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SURGICAL DISCRETION As an M.D., I’d like to applaud Claudia Wallis’s review of the ISCHEMIA and CABANA trials of treatments for particular heart conditions in “The Case for Less Heart Surgery” [The Science of Health]. As she says, those trials conclude that stenting or bypass surgery for stable coronary artery disease—in which coronary arteries are narrowed—and ablation for atrial fibrillation—in which the heart beats irregularly—may help patients feel better, but they won’t live longer....

Before this year the H7N9 bird flu virus linked to 133 human infections and 43 deaths was never seen in people. All the available evidence suggests that an effective biological barrier apparently kept a pandemic at bay—humans only contracted the novel virus via direct contact with poultry or environments such as live bird markets rather than by human-to-human transmission. New analysis from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), however, suggests that the virus is closer to becoming a disease transmitted among humans than previously thought....

If I had come to London to ponder the nature of reality, I had clearly come to the right place. In my philosophy of science class, we discussed it endlessly. Is there a reality? Is it sitting “out there,” independent of us? If so, what is it made of ? How can we distinguish it from mere appearances? Is there any hope we’ll ever know it at all? In class, we debated the merits of realism and antirealism....

Democracy is currently under threat in the United States. Some scientists have joined in efforts to counter this threat, but most of us have not. We are understandably focused on our pressing professional and family responsibilities, particularly during the current COVID-19 pandemic. But in this time of crisis for our nation we need to sound the alarm. To do so—to express our concerns and recommend actions—a group of us posted a statement on September 18 for our colleagues to sign: As scientists committed to democratic principles, we observe troubling developments in the public affairs of the United States: the undermining of democratic checks and balances; threats to the electoral process; subversion of the rule of law; vilification of people of color, of other minorities, and of immigrants; the fomenting of hate, division, misogyny, and violence; attacks on the free press; propagation of disinformation; and sidelining of science as input to public policy....

Growing populations and tightening water supplies have spurred people in many places—including the Middle East, Australia, California and China—to look to the oceans and other salty waters as a source of new drinking water. But desalination plants are energy intensive and create a potentially environment-harming waste called brine (made up of concentrated salt and chemical residues), which is dumped into the ocean, injected underground or spread on land. Despite the ecological threats, “there was no comprehensive assessment about brine—how much we produce,” says Manzoor Qadir, assistant director of the United Nations University Institute on Water, Environment and Health....

Lab-grown miniature brains are poised to shake up drug testing for everything from Alzheimer’s disease to Zika. Each bundle of human brain cells is so tiny that it could fit on the head of a pin. Researcher Thomas Hartung and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University created these mini brains using stem cells that, over the course of two months, morph into supporting cells and various types of neurons, which quickly connect to one another and start communicating....

View Transcript In the womb, we are bathed in song. Even if mom never sings or listens to the stereo, the music of her speech rings clearly to the unborn. We learn to recognize her spoken melodies even though her tissues distort her words. Those melodies set the stage for mother-child bonding and the early development of speech. From the beginning of life, music and speech are intertwined, an interplay psychologist Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego, explores in the latest Scientific American Mind....

On an April morning in 2001 Christopher Bono, a clean-cut, well-mannered 16-year-old, approached Jackie Larsen in Grand Marais, Minn. His car had broken down, and he needed a ride to meet friends in Thunder Bay. As Larsen talked with him, she came to feel that something was very wrong. “I am a mother, and I have to talk to you like a mother,” she said. “I can tell by your manners that you have a nice mother....

The prevalence of autism in the United States has risen steadily since researchers first began tracking it in 2000. The rise in the rate has sparked fears of an autism ‘epidemic.’ But experts say the bulk of the increase stems from a growing awareness of autism and changes to the condition’s diagnostic criteria. Here’s how researchers track autism’s prevalence and explain its apparent rise. How do clinicians diagnose autism? There is no blood test, brain scan or any other objective test that can diagnose autism—although researchers are actively trying to develop such tests....

