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From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Structure equals function: If there’s one thing we all learned about proteins in high school biology, that would be it. According to the textbook story of the cell, a protein’s three-dimensional shape determines what it does—drive chemical reactions, pass signals up and down the cell’s information superhighway, or maybe hang molecular tags onto DNA. For more than a century, biologists have thought that the proteins carrying out these functions are like rigid cogs in the cell’s machinery....

When Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, one of the first issues he raised in his speech was immigration—specifically, the idea that undocumented immigrants are dangerous. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said. As Trump’s presidency nears its end, his unwavering views on immigration are directly contradicted by a growing body of criminology research. Studies overwhelmingly find no evidence that U....

You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes at the latest round of promises that virtual reality has finally arrived for the masses. Tech companies have been hanging their hats on that one for decades without much success, due to high prices and poorly rendered graphics that have given people headaches—literally. Despite these missteps, a new generation of virtual-reality tech targeted at consumers has begun to hit the market, most prominently with Samsung’s $100 Gear VR visor released in late November....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Our society is running into problems with brain research. To identify new treatments for stroke, for instance, clinical trials need to enroll stroke victims. But the brain damage in these patients that makes them good candidates for trials can also render them incapable of consenting, in a valid, informed manner, to participation. So how can medical science advance?...

From amoebas engulfing one another to polar bears eating cubs, cannibalism is all over the natural world. But it’s a risky way to get food. Animals of the same species tend to have similar natural defenses and can easily share diseases. And eating one’s own offspring typically undermines genetic success. So what pushes some animals over the edge? “Almost all predators express cannibalism when conditions get grim enough,” says Jay Rosenheim, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis....

Consider the following statements: “War continues.” “No sign of peace.” Does our brain treat these two sentences differently, despite their identical meaning? A new study suggests it does. British researchers showed that we are better at detecting words that carry negative meaning than those that are positive. Volunteers were exposed to a word for a fraction of a second—too short a time to consciously read the word—and then asked to guess whether the word was neutral or had emotional content (either positive or negative)....

Like most residents of developed nations who hadn’t traveled broadly in the developing world, the sight of smoldering rubbish piles, which contain anything from food waste to plastics to electronics, came as a surprise to Wiedinmyer, who works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “It’s just not something that I’ve been exposed to,” she told Climate Central. In the U.S., “we have waste management. We have people who pick up trash and take it away....

A new study was released that I know a lot of you are going to be concerned about. It seems that eating fruits and vegetables that are known to have high pesticide residues could make it harder to get pregnant. There’s bound to be a lot of hand-wringing over this in certain corners of the internet. So, I want to put these findings in perspective for those of you who are trying to conceive as well as anyone who is just generally concerned about pesticides and their effects on health....

Chinese astronomers hope to establish a major observatory program on the roof of the world, the Tibetan Plateau, with new research arguing for pristine observing conditions nestled in the uplands. The analysis focuses on a study site near Lenghu Town in Qinghai Province at an altitude of more than 2.5 miles (4.2 kilometers) and some 1,900 miles (3,000 km) west of Beijing. In the paper, the scientists argue that three years of monitoring shows conditions on par with those at some of the most renowned scientific outposts on Earth....

CubeSats—spacecraft built from 10-centimetre-sided cubes, often with off-the-shelf parts—are already ubiquitous in near-Earth orbit, doing everything from Earth observation to studies of bacterial proteins in space. Now scientists are itching to send them farther afield, and more than a dozen deep-space CubeSats are in the pipeline. The cost—typically no more than US$10 million for an interplanetary mission—means that the mini-craft can take risks that a more costly venture could not. They can also work in swarms, which allows new kinds of experiments....

We put up with a lot of crap—literally. Last year, at least 4.7 billion gallons of hog manure in the U.S. came from one company, Smithfield foods, the nation’s leading pork producer. The feces load will rise if U.S. regulators green-light a proposed merger that would bring the firm under the auspices of a China-based company. That increase could also promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and increase health risks for hog farm workers and the communities living around them....

A Google-made extension appears to port Google Now beyond Android via Chrome. (Credit:Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)A Chrome browser extension and some code hidden on a Web site indicate that Google might replace iGoogle with a desktop version of Google Now.The unconfirmed report on Google Operating System, a blog that’s not affiliated with Google, highlights code on a Web page that it says Google uses to test new features. In this case, the code calls out “Google Now” in instructions on what the new features do....

In the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market share by improving the Macintosh operating system were unsuccessful. After several years of debilitating financial losses, the company chose to purchase a fledgling software company called NeXT. Along with purchasing the rights to NeXT’s software, this move allowed Apple to regain the services of one of the company’s founders, the late Steve Jobs....

Biologists trying to count endangered Antillean manatees in Costa Rica and Panama face a major challenge: the animals live in murky waters, making them virtually impossible to see. “I rowed back and forth [along Panama’s] San San River every day for two years, and all I got to see were some noses,” biologist and computer scientist Mario Rivera-Chavarria says. “I could hear them, but I never saw them.” In 2013 Rivera-Chavarria, then at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute launched a manatee census in Panama’s San San Pond Sak wetlands, an area that borders Costa Rica and includes the San San River....

Jim Lovelock (never ‘James’) is remembered as the father of the Gaia hypoth-esis: the idea that Earth is a self-regulating living organism. Few accepted his argument that this should be elevated to the status of a theory, even though it generated predictions about environ-mental changes that were borne out by subsequent observations. As a heuristic model, however, Gaia profoundly influenced thinking about the environment and how we interact with it, giving rise to the field of Earth-system studies....

The world’s most massive animal, the blue whale, is like a 100-passenger jet gliding below the ocean’s surface. Whales are among the largest organisms ever to exist, and now scientists say they may know when and why they evolved to be so enormous. In a study published recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers modeled the sizes of baleen whales that lived between roughly 35 million years ago and the present....

Getting discouraged by setbacks is one of the most common reasons people fail to meet their goals. Recent research at Rutgers University reveals that people who felt a setback was within their control were more likely to persevere afterward, as were people who got more frustrated by adversity. The results jibe with a larger body of work suggesting that if you approach setbacks and your ensuing negative emotions with the right mind-set, you will be more likely to bounce back....

Suicide rates have been rising alarmingly in the U.S. and have reached a 30-year peak of 13 per 100,000 people, according to a 2016 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As psychologists and public health officials scramble to find solutions, Michael Nadorff, a psychologist at Mississippi State University, argues that one treatable risk factor has been hiding in the dark: nightmares. Over the past five years Nadorff’s research has shown that nightmares are an important clue to suicide risk among healthy individuals—and that therapy aimed at addressing their nightmares could help save lives....

Celebrity plays a role in increasing public awareness of Parkinson’s disease—and drums up funding. A foundation named after actor Michael J. Fox is the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson’s research. Another actor, Alan Alda, generated global news coverage with his recent announcement that he received a diagnosis more than three years ago. Tech titan Sergey Brin carries a version of a gene that greatly increases risk for Parkinson’s (PD), but the gene has an unwieldy name that few would otherwise recognize....

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb sensations, feeling pain, itching or other impulses coming from limbs that no longer exist. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran worked with patients who had so-called phantom limbs, including Tom, a man who had lost one of his arms. Ramachandran discovered that if he stroked Tom’s face, Tom felt like his missing fingers were also being touched. Each part of the body is represented by a different region of the somatosensory cortex, and, as it happens, the region for the hand is adjacent to the region for the face....