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NEW YORK—Using a pipette as a makeshift rolling pin, Raymond Schuch spent some of his lab time last summer pressing the guts out of earthworms that he had collected, fresh from Manhattan soil. For his efforts, The Rockefeller University microbiologist extracted what looked like just a small pile of dirt, but was actually a microcosm teeming with phages—viruses that infect bacteria. Schuch was on the hunt for phages that could kill anthrax and become anti-anthrax therapies, but what he discovered were viruses that enable this deadly bacteria to grow and survive when the going gets tough....

A friend had a grandfather named August, who passed away on a September 1st. His widow would later say, “The beginning of September was the end of August.” Moving on, as perspicacious readers may have noticed, the end of August 2020 was the 175th anniversary of the first issue of Scientific American. In 1921 we published an interview with Marie Curie. In 1950 we ran an article on relativity by Albert Einstein....

Your liver could be “eating” your brain, new research suggests. People with extra abdominal fat are three times more likely than lean individuals to develop memory loss and dementia later in life, and now scientists say they may know why. It seems that the liver and the hippocampus (the memory center in the brain), share a craving for a certain protein called PPARalpha. The liver uses PPARalpha to burn belly fat; the hippocampus uses PPARalpha to process memory....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Citizenship is and always has been a valued possession of any individual. When one studies the majority of ancient empires one finds that the concept of citizenship, in any form, was non-existent. The people in these societies did not and could not participate in the affairs of their government....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The idea that it was the Norse who discovered America first emerged in the late 18th century, long before there was any public awareness of the sagas on which such claims were based. In the course of the 19th century, evidence for a Norse presence was discovered in what is now the United States....

Now that we’ve learned the basics of lightning fast mental addition, mental subtraction, and mental multiplication, it’s time to turn our attention to a few tips that will help you take your skills to the next level. Today we’re going to kick things off by learning 5 tips that will help you multiply numbers quickly in your head and become the mental math wizard in your family. Tip #1: Multiplying by Powers of 5 There are times in life when you just get lucky....

Notoriously, the theory of quantum mechanics reveals a fundamental weirdness in the way the world works. Commonsense notions at the very heart of our everyday perceptions of reality turn out to be violated: contradictory alternatives can coexist, such as an object following two different paths at the same time; objects do not simultaneously have precise positions and velocities; and the properties of objects and events we observe can be subject to an ineradicable randomness that has nothing to do with the imperfection of our tools or our eyesight....

This past summer at least 100,000 Americans took to the streets in the People’s Climate March to demand that political leaders take action on global warming. As nations dither on meaningful steps to combat climate change, however, localities are stepping in with their own measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. David Biello reports how cities are coming to the rescue. Unfortunately, a cracked smartphone screen is often beyond rescue. But if those displays were flexible to begin with, shattering wouldn’t be a problem....

One day last spring, Fredy Peccerelli found himself conducting an unusual exercise: correlating the dates of major massacres during Guatemala’s civil war to the play schedule of the New York Yankees in the 1980s. It was an attempt, the director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation says, to compare what happened in his native country with his own life after he and his family fled in the fall of 1980 when he was nine years old....

Eye-tracking has become the tech trend du jour. Advertisers use data on where you look and when to better capture your attention. Designers employ it to improve products. Game and phone developers utilize it to offer the latest in hands-free interaction. But eye-tracking can do more than help sell products or give your finger a rest while playing Fruit Ninja. Years of research have found that our tiny, rapid eye movements called saccades serve as a window into the brain for psychologists just as for advertisers—but instead of giving clues about our preferred cookie brands (pdf), they elucidate our inner mental functioning....

Answer the Call of Duty Can’t afford the $60 price tag on the hot new Call of Duty: Ghosts? Give it time; in six months or so, you’ll be able to get it for half as much, maybe even less. In the meantime, how about a little older-school CoD action? For the next couple days, StackSocial has Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PC/Mac) for $4.99. Price on Steam: $19.99. The game may be six years old, but it still offers plenty of pulse-pounding running and gunning....

Be their assistant. (Credit: Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET) When you go to the Google home page in some parts of this world on Friday, you might think you have a medical problem. The page, you see, won’t stop moving. It seems as if there are vast numbers of strangely dressed men performing the Riverdance. (This is true at least in certain Anglo-centric iterations of Google.com, such as .au, .nz, and ....

Pollutants on the icy Tibetan Plateau, which absorb solar radiation and are accelerating the melting of snow and ice, are known to come from as far afield as Africa and Europe. But work by Chinese researchers now suggests a brownish haze of pollution from forest fires, crop burning and domestic cooking stoves in south Asia is also contributing to the problem. It can waft up and over the Himalayas to settle on the plateau, they report....

Are mortality figures for disasters fueled by climate change being underreported? That question gained new relevance yesterday as research published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicated that 4,645 people died as a result of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. That’s 72 times more fatalities than were officially reported by the government after Maria swept across Puerto Rico last Sept. 20, flattening homes; wiping out electrical service; and displacing tens of thousands of U....

(Credit:Apple)The iPad 3 will reportedly come in three versions to handle Wi-Fi, 3G, and 4G.Citing intel from its own sources, 9to5Mac said yesterday that the new iPads will be codenamed J1, J2, and J2a, backing up previous information that it received.The J1 is likely the Wi-Fi-only model, the blog’s Mark Gurman speculates, while the J2 and J2a are probably the cellular versions, offering the necessary mix of GSM, CDMA, and LTE to run on both 3G and 4G networks around the world....

Pulling into a parking spot at work, you realize you have no recollection of the drive that got you there. While reading a news story, you arrive at the bottom of the page, frustrated that you have no idea what you just read. In midconversation you suddenly become aware that you have missed what the person speaking to you has said. These episodes are symptoms of a distracted mind. You were thinking about a project idea while driving, reliving a troubling memory while attempting to read, envisioning a weekend getaway with friends during a conversation with your co-worker....

The first of a two-part series. ESBJERG, Denmark—Flying 56 miles west from this port, you are greeted by a 10-story, yellow, boxlike platform rising out of the North Sea. It is called SylWin1, the connection to Europe’s electric grid from one of the largest power plants ever built offshore. Beyond it, arrayed over 27 square miles of ocean, are the 80 Siemens 3.6-megawatt turbines of the Dan Tysk wind farm. For Europeans, and perhaps for some Americans, this may be their energy future....

The Omicron coronavirus variant was likely the fastest-spreading virus in human history. One person with the measles virus—a standout among infectious microbes—might infect 15 others within 12 days. But when Omicron suddenly arrived this past winter, it jumped from person to person so quickly that a single case could give rise to six cases after four days, 36 cases after eight days, and 216 cases after 12 days. By the end of February the variant accounted for almost all new COVID infections in the U....

It was a personal shock to me yesterday (Aug. 29) to learn of the passing of Paul Spudis, a leading moon expert, a great friend over the decades and an in-your-face proponent of the moon over Mars as the next deep-space astronaut destination. Word first came to me via a posting by Samuel Lawrence of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who chairs the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group: “Today, we lost a giant of our field....

By Matt KaplanExtremely well-preserved DNA discovered in the fossilized eggshells of extinct bird species suggests that they could be a source of ancient genetic material for sequencing efforts.Eggshells are commonly found at fossil sites worldwide. But, to date, no one has described recovering DNA from them successfully.Now, evolutionary biologist Michael Bunce and his graduate student Charlotte Oskam at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, together with an international team of scientists, have recovered DNA from fossil eggshells by dramatically improving on the process used to extract it....