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Whether they sit in your kitchen or inside your personal computer, refrigerators and other cooling devices are typically bulky, often noisy and frequently power-hungry. A team at Pennsylvania State University recently found that certain plastics cool off a significant amount—12 degrees Celsius—when an applied electric field is removed. Should the technique become feasible, the resulting solid-state coolers could efficiently and quietly eliminate heat from, say, integrated-circuit boards, enabling smaller, faster computers....

Editor’s Note: We are posting this feature from our February 2007 issue because the transition to DTV has been back in the news. February 17, 2009, is D-day—when the term “digital divide” will take on a whole new meaning unrelated to computer access. That is when the nation’s 1,700 analog television stations will shut down in the long-promised changeover to all-digital broadcasting. Cable and satellite viewers or those whose TV has a digital tuner will be able to watch CSI and American Idol unaware that anything has changed....

“Another skeleton with a perfect skull!” I shouted to the team, all of whom were face down on the quarry floor exposing other skeletons. In the years I had spent as a paleontologist, never had I seen anything like this. Our team of fossil hunters had been prospecting for only 15 days in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia, but already we had uncovered a veritable graveyard of intact fossils. Over the next few weeks we would apply chisel, pickax and bulldozer to the site, digging up more than a dozen examples of an ostrichlike dinosaur that was to become one of the most well known in the dinosaur world....

Statins can indeed produce neurological effects. These drugs are typically prescribed to lower cholesterol and thereby reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. Between 2003 and 2012 roughly one in four Americans aged 40 and older were taking a cholesterol-lowering medication, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But studies show that statins can influence our sleep and behavior—and perhaps even change the course of neurodegenerative conditions, including dementia....

A new study shows a correlation between nausea and vomiting during pregnancy and the long-term neurocognitive development of those kids. Pediatric researcher Irena Nulman and her team at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto found that youngsters whose mothers suffered from morning sickness during pregnancy scored higher on some cognitive tests than did those whose mothers did not start their pregnant days throwing up. All children tested within the normal range, however....

In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors’ wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries. Galen’s texts wouldn’t be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections — often in public — surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren’t as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals....

Ask any economist how we should respond to climate change, and they will tell you that the most effective strategy is to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, ideally through a carbon tax. This reflects a basic economic principle: the waste produced from any activity is a cost that has to be paid. We pay for throwing away our garbage, for cleaning our wastewater, and we should pay for the carbon dioxide waste we create from activities such as burning fossil fuels....

Maria Nieves and Juan Carlos Copes are passionate about Argentine tango. They have been dancing together for 40 years and are among the best-known dance pairs in the world. Copes was once heard to say that if he had not found Nieves–someone to whom he is remarkably attuned–he would need four different partners to fully explore the tango’s expressive spectrum. Anyone who has ever done pairs dancing will understand just how difficult it is to forge a merger out of differing styles and capacities, while coordinating movements with near perfection in space and time....

Money is an incentive to work hard, but it also promotes selfish behavior. Those conclusions may not be surprising, but now researchers find that merely thinking of money makes people less likely to give help to others. “Self-sufficient people are more diligent in their own goals,” says Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the University of Minnesota. “Money is cognitively and mentally linked to personal goals. It allows people to do things efficiently and not need other people....

Energy security is the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time. But lack of action has put the U.S. at risk. America needs a bold plan that ignites our collective imagination, sparks innovation, and creates economic and national security. The starting point? A call to action from our new president in the first 100 days of his administration. The president, Congress and industry must proceed with haste because a seismic restructuring of the global energy system is under way....

There’s nothing like a throw-down to push new technologies out to the masses. A team of high-tech gearheads is applying that age-old adage to self-driving cars, with plans to launch a new motorsport that will pit robotic cars head-to-head on long, winding racetracks. Roborace—which refers both to the sport and its organizer—wants to create an autonomous version of Formula 1 racing, where the superstars are computer programmers whose code unleashes the speed, precision and efficiency needed to take the checkered flag....

Key concepts Music Singing Pitch Age Gender Introduction Do you enjoy singing holiday songs at school—or with friends or family? Singing can be a fun tradition, especially at this time of year. But have you noticed that different people tend to sing different parts of a song—or sing in different octaves? Have you ever wondered what the highest note is that you can sing? How about the lowest? Do you think males and females can reach most of the same notes?...

Tuberculosis, food poisoning, cholera, pneumonia, strep throat and meningitis: these are just a few of the unsavory diseases caused by bacteria. Hygiene—keeping both home and body clean—is one of the best ways to curb the spread of bacterial infections, but lately consumers are getting the message that washing with regular soap is insufficient. Antibacterial products have never been so popular. Body soaps, household cleaners, sponges, even mattresses and lip glosses are now packing bacteria-killing ingredients, and scientists question what place, if any, these chemicals have in the daily routines of healthy people....

Wildfires can quickly rage out of control, wreaking destruction for miles. Any information about how they may behave can help scientists better contain and fight the flames. Findings published online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide additional insight into the blazes’ behavior: they follow the same mathematical laws as other natural events such as earthquakes do. Bruce Malamud of King’s College London and his colleagues analyzed records from more than 88,000 wildfires that occurred in the U....

Roadside-nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more maneuverable wings, which may have helped them to make hasty retreats from oncoming vehicles, according to a study published in Current Biology. The study’s authors discovered the trend after noticing that the number of vehicle-killed birds had declined over the past three decades. They suggest that the two findings provide evidence of roadway-related adaptation. “I’m not saying that it’s all because of wing length,” says Charles Brown, a biologist at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and one of the authors of the study....

War fatalities—and especially those from terrorist or insurgent attacks—seem particularly and cruelly random. But some scientists think they have found the key to predicting just when these deadly assaults will come. The findings are not based on new reconnaissance technology or intelligence breakthrough, but rather on some relatively simple number crunching. As it turns out, whether it is fatal roadside bombings in Kabul in 2008 or lethal terrorist attacks from a separatist group in the 1970s, the frequency of successful strikes comes at a relatively consistent rate of escalation, according to a new paper published in the July 1 issue of in Science....

Smell is perhaps our most evocative sense. In Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, the nostalgic flavor and fragrance of a madeleine, a delicate pastry, evokes a description of taste and smell, the senses that alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent…bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. Humans often view smell as an aesthetic sense, yet for most animals smell is the primal sense, one they rely on to identify food, predators and mates....

After the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March, the scans that Josh Mailman relies on to keep tabs on his pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors were postponed three times until July. For Mailman—who says he had considered delaying the scans even longer to reduce unnecessary hospital visits during the pandemic—the results were shocking. “Several of my tumors had doubled in size,” says Mailman, who leads one of the largest U....

Editor’s Note (02/08/18): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published August 5, 2016, in light of the 2018 Winter Games which begin on February 9 in PyeongChang, South Korea. When the 2016 Summer Olympics begin in Rio, one group of athletes will be conspicuously absent: The Russian track and field and weight lifting teams. Their absence will be felt: In London in 2012 the team took home a total of 82 medals....

Neuroscientist James Hudspeth has basically been living inside the human ear for close to 50 years. In that time Hudspeth, head of the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University, has dramatically advanced scientists’ understanding of how the ear and brain work together to process sound. Last week his decades of groundbreaking research were recognized by the Norwegian Academy of Science, which awarded him the million-dollar Kavli Prize in Neuroscience....