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What started as a summer science project soon turned into a family medical crisis for geneticist Heidi Rehm. In July, she ordered a test to sequence her 14-year-old daughter’s DNA, hoping to find a genetic explanation for why one of the girl’s adult teeth hadn’t emerged. Instead, mother and daughter found that they both carried a genetic mutation linked to dilated cardiomyopathy—a heart-muscle abnormality that can lead to sudden death, especially in adults....

Scientists who study Alzheimer’s disease have mostly ignored the role of seizures, but that is beginning to change, and new research suggests they may provide insight into the progression of the disease and pave the way for treatments. It’s no surprise to neurologists that some people experience convulsive seizures in the later stages of the disease. In fact, the second patient ever to receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis more than a century ago suffered from them....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

Editor’s note: This article was printed with the title, “O Mercaptan, My Mercaptan” in the May issue. Friday, February 25, 2011: A date which will live in odiferous infamy. At least at my house. All seemed well that morning when the rains came. I was warm and dry and didn’t need to leave the comfort of home. But that comfort swiftly departed. First, I heard the glug glug glug. Then I picked up a whiff both faint and foul....

It was the first beautiful Saturday in spring, and I was in charge of my children. We were out browsing the stores around our local green when the page came in. Lawrence Cohen, a preeminent cardiologist and my colleague at Yale University, was distraught. Normally a man of few words, Cohen was speaking quickly, almost feverishly. “I need you, John. In the ER. Right away. She’s dying, John. She’s dying right in front of me....

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English by Michael D. Gordin University of Chicago Press, 2015 ($30) More than 90 percent of scientific publications today are in English, but that was not always the case. Latin was once a near-universal language for scholarship in Western science; then Latin gave way to a “Scientific Babel,” as historian Gordin calls it, where research came to light in a profusion of languages....

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Riverhead, 2015 ($27.95) Social media has brought about “a great renaissance of public shaming,” writes journalist Ronson, who tells of people whose mistakes have invited mass scorn. He interviews a woman, Justine Sacco, whose ill-considered joke about AIDS and Africa on Twitter temporarily made her the Internet’s Public Enemy No. 1, as well as journalist Jonah Lehrer, who fabricated quotes and plagiarized himself—and was broadly lambasted when the truth was revealed....

Most female mammals go into some form of estrus, or heat, when fertile, displaying hormone-induced behavioral changes that mark ovulation. Scientists used to think that humans were the exception, but evidence is mounting that women may undergo their own, albeit subtler, period of heat. A number of recent studies have shown that ovulating women appear—and even smell—more attractive to men. And a recent University of New Mexico study found that female strippers earn up to twice as much tip money during their most fertile period as compared with other times....

U.S. government programs helping farmers in developing countries withstand climate change now have stronger backing from Congress. Last week, the House passed the “Global Food Security Act of 2016” (S. 1252), authorizing a “comprehensive strategic approach” for U.S. foreign assistance programs that address poverty, hunger and malnutrition, and increase resilience of vulnerable communities. The bill represented a rare moment of strong bipartisan support in Congress and will help secure the future of one of the Obama administration’s longest-running aid programs....

Designer Supermarkets Marketing experts design nearly every feature of food stores—from product placement to mood music—to maximize sales. When customers enter a grocery store, the first thing they see is typically something colorful, aromatic and enticing—fresh produce, for example. The long center aisles and aisle-end displays are jam-packed with products, forcing shoppers to pass by many items that they might purchase on impulse. Food companies pay supermarkets to get their products—salty chips and other junk foods—positioned prominently in huge displays....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineEfforts to detect and halt the global spread of drug-resistant bacteria are being hindered by a poor understanding of the limitations of crucial laboratory tests. Because infected patients need to be isolated quickly to avoid spreading infections, the failure to identify antibiotic-resistant pathogens is increasing the risk of untreatable outbreaks, microbiologists argue.This month at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in London, Herman Goossens, director of the Laboratory of Medical Microbiology at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, presented data about one type of commercial kit often used to identify particular drug-resistant pathogens....

Americans have begun to battle over sunshine. In sun-scorched Arizona a regulatory skirmish has broken out over arrays of blue-black silicon panels on rooftops, threatening the local utilities that have ruled electricity generation for a century or more. With some of the best access to sunshine on the planet, Arizona boasts the second-most solar power in the U.S.—more than 1,000 megawatts and counting. The state hosts vast photovoltaic arrays in the desert as well as the nation’s first commercial power plant with the technology to use sunshine at night—by storing daytime heat in molten salts....

On September 25, a sensational rumor appeared on Twitter: Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist, reported hearing that the world’s largest gravitational-wave observatory had seen a signal, barely a week after its official re-opening. The rumour had been spreading around physics circles for at least a week. If it is true, and if the signal seen by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) genuinely represents the signature of a gravitational wave, it would confirm one of the most-elusive and spectacular predictions of the general theory of relativity almost exactly 100 years after Albert Einstein first proposed it....

As the Supreme Court appears poised to return abortion regulation to the states, recent experience in Texas illustrates that medical care for miscarriages and dangerous ectopic pregnancies would also be threatened if restrictions become more widespread. One Texas law passed last year lists several medications as abortion-inducing drugs and largely bars their use for abortion after the seventh week of pregnancy. But two of those drugs, misoprostol and mifepristone, are the only drugs recommended in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines for treating a patient after an early pregnancy loss....

Adapted from The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, by David J. Hand, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (North America), Transworld (UK), Ambo|Anthos (Holland), C.H. Beck (Germany), Companhia das Letras (Brazil), Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal (Poland), Locus Publishing Co. (Taiwan), AST (Russia). Copyright © 2014 by David J. Hand. A set of mathematical laws that I call the Improbability Principle tells us that we should not be surprised by coincidences....

New coronavirus infections have soared to their highest levels in five states, as some leaders pause plans to reopen businesses further. The record highs—in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and South Carolina—mark a concerning rise in cases that is now stretching into its third consecutive week. More than 2.5 million people in the United States have been infected with coronavirus and at least 125,000 have died, greater than any other country. Early in the pandemic, Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, pivoted her own research on influenza to model the dynamics of COVID-19....

ENHANCING EDUCATION In focusing on the insufficiently rigorous academic preparation of math and science teachers in the U.S. in “Building a Better Science Teacher,” Pat Wingert neglects larger issues. The head of a charter school is quoted saying that for every five candidates she observes in teaching demonstrations, she hires only one. What qualities does she look for beyond math mastery? I’d bet they are social and emotional ones. If a person with deep knowledge lacks empathy and relationship management skills, he will fail as a teacher....

By Lauren Gravitz of Nature magazineOne can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, but new research suggests that a bit of transgenic tweaking may make it possible to squeeze blood–or at least blood protein–from a grain of rice. In a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe rice seeds that can produce substantial quantities of a blood protein called human serum albumin, or HSA....

Normally science follows an orderly path: new observations build on previous findings, often in incremental steps over many years, contributing piecemeal to a larger body of knowledge. Every now and then, insights arise that don’t quite jibe with the observations that came before. Such aberrations yield a more nuanced understanding of the topic and are folded into the narrative of what we know. Sometimes, though, a new discovery is so profound that it is impossible to reconcile, and knowledge must proceed in a different direction entirely....

From Nature magazine What do you do when a charismatic marine mammal is wreaking havoc by gorging on a threatened species that humans also find delicious? That’s the awkward problem faced by wildlife managers along the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon states, where sea lions have been congregating for the past decade to feast on salmon waiting to climb the fish ladders at the base of the Bonneville Dam on their spring voyage upriver to spawn....