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If you had to capture love in a gift, what gift would you pick? Flowers? A ring? A poem? A recently deceased flying mammal most often associated with horror films, Halloween and fear of the dark? For two Indian researchers and conservationists, it was definitely the last one. And for them, the gift could not be more perfect. “I guess I wanted to impress him—instead of roses, I’d given him a dead bat,” says Bhargavi Srinivasulu, thinking back to the early days of her courtship of Chelmala Srinivasulu....

By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Corals reefs are suffering a severe underwater heat wave this year for the third time on record, including a mysterious warm patch in the Pacific known as “The Blob”, scientists said on Thursday. The bout of record high temperatures in parts of the oceans, stoked by climate change, is expected to kill more than 12,000 sq kms (4,600 sq miles) of reefs, or about five percent of the global total, they said....

In space, as was first noted in the ad campaign for the movie Alien, no one can hear you scream. What prompts that screaming in the Alien franchise and other space opera sci-fi is typically terror, dismemberment or larval-monster intestinal occupation. But more mundane issues make real-life astronauts want to scream. Because in space, everybody can smell your gas. Space, when done with people living together in close quarters, stinks. Best-selling author Mary Roach catalogues the rank unpleasantness of space travel in her new book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (W....

When 3-D movies returned to theaters five years ago with the opening of Chicken Little, they came with new specs. The old 3-D glasses that relied on red/cyan lenses went the way of Godzilla. Instead the new eye gear used a variety of more sophisticated methods to bring a sharp, full-color, three-dimensional image to viewers’ eyes without limiting the spectrum of colors they could see. Dolby, one of the major players in the 3-D movie market, just received a patent for its glasses, which offers a close-up look at how they work....

From Nature magazine It was hailed some 15 years ago as the great hope for a biomedical revolution: the use of cloning techniques to create perfectly matched tissues that would someday cure ailments ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. Since then, the approach has been enveloped in ethical debate, tainted by fraud and, in recent years, overshadowed by a competing technology. Most groups gave up long ago on the finicky core method — production of patient-specific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from cloning....

Animal species around the world are beginning to feel the effects of warming temperatures, but few are seeing their habitats change as quickly as the Adélie, chinstrap and gentoo penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula. Jutting out into the Scotia Sea toward the southernmost tips of Chile and Argentina, the 800-mile-long peninsula is warming at five times the rate of the planet. Since the mid-20th century, temperatures have risen on average by 6 to 7 degrees Celsius....

On November 6, 2020, I woke up to a flood (for a statistician) of tweets about my 2018 article “Statistical Paradises and Paradoxes in Big Data (I): Law of Large Populations, Big Data Paradox, and the 2016 US Presidential Election.” A kind soul had offered it as an answer to the question: “What’s wrong with polls?” which led to the article going viral. As much as I was flattered by the attention, I was disappointed that no one had asked “Why would anyone expect polls to be right in the first place?...

The physiology of weight regain still baffles scientists, but surprising insights have emerged. Why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off? For a moment, several years ago, it looked like we had an answer. In May 2016, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the findings from a study out of the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases: fourteen reality show contestants had been tracked for half a dozen years after appearing on the program The Biggest Loser....

As the U.S. military embarks on its review of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, to be delivered in a final report later this year, the question arises: How many service members are affected by the policy? To help answer that question, the Pentagon this past summer surveyed its troops, asking them if they served or had ever served with someone they believe to be gay. Leaving aside an obvious problem with the survey—that it is based on pure speculation—it also raises a common statistical challenge: asymmetry in population sizes....

In the eight years that John P. Holdren has been White House science adviser—longer than anyone else has held the job—the U.S. signed a climate accord 20 years in the making, began regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and embarked on an ambitious research effort to understand how the human brain works. Will these and other accomplishments survive the administration of Donald J. Trump, who will become the 45th president of the United States on January 20?...

Longtermism, an idea that has been attracting attention lately, says that while we should help people alive today, we should also care about those who might live in the future. We should try to maximize the number and happiness of these possible people. And how exactly should we do that? William MacAskill, a philosopher and leader of longtermism, wrestles with this question in his new bestseller What We Owe the Future....

What is the sound of one molecule clapping? Researchers have demonstrated a device that can pick up single quanta of mechanical vibration similar to those that shake molecules during chemical reactions and have shown that the device itself, which is the width of a hair, acts as if it exists in two places at once. This type of “quantum weirdness” feat so far had only been observed at the scale of molecules....

Researchers may have found a new form of chlorophyll, the pigment that plants, algae and cyanobacteria use to obtain energy from light through photosynthesis. Preliminary findings published August 19 in Science suggest that the newly discovered molecule, dubbed chlorophyll f, has a distinct chemical composition when compared with the four known forms of chlorophyll and can absorb more near-infrared light than is typical for the photosynthetic pigments. Chlorophyll f, which was extracted from cultures of cyanobacteria and other oxygenic microorganisms, may allow certain photosynthetic life forms to harvest energy from wavelengths of light that many of their competitors cannot use....

March 1965 Magnet Earth “Since 1958 direct measurements of the outer reaches of the earth’s field by means of artificial satellites and rocket probes have convinced many geophysicists that the simple picture of that magnetic field must be drastically revised. Far from being free of external influences, the geomagnetic field is continuously buffeted by a ‘wind’ of electrically charged particles emanating from the sun, distorted by electric currents circulating in the radiation belts that girdle the earth....

By Lucas Laursen of Nature magazineGlaciologists and climatologists are racing to correct an error in the latest edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which they say overstates the extent of ice loss in Greenland over the past 12 years.The 13th edition of the atlas was released on 15 September. The map’s publisher, London-based HarperCollins, said in a press release that it had “had to erase 15% of Greenland’s once permanent ice cover” since the previous edition in 1999....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. I’ve gotten lots of questions about a new product called Soylent. It’s a powder that you mix with water and oil and consume in place of food. The name is sort of an inside joke referring to a 1973 science fiction film called Soylent Green. (You can google that if you’re not in on the joke....

In the chilling scenario that a tornado warning is issued for your area, what do the experts feel are the best choices for avoiding serious injury or loss of life? Options range from seeking shelter in basements to interior above-ground rooms to below-ground storm shelters. However, there are pros and cons to all of these options. Many experts agree that your odds for surviving a direct hit with a strong tornado (EF-4 or EF-5) are greatest in a nearby below-ground storm shelter....

As the toll from California’s wildfires grows higher year after year, the state’s future appears fiery and hazy with smoke. For conservative columnists like Ben Shapiro, Niall Ferguson and Tyler O’Neil, it’s clear who is responsible: California Democrats. In recent opinion pieces, they acknowledge that climate change might play a role in these fires, but they blame Democratic leadership for exacerbating fuel buildups through poor land management. As proof, they reference a study from early this year in Nature Sustainability....

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was honored for his groundbreaking research on sequencing the genome of the Neandertals, an extinct relative of humans, and discovering a new hominin species, Denisovans. He also demonstrated that humans—Homo sapiens—interbred with these species after migrating out of Africa....

Interrogate suspects separately and get them to incriminate one another—that’s how cops do it. New research suggests that a better way to catch colluding criminals might be to interview them together. In a recent experiment in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition with more than 40 pairs of subjects, half were told to steal 10 and then convince an interviewer of their innocence. The other pairs were told the money had gone missing....