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Sitting through an entire lecture or even a movie without furtively glancing at a cell phone can be surprisingly difficult for some of us. In Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (HarperCollins, 2013), psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman explores the significance of attention, revealing the deleterious effects of distractions on work and relationships. Investing more fully in the moment can spur creativity when wrestling with a problem or even spark a new romantic connection....

Excerpted from The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human by Adam Piore. Copyright © 2017 Adam Piore. With permission of the publisher, HarperCollins. All rights reserved. It’s a frigid February afternoon, and I’m sitting in a hospital room in downtown Albany, New York, as a team of white-jacketed technicians bustle about the bed of a 40-year-old single mother from Schenectady, named Cathy. And they are getting ready to push the outer bounds of computer-aided “mind reading....

As book reviewer and later columnist for Scientific American, Philip Morrison traveled often from Boston to New York to attend the monthly meeting of the editors. He was always the star turn. Speaking at machine- gun speed, yet in complete sentences and even (to my ear) complete paragraphs, he held forth illuminatingly on a great variety of subjects. His incisive quips on topics that came up at the meetings drew many a laugh....

Editor’s Note (8/21/20): Tropical Depression 13 has now strengthened and become Tropical Storm Laura. Peak Atlantic hurricane season began yesterday. The greatest number of storms—especially major storms—typically form between Aug. 20 and Oct. 10. But the start of the busy season is a bit more troubling than usual this year. The early part of the season has already been abnormally active. So far, 11 named storms have already formed in the Atlantic basin....

Again, suppose Jeremy cuts the first cake into the fractions f and 1-f , where f is at least 1/2. Then if Marie chooses first, Jeremy will get 1 1/4 cakes from the last two. If Marie chooses to go second, then Jeremy will get f of the first cake and then will divide the last two cakes in half. So, f + 1/2 + 1/2 = (1 - f) + 1 1/4....

April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late April was more like what would be expected for mid-June, well into the melt season. These conditions are the continuation of a winter-long scarcity of sea ice in the Bering Sea—a decline so stark it has stunned researchers who have spent years watching Arctic sea ice dwindle due to climate change....

It’s the premise of every third sci-fi thriller. Man wakes up to his normal seeming life, but of course it isn’t. At first, just the little things are off – the dog won’t eat and the TV keeps looping some strange video – but whatever. A few cuts later, with only his granddad’s rusty brass knuckles and a steely-eyed contempt for authority, our hero reveals a conspiracy that kicks up straight to the top....

COVID caseloads have plummeted in many areas with high vaccination rates. But as the number of people being infected daily worldwide still exceeds 400,000 and the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus spreads rapidly, treatment options are limited. Two of the current best available treatments, monoclonal antibodies and the drug remdesivir, are given by infusion. Patients only benefit during the first week or so of infection, when the virus is still present and replicating in the body....

Knots can help unravel some knotty (sorry!) situations. The mathematical study of knotted shapes has proved constructive for many branches of physics, from understanding how fluids flow to developing quantum computers. Now physicists have found that light itself can be knotted by discovering a new set of solutions to the famous Maxwell equations of electromagnetism. In the 1860s Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell wrote down a series of equations describing how electric and magnetic fields form and change....

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - On any given summer evening about 60 tourists gather in campground amphitheatres here for park ranger presentations. Astronomy, geology, human history, fire ecology are on the regular schedule of program topics. Wilderness safety and Yosemite’s notoriously aggressive black bears are also popular. But one July evening Yosemite ranger Matt Holly popped something different onto his projector screen: “Yosemite’s climate: Past…and Future?” What followed was a rare and relatively new occurrence in Yosemite Valley - a ranger program focused exclusively on how one of the jewels of America’s national parks system is responding to a changing climate....

Brain signals measured during a simple visual task could serve as a biomarker for autism, according to a new study published Thursday. The task tests a person’s ability to perceive a phenomenon called binocular rivalry. This occurs when a person views two images simultaneously—one with the left eye and one with the right. The viewer’s brain deals with the competing stimuli by inhibiting one input and then the other. As a result, she sees the images one at a time....

America’s biggest banks are in a jam. Under pressure from environmentalists, they’ve vowed to throw their weight behind the transition to a low-carbon economy by achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. But standing in the way are a slew of obstacles. High on the list is that there is no set standard to calculate the climate impact of finance activities. That’s a real problem, experts say, because the lack of uniformity makes it difficult for banks and their investors to assess progress....

The World Health Organization said the coronavirus outbreak that has swept from China to a number of countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe is not yet a pandemic, but it urged countries to prepare for its arrival on the assumption that a declaration may come. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said countries should be working to protect health workers, engaging groups that are at highest risk—for instance, the elderly—and striving to contain spread of the virus to the highest degree possible to slow its arrival in countries that don’t have the means to respond to its threat....

Biologist Jeff Sikich has worked at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area since 2002. He has dealt with a lot of odd things, including, on one memorable occasion, a call to bring his dart gun to tranquilize what turned out to be a three-foot-tall statue of a mountain lion rather than an actual mountain lion. But what he was seeing one March day in 2020 was unusual and ominous. It was also not that surprising....

The heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic are legion: nurses, doctors and others who care for the sick; epidemiologists and public health experts who track the disease and offer clear lifesaving guidance; and everyone who masks up and avoids crowds and protects their own health and the health of their communities. And around the world many scientists are working practically nonstop to understand the virus, how it spreads and what it does to the body....

MONTREAL—Arnold Franck was 1,800 miles away from his island nation of Haiti this week when Hurricane Matthew washed away entire towns and claimed nearly 300 lives. But, he said, being here at a meeting of the United Nations’ aviation agency was critical for Haiti’s future. Franck, the director of air transport for Haiti’s national civil aviation office, said countries considering a plan before the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to limit global aviation emissions needed to hear what climate change means for poor and vulnerable nations....

LAS VEGAS—With every corner of its business facing strong competition in the past few years, Microsoft has been pushed (mostly by Google and Apple) to prove that it has the chops to survive in a world coming to rely less on Windows-based PCs and more on smart phones, touch-screen tablets and Internet-connected appliances for access to information and entertainment. On the eve of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used his annual keynote to sum up his company’s strategy: “Whatever device you use, now or in the future, Windows will be there....

For 15 years three competing groups of astronomers have chased a single dream: to build the grandest telescope on earth. The stargazing behemoths they aim to build would be three times larger than the world’s current largest optical telescopes, powerful enough to take pictures of planets circling other stars and to peer across the breadth of the universe, gazing back in time nearly to the big bang. This dream observatory comes in three versions: the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), developed by a consortium including the Carnegie Institution for Science; the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), developed by the California Institute of Technology, the University of California system and others; and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), developed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO)....

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by McKenzie Funk Penguin, 2014 Can climate change make for good business? Entrepreneurs all over the world are counting on it, claims journalist Funk in his new book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming. The effects of a shifting climate, he says, can be divided into melt, drought and deluge (that is, rising sea levels), each of which would mean big paydays for different industries....

Climate change has arrived in America’s national parks, threatening natural and historical resources with climbing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, according to a new National Park Service report. In “Climate Exposure of U.S. National Parks in a New Era of Change”—published yesterday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE – National Park Service scientists Nicholas Fisichelli and William Monahan find that present-day temperatures are at the high end of the range of temperatures measured since 1901 and point to changes in precipitation patterns over time....