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Depression is the most common mental health disorder in the United States. According to the National Institutes of Health, over 16 million adults in the U.S. experienced at least one episode of clinical depression in the year 2015. And it is likely underestimated given that many with this medical condition sadly never seek help. Studies show that only about 50% of those with depression actually seek help from their doctor. Contraceptives, on the other hand, have been used by nearly all women living in the United States at some point during their reproductive years....

Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Celexa. These popular antidepressants are effective—but their function arises mainly from the placebo effect. Psychologist Irving Kirsch arrived at this conclusion a few years ago after he and his colleagues took a thorough look at all the data from experiments with antidepressants. In The Emperor’s New Drugs, Kirsch reports that sugar pills are about as effective as antidepressants and that for many years drug companies withheld this information....

As people age, their brain tends to shrink and their memory gets worse. But what if this deterioration weren’t inevitable? New research suggests not only that some elderly individuals retain sharp memory skills but also that their brain remains unscathed. Although scientists do not yet know what is responsible for this special resiliency—or how to help people acquire it—a brain region involved in attention may offer an important clue. Researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine identified 12 individuals older than 80 years—whom they called “Super Agers”—who performed as well on memory tests as a group of 14 volunteers between the ages of 50 and 65....

Fullerenes, a form of solid carbon distinct from diamond and graphite, owe their discovery to a supersonic jet—but not of the airplane variety. At Rice University in 1985 the late Richard E. Smalley, Robert F. Curl and Harold W. Kroto (visiting from the University of Sussex in England), along with graduate students James R. Heath and Sean C. O’Brien, were studying carbon with a powerful tool that Smalley had helped pioneer: supersonic jet laser spectroscopy....

The latest physical anthropology research indicates that the human evolutionary line never went through a knuckle-walking phase. Be that as it may, we definitely entered, and have yet to exit, a knuckle-cracking phase. I would run out of knuckles (including those on my feet) trying to count how many musicians wouldn’t dream of playing a simple scale without throwing off a xylophonelike riff on their knuckles first. But despite the popularity of this practice, most known knuckle crackers have probably been told by some expert—whose advice very likely began, “I’m not a doctor, but …”—that the behavior would lead to arthritis....

Modern physics began with a sweeping unification: in 1687 Isaac Newton showed that the disparate theories describing everything from planetary motion to tides to pendulums were all aspects of a universal law of gravitation. Unification has played a central role in physics ever since. In the middle of the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell found that electricity and magnetism were two facets of electromagnetism. One hundred years later electromagnetism was unified with the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity, in what physicists call the electroweak theory....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Remnants of ancient viral pandemics in the form of viral DNA sequences embedded in our genomes are still active in healthy people, according to new research my colleagues and I recently published. HERVs, or human endogenous retroviruses, make up around 8% of the human genome, left behind as a result of infections that humanity’s primate ancestors suffered millions of years ago....

Entering motherhood is a rite of passage for most women. For many new moms, however, the first months and years can be a lonely place. A new study finds that several types of social support are crucial for staving off negative feelings. Although only 10 to 15 percent of mothers from Western nations will develop a full-blown case of postpartum depression (PPD), many more will experience some serious symptoms of depression, explains Patricia Leahy-Warren, a senior lecturer at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at University College Cork in Ireland....

Time, space and social relationships share a common language of distance: we speak of faraway places, close friends and the remote past. Maybe that is because all three share common patterns of brain activity, according to a January study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Curious to understand why the distance metaphor works across conceptual domains, Dartmouth College psychologists used functional MRI scans to analyze the brains of 15 people as they viewed pictures of household objects taken at near or far distances, looked at photographs of friends or acquaintances, and read phrases such as “in a few seconds” or “a year from now....

