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Comedian and actor Robin Williams, 57, last week postponed a planned 80-city tour of his one-man show, “Weapons of Self-Destruction” to undergo aortic valve replacement surgery. His announcement came just days after 83-year-old former first lady Barbara Bush left a Houston hospital after undergoing the same procedure. The aortic valve is what keeps oxygenated blood flowing from our heart into the aorta, the largest artery in our body, and prevents it from washing back into the heart with each pump cycle....

The White House issued a 187-page report on Thursday designed to improve biosafety following a series of safety breaches at federal laboratories charged with handling dangerous pathogens such as anthrax, bird flu and smallpox. The report follows a sweeping review of the government’s biosafety and biosecurity practices, and includes specific recommendations and deadlines for laboratories to improve their practices. It was addressed to top officials at 16 federal agencies, including the U....

When we experience social pain — a snub, a cruel word — the feeling is as real as physical pain. That finding is among those in a new book, Social, and it is part of scientist Matthew Lieberman’s case that our need to connect is as fundamental as our need for food and water. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. You argue that our need to connect socially is “powerful....

(Credit:Apple)Apple’s long been at the top of the heap when it comes to making money on one key aspect of its portable devices: storage. That trend continued with this morning’s announcement of a 128GB model of the iPad, a device that costs just a steak dinner short of a full-blown Mac notebook. The new models ring in at $799 for the Wi-Fi only, or $929 for the version with 4G LTE connectivity....

Fertility rates in Western countries had been trending down for more than a century, and so following World War II, demographers expected only a modest increase. What happened instead was the baby boom. Since then, social scientists have been arguing about the causes. The best-known explanation comes from economist Richard A. Easterlin of the University of Southern California. He argues that the baby boom resulted from the unprecedented concurrence of three developments: an expansion of the economy, restricted immigration since the mid-1920s, and a relatively small cohort of new job seekers because of low fertility in the late 1920s and 1930s....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In this week’s episode I’ll explore file syncing services. File syncing services or programs do exactly what they sound like: They sync your files across multiple devices. This can be particularly useful if you go between multiple computers or mobile devices in any given day and need all of your files to be up to date....

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, took office on January 1, after running a right-wing populist campaign. His administration has cut funding for research, questioned the work of scientists and attempted to roll back environmental protections. Scientific American spoke with Galvão about the situation. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] What happened in your meeting with Pontes? Well, that was a good surprise for me. I was afraid I would be pressed to resign....

A second case of the new infection emerging from China has been discovered in the United States—a woman who returned to Chicago from Wuhan on Jan. 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, cautioned that the country will likely see more cases and even some domestic spread from imported cases to contacts as this quickly expanding outbreak continues....

Physicists have verified a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity with unprecedented accuracy. Experiments at a particle accelerator in Germany confirm that time moves slower for a moving clock than for a stationary one. The work is the most stringent test yet of this ‘time-dilation’ effect, which Einstein predicted. One of the consequences of this effect is that a person travelling in a high-speed rocket would age more slowly than people back on Earth....

In a petri dish in the bowels of Harvard Medical School scientists have tweaked three genes from the cells of an Asian elephant that help control the production of hemoglobin, the protein in blood that carries oxygen. Their goal is to make these genes more like those of an animal that last walked the planet thousands of years ago: the woolly mammoth. “Asian elephants are closer to mammoths than either is to African elephants, yet quite different in appearance and temperature range,” notes Harvard geneticist and technology developer George Church....

PARIS (Reuters) - The right of lesbian couples and single women to have access to assisted reproduction was “a matter of social justice” and will likely be legislated next year, a French government minister said on Tuesday. The move would mark a significant extension of gay rights in France, where violent protests preceded the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption by homosexual couples in 2013. “It was a campaign promise. It will be honored,” Marlene Schiappa, minister for gender equality, told BFM TV....

Day after day an overbearing colleague grates on your nerves. It’s a battle to keep your irritation under wraps. Suddenly, during a particularly long encounter, you snap—you lose your temper and give your shocked co-worker a piece of your mind. Most of us blame ourselves for such lapses in willpower, but new research suggests that willpower may not be available in an unlimited supply. Scientists have discovered that a single, brief act of self-control expends some of the body’s fuel, which undermines the brain’s ability to exert further self-discipline....

Something very odd seems to be going on out beyond Pluto. Astronomers have known for more than two decades that the tiny former planet is not alone at the edge of the solar system: it is part of a vast cloud of icy objects known collectively as the Kuiper belt. But unlike most of their fellow travelers, and unlike the planets and most asteroids, which orbit between Mars and Jupiter, a small handful of Kuiper belt objects, or KBOs, have orbits that are decidedly weird....

In five years, Black Death wiped out an estimated 30 to 50 percent of Europe’s population. This medieval plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which still circulates among humans. Genetic clues as to what might have made it so deadly, however, had remained interred with the tens of millions of victims. After careful extraction of genetic material from victims’ teeth, a team of researchers has sequenced 99 percent of the Plague’s genome—the first whole-genome reconstruction of a disease from skeletal remains....

“What is the difference between yesterday and tomorrow?” The Yupno man we were interviewing, Danda, paused to consider his answer. A group of us sat on a hillside in the Yupno Valley, a remote nook high in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. Only days earlier we had arrived on a single-engine plane. After a steep hike from the grass airstrip, we found ourselves in the village of Gua, one of about 20 Yupno villages dotting the rugged terrain....

Besides being beautiful, Costa Rica’s beaches are the nesting sites of four endangered sea turtle species, which return each year to lay their eggs. But there is trouble in paradise for these reptiles, namely, from egg thieves. Since 1996, it’s been illegal to remove turtle eggs from beaches in Costa Rica, said Beth Adubato, a New York Institute of Technology criminologist interested in crimes against wildlife. However, that hasn’t stopped egg thieves — egg poaching is up 30 percent since the law was put in place, she told LiveScience....

When two lion cubs were found dead one day this September in India’s Gir National Park, forest officials shrugged off their demise as “natural.” Three weeks later, however, 23 lions had perished—sparking fears an epidemic could very quickly devastate the last surviving population of the Asiatic lion. Suspecting a viral outbreak, authorities captured the 19 remaining lions in the eastern edge of the sanctuary—the part where seven of the deaths had occurred—and isolated them individually at a care center....

The leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) is one of Antarctica’s top predators. It kills penguins and smaller seals by biting them with sharp canine teeth and repeatedly smashing them against the ocean surface to flay and dismember them. But it now seems that this seal is also equipped to tackle smaller prey. David Hocking from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues have shown that the leopard seal eats krill like a whale, by sucking them into its mouth and sieving them through special teeth....

In the March/April 2013 issue of Scientific American MIND, we unveiled a lively new design for the Head Lines section of the magazine, including a news ticker along the bottom of the page. Here are the articles that the ticker mentions in brief. Whether reading French words or Chinese characters, people harness the same brain regions. A mother’s brain can harbor cells that originated in a fetus. If a woman conceives a boy, she can end up with male cells in her brain....

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has flexed some new scientific muscles, likely solving a Red Planet puzzle in the process. Mission team members repurposed the rover’s navigation gear to measure tiny variations in gravitational fields, a new study reports. This novel strategy allowed the researchers to figure out how the huge Martian mountain whose base Curiosity is exploring formed—namely, that it was probably built up as a free-standing mound by the deposition of windblown sand and sediment....