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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 nuclear fission? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? Whenever there is a discussion about nuclear power, the question arises about the sustainability of the uranium supply. Critics observe that resources are limited and, at present consumption rates, would be depleted in 50 to 100 years....

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - BMW will start delivering imported electric cars in China in September, with pre-orders indicating short supplies in a market that could become the world’s biggest for green vehicles, China president Karsten Engel said on Wednesday. The German premium automaker will sell its all-electric powered BMW i3 sedan and plug-in hybrid i8 sports car in four Chinese cities initially, with a sales cap of 1,000 vehicles this year, Engel said....

It took just a few decades for computers to evolve from room-size vacuum tube–based machines that cost as much as a house to cheap chip-powered desktop models with vastly more processing power. Similarly, the days of “personal robots”—inexpensive machines that can help out at home or the office—may be closer than we think. But first, says Alexander Stoytchev, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University in Ames, robots have to be taught to do something we know instinctively: how to learn....

Going against conventional wisdom, Regine Gries let the bedbugs bite. A lot. The biologist let the pests in her laboratory feast on the blood in her forearms—to the tune of some 180,000 bites—in the name of science. In doing so, she’s helped discover a previously unidentified bedbug pheromone that could help identify and fight future infestations. When bedbugs move into a building, eradicating them is an expensive process fraught with anxiety and frustration....

Another skeleton with a perfect skull!” i shouted to the team, all of whom were face down on the quarry floor exposing other skeletons. In the years I had spent as a paleontologist, never had I seen anything like this. Our team of fossil hunters had been prospecting for only 15 days in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia, but already we had uncovered a veritable graveyard of intact fossils. Over the next few weeks we would apply chisel, pickax and bulldozer to the site, digging up more than a dozen examples of an ostrichlike dinosaur that was to become one of the most well known in the dinosaur world....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has undercounted nearly 8 million homes and businesses that face substantial risk of flooding, placing more Americans in jeopardy from coastal storms, rising rivers and flash flooding, according to a new analysis from the nonprofit First Street Foundation. The findings, based on advanced modeling of flood conditions under current and projected climate scenarios, show that FEMA’s estimates of properties with a 1% flood risk—meaning a property that’s expected to see major flooding once every 100 years—could be far too conservative....

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the term “social distancing” has been at the center of public conversation, but this phrase is a bit of a misnomer. Taken literally, the phrase seems to endorse social separation. But it’s not “social” distance we are trying to promote. It’s physical separation. In fact, preserving social ties—even at a distance—is essential for both mental and physical health. The results of epidemiological meta-analyses, for example, indicate that a lack of social support is on par with smoking cigarettes as a risk factor for morbidity and mortality and is even more harmful than other stressors, such as obesity and air pollution....

Scientists in London have been granted permission to edit the genomes of human embryos for research, UK fertility regulators announced today. The approval on February 1 by the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) represents the world’s first endorsement of such research by any national regulatory authority. “It’s an important first. The HFEA has been a very thoughtful, deliberative body that has provided rational oversight of sensitive research areas, and this establishes a strong precedent for allowing this type of research to go forward,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Children’s Hospital Boston in Massachusetts....

The argument over whether intelligence is innate or environmentally influenced has raged for more than a century. One of the most recent issues in the nature versus nurture debate is the effect of breast-feeding on IQ. Research shows that the fatty acids in human milk may influence brain development. Using that data as a springboard, a group of scientists, led by a team at the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, set out to determine how the makeup of infants interacts with their mothers’ milk to affect intelligence....

Key Concepts Physics Air pressure Water pressure Surface tension Introduction Did you know that at sea level there are about 15 pounds of air pressing on each square inch of your body? This air is very helpful in our daily lives. For example, the layer of air around the earth helps to keep it from getting too cold or hot. It can even help keep a bottle with holes in it leak-free!...

