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The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

Narcissism has long gotten a bad rap. Its unseemly reputation dates back at least to ancient Greek mythology, in which the handsome hunter Narcissus (who undoubtedly would be gloating over his present-day fame) discovered his own reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it. Narcissus was so transfixed by his image that he died staring at it. In 1914 Sigmund Freud likened narcissism to a sexual perversion in which romantic attraction is directed exclusively to the self....

Computer viruses do not discriminate. Malware prowling the cybersphere for bank information and passwords does not distinguish between a home computer or a hospital machine delivering therapy to a patient. Even if a radiation therapy machine, say, is infiltrated unintentionally, malware could theoretically cause radiation doses to spike. Medical device-makers need to protect their products from cyber attack, according to recent draft guidance the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA calls for medical device manufacturers to consider the vulnerabilities that crop up when medical devices are designed to be more thoroughly integrated into networks and connected to the Internet....

The U.S. government’s partial shutdown is in its third week, and the pinch of the protracted standoff over funding for a wall along the country’s border with Mexico is starting to be felt—not only by workers missing paychecks, but also in terms of important science that is not getting done. About 800,000 workers have either been furloughed or, if their jobs are deemed essential to protecting lives and property, are working without pay across dozens of shuttered agencies and departments....

Microbes are tricky critters. Scientists long thought that antibiotics killed bacteria in diverse and specific ways—some prevented bacterial DNA from replicating; others impaired bacterial protein synthesis. Not so, said James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University. In 2007 he published findings that these targeted mechanisms were not the cause of bacterial death after all. His team’s study suggested that antibiotics kill by a common mechanism: they boost bacterial levels of molecules known as reactive oxygen species, which fatally corrode the organisms’ DNA....

By Thomas Escritt AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch authorities on Sunday said they had found the H5N8 strain of bird flu at a poultry farm in the central Netherlands, the same highly contagious strain as found this month in Germany and which has prompted massive poultry culls in Asia. Agricultural inspectors set about destroying the 150,000 chickens at the farm in the village of Hekendorp, and banned poultry transport across the whole of the Netherlands....

Performance usually improves with practice, but not if training is a rotten time. A new study shows that people’s ability to identify noises declines when the sounds are paired with putrid smells—a phenomenon that may allow our brain to detect danger more quickly. In a study published in May in Nature Neuroscience, neurobiologist Rony Paz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues exposed volunteers to auditory tones presented with no other stimuli or immediately followed by a rancid or fragrant odor delivered through a nose mask....

From the time it was approved in 1998, Genentech’s Herceptin–a drug in the vanguard of the first generation of so-called targeted therapeutics–has achieved an impressive track record for a subset of breast cancer patients. Some patients who take it live longer and the size of their tumors is kept under better control than if they had received standard chemotherapy alone. To develop Herceptin, researchers at Genentech drew on investigations into the molecular workings of a cancer cell....

Three years ago, Laura Gaither and her family spent their summer vacation in Panama City Beach, Florida. One afternoon, while rinsing sand off her feet, the 35-year-old Alabama resident felt something biting her legs and noticed tiny black bugs on her skin. Gaither brushed them away, and later, when she described the bites to local residents, they told her that she had likely been bitten by sand flies. Three of Gaither’s five kids had been bitten, too, but she didn’t worry....

Thick mucus that can drown the lungs of a child has long been the hallmark of cystic fibrosis. The hereditary disease affects 30,000 Americans, and patients die unless they receive treatment to clear their lungs. But new research suggests that this pulmonary view of cystic fibrosis is only half of the picture: a suite of symptoms associated with cystic fibrosis can also occur in patients who do not have lung disease at all, indicating that cystic fibrosis is really two diseases....

By Nicola JonesThis year was a busy one for meteorologists, as they tracked heat waves, monsoons, and winds carrying volcanic ash. Nicola Jones catches up with Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the UK Met Office in Exeter, Devon, about how natural disasters and extreme weather events over the past 12 months have changed what Britain’s national weather centre does.Was 2010 an unusual year?There was a whole host of natural disasters that were either caused by weather or affected by weather....

A new study has found that a regulatory gene that directs stem cells during normal brain development may also play a role in the growth of the most common form of primary brain cancer. Researchers at Harvard Medical School’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in this week’s issue of Neuron that Olig 2 is apparently a “gateway” gene to formation of malignant brain tumors known as gliomas. They say the discovery could lead to new therapies for this type of tumor, which strikes some 19,000 Americans a year....

The gut bacteria of obese mice unleash high levels of an acid that promotes liver cancer, reveals one of the first studies to uncover a mechanism for the link between obesity and cancer. The research is published today in Nature. “Obesity in general has many different types of cancer associated with it,” says Eiji Hara, a cancer biologist at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in Tokyo and one of the study authors....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Would you believe it’s possible to send someone a secret message secured with absolutely unbreakable encryption using only a bit of simple arithmetic? Well, it is—the solution is surprisingly simple and was used by British, German, and American spy agencies throughout World War II. Curious to know how it works?...

CANADA A new study models how a gigantic, morphing blob of liquid iron in Earth’s outer core underneath the Canadian Arctic is losing its grip on the North magnetic pole. A second, intensifying blob below Siberia is pulling the pole away. SCOTLAND A geologic-dating effort suggests the fossil of a millipedelike creature found on the island of Kerrera formed 425 million years ago, making it possibly the oldest-known fossilized land animal....

I moved my eyes, and I realized that I was asleep in bed. When I saw the beautiful landscape start to blur, I thought to myself, “This is my dream; I want it to stay!” And the scene reappeared. Then I thought to myself how nice it would be to gallop through this landscape. I got myself a horse … I could feel myself riding the horse and lying in bed at the same time....

Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” might need a little more revising — a newly discovered dinosaur species offers hints that feathers were much more common among the ancient beasts than once thought. Researchers unearthed hundreds of fossils of a new genus and species of plant-eating dinosaur called Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus in Siberia that sports both feathers and scales. The finding suggests that most dinosaurs had feathers, which they used for insulation or attracting mates, only later relying on the fringes for flight, according to a study detailed today (July 24) in the journal Science....

It is possible to flip every square of the board in 41 moves. I don’t know of any better solution. First imagine that the board is numbered (0,0) in the lower left hand corner, (7,0) in the upper left corner, and (7,7) in the upper right hand corner, when you orient the board playing black. (In fact the orientation doesn’t matter, but this way we can be concrete.) Drop the knight on (2, 2) and flip that square accordingly....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is set to review a drugmaker’s application for the first over-the-counter birth control pill in November 2022, with a decision expected in the first half of 2023. An approved over-the-counter hormonal birth control product would not require a prescription and would be considered self-care, defined as “the practice of individuals looking after their own health using the knowledge and information available to them....

SpaceX has scaled back the daring rocket-landing test that it plans to perform after it launches a space weather satellite today (Feb. 11). The private spaceflight company had intended to try landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on an “autonomous spaceport drone ship” in the Atlantic Ocean during today’s liftoff of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), which is scheduled to take place at 6:03 p.m. EST (2303 GMT) from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station....