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Swept away by mudslides, entombed in lava or suffocated under ash, nearly 280,000 people have died in volcanic eruptions during the past four centuries, but only now has humanity managed to quantify the risk posed by these fiery phenomena. The first detailed assessment of global volcanic risk—part of a larger international hazard assessment released on March 4 by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—aims to save lives by providing better information for risk planners and by showcasing effective response measures....

“More is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes....

When the virus first struck this time last year, we young people failed you. We did not take it seriously. We flouted social distancing practices. We caught the virus and spread it to you and your parents. What we lacked was not compassion or intelligence, but perspective, which brings humility. Like most who have never experienced catastrophe, we thought we never would. But you failed yourselves in this pandemic as well, because you shared our hubris....

Could certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves or radiation interfere with brain function? —L. Chamas, Montreal Amir Raz, assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia University, replies: DEFINITELY. Radiation is energy, and research provides at least some information concerning the ways in which specific types of energy may influence tissue, including the brain. I will review what we know about several types. MAGNETIC FIELDS. In some cases, the effect can be therapeutic....

Africans have long been told that our agriculture is backward and should be abandoned for a 21st-century version of the Green Revolution that enabled India to feed itself. Western science and technology, in the form of seeds modified by science and technology, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, petroleum-fueled machinery and artificial irrigation were key to that miracle, we are informed, and we too need to tread that path. A primary proponent of this view is the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), founded in 2014 to “depolarize the charged debate” around genetically modified (GM) seeds....

The nation’s flood insurance program doesn’t know the elevation of 750,000 high-risk homes with discounted policies, according to the National Research Council. The omission could complicate efforts to phase out subsidized insurance rates in the National Flood Insurance Program, said researchers who contributed to a technical report that suggests the program needs to modernize the way it collects data and sets rates. About 20 percent of the program’s 5.5 million policies are priced too low to cover the risk of flooding....

Top researchers are huddled with government officials in South Korea this week to confront the scientific consensus that maintaining a safe global climate will require immediate and aggressive action. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to release a long-awaited study Monday showing what the world will look like if temperatures rise an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, versus the 2-degree scenario scientists once deemed safe....

A mysterious extinct branch of the human family tree that once interbred with modern humans was more genetically diverse than Neanderthals, a finding that also suggests many of these early humans called Denisovans existed in what is now southern Siberia, researchers say. In 2008, scientists unearthed a finger bone and teeth in Denisova cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains that belonged to lost relatives now known as the Denisovans (dee-NEE-soh-vens). Analysis of DNA extracted from a finger bone from a young Denisovan girl suggested they shared a common origin with Neanderthals, but were nearly as genetically distinct from Neanderthals as Neanderthals were from living people....

NASA will decide soon whether a Mars lander that was supposed to launch next month will ever get off the ground. NASA announced in December that its InSight lander, which is designed to probe the interior structure of Mars, would not be ready to blast off in March as originally planned because of a leak in the vacuum container surrounding one its key instruments. Favorable alignments of Earth and Mars come along just once every 26 months, so NASA could aim to send InSight on its way in mid-2018....

Edited by Dava Sobel They fly from the Caribbean sun into the storm’s spiraling arms; their turbo prop jolts and shudders. Across his window, streaks of rain begin. They’re flying into darkness, the plane all fumes and metal shell, he thinks, as they head for the eye. All along, they’re dropping instruments to map vertically pressure, temperature, wind direction and speed, data in three dimensions plus time. He’s read about these trips: to enter the gyre’s racket of wind and rain, the crew harness themselves in place....

Almost three weeks after it crash-landed the Rosetta orbiter on a comet, the European Space Agency (ESA) is gearing up to land another spacecraft—this time on Mars. It hopes that a craft called Schiaparelli will touch down on the red planet on October 19. Compared to the pioneering Rosetta mission, landing on Mars is a more conventional feat. But for ESA, the stakes are high, given that the tally of successful landings on Mars currently stands at NASA 7, Europe 0....

THE VISUAL IMAGE is inherently ambiguous: an image of a person on the retina would be the same size for a dwarf seen from up close or a giant viewed from a distance. Perception is partly a matter of using certain assumptions about the world to resolve such ambiguities. We can use illusions to uncover what the brain’s hidden rules and assumptions are. In this column, we consider illusions of shading....

Some owners of Samsung Galaxy Note7 smartphones learned the hard way last year that lithium-ion batteries, commonly used in many consumer electronics, can be flammable and even explosive. Such batteries typically rely on liquid electrolytes, which are made up of an organic solvent and dissolved salts. These liquids enable ions to flow between electrodes separated by a porous membrane, thus creating a current. But the fluid is prone to forming dendrites—microscopic lithium fibers that can cause batteries to short-circuit and heat up rapidly....

Walking down a residential street in the evening, you might find yourself glancing through the brightly lit windows of the houses you pass. As you peek inside, you take stock of the occupants’ selections: the mahogany chaise lounge with the curved armrests in one house, the sleek leather couches and minimalist paintings in another. Each person’s aesthetic taste seems distinct, and yet that perception belies a large body of shared preferences....

This image—the closest ever taken of the Sun—shows the corona teeming with thousands of miniature solar flares, which scientists have dubbed ‘campfires’. The pictures are the first released from the Solar Orbiter satellite mission, led by the European Space Agency. “When the first images came in, my first thought was this is not possible, it can’t be that good,” David Berghmans, principal investigator for the orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager instrument, told a press briefing on 16 July....

Seven actors stand around a circle of swirling colors—blue, gold and white painted in the middle of the stage. Interspersed among them are twice as many children. Most of the younger players look withdrawn. Many appear disabled, intellectually or physically. One girl, about 12 years old, sits quietly in an electric wheelchair. The professional cast take turns, enticing their young charges into the center of the colorful “island,” where they play simple games—practicing facial expressions and chanting words—all based on emotional scenes from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest....

Can the U.S. stave off the erosion of its longtime preeminence in science and engineering? For decades the nation’s stature in those disciplines has attracted many of the brightest and most talented students from around the world to America’s advanced degree programs. Citizens of other countries now receive more than half the Ph.D.s awarded by U.S. universities in engineering, computer science and physics, on top of earning one third of all college degrees in science and engineering....

Once a brilliant Russian Neurosurgeon named Akakhi Akakhievitch had a patient who wanted to forget his overbearing, impossible mother. Eager to oblige, Akakhievitch opened up the patient’s brain and, one by one, ablated several thousand neurons, each of which related to the concept of his mother. When the patient woke up from anesthesia, he had lost all notion of his mother. All memories of her, good and bad, were gone. Jubilant with his success, Akakhievitch turned his attention to the next endeavor—the search for cells linked to the memory of “grandmother....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Childhood asthma rates appear to have stopped rising among many U.S. groups, but not among the poorest kids or children aged 10 and older, a study suggests. Overall, asthma prevalence among kids under 18 had been rising for decades, until it peaked at 9.7% in 2009. Then it held steady until 2013, when it dropped to 8.3% from 9.3% the previous year, researchers reported online December 28 in the journal Pediatrics....

Every 18 minutes in the U.S., a baby who will acquire autism is born. Despite its widespread prevalence, scientists do not know what causes the developmental disorder—an array of genetic and environmental factors are probably involved. One such variable, a new study suggests, might be the womb: mothers of autistic children may produce immune proteins that react with and potentially harm their babies’ brains during pregnancy. Past studies have linked autism to the immune system—especially to autoimmune reactions, in which the body’s defenses mistakenly attack native tissue....