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NASA will include a small, autonomous helicopter in the agency’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission, officials announced today (May 11). The craft will undergo a 30-day test campaign once it reaches the Red Planet to demonstrate the viability of travel above the Martian surface with a heavier-than-air craft. “NASA has a proud history of firsts,” NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement. “The idea of a helicopter flying the skies of another planet is thrilling....

Point to any one organ in the body, and doctors can tell you something about what it does and what happens if that organ is injured by accident or disease or is removed by surgery—whether it be the pituitary gland, the kidney or the inner ear. Yet like the blank spots on maps of Central Africa from the mid-19th century, there are structures whose functions remain unknown despite whole-brain imaging, electroencephalographic recordings that monitor the brain’s cacophony of electrical signals and other advanced tools of the 21st century....

A new analysis suggests that theropod dinosaurs such as T. rex shared another characteristic with their modern day bird descendants: their mode of breathing. Although some scientists have posited that the extinct creatures would have had lungs similar to those of today’s crocodiles and other reptiles, the results instead indicate that theropods used a more complex pulmonary system resembling that of living birds. Birds have a number of extra air sacs in their skeletons that supply their lungs with air and enhance their ability to exchange gases....

Get ready for a change of perspective when you read to Vlatko Vedral’s cover story, “Living in a Quantum World." “According to standard physics textbooks, quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world,” Vedral writes. And classical physics, in textbooks, “handles the largest of scales.” Not so, proclaims Vedral, who calls this idea “a myth.” Quantum effects are harder to observe in the macroworld because of decoherence. But in the past decade experimentalists have seen quantum behaviors persisting on a macroscopic scale—and these effects turn out to be as pervasive as they are profound....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Although most species of plants on Earth have flowers, the evolutionary origin of flowers themselves are shrouded in mystery. Flowers are the sexual organs of more than 360,000 species of plants alive today, all derived from a single common ancestor in the distant past. This ancestral plant, alive sometime between 250m and 140m years ago, produced the first flowers at a time when the planet was warmer, and richer in oxygen and greenhouse gases than today....

The manufacture of many chemicals important to human health and comfort consumes fossil fuels, thereby contributing to extractive processes, carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. A new approach employs sunlight to convert waste carbon dioxide into these needed chemicals, potentially reducing emissions in two ways: by using the unwanted gas as a raw material and sunlight, not fossil fuels, as the source of energy needed for production. This process is becoming increasingly feasible thanks to advances in sunlight-activated catalysts, or photocatalysts....

Baby Ezra is sitting on his mother’s lap and staring at the computer screen with the amazement of someone still new to the world. The five-month-old’s eyes rest on a series of pictures: three dancing women, four black circles, then a face among random objects. Ezra studies the screen with fascination—although now and then, his attention wanders. He lets out a gurgle, and moments later, a short cry. He is chewing a sock....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. For the past 10 months, Donald Trump has been a political enigma. Against the predictions of journalists, policy wonks and odds makers, a tabloid darling with no political experience and few coherent policies is now poised to be the Republican nominee for president. Hundreds of journalists and political scientists have tried to explain Trump’s appeal, suggesting reasons that range from the decline of White America to the rise of authoritarianism....

Highlander was a series of fantasy movies and also a television series about certain people who have the luck to be immortal. An immortal can die only if his or her head is chopped off. Shots to the heart or brain or any other normally sensitive body part heal in seconds. As a result the immortals hone their sword-fighting skills with great care. Each immortal acquires power by killing another immortal in a one-on-one duel....

When a blaze ignited Ohio’s Cuyahoga River on June 22, 1969, it wasn’t the first—or worst—time the notoriously filthy waterway had caught fire. But national media outlets seized on it as a stark example of the abysmal state of the nation’s waters after decades of unchecked industrial and sewage pollution. Coming at a time of growing public concern over the environment, the fire was one of many issues that spurred Congress to pass ambitious and bipartisan landmark legislation....

That success put Microsoft in the enviable position of waiting to see what Nintendo and Sony would offer in their next-generation consoles before taking the wraps off its next Xbox. Nintendo launched its Wii U, complete with a tablet-like game controller that doubles as a second screen, last November, well ahead of Microsoft and Sony in order to get a jump on rivals and boost its sagging console fortunes. But gamer interest has been tepid....

A common destination for ecotourists, the Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, home to Indigenous peoples and a high concentration of rare or endangered species, such as jaguars and giant armadillos. Small fires occur every year in the region, which sprawls over parts of western Brazil and extends into Bolivia and Paraguay. But 2020’s fires have been unprecedented in extent and duration, researchers say. So far, 22% of the vast floodplain—around 3....

October 1961 Is Bad Air Bad? “Is air pollution in fact a menace to public health? The first place to look for damage by unclean air would be the body surfaces exposed to air: the skin, which is hardy and mainly covered by clothing, and the respiratory passages, which are not covered at all. There is evidence that a commonplace disorder of the bronchial tubes and lungs—chronic bronchitis and emphysema—is showing an alarming increase in some places....

In 2014 mathematician Hannah Fry gave a TED talk where she presented the following set of equations that predicts the positivity of interactions between spouses: Though they look complex, the two equations predict how each spouse will respond to the other depending on their respective moods and influence over each other. The reasoning goes that more positive interactions will lead to a more positive marriage. Couples everywhere seemed to have a simple prescription: be more positive than negative, and you’ll have a better chance at success....

Time and again, we’ve heard the assertion that we’re attracted to partners who look like our parents. The, rather uncomfortable, theory was originally put forth more than a century ago by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud who dubbed it the Oedipus complex in males. An analogous theory proposed by Carl Jung is known as the Electra complex in females. The theories suggest that all boys between the ages of three and five sexually desire their mothers and that little girls covet their fathers....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Even a brief glimpse of Blade Runner 2049 takes you straight into Deckard’s world. Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece gets the colour palette just right, perfectly capturing the tone of the original. Achieving the look and feel of the original Blade Runner (1982) is essential because appearances, vision and eyes are key to both the experience and the story....

When you pass the Grey Poupon, you’re probably not thinking about nature’s defense systems. But mustard’s kick is not just for seasoning your sandwich, it’s a plant’s way of biting back. Recent research has found one reason why certain mustard plants carry these chemical compounds: in some environments a spicy taste may deter pests. Molecular and field biologists from Duke University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign have investigated why two populations of mustard plants from the same species produce distinctly different spicy flavors....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Several of you have written with questions about DHA, a type of Omega-3 fat that’s important for healthy brain function. We know that DHA is important for the development of a baby’s brain, both before and after birth. And lately, it’s been proposed as a possible treatment for ADHD and as a hedge against Alzheimer’s disease—two very different disorders that are both on the rise....

You can usually tell you’re starting to bore someone because their eyes will shift away from you and they’ll no longer return your gaze. Aligning pupils with someone might seem like an improbable way to signal to each other, but eye contact is one of the most important forms of nonverbal communication. We use eye contact every day to indicate interest while we listen and speak. Human eyes, with their large unpigmented areas, turn out to be great for deducing where someone is looking....

By Tom James (Reuters) - A crack that could create an iceberg the size of Delaware - and destabilize one of the largest ice shelves in the Antarctic - has branched out and begun to widen more quickly, a scientist said on Wednesday. The new fissure has turned toward the shelf’s ocean edge, potentially speeding up the iceberg’s process of breaking off, said Dan McGrath, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a project partner with UK-based monitoring group Project Midas, which reported on the new crack on Monday....