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Scalzi’s story—one of Scientific American’s “Recommended” titles for November—is a rollicking murder mystery, with meditations on disability politics and gender issues woven in. Many readers may not even notice, for instance, that the gender of Haden protagonist Chris is never revealed (pronouns for Chris are avoided throughout). Scientific American spoke to Scalzi about imagining this possible future and the parallels he sees to the real world. [An edited transcript of the conversation follows....

Although many people associate better cancer care with new treatments, advanced therapies are just one piece of the puzzle. Chatrick Paul, who oversees the U.S. oncology business at AstraZeneca, says the often-overlooked cancer care ecosystem is another. Through policy roundtables, an awards program and digital partnerships, Paul and his colleagues are building and supporting a nationwide community of healthcare professionals, policymakers and patient advocates dedicated to improving the lives of those affected by cancer....

“Crisis” is a strong word. Just a few weeks before this issue went to press, the U.S. and Iran seemed to be on the brink of war. So it might seem excessive to define a situation in which there is no danger to life or limb as a crisis. But in the world of cosmology, there may be no greater predicament than two divergent measurements of how fast the universe is expanding....

The Pacific island nation of Palau made waves in the ocean conservation world earlier this year with an announcement that they plan on turning their territorial waters into a no-take marine protected area. Part of the solution to supporting this project will rely on crowdfunding, a growing staple of fundraising. Palau’s waters are home to over 1,000 species of tropical fish, and their new national marine sanctuary will cover approximately 600,000 square kilometers, an area about the size of France or Texas....

Since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide (CO2) has been rising in the atmosphere due to human activities. Seasonal cycles mean that CO2 rises progressive throughout the fall and winter before peaking in late spring. At that point, a flurry of plant growth in the northern hemisphere — where most land is located — draws CO2 levels down over the summer before the cycle begins again. That process is made clear in the saw-toothed Keeling Curve, which shows ever rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere....

Over the past two decades, 20 natural disasters made worse by climate change have caused damage to countries worth 10% or more of their national output. In the most severe instance, the devastation Hurricane Maria brought to the tiny Caribbean country of Dominica in 2017 accounted for 260% of its gross domestic product. Two years earlier, Tropical Storm Erika caused damage worth 90% of Dominica’s GDP. The eye-popping figures illustrate just one of the threats a hotter, stormier world poses to sovereign debt and the global financial system that relies on it, according to a sprawling new report from a group of academics, environmentalists and financial analysts....

Climate change is doing more than warming the world’s oceans. It’s also making it harder for marine life to breathe. Curtis Deutsch, associate professor at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography, studies how increasing global temperatures are altering the levels of dissolved oxygen in the world’s oceans. Scientists have been warning that decreasing amounts of available oxygen will increase stress on a range of species, even as they also face the effects of rising temperatures and ocean acidification....

We do not notice many tasks that our brains perform, whereas we are completely aware of others. But it is sometimes hard for neuroscientists to determine when we are conscious of our actions. Now a group of British researchers is betting that betting can be used to study consciousness. Navindra Persaud, Peter McLeod and Alan Cowey of the University of Oxford were interested in situations in which people can show high levels of cognitive performance with no apparent awareness....

It was a clear violation of citizens’ rights—and about as quaint as a cold war spy movie. Nowadays governments have far more comprehensive ways of monitoring citizens than merely tapping computers on desktops or in briefcases. Hardly any of us still keep our private data solely in any one machine; instead it resides on corporate servers far from our homes. E-mail providers save messages in giant server farms distributed around the world....

To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov PublicAffairs, 2013 ($28.99) In his first book, The Net Delusion, published in 2011, Morozov showed how social media could be harnessed by authoritarian dictators just as effectively as freedom fighters. Here he turns his acerbic pen to the seductive hopes of the Silicon Valley do-gooders—those who claim that clever digital technologies will solve systemic problems of politics, policing and personal behavior....

