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When you pass the Grey Poupon, you’re probably not thinking about nature’s defense systems. Recent research, however, has found that the chemical compounds behind mustard’s kick help the plant family to deter pests. Researchers at Duke University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied the mustard plant species Boechera stricta. They looked at two populations of B. stricta growing in the Rocky Mountains, one in Montana and another in Colorado....

Your brain is electric. Tiny impulses constantly race among billions of interconnected neurons, generating an electric field that surrounds the brain like an invisible cloud. A new study published online July 15 in Neuron suggests that the brain’s electric field is not a passive by-product of its neural activity, as scientists once thought. The field may actively help regulate how the brain functions, especially during deep sleep. Although scientists have long known that external sources of electricity (such as electroshock therapy) can alter brain function, this is the first direct evidence that the brain’s native electric field changes the way the brain behaves....

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from. Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done. But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me. I think I’ll just let the mystery be. It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter....

Hopes for new Alzheimer’s drugs that would slow or stop the disease’s inexorable decline have repeatedly foundered in recent years. Large pharmaceutical companies, which have pushed ahead with drugs that stop the buildup of toxic proteins that damage and kill brain cells, have reported a recurring string of bad news. Just one example: Eli Lilly had to suspend last year the trial of a pharmaceutical designed to prevent the production of the toxic amyloid-beta protein because patients’ cognition actually worsened on the drug....

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova Viking, 2013 ($26.95) Konnikova, author of the Scientific American blog Literally Psyched, has been fascinated by Sherlock Holmes since the days when her father read aloud to her from Conan Doyle’s classic mysteries. Now a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, she examines Holmes’s powers of perception and problem solving through the lens of her discipline. The book is part literary analysis and part self-help guide, teaching readers how to sharpen the ways they observe the world, store and retrieve memories, and make decisions....

Key concepts Chemistry Chemical reactions Acidity Oxidation Introduction “See a penny, pick it up—all day long you’ll have good luck!” Maybe you’ve heard this phrase before, and maybe you’ve even stopped to pick up a lucky penny off the sidewalk. But sometimes those pennies you see on the ground look anything but lucky. They appear brown or black, and sometimes they’re so dirty looking you can’t even tell whether they’re pennies!...

“The camera does not lie,” the saying goes. And we tend to think of our eyes and our other sensory organs as video equipment, faithfully recording all the details of our busy lives. As you will learn from the articles on illusions collected in this special issue, however, we see with our brains, not with our eyes. And our brains make instant value judgments about the jumble of incoming sensory information, depending on what is important at that moment to us, to create a sensible narrative of the world around us....

With the click of a light switch and the whoosh of a hair dryer, Bob Smerbeck can unleash a tornado on his living room anytime he likes. And he does, often. Smerbeck, an expert senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com, built a model tornado machine to look at how vortexes form. How does it compare to a real tornado? Smerbeck’s tiny tornado has a vortex about an inch wide. Real tornadoes can grow to up to a mile wide....

The Arctic has transformed over the last five years into a region that’s warmer and greener, with larger patches of open water as sea ice recedes. It’s the “new normal,” say scientists who put together a new “Arctic report card” for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They described a series of dramatic shifts in the polar region that they said accelerated after record-setting sea ice loss during the summer of 2007, when the Arctic’s ice cover shrank 40 percent below its 30-year average....

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, winner of the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, is an accomplished scientist and champion for women in physics. As a graduate student in 1967, she co-discovered pulsars, a breakthrough widely considered one of the most important scientific advances of the 20th century. When the discovery of pulsars was recognized with the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, the award went to her graduate advisor. Undaunted, she persevered and became one of the most prominent researchers in her field and an advocate for women and other underrepresented groups in physics....

November 2 midterm elections marked a shift of power in Washington, D.C. The Republican Party wrested control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Democrats, who had held power across both houses of Congress and the White House since President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Just days after the midterm elections, a report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a related story in The New York Times examined what would happen to federal science agencies if the GOP carried through on their planned budget cuts....

We could have been living in an antimatter universe, but we are not. Antimatter is matter’s upside-down twin—every matter particle has a matching antimatter version with the opposite charge. Physicists think the cosmos started out with just as much antimatter as matter, but most of the former got wiped out. Now they may be one step closer to knowing why. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN near Geneva have discovered antimatter and matter versions of “charm” quarks—one of six types, or flavors, of a class of elementary matter particles—acting differently from one another....

When a male sand-sifting sea star in the coastal waters of Australia reaches out a mating arm to its nearest neighbor, sometimes that neighbor is also male. Undaunted, the pair assume their species’ pseudocopulation position and forge ahead with spawning. Mating, pseudo or otherwise, with a same-sex neighbor obviously does not transfer a set of genes to the next generation—yet several sea star and other echinoderm species persist with the practice....

Markets that sold animals—some dead, some alive—in December 2019 have emerged as a probable source of the coronavirus pandemic in a major investigation organized by the World Health Organization (WHO). That investigation winnowed out alternative hypotheses on when and where the pandemic arose, concluding that the virus probably didn’t spread widely before December or escape from a laboratory. The investigation report, released today, also takes a deep look at the likely role of markets—including the Huanan market in Wuhan, to which many of the first known COVID-19 infections are linked....

At 2:46 P.M. Tokyo time one of the largest earthquakes of the past century hit just off the coast of Honshu, the main island of Japan. The 8.9 magnitude quake stirred up massive tsunami waves that battered coastal cities, especially along the east coast north of Tokyo. The tsunami reached the coastline quickly; in some places the water had surged by more than three meters within about half an hour of the earthquake, according to data from the Japan Meteorological Agency....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Thanks to the new Sanal Muze digital portal released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey in 2020 CE, history lovers and art enthusiasts can now take virtual tours of Turkey’s best archaeological sites and museums. There are currently 33 online tours available, giving visitors a fantastic opportunity to check out archaeological sites and museums they may not have yet visited....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In ancient Celtic cultures, torcs were a common form of jewellery and were made from bronze, copper, silver, and gold. Torcs were not just exquisite works of Celtic art but also identified the wearer’s status and perhaps were believed to have spiritual properties. Depictions of gods and Celtic warriors in ancient art often show these figures wearing a torc around their necks....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. For centuries, Lucius Cornelius Sulla has been reviled as a maniacal tyrant who defiled the Roman constitution and instituted bloody purges, but some modern historians assert that he has been judged too harshly. They present him as a republican champion who predominantly acted out of necessity and often with the best of intentions....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The battle of Cynossema, in 411 BCE, was an Athenian victory during the final years of the Peloponnesian War. It marked the resilience of the renowned Athenian democratic system after their major defeats in Sicily and also after a small civil war within Athens. This victory, narrated by the famous Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, was crucial for the maintenance and balance of power in the Aegean Sea which was the main theatre of combat in the concluding years of the conflict....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineThe e-mail that ended one career for Alison Singer, but started another, arrived as she was cooking dinner for her daughters one evening in January 2009. Singer was preoccupied. At a committee meeting she was due to attend in Washington, D.C., the next day, she and others were set to vote on a plan that would direct much of the United States’ spending on autism research for the next year....