Many bilingual individuals say they feel like a different person depending on which language they are speaking. A new study lends credence to their claims. Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, charted the personality traits of 225 Spanish/English bilingual subjects in both the U.S. and Mexico as they responded to questions presented in each language. Ramírez-Esparza and her colleagues found three significant differences: when using English, the bilinguals were more extraverted, agreeable and conscientious than when using Spanish....

Keise Izuma, a lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of York in England, replies: Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling you get when you try to maintain two or more inconsistent beliefs at the same time or when you believe one thing but act in a contradictory way. For example, you commit to losing weight and then gorge on cake. The discrepancy can be unnerving, and people will often try to eliminate the dissonance by changing their attitudes....

Let’s say you are trying to sell cookies for a school fundraiser at the local mall, and you want to pick the ideal spot to set up your table. You’d probably look for an area with a lot of traffic. And once you’d picked your spot, you would no doubt give some thought to your pitch. A friendly hello and nice smile would set the stage nicely. Perhaps it would be a good idea to offer samples or to have friends hanging around saying nice things about the cookies or the school....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Right outside the cities of Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg in South-East Norway, there are two archaeological, intriguing and beautiful sites, the Hunnfelt, a monument consisting of several stone circles and burial sites, and the Begbyfelt, a large collection of petroglyphs. The sites are encoded with a rich and still not fully understood history stretching from the early Bronze Age (1700-1100 BCE....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. To this day the ancient Romans remain infamous for their dramatic use of spectacle and other forms of entertainment. A lesser known variation of Roman spectacle is the mythological re-enactments that took place during the ludi meridiani (midday spectacle). These performances were not only re-enactments for entertainment’s sake, but were also a very real form of execution....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A unique and fundamental aspect of ancient Judean society in both Israel and the Diaspora, the ancient synagogue represents an inclusive, localized form of worship that did not crystallize until the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. In antiquity, there was a variety of terms that represented the structure, although some of these were not exclusive to the synagogue and may refer to something else, such as a temple....

By Laila Kearney NEW YORK (Reuters) - Temperatures in all 50 U.S. states dipped to freezing or below on Tuesday as an unseasonably cold blast of weather moved across the country, while heavy snow prompted a state of emergency in western New York. In the U.S. South, states were bracing for a record chill from the Arctic-born cold that swept the Rocky Mountains last week. Every U.S. state, including Hawaii, was bitten by temperatures at the freezing point of 32 degrees F (0 C) or below, the National Weather Service said....

Warming temperatures expand the risk area for malaria, pushing the disease farther uphill in afflicted regions, according to a new study. Infecting more than 300 million people each year, malaria emerges from a tapestry of temperature, rainfall, vectors, parasites, human movement, public health and economics. Fighting the disease involves pulling on all of these threads, but scientists have a hard time figuring out which ones are the most important to predicting where the disease will go....

Lasers in today’s electronics generally come in red—in everything from DVD players to bar-code scanners—but a new result may point the way to making the lasers in a rainbow of hues. Conventional electronic lasers are made from layers of semiconductor. Now researchers have engineered crystalline semiconductor specks to produce laser light far more easily than before. The result brings the tiny flakes, called nanocrystals, a crucial step closer to fulfilling their promise of tailoring a laser’s color just by changing the size of the crystal, which could lead to more powerful tools for detecting chemicals or sending information via flickers of light....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Why are SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and COVID-19 hospitalizations dropping so rapidly these days in the U.S.? A 2/17/21 story by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic reports that it’s a combination of better social distancing, increased mask-wearing, seasonality, a growing number of people in the U....

Congress should create an ocean zoning system to protect marine resources from expanded offshore energy development, according to Duke University researchers. Their paper, published today in Science, says federal policymakers must extend public-trust doctrine used for settling legal disputes on land to the sea. The doctrine could provide an effective and ethical answer to questions about how to regulate offshore areas for oil and gas drilling and wave and wind development while protecting fisheries and marine habitat, the researchers write....