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This is the first of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters. As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab....

Some children with autism carry rare mutations in DNA segments that flank genes and control their expression—and they tend to inherit these mutations from their unaffected fathers, according to a study published today in Science1. The finding is unexpected because most studies implicate mutations inherited from mothers in autism risk. For this reason, some experts are skeptical of the results. The study is the largest yet to explore how mutations outside of genes contribute to autism: It is based on an analysis of 9,274 whole genomes....

A new study published in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association reveals a variety of recent health trends in the U.S., including a detailed breakdown of data at the state level. A group of researchers called the U.S. Burden of Disease Collaborators completed the study as part of an annual assessment known as the “Global Burden of Disease” (GBD) analysis. The GBD represents an ongoing effort by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to quantify health disparities—part of an effort toward improving health systems around the world....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. “Whatever dressing one gives to mushrooms…they are not really good but to be sent back to the dungheap where they are born.” French philosopher Denis Diderot thus dismissed mushrooms in 1751 in his “Encyclopedie.” Today his words would be dismissed in France, where cooks tuck mushrooms into crepes, puff pastry and boeuf Bourguignon (beef Burgundy), to name just a few dishes....

Excerpted from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness and Recovery, by Sam Kean. Copyright © 2014 by Sam Kean. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Co.; all rights reserved. It is possible to take the idea of left/right differences within the brain too far: it’s not like one side of the brain talks or emotes or recognizes faces all by itself while the other one just sits there twiddling its neurons....

Calpine Corp. is poised to build the first U.S. power plant with federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions in California after clearing a final regulatory hurdle today. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District granted the Houston-based utility its final air quality permit today, allowing the company to proceed with the planned construction of a 600-megawatt natural gas-fired Russell City Energy Center. The 15-acre project site is in Hayward, just east of the San Francisco Bay....

An immunization campaign in West Africa has shown that vaccines can be delivered to remote areas without using ice boxes, and still remain viable. The finding challenges decades-old dogma that vaccines must be kept cool at every step of the chain from manufacture to use. Julien Potet, a vaccines-policy adviser at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; also known as Doctors Without Borders) in Paris, says that the findings set “a very positive precedent”....

America’s stunning, sinuous coastlines have long exerted an almost mystical pull on the imaginations of the country’s citizens. The irresistible attraction is perhaps best described by Herman Melville in the opening pages of Moby Dick: “Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land…. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.” In recent years, millions of Americans have moved to coastal areas, particularly in the Southeast, to take advantage of their balmy climate, recreational opportunities and natural beauty....

When NASA announced last month the finding of water ice in several impact craters on Mars, and either water or hydroxyl widely dispersed on the moon’s surface, the solar system became a little more familiar because it seemed a tad more hospitable to life as we know it on Earth. But is that because the rest of the cosmos has much in common with Earth or vice versa? Water, the unique molecule that cradles and nurtures life here, is apparently common and perhaps abundant in the solar system....

Medicare and Medicaid, which provide medical coverage for seniors, the poor and the disabled, together make up nearly a quarter of all federal spending. With total Medicare spending projected to cost $7.7 trillion over the next 10 years, there is consensus that changes are in order. But what those changes should entail has, of course, been one of the hot-button issues of the campaign. With the candidates slinging charges, we thought we’d lay out the facts....

Every Fourth of July holiday, 20,000 visitors descend on Block Island, a remote community of a thousand off the US’s New England shore. In recent years, the surge put a major strain on the island’s diesel-fired electrical system, to the point where blackouts became as much a feature as the traditional fireworks and steak fry. But this year, “there were absolutely no power problems,” says Jessica Willi, executive director of the Block Island Tourism Council....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Battle of Ferozeshah (aka Forezeshur) on 21-22 December 1845 was one of four major battles during the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-6) between the Sikh Empire and the British East India Company (EIC). The British relentlessly attacked the Sikh defensive positions and, thanks to the Sikh commanders’ duplicitous ineptitude, gained a marginal victory with high casualties on both sides....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In recent years, there have been many books, and even more websites, concerning the calendar of the ancient Maya and the end of the world in December 2012 CE. There is no need to list and further popularize such works as they can be found easily enough. They are prominently displayed in sections devoted entirely to the subject in popular book stores and even a cursory search of the internet will reveal a multitude of them....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Puritans who settled New England claimed they came to the New World for religious freedom but, once settled, made it clear that this freedom was for themselves only and dissent would not be tolerated. Although the most famous example of this is Anne Hutchinson (l. 1591-1643 CE) who was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony for her religious views in 1638 CE, an earlier illustration of this same kind of reaction to dissent is the banishment of the Puritan separatist minister Roger Williams (l....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Women in ancient Egypt had greater rights than in any other civilization of the time. They could own land, initiate divorce, own and operate their own business, become scribes, priests, seers, dentists, and doctors. Although men were dominant and held the most important positions in society as a general rule, there is ample evidence of positions in which women had authority over men....

Not in PCs just yet, but certainly in Apple’s Macs. Earlier this week Apple introduced updated versions of its MacBook Pro with Retina Display, alongside an all new Mac Pro. What wasn’t updated was Apple’s line of non-Retina MacBook Pros, the only Apple devices that were still sporting a disc drive. In fact, Apple axed the 15-inch version and trimmed the non-Retina line to a single, 13-inch machine. The company has whittled away at product lines like this in the past, and it’s usually a sign of imminent extinction....

Give us all a reverence for the Earth as your own creation, that we may use its resources rightly in the service of others and to your honor and glory. The prayer was recited regularly by a young Sally Bingham growing up in San Francisco. Only years later, as an ordained Episcopal Church priest, did Bingham realize something was amiss with the childhood supplication. “There was this terrible hypocrisy,” she said....

Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 10^26. That’s what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, could shed light on this mysterious growth, called inflation, by catching a glimpse of the particle behind it....

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the August 1985 issue of Scientific American under the title “Computer Recreations: A computer microscope zooms in for a look at the most complex object in mathematics.” The article helped make famous the Mandelbrot set, named for mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; it is being posted now following the October 14 death of Mandelbrot at age 85. The Mandelbrot set broods in silent complexity at the center of a vast two-dimensional sheet of numbers called the complex plane....

Scientists may still be debating the role of viruses in chronic fatigue syndrome, but blood banks aren’t taking any chances. Last summer the AABB, a nonprofit that represents blood-collecting organizations, advised people with the disorder, marked by severe fatigue and aches lasting six months or more, to self-defer from blood donation. Last December the American Red Cross went further, banning people who revealed during a predonation interview that they had the syndrome from ever giving blood at its centers....