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This series of photographs explores why people chose to remain after nuclear disasters struck their locales and their lives afterward. They are excerpted from Would You Stay?, by Michael Forster Rothbart. TED Conferences, October 28, 2013. The 1986 nuclear meltdown and explosion at Chernobyl scattered radioactive fallout across 30 European countries. Yet in the regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, which suffered the worst contamination, the majority of the population stayed....

When fisheries biologist James Drymon noticed feathers in the vomit of a tiger shark, he first assumed they belonged to some unfortunate seabird: a gull, perhaps, or a pelican. But when he and his team genetically sequenced the feathers, the results surprised them: the quills came from a land-based songbird called a brown thrasher. So what was it doing in a tiger shark’s stomach in the Gulf of Mexico? Drymon, a researcher at Mississippi State University’s Coastal Research and Extension Center, and his colleagues sorted through the stomach contents of 105 juvenile tiger sharks between 2010 and 2018....

By Amy MaxmenResearchers have discovered a means of cell communication that may illuminate events ranging from embryo development to brain activity.A Norway-based team reported in the September 20 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that electrical signals can be transmitted between distant cells by means of nanotubes–ultrathin cables containing actin proteins–and that “gap junctions” are involved in the process. Gap junctions are proteins that form pores between two adjacent cells, and that can link animal cells directly....

Why Nature favors making left-handed proteins and right-handed carbohydrates is one of the great mysteries of life, as Sarah Everts explains in the May issue of Scientific American. By contrast, the manufacturing processes used by pharmaceutical companies are far less discriminating—typically producing right- and left-handed versions of the desired compounds in equal numbers. Such molecules are mirror images of each other. Each version consists of the same component atoms arranged in the same order, but the two versions, referred to as enantiomers by scientists, cannot be superimposed on each other....

Climate negotiators from around the world met yesterday for the first time since brokering the Paris climate deal to start filling in some of the gaps left in that landmark agreement. The midyear U.N. meeting in Bonn, Germany, was much lower-profile than the confab on the outskirts of the French capital in December. And the agenda was more mundane. “It’s going to be a very weird session,” outgoing U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change chief Christiana Figueres told ClimateWire last week on the margins of another international meeting in the Rhine River city....

“Visualize three tons of moldy bread.” It’s not the most appealing image, perhaps, but it’s a description of the moist mound of growth media tended by bioscientist Cliff Bradley and his partner, chemical engineer Bob Kearns at their biofuel facility in Butte, Mont., that could help cut ethanol costs at the fuel pump. Selected soil fungi that eat cellulose—the hard-to-digest, structural component of woody plants—thrive on the big pile of putrefaction from which Bradley and Kearns harvest certain powerful enzymes....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to the May 2014 issue of Scientific American Classics: The Birth of the Great GMO Debate. The idea of intentionally infecting a plant with a bacterium might seem strange. Just three decades ago, however, researchers discovered that they could use this infection to deliver new and potentially useful genes into crops. “What has long appeared to be simply the agent of a bothersome plant disease is likely to become a major tool for the genetic manipulation of plants: for putting new genes into plants and thereby giving rise to new varieties with desired traits,” announced acclaimed scientist Mary-Dell Chilton in 1983 in a pioneering article, one of many in this collection from the archives of Scientific American....

Editor’s Note: This feature was originally published in our January 1992 issue. We are posting it because of recent discussions of the connections between chaos and quantum mechanics. In 1917 Albert Einstein wrote a paper that was completely ignored for 40 years. In it he raised a question that physicists have only, recently begun asking themselves: What would classical chaos, which lurks everywhere in our world, do to quantum mechanics, the theory describing the atomic and subatomic worlds?...

By Stanley Carvalho ABU DHABI (Reuters) - A solar-powered aircraft successfully completed the first fuel-free flight around the world on Tuesday, returning to Abu Dhabi after an epic 16-month voyage that demonstrated the potential of renewable energy. The plane, Solar Impulse 2, touched down in the United Arab Emirates capital at 0005 GMT (0405 local time) on Tuesday. It first took off from Abu Dhabi on March 9, 2015, beginning a journey of about 40,000 km (24,500 miles) and nearly 500 hours of flying time....

All that lives and breathes on Earth owes its existence to the sun, that great power plant in the sky. But to what does the sun owe its existence? The process by which the sun and its fellow stars form, transforming a cold cloud of dust and gas to a nuclear fusion reactor that burns for billions of years, is reasonably well understood, thanks to ever more refined theoretical work supported by sophisticated computer simulations and detailed observations of star-forming regions in space....

