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Since 1978 chemists at the University of California, Irvine, have been collecting air in 40 locations from northern Alaska to southern New Zealand. Using gas chromatography, the scientists have measured the levels of methane–CH4–in the lowest layer of our atmosphere. Although not nearly as abundant as carbon dioxide–CO2–methane remains the second most important greenhouse gas, both because each molecule of CH4 in the atmosphere traps 23 times as much heat as carbon dioxide and it helps create more ozone–yet another greenhouse gas–in the atmosphere....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Imagine you begin to feel ill on Thursday, a few days after returning from a trip. You’re afraid it’s COVID-19, so you get tested on Friday. Even under good circumstances, it will probably be at least Monday before a contact tracer calls from the health department. And then some phone tag may ensue before you speak with anyone—if you get a call at all....

To most people, a cloud of midges is an annoyance. To Nicholas Ouellette it is the key to a mysterious animal behavior — the swarm. Ouellette, who works on complex systems at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and his colleague James Puckett, have found that swarms of these insects become self-organizing when their numbers reach just ten individuals. Their paper, published on 13 August in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, is part of a small but growing area of research producing data from real swarms to inform models of this behavior....

In an instant, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin sent the United States’ climate promises to the world into a tailspin. The conservative Democrat effectively removed the best path the U.S. has to fulfill the climate commitments it made to leaders worldwide by saying he would vote against his party’s signature climate legislation. It isn’t just the fate of U.S. climate policy that appears in tatters. It could reverberate into other corners of the globe and undermine efforts to keep deadly floods, fires, heat, hurricanes and sea-level rise from inflicting greater havoc....

Insulin, the well-known blood sugar hormone, may have a newly discovered function in the body that will rattle your bones—regulating skeletal growth and breakdown. Two new studies published online July 22 in Cell show that insulin stimulates both bone building and breakdown in mice through the hormone’s effects on two types of bone cells: bone-building osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts. What’s more, these cells are involved in an intricate hormonal loop that in turn regulates not only insulin production, but also blood sugar levels and energy metabolism....

About 1 in 68 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with autism, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), scientists from the organization reported Thursday. This estimate represents a 30 percent increase in prevalence from the 1 in 88 children reported in 2012 to have autism. The researchers evaluated school and medical records of 363,749 children who were 8 years old in 2010. The prevalence data are from 11 states but vary widely by geography, from 1 in 45 in New Jersey to 1 in 175 in Alabama....

By Ben Gruber DELRAY BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) - Lotta Bosnyak takes extra time to chew the blueberries in her yogurt. Otherwise, she said, the device she credits with saving her life will not work. The tube Bosnyak is referring to has been implanted into her stomach. She turns a valve and, standing over a toilet, drains out the yogurt. The 52-year-old Delray Beach, Florida, resident was one of the first people to try the “AspireAssist” device four years ago in Sweden, where she is from....

On Valentine’s Day, everywhere you look there are heart-shaped balloons, pink greeting cards and candy boxes filled with chocolate. But what is true love? Does it exist? Or is it simply a cognitive illusion, a trick of the mind? Contrary to the anatomy referenced in all our favorite love songs, love (as with every other emotion we feel) is not rooted in the heart but in the brain. (Unfortunately, Hallmark has no plans to mass-produce arrow-pierced chocolate brains in the near future....

Editor’s note: We are posting this story from our June 2005 issue because of the upcoming February 17, 2009 deadline for switching to digital TV, which may be hitting some snags. Keep the antenna level. Rotate it 90 degrees. Move it a few inches to the left. Stand to the right. Hold it a bit higher…there—nope. Try again. That has been my high-definition television (HDTV) experience. I plunged into the alphabet-soup world of digital television (DTV) in 2003, shortly after I replaced my electron-gun boob tube with a 42-inch plasma flat panel....

Editor’s Note: The World Wide Web went live 20 years ago this month, on a single computer in Geneva, Switzerland. For the anniversary the Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has written an exclusive article for Scientific American. In it he confronts various threats that could ruin the Web, and explains why preserving the basic principles that have allowed the Web to flourish is essential to preventing its destruction. While preparing the article, Berners-Lee also spoke to Scientific American about emerging Web capabilities that could change how the online and physical worlds work....

A congressionally mandated report published today (Sept. 5) by the premier science advisory group in the United States has found that NASA should focus its exoplanet research budget on large space- and ground-based telescopes. The new National Academy of Sciences report feeds into a decadal priority-setting system in the astronomy community that guides NASA’s long-term strategy. “The really big message is that this is a very special moment in human history,” David Charbonneau, an astronomer at Harvard University and co-chairman of the committee behind the new report, told Space....

What could the study of infectious disease teach us about the 2008 financial crisis? Plenty, argue University of Oxford ecologist Robert M. May and Andrew G. Haldane, the Bank of England’s executive director for financial stability. In a recent paper they compared big banks such as Lehman Brothers with what epidemiologists call “superspreaders”—infected people or organisms who endanger entire networks through their web of connections. To prevent another meltdown, financial regulators may need to focus on the health of networks, not just individual banks, May notes....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Editor’s note: Today the World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, one of the organization’s networks of expert communities that form the Global Agenda Councils, released its Top 10 List of Emerging Technologies for 2015. Bernard Meyerson, chief innovation officer of IBM and author of the following essay, is chair of the Meta-Council. Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina is serving as vice-chair....

Researchers are probing the health and economic fallout from this year’s record allergy season to understand how warming weather and shifting rainfall may lead to more widespread and costlier allergy problems in the future. Already, doctors are seeing climate change alter how allergens disperse. “It played out in the form of the duration of the pollen season,” said Leonard Bielory, an attending physician and allergist at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and a professor at Rutgers University’s Center for Environmental Prediction....

The United States will revive the long-dormant National Space Council, a group meant to coordinate space policy among government agencies and departments. Vice-president Mike Pence, who will chair the council, announced its reinstatement on June 7 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. First constituted in 1958, the space council—or some iteration of it—has been active sporadically, most recently between 1989 and 1993. Since then, space policy has been mainly run out of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and NASA....

Cyclist Lance Armstrong has apologized for using performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de France titles. He attributed his cheating to a determination to “win at all costs.” Psychologist Marc Hauser of Harvard University, who once wrote an article entitled “Costs of Deception: Cheaters Are Punished…,” is now out of a job after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity concluded that he “fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways....

ONE OF THE SIGNATURE discoveries of cognitive neuroscience is that a structure called the hippocampus, deep within the brain, is intimately involved in creating memories. This fact was dramatically illustrated by a singular patient, Henry Molaison, who experienced severe epileptic seizures. In 1953, when Molaison was 27, doctors removed his hippocampus and nearby areas on both sides of his brain. The operation controlled his epilepsy, but at a price—from that time on, he was unable to remember the things that happened to him....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Medicine in ancient Egypt was understood as a combination of practical technique and magical incantation and ritual. Although physical injury was usually addressed pragmatically through bandages, splints, and salves, even the broken bones and surgical procedures described in the medical texts were thought to have been made more effective through magic spells....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The names of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood are forever linked to the Maya and Mayan studies as the two great explorers who documented the ruins from Copan in the south to Chichen Itza in the north. The stories told by Stephens in his Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843) complemented by Catherwood’s illustrations, focused international attention on the Maya civilization....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The sea dogs, as they were disparagingly called by the Spanish authorities, were privateers who, with the consent and sometimes financial support of Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603 CE), attacked and plundered Spanish colonial settlements and treasure ships in the second half of the 16th century CE....