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For Google, the future is “Now"Google’s predictive search and voice recognition tool sauntered over to Apple’s iOS as an app on Monday.Having debuted at last year’s Google I/O conference, the Now-enabled Google Search 3.0 for iOS brings the same robust search features and visual style, called cards, to iPhones and iPads. Tamar Yehoshua, Google Search’s director of product management, said that Google Now will compete well against Apple’s personal assistant Siri because of its accuracy....

Gadget makers often rely on piezoelectricity—the ability that some solids have to produce voltage when pressure is applied to them—to power tiny embedded systems, such as a BlackBerry Storm 2’s touch screen or a car’s airbag sensor. Whereas lead-based compounds typically have the greatest piezoelectric potential, the heavy metal has fallen out of favor as device-makers push to eliminate it from all electronics in an attempt to reduce toxic waste....

In a maverick method, nephrologist Michael Field taught medical students to decipher different heart murmurs through their stethoscopes, trills, grace notes, and decrescendos to describe the distinctive sounds of heart valves snapping closed, and blood ebbing through leaky valves in plumbing disorders of the heart. Separately, in music based on electrocardiographic (ECG) traces of heart rhythm disorders, one of us—musician-mathematician Elaine Chew—used music notation to capture the signature rhythms of electrical anomalies of the heart....

Rebuilding the hurricane-wrecked Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida will come with a massive price tag, but experts say it offers a chance to make the base more resilient to the effects of extreme weather. Videos and photos taken after Hurricane Michael hit Tyndall as a Category 4 storm last month showed hangars with torn roofs and downed trees. Tyndall soon reported it had suffered “widespread catastrophic damage.” Personnel evacuated ahead of the storm, as did some of the pricey F-22 Raptor aircraft housed there....

When it’s smoggy outside, the ozone (O3) responsible for the murk slips indoors, too, wafting through doors or ventilation systems. Once inside, the volatile oxygen molecule reacts with carpets, chemical cleaner residue and human skin. In fact, according to new research published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ozone coming into contact with human skin and hair, specifically the oils on each of them, sets off a whole lot of chemistry, some of it possibly of concern....

Corporations that design facilities to minimize their environmental impact may earn a financial return, too. That is Intel’s experience as it prepares to open two significant installations: a research and development building in Israel and a $2.5-billion integrated-circuit fabrication plant in China. “We haven’t run out of projects that get a three-year return on investment,” says Todd Brady, Intel’s corporate environmental manager. Intel’s building in Haifa, due to open early in 2009, will comply with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system....

The highest-energy collisions ever seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are now producing data for science. Teams at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have spent two years upgrading what was already the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. At 10.40 local time on June 3 they officially set the newly supercharged collider running. Physicists can now smash together bunches of protons at a record energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) and will soon collide a billion pairs of protons per second—almost double the previous rate....

Researchers have discovered dangerous levels of the neurotoxin mercury (Hg) in the muscle tissue of perch and in the blood and eggs of the common loon in aquatic ecosystems of the northeastern U.S. and southern Canada. The finding led them to identify five “hot spots” of mercury contamination that pose serious health risks to animals as well as humans. In addition, elevated concentrations of the neurotoxin were found in nine other regions labeled as “areas of concern” in the report published in the January issue of Bioscience....

Sometimes hunting down the best mate can backfire. The theory of sexual selection posits that choosy females seek out mates with elaborate antlers or splashy plumage, for example, because these traits might signify good genes that will lead to hearty offspring. But researchers report that top-breeding fruit flies of both sexes produced worse-breeding descendents, primarily because the mating prowess of each parent did not translate to offspring of the opposite sex....

Brought to the U.S. as pets, Burmese pythons have made headlines with their uncontrolled spread in the Florida Everglades and willingness to challenge alligators for the position of top predator. A report released by the U.S. Geological Survey last fall delivered more bad news: two other constrictor species, also former pets, are thriving in the area, and six others could pose similar threats. Researchers fear that reproductive populations could spread and eat native animals into extinction....

Editor’s note: This story was originally posted in the March 2004 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long history of Nobelists publishing in Scientific American. Most American and French citizens—indeed, those of democracies the world over—spend little time contemplating their voting systems. That preoccupation is usually left to political and electoral analysts. But in the past few years, a large segment of both these countries’ populations have found themselves utterly perplexed....

Although teen smoking rates are at a record low, more of them are smoking pot and fewer than ever believe it is bad for them. Data released last December as part of the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future project show that only 44.1 percent of 12th graders believe regular marijuana use is harmful, the lowest level since 1973. That may explain why more than one third of high school seniors tried pot in 2012, and one in 15 smoked it daily....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Can a government agency capture the explorer’s urge of Christopher Columbus, Neil Armstrong or James Cameron? That’s what the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy hopes to do, in the words of Deputy Director Cheryl Martin, who is currently heading ARPA–E. The mission of the agency is simple: “to advance high-potential, high-impact transformative energy technologies that are too early [in their development] for private investors,” Martin said at the agency’s recent summit here....

DON’T WORRY, IT CAN’T HURT YOU—YET. Scientists have identified Reston ebolavirus—a member of the deadly Ebola group of hemorrhagic fever viruses—in domestic swine from the Philippines. Ebola is infamous for being highly contagious and causing death rates as high as 90 percent in some human outbreaks. This particular strain, first identified in monkeys in 1989 in a research laboratory in Reston, Va., is the only one of the family that is harmless to humans....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. That day will come: the life-changing moment when renewable energy—wind, solar, geothermal and others still in development—replace fossil fuels as the principal source of world energy. Most analysts insist, however, that this day will not arrive for many decades to come—certainly well past the middle of the century. Fossil fuels are too entrenched, it is said, and renewables too costly or impractical to usurp existing systems....

COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns? PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals....

When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana in the 2004 film Troy that “there are no pacts between lions and men,” he is not reciting a clever line from the pen of a Hollywood screenwriter. He is speaking Achilles’ words in English as Homer wrote them in Greek more than 2,000 years ago in the Iliad. The tale of the Trojan War has captivated generations of audiences while evolving from its origins as an oral epic to written versions and, finally, to several film adaptations....

Incandescent lightbulbs may be history. As of 2007, compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs), which are more energy-­efficient, had made only modest inroads because they were more expensive. But in December the U.S. Congress passed a major energy bill that included a new lighting standard. By 2012 manufacturers selling any 100-watt (W) bulb must make it 30 percent more efficient than today’s 100-W incandescent bulb. Similar requirements will phase in for 75-W bulbs in 2013 and 60-W and 40-W in 2014....

SAN FRANCISCO – A giant tidal barrier stretched across the Golden Gate is among the adaptation remedies proposed by a Bay area nonprofit to cope with anticipated sea level rise caused by climate change over the coming century. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association mentioned the idea this week as part of an extensive analysis of how global warming might affect the City by the Bay, which is thought to be highly susceptible to flooding and other dangers in the decades ahead....

Neuroscientists have been using brain scans to learn how to read minds. This research is increasing our basic understanding of the human brain and offering hope for medical breakthroughs. We should all applaud this work. Commercial firms, however, are beginning to apply this research to lie detection, selling their services. The technology is tempting, but before we accept it, we need to think hard about it—and go slow. The trouble is not with the pace of research....