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OUR PERCEPTION of the world depends, to a surprising degree, on intelligent guesswork by the brain. An oval-shaped white image exciting your retina could be produced by an egg, or a perfectly circular, flat tilted disk, or an infinite number of intermediate shapes, each angled to the right degree. Yet your brain “homes in” instantly on the correct interpretation of the image. It does this by using certain unconscious assumptions about the statistics of the natural world—suppositions that can be revealed by visual illusions....

Google unveiled on Wednesday the new look and automatic labels for Gmail on the Web, as well as in Gmail’s Android and iOS apps. Gmail’s new look and labels on Android.(Credit:Google)The new default categories, based on Gmail’s existing Label system, are Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. They appear as large tabs on the Gmail site, easy to use for touch screens and fully customizable. You can also drag-and-drop messages between them, and Google will automatically “learn” how you want them filtered....

Scientists have known since 2004 that wind farms kill bats, just as they kill birds, even though the flying mammals should be able to avoid them. Many biologists thought that the bats, like their avian counterparts, might be falling victim to the fast-spinning turbine blades. But an examination of 188 hoary and silver-haired bats killed at a wind farm in southwestern Alberta in Canada between July and September in 2007 showed that nearly half showed no external injuries—as would be expected if the giant blades had smashed the flying mammals to the ground....

I once got hit just above my eye by a cricket ball, which is much like a baseball only harder. One instant, the missile was safely cupped in the wiry fists of a fellow nicknamed The Wooloomooloo Whippet, and the next instant it was rattling my braincage. An hour later, my eye feeling very swollen, I strolled around the Ladies’ Stand awaiting congratulatory warrior-worship type comments. None. Not even one. Nobody commented on my heroics or my brutal injury....

FOOD POISONING’S EFFECTS Maryn McKenna does not mention controls for medical history in her article on evidence that foodborne pathogens cause lifelong consequences, “Food Poisoning’s Hidden Legacy.” An elevated incidence of renal impairment and circulatory problems within six years after individuals suffered severe immediate symptoms of Escherichia coli ingestion, as compared with those suffering mild or no symptoms, does not prove their E. coli exposure was the cause. That conclusion assumes that there was no preexposure renal or circulatory dysfunction....

Eyes lose their flexibility with age, sometimes making it difficult to shift focus from near to far or vice versa. To combat the problem, Benjamin Franklin devised bifocals–eyeglass lenses shaped for near viewing in the lower half and distance vision in the upper portion–more than 200 years ago. Now researchers have created liquid crystal lenses that can change between long-distance and reading modes with the flick of a switch. Guoqiang Li of the University of Arizona and his colleagues sandwiched a thin layer of liquid crystal between two layers of glass and laced it with concentric rings of electrodes....

Seawater is a lot more complex than a simple solution of water and sodium chloride. As researchers have been discovering for the past century, it is a highly variable cocktail, and its particular makeup can have a substantial impact everything from coral to currents. To make sure monitoring and modeling of the globe’s biggest bodies of water stay accurate, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) has adopted a new official definition for seawater....

Key concepts Physics Friction Motion Materials Introduction Have you ever tried to get a running start and slide across a smooth, wooden floor while wearing socks? What happens if you try the same thing on a carpeted floor or while wearing shoes? The amount of friction between your feet and the floor surface determines how well you can slide. Some combinations of surfaces, such as socks on a wooden floor, produce very little friction....

With the right mix of nutrients and a little bit of coaxing, human stem cells derived from skin can assemble spontaneously into brain-like chunks of tissue. Researchers provide the first description and application of these ‘mini-brains’ today in Nature. “It’s a seminal study to making a brain in a dish,” says Clive Svendsen, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. “That’s phenomenal....

The exoplanet revolution began 25 years ago today. On Jan. 9, 1992, astronomers Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper in the journal Nature announcing the discovery of two planets circling an incredibly dense, rapidly rotating stellar corpse known as a pulsar. It was a landmark find: While several alien-world “candidates” had recently been spotted, Wolszczan and Frail provided the first confirmation that planets exist beyond our own solar system....

Paul Kwiat asks his volunteers to sit inside a small, dark room. As their eyes adjust to the lack of light, each volunteer props his or her head on a chin rest—as you would at an optometrist’s—and gazes with one eye at a dim red cross. On either side of the cross is an optical fiber, positioned to pipe a single photon of light at either the left or the right side of a volunteer’s eye....

After months of hearings and finger-pointing, a Deepwater Horizon investigative commission formed by President Obama has begun to shed light on what led to the April 20 explosion that killed 11 and initiated a deep underwater gusher that spewed more than 750 million liters of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet one of the biggest mysteries remains—why did the drillers use cement designed to shore up the well despite warnings that the mixture would not hold?...

WBy Nadia Drake of Nature magazineThe sighting of a lone gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) last year off the beaches of Israel, and then again near Spain, came as a surprise to many. How did a creature normally found in Pacific waters come to be in the Mediterranean Sea? Although no one knows what happened to the bus-sized mammal after its last appearance in May 2010, a group of researchers now suggests that the sighting might indicate a wider trend: the mixing of northern Atlantic and Pacific marine ecosystems, made possible by the climate-driven depletion of Arctic sea ice....

Physicists have found hints that the asymmetry of life — the fact that most biochemical molecules are ‘left-handed’ or ‘right-handed’ — could have been caused by electrons from nuclear decay in the early days of evolution. In an experiment that took 13 years to perfect, the researchers have found that these electrons tend to destroy certain organic molecules slightly more often than they destroy their mirror images. Many organic molecules, including glucose and most biological amino acids, are ‘chiral’....

I am not the editor in chief of a propaganda farm disguised as a far-right breaking news outlet. But one day last February, just before the world shut down, I got to play one. About 70 journalists, students and digital media types had gathered at the City University of New York to participate in a crisis simulation. The crisis at hand was the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The game was designed to illuminate how we, as reporters and editors, would respond to a cascade of false and misleading information on voting day—and how public discourse might respond to our coverage....

The monsoon is the great life-giver and the great destroyer of the subcontinent. Without rain from these annual storms, crops wither, animals die and more than half the world’s population suffers from potential famine. With too much rain, crops are inundated, animals drown and people suffer from floods and the diseases that follow in their wake. Observations of this critical climate system stretch back decades, and the overall level of rainfall has changed little over the years....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Lucius Cornelius Sulla (l. 138 - 78 BCE) enacted his constitutional reforms (81 BCE) as dictator to strengthen the Roman Senate’s power. Sulla was born in a very turbulent era of Rome’s history, which has often been described as the beginning of the fall of the Roman Republic....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum of Rome was erected in the final decade of the 1st century BCE, replacing the earlier temple to the twin sons of Jupiter which had stood on the site since 484 BCE. Today only the inner concrete core of the podium and three columns survive of this once massive structure....

In English, the word for the sniffing appendage on our face is nose. Japanese also happens to use the consonant n in this word (hana) and so does Turkish (burun). Since the 1900s, linguists have argued that these associations between speech sounds and meanings are purely arbitrary. Yet a new study calls this into question. Together with his colleagues, Damián Blasi of the University of Zurich analyzed lists of words from 4,298 different languages....

Since the attacks of September 11, Congress has approved nearly $1.3 trillion for military spending. Much of that money has gone into mounting Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom. But some of the funds have been used to dream up and develop futuristic-sounding military devices such as exoskeletons. Scientific American looked at some of these new and emerging technologies. Body Armor and Exoskeletons Improved body armor has allowed far more Western troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq to survive improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and direct-fire engagements....