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Considering the forces involved in many sports, it’s no surprise that professional athletes sustain serious injuries to their muscles, ligaments, tendons and bones. A spate of bone fracture–related injuries seems to be dogging professional teams this year. The Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association lost seven-time all-star Tracy McGrady to season-ending microfracture surgery in February. And on Monday, Rocket’s team physician Tom Clanton announced in the Houston Chronicle that all-star center Yao Ming’s fractured foot, which he sustained in a play-off game against the Los Angeles Lakers in May, has worsened over time and may end his career....

Adapted from Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything, by George Musser, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US). Copyright © 2015 by George Musser. All rights reserved. When I first learned about the quantum phenomenon known as nonlocality in the early 1990s, I was a graduate student. But I didn’t hear about it from my quantum-mechanics professor: he didn’t see fit to so much as mention it....

Evidence now suggests that continued reductions in deforestation will be hard to come by. Why? Because clear-cutters have figured out how to defeat detection efforts by targeting small parcels that are less likely to be observed by the satellites currently in use to monitor illegal logging. “The challenge has become much more difficult,” says engineer Gilberto Camara, head of INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Those bi-weekly alerts have guided the nation’s environmental police, and enforcement operations have doubled in the region in the past five years....

For decades, the standard perception of Mars has been almost black-and-white in its simplicity—or rather red and blue: There is the barren, freeze-dried and rust-ruddy planet of today. And eons ago, there was a world warmer, wetter and more aquamarine with rivers, lakes, oceans and perhaps even life on its surface. In this red-and-blue view of Mars is much like a coin, with scientists questing to understand what caused the great planetary flip between its two opposing sides....

Genetic sequences of drug-resistant bacteria have helped scientists better understand how these dastardly infections evolve and elude treatment. Preventive measures such as increasing health care worker hand washing and isolating infected patients have reduced the spread of many health care–acquired infections. Yet these preventable infections still kill some 100,000 patients in the U.S. every year. Researchers might soon be able to track outbreaks in real time, thanks to advances in sequencing technology....

THERE MAY BE A NEW ROOF on the New Orleans Superdome and tourists in the French Quarter, but time is not healing all wounds in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Even two years after the storm, mental health problems in the region are growing among the nearly 70,000 families still living in temporary housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The slow recovery, researchers and clinicians are finding, has bred levels of mental distress unseen in the aftermath of other disasters....

Evidently, the moon has recently been letting slip gases, like carbon dioxide and steam, indicating that the rock’s reputation as a cold, inactive orb is undeserved. Previous estimates proclaimed that the moon has been volcanically inactive for the past one billion to three billion years. Researchers studying features of the Ina structure, a 15-kilometer-wide lunar crater first imaged during the Apollo missions, found that volcanic gaseous emissions likely occurred sometime in the last one million to 10 million years and that parts of the Ina crater may have formed in that time or even more recently....

National Geographic Channel. Premiering June 1 Behind many historic inventions—flight, electricity, personal computers—are tales of heated rivalries that spurred the inventors on. This television miniseries profiles the competitions of such geniuses as the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Actors convey the intensity of the feuds, and interviews with experts illuminate the characters and the science that made the innovations possible....

Art and neuroscience have been intertwined for centuries. Early surgeons and scientists who poked and prodded inside cranial cavities—such as Santiago Ramn y Cajal—often drew what they saw. These artistic renderings played a critical role in helping researchers grapple with the mysteries of our most vital organ. (Cajal even shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for his drawings.) Methods for exploring the brain have (thankfully) changed, and our understanding has evolved....

By Emma MarrisA genetically modified animal is on the brink of making an appearance on US dinner tables for the first time. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve a genetically modified (GM) Atlantic salmon that grows twice as fast as wild Atlantics, reaching market weight in a year and a half instead of three. Approval could come as soon as next week.The fish contains a single copy of a DNA sequence that includes code for a Chinook salmon growth hormone and regulatory sequences derived from Chinook salmon and the eel-like ocean pout....

A research team has identified a new gene that likely affects a child’s chances of developing type 1 diabetes. The chronic disease—which affects about 2 million people in the U.S. and is diagnosed in 13,000 children each year—is an autoimmune disorder, in which disease-fighting cells attack pancreatic cells that produce insulin, a hormone that regulates the level of glucose (sugar) in the blood. A deficit of insulin causes blood glucose levels to spike, which can lead to, among other things, kidney failure, retina damage, heart disease and, in some cases, death....

A collaboration with Matter. High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles. But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is diverted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley....

Dear EarthTalk: What is a “dead zone” in an ocean or other body of water?—Victor Paine, Tallahassee, Fla. So-called dead zones are areas of large bodies of water—typically in the ocean but also occasionally in lakes and even rivers—that do not have enough oxygen to support marine life. The cause of such “hypoxic” (lacking oxygen) conditions is usually eutrophication, an increase in chemical nutrients in the water, leading to excessive blooms of algae that deplete underwater oxygen levels....

Wikipedia is among the most frequently visited websites in the world, and one of the most popular places to tap into the world’s scientific and medical information. But scientists themselves are generally wary of it, because it can be edited by anyone, regardless of their level of expertise. At a meeting in London last week, the non-profit website’s volunteer editors reached out to scientists to enlist their help and to bridge the gap between the online encyclopaedia and the research community....

In a special report on sex and gender in the September 2017 issue of Scientific American, Stanford University professor of medicine Marcia L. Stefanick wrote that “medical researchers and physicians have a lot of untangling to do before they can offer better health care to women.” The tangle she was referring to? The woeful lack of data on how women experience diseases, how they respond to medications and the widespread bias in the medical field when diagnosing women....

The price of gold affects more than global finances; it also drives the world’s most toxic pollution problem, according to new research from the Blacksmith Institute, an environmental health group based in New York City. Miners in countries from across Africa and Southeast Asia use mercury to separate the precious metal from the surrounding rock and silt. To then separate the resulting amalgam of gold and mercury, heat must be applied to vaporize the mercury....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. There are at least a thousand reasons to visit Sicily, the great island – indeed the largest in the Mediterranean – that forms the triangular football to the boot that is the Italian peninsula. They are all very good reasons, including amazing landscapes, a uniquely complex and delicious cuisine, a history that is diverse and multifaceted beyond belief, excellent wines, a vast array of archaeological sites, an even vaster one of historical towns and villages....

To rid families of the curse of inherited diseases, medical geneticists have dreamed about changing human DNA before birth. The dream is also a nightmare, however, because it raises the specter of designer babies or creating harmful mutations. Now a precision genome-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9 has brought both dream and nightmare to the edge of reality. The technique makes snipping out troublesome DNA from a cell’s nucleus incredibly easy and cheap, compared with other methods....

In its push for cutting greenhouse gases in the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration has leaned hard on the health argument for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. President Obama pitched his carbon proposal last year from Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he met with children suffering from asthma. In the first year it goes into effect, U.S. EPA’s carbon plan for existing power plants would avert up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks, the president noted....

In the continuing battle to counter growing antibiotic resistance, a new finding may help keep our current arsenal of antibacterial agents from having to be scrapped and replaced by an as yet unrealized new infection-fighting therapy. By targeting an enzyme that bacteria use to swap genetic material, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have stopped the microbes’ ability to spread, among other advantageous mutations, resistance to antibiotics....