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The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World by Anthony Biglan New Harbinger, 2015 ($26.95) Famed behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, my mentor in graduate school, died a happy man. From his hospital bed, he motioned to his daughter to pass him a glass of water, took a sip and said, “Marvelous”—his last word on earth. He had led a long, fulfilling life, and his impact on the behavioral sciences was perhaps unparalleled....

An unusually busy Atlantic hurricane season is showing no signs of letting up. Hurricane Delta is currently churning toward the Gulf Coast, expected to make landfall in Louisiana later today. Delta is the 25th named storm this season and the ninth hurricane. It’s the earliest in the year that any season has reached 25 storms. Delta is also the third storm this year to achieve “major hurricane” status—that is, Category 3 or higher....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. Dr. James Hamblin, a preventive medicine physician and a staff writer at The Atlantic, has written an essay that explores the concept of herd immunity, that is, the percentage of people needed to achieve immunity to prevent big spikes in a disease....

A new computer algorithm can play one of the most popular variants of poker essentially perfectly. Its creators say that it is virtually “incapable of losing against any opponent in a fair game”. This is a step beyond a computer program that can beat top human players, as IBM’s chess-playing computer Deep Blue famously did in 1997 against Garry Kasparov, at the time the game’s world champion. The poker program devised by computer scientist Michael Bowling and his colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, along with Finnish software developer Oskari Tammelin, plays perfectly, to all intents and purposes....

The next revolution in medicine just might come from a new lab technique that makes neurons sensitive to light. The technique, called optogenetics, is one of the biggest breakthroughs in neuroscience in decades. It has the potential to cure blindness, treat Parkinson’s disease, and relieve chronic pain. Moreover, it’s become widely used to probe the workings of animals’ brains in the lab, leading to breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of things like sleep, addiction, and sensation....

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down subterranean cellular phone service on August 11, stifling protests that had been set to take place on its train platforms that day. Demonstrators had planned to stop trains from running in response to the fatal shooting of an unarmed passenger by the BART police on July 3. But without the ability to coordinate their efforts via cellphones, acts of civil disobedience never crystallized....

Listener Brian wrote in with a dilemma. Like many office workers, he works in an open cube environment. He’s friendly and easygoing, but finds he’s a magnet for coworkers taking a break from their own work. People pull up a chair next to his cube and chat, sometimes for up to half an hour! And when they’re not hanging out in his cube, they’re often hanging out nearby, having a loud conversation or talking on the phone....

Two icy volcanoes may lurk near Pluto’s south pole, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suggest. The images show two mountains roughly circular in shape and with deep depressions in their centers. One, Wright Mons, is 3 to 5 kilometres high, while the other, Piccard Mons, is up to 6 kilometres high. They resemble icy volcanoes, known as cryovolcanoes, on Neptune’s moon Triton and other frozen worlds. Flowing ice, rather than hot lava, fuels cryovolcanoes....

You may never actually win a Nobel Prize, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take one of these prestigious awards home with you. Next week, the Nobel Prize gold medal that was awarded to James Watson in 1962 for the discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA hits the auction block in New York City. The medal will be sold on Dec. 4, and Christie’s New York, the auction house conducting the sale, said this piece of scientific memorabilia could fetch between $2....

It’s been over two years since Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin made an explosive claim: based on the orbital motion of objects in the Kuiper Belt—a region beyond Neptune that is home to Pluto and other icy bodies—there must be a very big something much farther out, hidden save for its subtle gravitational tugs on the rest of the solar system. Brown and Batygin’s best models put this mysterious object at about 10 times Earth’s mass, perhaps 20 times more distant from the sun than Neptune and currently drifting through what might be a 20,000-year orbit in a patch of sky near the constellation Orion....

This past September, Apple released new iPhone models without headphone jacks. The people were not pleased. “It’s eliminating a connector and adding inconvenience in the name of profit,” one commenter wrote. “Apple wants to see just how stupid the public really is,” said another. “There is absolutely no reason to get rid of a perfectly working universal headphone jack,” added a third. As it turns out, there is a reason. The plug itself is small....

As recording-breaking wildfires continue to rage across the West, firefighters are confronting a new challenge that has snuck in under cover of darkness: rising nighttime temperatures. Days and nights are both warming while heat-trapping greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere, but scientists say nighttime increases are outpacing daytime rates. Since 2000 California’s daytime highs have been about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the previous 125 years, whereas overnight lows have been about 2....

In September 2019 millions of workers and students around the world walked out of their schools and off their jobs to protest governments’ inaction on climate change. For the protesters, the consequences of global warming were all too apparent. Last year Australia’s Black Summer bushfires brought destruction and death, killing hundreds of millions of animals. Hotter conditions have triggered record-setting ice melt, heat waves, low crop yields and bleached reefs—and have even, some argue, set the scene for the novel coronavirus pandemic....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a blow to administration efforts to free the oil and gas industry from Obama-era environmental rules, a Senate resolution to revoke a rule to limit leaks and flaring of methane from oil and gas production on federal lands fell short of votes 49-51 on Wednesday. The surprise vote outcome came after Republican leaders scrambled for weeks to secure the 51 votes necessary to pass the Congressional Review Act resolution, which would revoke the rule and prevent any similar regulations from being introduced....

More than a dozen science and engineering organizations worked with ScienceDebate.org to draft 14 top science questions to ask the two main presidential candidates this election year. Although President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney declined to debate these issues in person (at least as of press time), their campaigns provided written responses to the queries. Because these are substantive issues that will play a critical role in determining the nation’s—not to mention our planet’s—future, the Scientific American editors summarized and rated the candidates’ answers....

At 135,000 square miles, the Great Barrier Reef reigns as the world’s largest living structure. Located off the northeastern coast of Australia, it houses more than 600 species of coral and thousands of other types of marine animals, too. Yet the reef’s future looks bleak. In the 27 years from 1985 to 2012, half of its coral cover vanished. A significant proportion of the loss is attributable to climate change, which has strengthened destructive tropical cyclones and made surrounding waters warmer and more acidic....

Take a moment and picture an image of a rapist. Without a doubt, you are thinking about a man. Given our pervasive cultural understanding that perpetrators of sexual violence are nearly always men, this makes sense. But this assumption belies the reality, revealed in our study of large-scale federal agency surveys, that women are also often perpetrators of sexual victimization. In 2014, we published a study on the sexual victimization of men, finding that men were much more likely to be victims of sexual abuse than was thought....

Key concepts Food science Chemistry Protein Cooking Introduction When it comes to food, presentation matters. Creativity and science, combined, can result in fascinating ways to cook and present food; hard-boiled eggs are just one example. Some interesting chemistry happens when you cook an egg. For example, think about how an egg starts out as a thick, liquid, translucent substance. But after heating the egg it turns into a gel-like substance, which after further heating and cooling turns into a rubbery solid....

Ordinarily, I love transatlantic flights. Sure, there’s something magical about being transported to another land. But there’s also something deliciously self-indulgent about watching all the movies you want, without paying for them or feeling guilty about the time you’re spending on them. That’s why, on a recent flight to London, I was irked to discover that my seat-back screen was busted. Yeah, I know: #firstworldproblem. Still, in this world of instant information about anything, it’s too bad there’s no app that would let me warn whoever sat in 22F on this plane’s next flight about the broken screen....

Key concepts Physics Light Reflection Vision Introduction You might have heard the saying “not everything is as it seems.” Something faraway might look great, but when you take a closer look it might not turn out to be as you thought it would be! In this activity you will turn a spoon blackened with soot into shiny silver. Even though it is only an illusion, you will not know it when you see it....