Think of the hundreds of people you can remember ever having met. Add those individuals–such as celebrities, politicians and other famous figures–whose faces you know well only from movies, TV and photographs. Is it possible that each of those individuals, along with thousands of other objects you can easily recognize from earlier encounters, could be captured in your memory by its own personal brain cell? Perhaps. A recent study published in the journal Nature by scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that our brains use far fewer cells to interpret any given image than previously believed....

Microfabricated tools and crystallization plates: Proteins catalyze reactions, shape cells and relay signals through the body. To understand how they work, researchers first figure out proteins’ 3-D shape. Part of that process involves crystallizing proteins on rectangular plates with hundreds of individual wells. Current tools for protein crystallization have flaws: tiny tools to manipulate the protein crystals are rigid, vibrate easily and can damage fragile samples. Frustrated with the fuss, physicist Robert Thorne of Cornell University developed new tools and plates....

English poet John Keats famously worried that scientific explanations would “unweave a rainbow”—that by elucidating rainbows and other phenomena rationally, scientists would drain the world of its mystery. Yet if anything, the close study of rainbows enriches our appreciation of them. The multicolored arc is just the beginning. Look closely, and you will see that outside the main bow is a darkened band of sky and a second, dimmer arc, with its colors in reverse order....

Beetles whose flashes punctuate summer skies; killer fish that lure prey with an enticing light; algae that rat out their attackers with a telltale glow. These ominous organisms might seem like creatures from out of this world, but thanks to some clever chemistry, such beings are in fact abundant on our planet. Examples of creatures that generate their own light—a capability known as bioluminescence—are especially common in the ocean, where filmmaker James Cameron purportedly drew inspiration for the glimmering alien life in his new sci-fi flick Avatar....

Surgeon General Jerome Adams is issuing a rare public health advisory on Thursday, calling for friends and family of people at risk for opioid overdoses to carry the OD-reversal medication naloxone. He likened the treatment to other livesaving interventions, such as knowing how to perform CPR or use an EpiPen. The recommendation comes in the form of a surgeon general’s advisory, a tool used to draw attention to major public health issues....

Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. A psychotic Black woman admitted to a psychiatric emergency room is discharged “to the streets,” despite being pregnant and disorganized. Several white health care providers, noting her history of methamphetamine use, joke “she’s always like this” and claim she is “at baseline,” suggesting she is inherently inferior and unworthy of treatment....

“Hello, we’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.” After years of seemingly unstoppable scam robocalls, this phrase is embedded into the minds of many of us. Last month the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it was ordering phone providers to block any calls coming from a known car warranty robocall scam, offering hope that U.S. phone users may hear that all-too-familiar automated voice a little less often....

We saw the story over and over again: computer programmer Klára Dán von Neumann was a pioneer in weather forecasting. But when we talked to Thomas Haigh, a historian who studies Dán von Neumann’s work, he said he’s found absolutely no evidence of this. How did this weather myth start? We set out to answer that question. And in the process, we asked this: Why is it so tempting to credit the wrong person, even when that false credit is given with the best of intentions?...

My September Scientific American column explores the push to replace live orchestras at operas and musicals with less expensive, but less satisfying, digital ones. This issue affects me deeply, you see, because I wasn’t always a technology writer. My original aspiration was to compose Broadway musicals. After college I spent 10 years chasing that dream. While I waited for the world to discover my compositional genius I worked in the office of a theatrical licensing house called Music Theater International (MTI)....

Ruby flew down the hall, careened around the corner, and stopped just briefly to jump on me before charging off again. His pointy ears and tail bobbed and wagged in rhythm as he ran laps around the house. I had just come through the door on my first trip home from college and it was the best welcome-home I could ask for. Ruby’s exuberance over seeing me again, after our months apart, is a favorite memory from my college days....

A: Yes. But I think it’s still based in the brain’s mechanical architecture. It’s not a separate entity but it’s an emergent property of the mechanism of the brain. Q: You are 22. What do you reasonably expect to see in your lifetime in terms of unraveling this question of what the brain has to say about free will vs. determinism? A: I think that the trend will move further and further into thinking that free will does not exist....