Sleeping bag, check. Tent, check. Flashlight, check. Smart phone, check. A few years ago, the last item on this camping list would not have been included. But with a vast number of lifestyle, navigation and citizen science mobile apps available nowadays, why would you venture out into the wild without a useful set of tools right in the palm of your hand? With the camping season about to heat up in August and September, Scientific American has put together a list of six practical mobile apps for adventurers based on functionality, content, offline performance and user reviews....

In science fiction and fantasy tales, there is a long running fascination with the idea of dramatically diminishing or growing in stature. In the 1989 classic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis invents a device which accidentally shrinks both his own and the neighbor’s children down to a quarter-of-an-inch tall. Preceding this by more than 100 years, Lewis Carroll wrote about a little girl who, after tumbling down a rabbit hole, nibbles on some cake and then grows to massive proportions....

ONE WEDNESDAY MORNING an engineer named Marcus was called into his boss’s office. The manager thanked Marcus for his 30 years of service to the firm and handed him his pink slip. A security officer escorted Marcus back to his office to clean out his desk and then to the building’s exit. The same thing happened to 100 other engineers that day—the Dallas computer company they worked for laid them off without any notice and sent them on their way....

DANDONG, China—The coal burned in the Dandong Power Plant lights up the night all along the Chinese side of the Yalu River, as a rainbow of shifting illuminated patterns outlines the Friendship Bridge to North Korea, which disappears into darkness after crossing the border. And the smoke that billows out of the plant’s towering, candy-cane striped smokestack day and night includes nearly three metric tons of invisible carbon dioxide for every metric ton of coal burned, or more than 11,000 metric tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere on just one late autumn day....

As phones, computers and other electronics have grown ever smaller, their optical components have stubbornly refused to shrink. Notably, it is hard to make tiny lenses with traditional glass-cutting and glass-curving techniques, and the elements in a glass lens often need to be stacked to focus light properly. Engineers have recently figured out much of the physics behind much smaller, lighter alternatives known as metalenses. These lenses could allow for greater miniaturization of microscopes and other laboratory tools, as well as of consumer products, such as cameras, virtual-reality headsets and optical sensors for the Internet of Things....

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. – Weary of debating the causes of climate change, mayors and other elected officials of Virginia’s battered coastal regions gathered here last week and agreed that local impacts have become serious enough to present a case for state action. “We are here to ask for your assistance,” said Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim. “It’s a threat we can no longer afford to ignore.” So far, assistance from the state level has been paltry and grudging at best....

Here’s the swimwear for one of the most polluted waterways in America: a yellow-and-black dry suit, flippers, thick, black gloves, a green swimming cap with the hashtag #hope scrawled on it in black marker, goggles and ear plugs—plus a whole lot of water-repelling gel on your neck and face. That’s what Christopher Swain wrapped himself in before he plunged into the putrid Gowanus Canal on April 22, 2015. The 47-year-old is something of a professional swimmer of dirty waters, and he took to the Gowanus on Earth Day to highlight the need to clean it up....

This August’s production of Richard Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle in Hartford, Conn., has been postponed. Rather than hiring pit musicians, producer Charles M. Goldstein had intended to accompany the singers with sampled instrument sounds, played by a computer. Not a CD, not a synthesizer; the computer triggers the playback of individual notes (“samples”) originally recorded from real instruments. The reaction of professional musicians—and, of course, the musicians’ union—was swift and furious....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Imagine you’re strolling through a park and you overhear a middle-aged couple cooing over each other, doting over their “wittle sugar pwum” and “baby doll.” “Ewwww,” you might reflexively think. Baby talk is cute when grown-ups dote on babies. But when adults converse with each other? Not so much. Yet in my work as a communication sciences and disorders researcher, I’ve come across studies showing that as many as two-thirds of couples use romantic baby talk....

Everyone knows it’s no fun to be away from your significant other. Studies using anecdotal evidence have indicated that long-term separation from a romantic partner can lead to increased anxiety and depression as well as problems such as sleep disturbances. Now researchers are identifying the neurochemical mechanisms behind these behavioral and physiological effects. In a study published last fall, researchers showed that male prairie voles that had been separated from their female partners for four days—a much shorter amount of separation time than researchers had previously found to affect the voles’ physiology—exhibited depressionlike behavior and had increased levels of corticosterone, the rodent equivalent of the human stress hormone cortisol....