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Big test coming up? Having trouble concentrating? Try a little estrogen. Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, report in a recent study that hormone fluctuations during a woman’s menstrual cycle may affect the brain as much as do substances such as caffeine, methamphetamines or the popular attention drug Ritalin. Scientists have known for decades that working memory (short-term information processing) is dependent on the chemical dopamine. In fact, drugs like Ritalin mimic dopamine to help people concentrate....

One drop of LSD can erase your entire sense of being until—interminable hours later—you recapitulate your identity, one puzzle piece at a time. Beyond that and the iconic kaleidoscope visual effects, lysergic acid diethylamide has supposedly inspired revolutionary ideas, too. It has been famously (and controversially) credited, in part, for the creation of the iPhone and the polymerase chain reaction, the tool used to clone DNA. And all it takes is 100 micrograms of the drug, roughly the weight of two and a half eyelashes....

With her second child growing larger by the day, Liz is experiencing the tyranny of her pregnancy. Her belly seems impossibly huge to her. Easy sleep is a distant memory now that she must contend with tens of pounds of extra girth. With belching and heartburn following every meal, she feels as if she is subsisting on a diet of small volcanoes. But Liz is not just any late-term mother-to-be. She is also a neuroscientist studying the changes that occur in a mother’s brain—in fact, she co-authored this article....

“Give me a telescope, and I can come up with something good to do with it,” says Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as the agency’s operations project scientist for the $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful off-world observatory yet built by humankind. Over the course of her career, Rigby has used many of the world’s premier ground- and space-based astronomical facilities—and she is helming one of Webb’s many “early release science” campaigns front-loaded for its first year of observations, utilizing the telescope to study star formation in galaxies across eons of cosmic time....

If you saw Winged Migration or Fly Away Home, which delivered the first true bird’s-eye views of the world, you may have wondered how they got those wild geese to wear tiny camcorders on their heads. In fact, the cameras were in ultralight aircraft, which the birds accompanied—by choice. The crafty filmmakers took advantage of one of Mother Nature’s tricks called imprinting: If you had grown up thinking your mom was inside that noisy plane—or was that noisy plane—you’d have gladly tolerated it, too....

Edited by Dava Sobel Credit: Martin Ruegner Getty Images Author’s Note: What we all learned in high school about lichen—that it’s the synergistic collaboration of a fungus and algae or cyanobacteria—is simplified in many ways. For one thing, the original organisms are changed utterly in the compact. They can’t return to what they were. For another, according to Anne Pringle, one of the leading contemporary mycologists (with whom I had the lucky opportunity to collaborate), it may be that lichen do not, given sufficient nutrients, age....

Rice, wheat and other grains that have been bred to produce larger harvests using less land have been critical to feeding Earth’s population in the past 50 years. But these crops come with a significant cost: Their thirst for the chemical nutrients in fertilizer contributes to pollution that threatens air, land and sea. Now a team of scientists have genetically engineered new high-yield grain varieties that require less fertilizer and thereby could prove more environmentally friendly....

Culminating more than a decade of wrangling, the Senate today unanimously passed a landmark bill that would make it illegal for health insurers and employers to discriminate based on genetic predispositions to diseases such as breast cancer. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) now goes to the House, which approved a nearly identical measure last year by a margin of 420 to three, and is expected to vote on this version as early as next week....

The Trump administration yesterday unsheathed the second part of its massive rollback of Obama-era clean car standards, setting the stage for a prolonged legal feud as the nation struggles to address the global coronavirus pandemic. The long-awaited and nearly 2,000-pageSafer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Ruleunravels a 2012 standard designed to significantly curb air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks (Greenwire, March 31). EPA and the Transportation Department last fall released part one of the SAFE Vehicles Rule, which prevented California from setting stricter emissions limits than the federal government....

Mark Selapack could probably use a break. Stranded for a time aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship in March while he worked to transfer COVID patients, deployed to wildfires up and down California, and sent to skilled nursing facilities to provide badly needed patient care, the San Diego–based paramedic was not home for 160 days in 2020. Then the calendar turned over—and the pace, and need, only accelerated. “It’s a little bit exhausting, but definitely rewarding for those we do help out” Selapack said during a recent shift in Imperial County, where staffing shortages had created a mini-emergency of its own....