In the winter of 1997 Carver Mead lectured on an unusual topic for a computer scientist: the nervous systems of animals, such as the humble fly. Mead, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, described his earlier idea for an electronic problem-solving system inspired by nerve cells, a technique he had dubbed “neuromorphic” computing. A quarter-century later, researchers have designed a carbon-based neuromorphic computing device—essentially an organic robot brain—that can learn to navigate a maze....

An uncharted trawl through thousands of small molecules involved in the body’s metabolism may have uncovered a potential route to treating pain caused by nerve damage. Neuropathic pain is a widespread and distressing condition, and is notoriously difficult to treat. So Gary Siuzdak, a chemist and molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and his team decided to take an unusual route to finding a therapy. Their results are published today in Nature Chemical Biology....

This boat ride on Lake Constance, or the Bodensee as it is locally known, was part of the last day’s activities of the 61st annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany. It was tough to swing Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger’s possibly dead cat in the tiny seaside resort town all week and not hit one of the 23 Nobelists who had come to deliver lectures and advice to some 600 young researchers from all over the world....

(Adds detail on water tests) By Edward McAllister NEW YORK, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Tank cars from a derailed oil train were still on fire in West Virginia on Wednesday, two days after an explosive accident in which 25 cars went off the rails, a CSX Corp spokeswoman said. Twenty cars caught fire after Monday’s derailment in the small town of Mount Carbon 33 miles (54 km) southeast of Charleston. “We still have some fires on and near tank cars,” CSX railroad spokeswoman Melanie Cost said, without giving an exact number....

Our Milky Way is just one of many billions of galaxies that dot the cosmos—an ordinary spiral in a universe filled with them. The unspecialness of our corner of space, an idea known as the Copernican principle, is a cornerstone of modern cosmology. But it doesn’t mean that the Milky Way has to be totally average in every respect. Among the more than 20 satellite galaxies that hover around the Milky Way in a kind of galactic entourage are two large satellites known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds....

Plants cannot run or hide, so they need other strategies to avoid being eaten. Some curl up their leaves; others churn out chemicals to make themselves taste bad if they sense animals drooling on them, chewing them up or laying eggs on them—all surefire signals of an attack. New research now shows some flora can detect an herbivorous animal well before it launches an assault, letting a plant mount a preemptive defense that even works against other pest species....

In an era when partisan squabbling threatens to bring the U.S. government to a halt, one of America’s most successful global health programs, begun under President George W. Bush in 2005, is about to enter a second phase. Known as the President’s Malaria Initiative, or PMI, the program is considered by many to be one of the best run and most effective of the U.S.’s worldwide health efforts. The initiative is one of the largest players in the international effort to combat malaria, which kills more than half a million people a year....

Centuries after its invention, the microscope continues to prove that it is not only crucial to science but can also produce works of art—a feat acknowledged each year by the Nikon Small World Award, a competition in which the famous photographic brand recognizes what judges consider the most interesting and beautiful scientific images. Microscopic pictures of an insect, a 273 million-year-old rock and a culture of human neurons are among the 2016 winners....

AS MAXIMS GO, Time is relative may not be quite as famous as Time is money. But the notion that time speeds up or slows down depending on how fast one object is traveling relative to another surely ranks as one of Albert Einstein’s most inspired insights. The term time dilation was coined to describe the slowing of time caused by motion. And to illustrate the effect of time dilation, he proposed an example–the twin paradox–that is arguably the most famous thought experiment in relativity theory....

By Katie Knapp Schubert OMAHA Neb. (Reuters) - A surgeon from Sierra Leone being treated for Ebola in a Nebraska hospital on Saturday was critically ill after being airlifted back from Africa, medical officials said. Dr. Martin Salia, 44, a permanent U.S. resident, caught the disease while working as a surgeon in a Freetown hospital, according to his family. Doctors at the Nebraska hospital said his condition was extremely critical. He had been stable enough to take a flight from West Africa to Omaha but was too sick to walk off the plane, medical officials said....