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Scientists talk about the iron hypothesis, which means that if someone dumps iron into the global oceans at its most desolate zones, the world could enter a period of rapid cooling. The iron hypothesis does not apply equally in all oceans. Scientists have found that dumping iron in the Antarctic Ocean might work to trigger global cooling, but dumping the element in the equatorial Pacific Ocean would not. The findings, published yesterday in the journal Nature, provides insight into the only guaranteed geoengineering hack scientists have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and address global warming....

I am a glutton. Most Americans are, it seems: more than two thirds of the population is overweight or obese, and that proportion continues to rise, even as public awareness of the importance of healthy eating is at an all-time high. I know what a healthy diet looks like, and I certainly don’t enjoy being fat, so why is eating less such a difficult process? It turns out that every decision we make about eating is influenced by mental and physiological forces that are often outside of our awareness and control....

On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine left their camp less than a kilometer from the summit of Mount Everest on a mission to be the first mountaineers to ascend the world’s highest peak (8,850 meters). They were never to be heard from again. Whether either man reached the summit—almost three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s historic 1953 climb—has been an open question for nearly 86 years....

In my first experience with negotiation, a human resources rep at a publishing company offered me $24,000 a year for an entry-level gig. Having been coached never to take a first offer, I responded, “Is there any way you can do better?” A day later I was ecstatic to accept her second offer of $24,500. The victory, however small, set me up to be willing to negotiate the next time an opportunity arose....

In the mid-1800s English doctor John Langdon Down was appointed director of a home outside London for mentally handicapped children, where he studied their symptoms. In 1862 he described the case of one of his wards who was short and had stubby fingers and unusual eyelids. The boy’s condition was later labeled with his surname. But the genetic cause of Down syndrome was not uncovered for another century. In 1959 French pediatrician Jrome Lejeune discovered that these children have three copies of chromosome 21, instead of the standard two....

Playtime for Everyone Yesterday while going through our mail, Scientific American Mind’s cover line jumped out at me: “The Serious Need for Play. How it improves your creativity, emotional health—and cuts stress” [article by Melinda Wenner]. I was thrilled to see “play” on the cover. Psychiatrist Stuart Brown is a role model for all of us who strongly believe in play. Readers might like to check out the National Institute for Play Web site, www....

Have you ever emerged from a matinee movie, squinted into the sudden burst of sunlight and sneezed uncontrollably? Up to a third of the population will answer this question with an emphatic “Yes!” (whereas nearly everyone else scratches their head in confusion). Sneezing as the result of being exposed to a bright light—known as the photic sneeze reflex—is a genetic quirk that is still unexplained by science, even though it has intrigued some of history’s greatest minds....

NEW YORK CITY – The Moto X is finally here, as Motorola took the wraps off its hotly anticipated new smartphone at an event on Thursday. The new smartphone, which has been talked about for months, marks the official relaunch of the handset maker Motorola, since it was acquired last year by tech giant Google. The new device, which will be Motorola’s flagship smartphone, marries Motorola’s history of hardware and design innovation with Google’s software and services chops to create a new device franchise that Google hopes will rival that of Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy series of smartphones....

Researchers often talk about a race between the Ebola virus and the people it infects. A patient wins the race only if the immune system manages to defeat the virus before it destroys most of his or her organs. A community wins the race if it can isolate the first few patients before the disease spreads. Humanity will win the race if it develops treatments and, ultimately, a vaccine before the virus gains a permanent toehold in the cities of the globe....

No matter how conscientiously the post-operation discharge instructions were crafted, I worried how my Spanish-speaking patient would refer to the “warning signs”—written in English—if questions arose at home. And I was right to worry: her arrival eight days later to the emergency department with a serious but preventable infection demonstrated the challenges that over 25 million American residents face whenever they interact with our English-centered health system. While this system aims to provide optimal care for all its patients, it often falls short for non-English speakers....

Optimists are no longer alone in promoting “mind over matter.” A compelling study claims there is chemical credence for the placebo effect, at least in masking pain. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor neuroscientist Jon-Kar Zubieta, who led the work, says that people produce a natural painkilling chemical in the brain when they expect to experience relief. Researchers gave test subjects a slow, long, harmless injection of a pain-inducing salt solution into the jaw....

