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Toyota’s flagship gas-electric hybrid sedan Prius represents the epitome of the emerging “green car” category in the mind of the buying public. Although hybrids are still only a blip on the automobile sales charts, the market-leading model has been the most effective tool in the car industry’s effort to wrap itself in an eco-friendly cloak. But even with the success of this niche market, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and BMW have mostly remained on the sidelines, unconvinced of the hybrid’s practicality and marketability....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In the lead-up to the launch of the twin Voyager spacecraft in 1977, NASA’s engineers faced a tough question: When the probes arrived at Jupiter and Saturn, how would they transmit color photos back to Earth using roughly the power of a light bulb? It was a task that called for extreme parsimony: Each image would have to be converted into a series of 24-bit binary sequences, called “codewords,” and blipped into space via radio waves that signified each 1 or 0 by the position of their peaks and troughs....

What exactly is Harvard theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb doing co-founding a $1.755-million academic effort to look for UFOs? In July 2021 Loeb revealed the Galileo Project, which aims to develop an artificial-intelligence-powered network of telescopes that can search for evidence of technological alien civilizations on or near Earth. The project has received mixed criticism from outside researchers, who maintain that although there is no harm in at least looking for such things in a rigorous manner, the possibility of finding anything seems slim....

Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of solar power (particularly solar thermal)? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? The biggest obstacles are ability to scale, long-term reliability and interruptibility due to clouds and the daily solar cycle....

For the past two decades, astronomers have been testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity using an exquisite celestial laboratory located thousands of light-years away, in the direction of the Southern Cross constellation. Discovered in 1999, this laboratory consists of two stellar heavyweights locked in an elaborate orbital dance: a white dwarf—a slowly cooling Earth-sized cinder left behind by an evaporating star—twirling around a pulsar called PSR J1141-6545—a rapidly spinning, ultradense, city-sized neutron star produced by a cataclysmic supernova explosion....

Determining turtle hatchlings’ sexes is a challenging but critical task. For many species the embryo’s sex development depends on environmental temperatures, and rising heat is producing overabundances of females and shortages of males. Unchecked, this mismatch could push some species toward extinction. To save them, “you have to really understand where the problems lie,” says Jeanette Wyneken, a biologist at Florida Atlantic University and senior author on a new study on the topic, published in March in Scientific Reports....

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 Former nasa roboticist Munroe has gained a cult following for his witty science-themed Web comic xkcd. Here, with drawings, math and logical reasoning, he answers strange and intriguing questions submitted by online readers, such as “If someone’s DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?” and “How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge capable of carrying traffic from London to New York?...

From Nature magazine After more than three decades on the brink of extinction, the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) — the largest and most threatened wild bird species in the United States — is making a modest recovery, thanks to intensive captive breeding and medical intervention. But troubling data reported this week suggest that unless hunters change their practices, the condor will require extensive support in perpetuity if it is to survive in the wild....

The operators of a US$2-billion dark-matter experiment aboard the International Space Station are striving to figure out how to keep three crucial cooling pumps working after the failure of a fourth last year. The glitch raises the most serious concerns yet about whether the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which probes cosmic rays for signs of dark matter being annihilated in deep space, will last until the space station’s planned retirement in 2024....

Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Now available on iPad MEDICAL ETHICS • In an expose of drug-industry influence on research, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN traces the flow of money from drug companies to scientists and faults funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health for failing to police conflicts of interest....

As San Diego and Los Angeles have grown, the scrub land of southern California has been paved and built over. That has squeezed out the Quino checkerspot butterfly’s habitat, and with the climate changes coming as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions, its listing as an endangered species by the U.S. government may not be enough to save the pretty little butterfly from extinction. But a group of biologists suggest in this week’s Science that simply moving the butterfly into similar habitat in nearby mountain ranges might solve the problem by overcoming the unnatural barriers humans have erected in the path of any potential shift in its natural range to follow such changing conditions....

Dinosaurs ruled the earth during the Jurassic period. But first, they had to make it through the end of the world. Most geologists suspect enormous volcanic eruptions were to blame for the mass extinction event at the end of the preceding Triassic period. This cataclysm spewed huge amounts of gases that geologists suspect altered the global climate and led to the extinction of nearly 80 percent of life on the planet—though the dinosaurs somehow survived and later thrived....

In March, as coronavirus widened its global sweep, one health statistic quickly flattened: influenza cases. In the Southern Hemisphere, flu season would have been just taking off, but cases were virtually nonexistent. “Never in my 40-year career have we ever seen rates … so low,” says Greg Poland, an influenza expert at the Mayo Clinic. Although researchers need to study the reasons further, several told Scientific American that coronavirus prevention measures—handwashing, mask wearing and social distancing—are working against flu transmission....

Few harbingers of old age are clearer than the sight of gray hair. As we grow older, black, brown, blonde or red strands lose their youthful hue. Although this may seem like a permanent change, new research reveals that the graying process can be undone—at least temporarily. Hints that gray hairs could spontaneously regain color have existed as isolated case studies within the scientific literature for decades. In one 1972 paper, the late dermatologist Stanley Comaish reported an encounter with a 38-year-old man who had what he described as a “most unusual feature....

Electronic pacemakers can be lifesaving for people with abnormal or slow heart rhythms, but not everyone who needs a pacemaker is able to have an electronic device implanted in their heart. Now, in experiments in pigs, researchers have come up with a new method for making a “biological pacemaker” that might one day serve as an alternative to electronic ones, the researchers said. Making this pacemaker involves injecting a gene into heart muscle cells, which transforms these normal heart cells into special cells that can initiate a heartbeat....

Marijuana is more popular and accessible in the U.S. than any other street drug. In national surveys, 48 percent of Americans say they have tried it, and 6.5 percent of high school seniors admit to daily use. So it was not too surprising when two states, Washington and Colorado, became the first to legalize recreational marijuana in the November 2012 general election, albeit in limited quantity, for anyone over the age of 21....

Physicists have known how to levitate water for more than 260 years. They just figured out how to levitate ice, too. By pushing a well-known physics phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect to the extreme, a group of researchers at Virginia Tech caused frozen disks of ice to hover over a hot aluminum surface. Outside of the lab, they say, engineers could harness the effect to create stronger metals or even fight wildfires....

THE AESTHETIC APPEAL of symmetry is obvious whether you are a child playing with a kaleidoscope or a Great Mogul emperor building the Taj Mahal as a monument to eternal love. That preference, as it turns out, greatly shapes how we see the world when items are in motion. More on that shortly. In the natural, as opposed to man-made, world, symmetry—whether we see it in prey, predator, mate or mother—serves as an early-alert system, drawing your attention....

By Ian Simpson WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - A U.S. Navy tug missing since 1921 has been discovered sunk off San Francisco, officials said on Wednesday, solving a nearly century-old maritime mystery. The wreck of the USS Conestoga was found near one of the Farallones Islands about 30 miles (50 km) west of San Francisco, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Navy said in a statement. “After nearly a century of ambiguity and a profound sense of loss, the Conestoga’s disappearance no longer is a mystery,” said NOAA Deputy Administrator Manson Brown....

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, issued yesterday, concludes that creating a nationwide infrastructure for electric vehicles appears to be a bigger challenge than producing affordable batteries to power the cars. The report, authored by professors Ernest Moniz and John Deutch, summarizes an MIT symposium last year on the electric vehicle. Symposium participants generally agreed that a comprehensive federal policy to limit carbon emissions would be the most effective boost for electric vehicle development, stimulating steadily growing consumer purchases and moving the United States toward low-carbon or carbon-free generation of electricity to charge the cars....