMES Mike Webster TITLE Evolutionary biologist LOCATION Cornell Lab of Ornithology Ithaca, N.Y. Red-backed fairy-wrens are an Australian species of small insectivorous birds. Males and females are socially monogamous—they pair together and stay in a family group. But they are also sexually promiscuous, so a lot of the offspring aren’t sired by the male that is raising them at the nest. When you have all this extra pair mating, there is a lot of competition among the males for females....