Scientists using an electrically charged needle have electrospun nanosize threads of cells encased in plastic polymers to create living microfibers that promote tissue regrowth. Unfortunately, the electrical charge can hurt both the spun cells and the scientists doing the spinning. But now mechanical engineers Suwan Jayasinghe and Sumathy Arumuganathar of University College London have invented a way to spin nanothreads using only pressure and, with the help of medical colleagues, shown that they can create such nanothreads of living heart tissue, potentially revealing the way to weave an entirely new, healthy heart or even fresh, new skin....

Replacing toxic ethylene glycol—the principal component of antifreezes and de-icers—with the food additive propylene glycol, and adding nanoparticles to improve the mixture’s properties, researchers at US company ACTA Technologyhave created an antifreeze formula that they say is safer, more environmentally friendly and performs better than existing products. Although poisonous, ethylene glycol has a sweet taste and every year thousands of people, many of them children, and countless pets and wild animals, are poisoned by accidentally drinking antifreeze....

Key concepts Astronomy Physics Meteors and meteorites Size Geometry Introduction Have you ever seen a “shooting star” race across the sky at night? Shooting stars are meteors zooming at high speed through Earth’s atmosphere and burning up along the way from friction. And right now is one of the best times to see them in person. The Perseids, which are impressive meteor showers that happen each year from mid-July to late August, have their peak activity around August 11 to 14....

Small screen size presents the biggest challenge to using—not to mention designing—a smartwatch. This loosely defined term has come to include just about any digital timepiece with a voice- or touch-enabled display. But women’s watches, which are traditionally smaller and more delicate than timepieces for men, pose an extra dilemma for smartwatch makers trying to pack fitness monitoring and smartphone functions into a wrist-worn device. As a result, very few smartwatches have been designed specifically to appeal to a woman’s lifestyle needs or fashion sense....

Snoring is not just a recipe for marital discord; it can be life-threatening, too, when it is a part of sleep apnea. This disorder, in which breathing stops many times a night, can detonate dangerous cardiovascular stress. But scientists have long puzzled over why we should respond so fiercely to dips in the oxygen supply. Now a new study has identified the tissue and chemical changes that stir up the problem, a finding that could lead to novel drug treatments....

Key concepts Physics Mass Gravity Angular momentum Introduction The bottle-flipping craze might be dying down, but it isn’t too late to investigate the physics of this internet sensation. Even if you’ve never heard of it, give this project a try—not only can you impress your friends with a fun new trick, but you’ll also be able to explain the science behind it! Background “Bottle flipping” took the internet by storm in 2016....

From Nature magazine Nestling among the dunes in the dry equatorial region of Saturn’s moon Titan is what appears to be a hydrocarbon lake. The observation, by the Cassini spacecraft, suggests that oases of liquid methane — which might be a crucible for life — lie beneath the moon’s surface. The work is published today in Nature. Besides Earth, Titan is the only solid object in the Solar System to circulate liquids in a cycle of rain and evaporation, although on Titan the process is driven by methane rather than water....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The world is full of connected devices–and more are coming. In 2017, there were an estimated 8.4 billion internet-enabled thermostats, cameras, streetlights and other electronics. By 2020 that number could exceed 20 billion, and by 2030 there could be 500 billion or more. Because they’ll all be online all the time, each of those devices–whether a voice-recognition personal assistant or a pay-by-phone parking meter or a temperature sensor deep in an industrial robot–will be vulnerable to a cyberattack and could even be part of one....

If our planet suddenly turned into an Earth-size pile of blueberries, things would start exploding. This is science. Specifically, it’s the conclusion of a juicy paper submitted to the preprint server arXiv on July 27. (Papers on arXiv have not yet passed through the peer-review process or been published in journals.) The author, Anders Sandberg, a computational neuroscientist with a broad research portfolio at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, addresses the problem—originally posed on the website Stack Exchange—in thorough, blueberry-bursting fashion....