“Take the high ground and hold it!” has been standard combat doctrine for armies since ancient times. Now that people and their machines have entered outer space, it is no surprise that generals the world over regard Earth orbit as the key to modern warfare. But until recently, a norm had developed against the weaponization of space—even though there are no international treaties or laws explicitly prohibiting nonnuclear anti­satellite systems or weapons placed in orbit....

CLIMATEWIRE | The Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday does not strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases. It is unlikely to change how the Biden administration regulates power plant emissions and will do little to boost the fortunes of a coal industry hamstrung by mounting competition from renewables. But the court’s 6-3 decision in favor of coal interests in West Virginia v. EPA could cast a long shadow over the administration’s wider attempts to combat climate change....

When nibbled, the leaves of one type of sweet potato release a strong-smelling chemical warning that prompts other leaves—on the same plant and those nearby—to produce defensive proteins that make them hard to digest. New research tracks this odorous alert system. “It’s sort of a shortcut,” says Axel Mithöfer, a plant ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and co-author of the study, which appeared last November in Scientific Reports....

Cast your mind back four years, and gravitational waves were the talk of the town. On September 14, 2015, the first detection of these ripples in space-time was made by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, revealed months later to deserved global fanfare. Now with the fourth anniversary of that discovery approaching, the field has matured dramatically with dozens of subsequent detections made—and the prospect of even more thrilling discoveries on the horizon. The field “has exploded,” says Nergis Mavalvala from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....

On a recent trip, I stopped in at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has a marvelous collection of Impressionist paintings. Among them, a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, completed in 1887 and one of the dozens of self-portraits the artist would complete in his lifetime. To me, this particular version is one of the broodier iterations, with the subject’s striking blue-green eyes seeming to emanate a kind of melancholy. I couldn’t help but wonder if van Gogh’s many self-portraits were an endeavor to know himself better—or perhaps know the version that friends and passersby might describe....

In her job as a physician at the Boston Medical Center, Sondra Crosby treated some of the first people in her region to get COVID. So when she began feeling sick in April 2020, Crosby wasn’t surprised to learn that she, too, had been infected. At first her symptoms felt like those of a bad cold, but by the next day she was too sick to get out of bed. She struggled to eat and depended on her husband to bring her sports drinks and fever-reducing medicine....

The first gene therapy in the U.S., approved last month to treat a rare, inherited form of blindness, now has a price tag: $850,000. That makes the treatment, called Luxturna and made by Spark Therapeutics, the most expensive medicine sold in the U.S., ranked by sticker price. But Spark CEO Jeff Marrazzo says Luxturna’s ability to restore vision in a small number of people with a defective gene justifies the high cost, particularly because the gene therapy is only injected one time in each eye for a long-term benefit....

More than three decades ago my students and I at Lund University in Sweden, along with other teams, developed “fishing nets” of sorts that worked at the nanometer scale. The nets we created could trap living cells and, later, smaller biological entities, such as enzymes or other molecules. Under the right conditions, our “catches” could continue to do their usual tasks outside of living organisms for months. The technology proved attractive for dozens of applications [see “Enzymes Bound to Artificial Matrixes,” by Klaus Mosbach; Scientific American, March 1971]....

Evidence began mounting as long as 70 years ago that restricting calories while consuming necessary amounts of sustenance could increase one’s life span. Since then, a group called the North Carolina-based Calorie Restriction Society has sprouted whose 1,800 members routinely down about half of the daily caloric intake recommended by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the hope of living to the ripe old age of 120. New research may prompt the organization to send out nose plugs with its next newsletter....

In the animal kingdom, some creatures are smarter than others. Birds, in particular, exhibit many remarkable skills once thought to be restricted to humans: Magpies recognize their reflection in a mirror. New Caledonian crows construct tools and learn these skills from their elders. African grey parrots can count, categorize objects by color and shape, and learn to understand human words. And a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball can dance to a beat....