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Megan McPhee, an assistant research professor at the University of Montana–Missoula’s Flathead Lake Biological Station reels in an answer for this query. There are two general explanations for how a fish species might end up in different lakes separated by hundreds of miles. The first is termed “vicariance” by biogeographers, who study the distribution of organisms. In this case, we begin with a species that occupies a much larger, continuous range....

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)” by saying that “if there’s going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now.” Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history....

In the field of conservation, success stories about saving individual species abound. Bald eagles have recovered from their bout with the pesticide DDT; from fewer than 500 breeding pairs in 1963, the population in the lower 48 states has grown to nearly 10,000 breeding pairs, such that they are no longer listed even as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Gray wolves have returned to Yellowstone National Park, as well as to the Italian and French Alps....

For people who face frequent needle jabs to treat chronic conditions, a new technology is on the horizon that might make treatment a lot less painful. Researchers report that a new wirelessly controlled microchip, implanted under the skin, can safely and reliably give osteoporosis patients the daily dose of a drug that they need for at least 20 days in a row. The findings were presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Vancouver and published online Thursday in Science Translational Medicine....

What if flipping a light switch could jump-start your thinking? Or if giving a friend a sugary snack could make them “sweeter” company? These situations may sound bizarre, but some psychologists suspect that our physical experiences—what we see, smell, touch, taste and hear—profoundly influence our mental states. In Sensation, psychologist Lobel explores the theory of embodied cognition, which posits that our body can direct our mind just as much as our mind directs our body....

It turns out the velvet worm family is more diverse than thought: A new species has been found in the jungles of Vietnam. Unlike related velvet worms, this species has uniquely shaped hairs covering its body. It reaches a length of 2.5 inches (6 centimeters), said Ivo de Sena Oliveira, a researcher at the University of Leipzig, Germany, who along with colleagues describes the species in Zoologischer Anzeiger (A Journal of Comparative Zoology)....

US researchers have made molecular sieving fibers that open up new possibilities for large scale chemical separations that use much less energy than conventional distillation methods. Sankar Nair and his Georgia Institute of Technology team have shown their metal–organic framework (MOF)-lined fibers can perform similarly to distillation in separating propylene and propane. That’s the same post-cracking raw mixture that the majority of the 77 million tons of propylene produced in 2011 was distilled from....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the 1999 book The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos. The most amazing thing about R2-D2 (Artoo) and C-3PO (Threepio) is how human they seem. They each have strong personalities, and they constantly convey emotions. Threepio is a worrier and a whiner. He seems constantly irritated, often venting his emotions by insulting Artoo, calling him an “overweight glob of grease” and other colorful insults....

On an ice-cold day in January, clinical psychologist Emily Holmes picked up a stack of empty diaries and went down to Stockholm’s central train station in search of refugees. She didn’t have to look hard. Crowds of lost-looking young people were milling around the concourse, in clothes too flimsy for the freezing air. “It struck me hard to see how thin some of the young men were,” she says. Holmes, who works at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, was seeking help with her research—a pilot project on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is all too common in refugees....

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant Viking, 2016 ($27; 336 pages) When economist Michael Housman wanted to understand why some customer service agents performed better than others, he considered scores of variables and found one in particular that distinguished those with happier customers and higher sales: the browser they used. Agents using Firefox and Chrome consistently outperformed agents using Internet Explorer on a number of measures—but not for reasons that had anything to do with the browsers themselves....

MUSEUMS/EXHIBITIONS Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum In 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe, three British art students rebelled against the formalities of the British Academy and sought to follow a Romantic ideal of responsible freedom. Their goal was to express novel ideas, their muse was to be Nature, and they derived their artistic technique from principles they felt had lost integrity following the rise in influence of Renaissance painter Raphael....

BOSTON—Thousands of protestors rallied Sunday in Boston’s Copley Square, outraged over Pres. Donald Trump’s order blocking immigrants from seven largely Muslim countries from entering the U.S. Protests broke out in city centers and airports across the country. The one in Boston—an academic hub for institutions including Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University—was among the largest. After Trump issued the executive order on Friday, federal judges in Boston, New York City and several other locations issued temporary rulings during the weekend in attempt to curb it....

Discarded electronics are piling up fast, pushing researchers to explore creative ways to reduce this e-waste. Now one team has crafted a water-activated disposable battery made of paper and other sustainable materials. The wires, screens and batteries that make up our devices—not to mention the plastic, metal and other materials that encase them—are filling up landfills with hazardous debris. Some e-waste is relatively large: old flip phones and air conditioners, for instance....

The moon is the final resting ground for scads of landed and crashed spacecraft, many of which have been pinpointed recently by sleuthing scientists. Using observations by NASA’s sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for example, researchers have located and imaged Apollo moon landing leftovers, old Soviet-era spacecraft and, more recently, the impact locales of NASA’s twin Grail spacecraft that were deliberately driven into a mountain near the moon’s north pole. But the search is ongoing to find the exact location of several pioneering moon landers....

On an unseasonably warm February morning, Mark Pierson takes a 20-minute drive to one of Minneapolis’s larger pet shops. Pierson, a researcher in an immunology laboratory at the University of Minnesota, often comes here to buy mice, so most of the staff know him. Today he asks for ten, and an employee fishes them out of a glass box. Pierson requests the smaller mice because they’re typically younger, but he isn’t too picky....

For a long time the smallest motor in the world was 200 nanometers across. That’s really small, about one-fortieth the size of a red blood cell. Charles Sykes and his team at Tufts University have now crushed that rec­ord. Their motor is just a single molecule, one nanometer across. Unlike other, bigger motors, this one isn’t driven by chemical reactions or light—it runs on electricity. “A lot of designs have been proposed,” says Johannes Seldenthuis, a researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, “but this has really been the first one that’s actually worked....

It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Of course, many experiences in daily life reflect the physical stimuli that send signals to the brain. But the same neural machinery that interprets inputs from our eyes, ears and other sensory organs is also responsible for our dreams, delusions and failings of memory....

The title of this issue is a bit misleading. A fully explanatory and complete title would have gone something like: “Scientists Confirm Long-Standing Theory of Sun’s Power, but As with All Science, Many Questions Remain and New Ones Are Revealed.” Exhaustive, yes. Catchy? No. Though when it comes to attention-grabbing-if-slightly-truncated headlines, this one still holds water. As reporter Davide Castelvecchi reports, astrophysicists have long hypothesized that a small amount of the sun’s energy is generated by a particular reaction involving carbon and nitrogen in the star’s core, and can be detected by neutrino emissions (see “Neutrinos Reveal Final Secret of Sun’s Nuclear Fusion”)....

If knowledge is power, scientists should easily be able to influence the behavior of others and world events. Researchers spend their entire careers discovering new knowledge—from a single cell to the whole human, from an atom to the universe. Issues such as climate change illustrate that scientists, even if armed with overwhelming evidence, are at times powerless to change minds or motivate action. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, people in the U....

In an apparent disappointment for President Trump, the Danish government has made it clear: Greenland is not for sale. The Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday that Trump had repeatedly expressed an interest in buying the semiautonomous Danish territory and that he had encouraged aides to look into the possibility. By Friday, officials in Greenland and Denmark had rebuffed the idea, stating that Greenland is open for trade but cannot be bought....