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Vampire bats—and their legendary taste for blood—are the stuff of nightmares. “Essentially they are living Draculas,” says Michael Hiller, a genomicist at the LOEWE Center for Translational Biodiversity Genomics in Frankfurt, Germany. These tiny bats, which reside in forests and caves throughout Central and South America and often prey on livestock, are the only mammals that feed exclusively on blood. New research on the bats’ genome by Hiller and his colleagues helps explain how they are able to live on such a nutrient-poor diet....

George Loewenstein is a neuroeconomist at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied everything from the brain activity triggered by retail shopping to the psychology of lottery tickets. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Loewenstein about his latest research, and what why credit cards are so dangerous. LEHRER: Your most recent paper looked at some of the factors that seem to influence the purchase of lottery tickets. What did you find?...

Electrons are the trusty foot soldiers of electronics, dutifully carrying the electric charges that enable our everyday activities, from making mobile phone calls to listening to music to—ahem—reading online news stories. But there is more to the humble electron than just shunting electric charge from one place to another. Electrons also have a property known as spin; an electron can “spin up” or “spin down,” pointing like a tiny magnetic compass needle in one of two directions....

In spring 2011 stillborn and newborn bottlenose dolphins washed up dead on Gulf coast beaches from Louisiana to Alabama in unusually high numbers. These tiny dolphins, less than 115 centimeters long, died either before birth or soon after, perhaps from their mother’s exposure to cold temperatures or to the oil released from the Macondo well for 87 days in the spring of 2010 when these babies were conceived. Yet there was no uptick in baby bottlenose dolphin deaths in Florida or Texas, areas that saw relatively little oil from BP’s spill....

Is what you flush down the toilet wasted energy? People living in countries with flush-toilets and running water produce a huge amount of wastewater daily. This water, thanks largely to excrement, is full of organic compounds that store usable energy in their chemical bonds. Several methods can be employed to harvest it—for example, engineers can extract methane through anaerobic (oxygen-free) digestion, or produce electricity using microbial fuel cells. In the past several years an increasing amount of research has focused on developing and improving on these methods, as harnessed sewage power could help water treatment plants produce enough power to meet all their own consumption—and even serve as a fuel source in developing countries where supplies are currently unreliable....

The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. Medical applications of CRISPR–Cas9 had a banner year in 2019. The first results trickled in from trials testing the tool in people, and more trials launched. In the coming years, researchers are looking ahead to more sophisticated applications of CRISPR genome editing that could lay the foundation for treating an array of diseases, from blood disorders to hereditary blindness....

The first “supermoon” total lunar eclipse in more than three decades did not disappoint, with the moon thrilling skywatchers around the world as it passed through Earth’s shadow. On Sunday evening (Sept. 27), the slightly-larger-than-normal full moon shined brightly in Earth’s skies and then dove into the planet’s shadow, turning a gorgeous reddish-gold color as observers with clear skies enjoyed the view. The event marked the first supermoon total lunar eclipse since 1982, and the last until 2033—and it was visible to potentially billions of people across the Western Hemisphere and parts of Europe, Africa and Asia....

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a climate science denier who once said that he wanted to shut down the U.S. Department of Energy, is expected to be President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run that very agency. In Perry’s famous “oops!” moment in 2011 that helped derail his candidacy for president, he forgot the name of the Energy Department during a Republican debate when asked which federal agencies he would eliminate. Perry is an ardent critic of Obama administration climate policies and denies that humans are causing climate change....

Our seas are choking on plastic. A staggering eight million metric tons wind up in oceans every year, and unraveling exactly how it gets there is critical. A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be pouring in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia. “Rivers carry trash over long distances and connect nearly all land surfaces with the oceans,” making them a major battleground in the fight against sea pollution, explains Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany....

In many detective novels, the ominous aroma of bitter almonds foreshadows a swift demise. The kernels of wild almond varieties—and also the pits of peaches, cherries and other stone fruits—have chemical compounds that contain cyanide. Almond breeders have long endeavored to cultivate varieties that lack the potent poison, a process that can be expensive and time-consuming. “You eat the flesh of the peach, you eat the flesh of the apple, but you don’t eat the flesh of the almond,” says plant biochemist Raquel Sánchez Pérez of the University of Copenhagen and the University Campus of Espinardo in Murcia, Spain....

