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When Alejandra was a 16-year-old teenager back in 2007, she had the aspirations of any girl her age. She attended an escuela secundaria in Medellín, one of Colombia’s largest cities. Schoolwork was interspersed with as many hours as she could squeeze in hanging out with friends at favorite haunts throughout the city. Then her mother, Yolanda, started to lose her memory. The quiet but conscientious woman would say hello to a visitor and, moments later, would repeat the same greeting again—then again....

“Each time you think you are unveiling the truth, all you get is a teasing glimpse of what turns out to be yet another veil,” wrote Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran in their February/March Illusions column [“Stability of the Visual World”]. Their words eloquently capture the stubborn persistence of researchers as they grapple with seemingly impenetrable mysteries of the mind. Along the same lines, articles in the issue discussed the struggle to understand how mental imagery forms [“Picture This,” by Thomas Grueter], how sexuality can vary [“Do Gays Have a Choice?...

What are ‘bath salts’ and are they bringing on a zombie apocalypse? Of course not, but join Scientific American blogger Cassie Rodenberg at noon EDT today (Wednesday, June 13) to discuss the chemistry of this new class of recreational drugs and why it has been associated recently with unusual forms of violence. CHAT TRANSCRIPT Robin Lloyd Welcome everyone to our 30-minute live chat today with Scientific American blogger Cassie Rodenberg....

Dawson City, Yukon—After revving up with a roar, a core drill designed to punch holes in concrete begins digging into ice more than 100,000 years old. Here in the Klondike, the drill serves as a kind of gas-powered, handheld time machine, bringing up frozen earth from the Pleistocene, when mammoths and other megafauna once ruled. In a land where miners still hunt for gold, paleomammalogist Ross Mac­Phee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and his colleagues seek a different kind of treasure—DNA from extinct titans....

MAKING NOISE Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man Once upon a time, humans could not hold conversations or sing songs together. Now we chatter incessantly, not only with speech but also through text messages, tweets and status updates. How we transformed into the highly social species we are today remains the subject of many theories. Two competing hypotheses center on whether our capacity for language is an innate skill that grew stronger through natural selection or whether we lacked any such ability and instead trained our brains to collect new information using objects and sounds in our environment....

The catastrophic damage wreaked by a rogue protein involved in Parkinsons’ disease has been tracked by researchers, in work that might help to reinvigorate an old treatment strategy to slow the condition. A team led by Virginia Lee, a neurobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, injected a misfolded synthetic version of the protein α-synuclein into the brains of normal mice and saw the key characteristics of Parkinson’s disease develop and progressively worsen....

A NASA mission that will send a probe to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa recently passed a critical stage on its long journey to the Jovian system. Europa is one of a handful of locations in the solar system that scientists think could host an environment fit for life. Beneath an ice layer about 10 to 15 miles (15-25 kilometers) thick, the moon is thought to harbor a liquid water ocean, possibly warmed by geologic processes originating in the planet’s core....

Want to lose weight but lack the willpower to just say no to fatty foods and sweets? Help may be on the way. The first clinical trials of an experimental weight-loss drug show that it helps curb appetite—and burn more fat—even at low doses. [See update at the end of this story.] Researchers report in the journal Cell Metabolism that taranabant, developed by drug giant Merck, is the second drug found to be successful in fighting flab by blocking cannabinoid receptors (responsible for the psychological effects of marijuana a....

Despite the most scrupulous planning, wildland firefighters can suddenly find themselves encircled by unpredictable flames reaching nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Unable to escape, they have no choice but to hunker down inside fire shelters—reflective, foil-like mini tents—and hope the flames pass over them quickly. In the summer of 2013, 19 firefighters deployed their standard-issue shelters in Yarnell Hill, Ariz.—but the conflagration proved too much, and none of them survived. After learning of the tragedy, scientists at the NASA Langley Research Center set out to build a better shelter....

Once locked in an arms race with each other for the fastest supercomputers, US national laboratories are now banding together to buy their next-generation machines. On November 14, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that they will each acquire a next-generation IBM supercomputer that will run at up to 150 petaflops. That means that the machines can perform 150 million billion floating-point operations per second, at least five times as fast as the current leading US supercomputer, the Titan system at the ORNL....