Particle Fever by Anthos Media/PF Productions, Opens March 5 in New York City and March 21 in Washington, D.C. This documentary, directed by Mark Levinson, accessibly conveys both the science and the human drama behind the largest machine ever built—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva—and its crowning achievement, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. Viewers feel the physicists’ tension and excitement as the first particles circled the LHC’s underground tunnels in 2008, along with the researchers’ growing anticipation....

It’s commonly assumed that testosterone, that stereotypically male hormone, is intimately tied to violence. The evidence is all around us: weight lifters who overdose on anabolic steroids experience “roid rage,” and castration—the removal of the source of testosterone—has been a staple of animal husbandry for centuries. But what is the nature of that relationship? If you give a normal man a shot of testosterone, will he turn into the Incredible Hulk?...

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineTexas higher-education officials delivered a stern message to physicists yesterday that the state is likely to stick to plans to phase out ’low-performing’ physics programs within the next year or two if they cannot demonstrate compelling plans to improve.Members of the American Physical Society requested yesterday’s meeting with the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB) after announcements in recent weeks that nearly half of the 24 undergraduate physics programs at state funded universities could be on the chopping block if they fail to graduate at least 25 students every 5 years....

[12/13/06 Author’s Update: Last week’s announcement and publication of results on the discovery of evidence for current liquid water on Mars in the very shallow subsurface is extremely exciting news for planetary scientists and astrobiologists. As I discuss in the following article, abundant evidence from the recent rover and orbiter missions indicates that there was liquid water on Mars early in the planet’s history. The water may have been persistent and long-lived on and near the surface....

MESA, Arizona—Since the dawn of the space age NASA and other agencies have spent billions of dollars to reconnoiter Mars—assailing it with spacecraft flybys, photo-snapping orbiters and landers nose-diving onto its surface. The odds are good, many scientists say, for the Red Planet being an extraterrestrial address for alien life—good enough to sustain decades’ worth of landing very expensive robots to ping it with radar, zap it with lasers, trundle across its terrain and scoop up its dirt....

There have been books, movies, in-depth reports and a musical about the Titanic, so why not a video game? That’s what deep-sea ocean explorer David Gallo hopes for—not a game to best an opponent, but one to explore the world’s most famous shipwreck in ways never done before. Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, got hooked on the technology of exploration in 1987, two years after Bob Ballard and a French–U....

The farmland of central Illinois might rarely be at the forefront of controversial climate action—but its moment arrived last spring when a Decatur-based ethanol plant became one of the first of its kind to launch an ambitious strategy to combat global warming. It combines the production of biofuel with a special technology designed to capture the facility’s carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a fledgling version of a much bigger geoengineering strategy that some experts hope could reduce global emissions by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere....

A hurricane can destroy a coral reef. The fragile superstructure created by millions of marine microorganisms does not fare well when slammed by high winds and powerful waves. But coral reefs worldwide have bigger fish to fry, so to speak, most notably the bleaching brought on by warmer waters. In that case, it appears that hurricanes are actually a boon. Marine biologist Derek Manzello of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reviewed the water temperature records surrounding five coral reefs off the coast of Florida....

The 6TB helium-filled Ultrastar He6 from Western Digital subsidiary HGST.(Credit:Western Digital)There’s a new use in town for helium besides supercooling electromagnets at the Large Hadron Collider and making your voice sound freakishly high-pitched: improving the capacity and efficiency of hard drives.Western Digital on Monday announced that its HGST subsidiary has begun shipping the new 6-terabyte Ultrastar He6 hard drive, a model that seals the spinning disk platters inside a hermetic chamber filled with helium instead of air....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Bronze Age Aegean in the eastern Mediterranean encompassed several powerful entities: the Minoans on Crete; the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, and the Cypriots on Cyprus. These cultures are often examined separately, and thus the ample cross-cultural transmission between them is overlooked. Focussing on the Minoans and Mycenaeans, although they are often perceived as one following after the other, there were a few hundred years in which the dominance in the Aegean shifted from the Minoans to the Mycenaeans....