Researchers have built the fastest random-number generator ever made, using a simple laser. It exploits fluctuations in the intensity of light to generate randomness—a coveted resource in applications such as data encryption and scientific simulations—and could lead to devices that are small enough to fit on a single computer chip. True randomness is surprisingly difficult to come by. Algorithms in conventional computers can produce sequences of numbers that seem random at first, but over time these tend to display patterns....

The do-it-yourself (DIY) movement, which has been steadily gathering momentum over the past decade, was on full display this weekend in New York City. The World Maker Faire—New York, held at the New York Hall of Science, was a celebration of makers—individuals and teams that embody the scrappy inventiveness of DIY culture. Makers make things, obviously. But more importantly, makers make do. They may not have the resources for expensive projects, but they take advantage of their circumstances and maximize available resources to achieve their goals....

One day soon an emerging technology highlighted in this report will allow you to virtually teleport to a distant site and actually feel the handshakes and hugs of fellow cyber travelers. Also close to becoming commonplace: humanoid (and animaloid) robots designed to socialize with people; a system for pinpointing the source of a food-poisoning outbreak in just seconds; minuscule lenses that will pave the way for diminutive cameras and other devices; strong, biodegradable plastics that can be fashioned from otherwise useless plant wastes; DNA-based data storage systems that will reliably stow ginormous amounts of information; and more....

In 1989 a female jogger was beaten senseless, raped and left for dead in New York City’s Central Park. Her skull had multiple fractures, her eye socket was crushed, and she lost three quarters of her blood. She survived, but she cannot remember anything about the incident. Within 48 hours of the attack, solely on the basis of confessions obtained by police, five African- and Hispanic-American boys, 14 to 16 years old, were arrested....

Lindley, an astrophysicist-turned-writer, charts the course of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The culmination of Heisenberg’s equally perplexing quantum theory, the uncertainty principle posited that in many physical measurements, one can extract one bit of information only at the price of losing another. Heisenberg’s mentor Niels Bohr agreed with the basic premises of his startling insights but saw the need to “make sense of the new quantum physics without throwing overboard the hard-won successes of the previous era....

Most of us reflexively grin when we see another beaming face and grimace when we see a comrade in pain. New research suggests that such mimicry helps people—especially women—more quickly grasp others’ emotional expressions. In their recent study Dutch psychologists Marille Stel of Leiden University and Ad van Knippenberg of Radboud University Nijmegen showed 62 research participants a series of photographs of faces, each for less than a tenth of a second....

The nascent industry of quantum communications could suffer a fatal blow if the U.S. enacts sweeping new regulations to provide wiretapping access to law enforcement. The weirdness of quantum mechanics makes it possible for two parties to share an encryption key and be sure that no one else can copy it. Any attempt to eavesdrop on the communication of the quantum key would irreversibly disturb its quantum state, thus revealing that the channel is being wiretapped....

Researchers are growing miniature organs in the laboratory to study how the new coronavirus ravages the body. Studies in these organoids are revealing the virus’s versatility at invading organs, from the lungs to the liver, kidneys and gut. Researchers are also experimenting with drugs in these mini tissues to see whether such therapies might be candidates to treat people. Physicians know from hospitalised patients and autopsies that SARS-CoV-2 can have a devastating effect on organs....

This time of year is always a somber one for NASA as the space agency remembers the astronauts who died in three horrific spaceflight disasters. Today (Jan. 27) marks the 50th anniversary of the first major, deadly disaster for the U.S. space program: the Apollo 1 fire. On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire erupted inside the Apollo command module during a preflight rehearsal test, killing three astronauts who were trapped inside....

On a clear November morning in 1964 the Royal Canadian Navy’s Cape Scott embarked from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a four-month expedition. Led by the late Stanley Skoryna, an enterprising McGill University professor, a team of 38 scientists onboard headed for Easter Island, a volcanic speck that juts out from the Pacific 2,200 miles west of Chile. Plans were afoot to build an airport on the remote island, famous for its mysterious sculptures of enormous heads, and the group wanted to study the people, flora and fauna while they remained largely untouched by modernity....