People with depression encounter a lot of pharmaceutical frustration. For largely unknown reasons, roughly one in three patients receive no benefit from any antidepressant. A recent study, however, suggests that something as simple as over-the-counter painkillers could play a role. Ibuprofen, aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs may disrupt the action of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the most commonly prescribed type of antidepressant. Antidepressants alter brain chemistry. SSRIs increase the amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the space between brain cells....

It’s not easy to make a planet. You start with a disk of gas and dust swirling around a newborn star. Grains of rock and minerals in the disk somehow clump together and eventually grow into an entire world. But exactly how dust particles stick together had long perplexed scientists. Electrostatic forces would build pebble-size clumps, similar to how dust bunnies form under a couch. But that process peters out at larger scales, where bigger objects bounce or shatter rather than sticking together when they collide....

By Nick Carey and Kim PalmerCHICAGO/CLEVELAND, Ohio (Reuters) - A blast of Arctic air gripped the vast middle of the United States on Monday with the coldest temperatures in two decades causing at least four deaths, forcing businesses and schools to close and canceling thousands of flights.Shelters for the homeless were overflowing due to the severe cold described by some meteorologists as the “polar vortex” and dubbed by media as the “polar pig....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. When my twins were born prematurely (common for twins) at 35 weeks, they unfortunately spent two weeks in the NICU before we had the opportunity to take them home. Instructions given to us upon discharge were to avoid bottled water for any supplemental formula feeding, and to instead use tap water due to potential bacterial overgrowth in bottled water....

In late summer Candice Davis and her brother, Starr, returned to South Philadelphia from a trip to Mexico, and Davis quickly knew that something was wrong. Both she and Starr felt ill, and both subsequently tested positive for COVID-19. But Starr, who had been immunized, experienced only mild flulike symptoms and felt better within a few days. For his unvaccinated sister, a nightmare began to unfold. Candice, age 30, quarantined for two days but soon noticed that things were worsening....

In recent years scientists have made synthetic versions of key parts of the cell, such as chromosomes and ribosomes. Now researchers have developed the first working artificial prototype of an “organ” of a human cell—the Golgi apparatus. Made up of a network of sacs piled together like a stack of pancakes, the Golgi apparatus chemically modifies proteins to help make them stable and functional, and it helps to manufacture complex sugars....

How pleasurable and desirable does this image of chocolate cake appear to you? Research has shown that the more tempting this cake looks to you, the greater the chances you’ll take a bite of real cake, followed by another bite, and another. Before you know it, you may eventually find yourself like 34% of U.S. adults – obese. But what if I told you that viewing this picture as not rewarding enough might also lead you down the path to obesity?...

At the dark bottom of our cool oceans, 85 percent of the earth’s volcanic eruptions proceed virtually unnoticed. Though unseen, they are hardly insignificant. Submarine volcanoes generate the solid underpinnings of all the world’s oceans massive slabs of rock seven kilometers thick. Geophysicists first began to appreciate the smoldering origins of the land under the sea, known formally as ocean crust, in the early 1960s. Sonar surveys revealed that volcanoes form nearly continuous ridges that wind around the globe like seams on a baseball....

As early as 1.8 million years ago Roasted meat Fire-kissed food is easier to digest and more nutritious than raw food is. Some anthropologists, such as Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, argue that cooking was the essential step that allowed early humans to develop the big brains characteristic of Homo sapiens. 30,000 years ago Bread Agriculture began around 12,000 years ago, but early Europeans were baking bread many thousands of years before that time....

A competition sponsored in 1913 by Scientific American asked for essays on the 10 greatest inventions. The rules: “our time” meant the previous quarter century, 1888 to 1913; the invention had to be patentable and was considered to date from its “commercial introduction.” Perception is at the heart of this question. Inventions are most salient when we can see the historical changes they cause. In 2013 we might not appreciate the work of Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison on a daily basis, as we are accustomed to electricity in all its forms, but we are very impressed by the societal changes caused by the Internet and the World Wide Web (both of which run on alternating-current electricity, by the way)....