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The earthshaking rumblings felt in Michigan last night weren’t an earthquake, but rather vibrations from a booming noise caused by a meteor whizzing overhead, according to the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). On Tuesday evening (Jan. 16), people in Ohio, Michigan and Ontario, Canada, were treated to the awe-inspiring view of a meteor streaking across the night sky. At 8:09 p.m. local time in southeastern Michigan, hundreds of people reported hearing a loud boom from the meteor and feeling the ground shake, according to the U....

ESTES PARK, COLO.: EARLY ON AN AUTUMN MORNING, A LIGHT confection of snow begins dusting treetops on the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. We’ve pulled our 4×4 to the side of the road, and I’m huddled low by the fender to line up my camera for a shot of four approaching elk. My guide, wildlife photographer Steven Morello, whispers to me from the driver’s side. No abrupt moves, he cautions; if I stay quiet, I’ll probably get a long shot of these animals when they amble up the hill to our right....

His finalist year: 1967 His finalist project: Studying how crayfish react to different ecological niches What led to the project: Haig Donabedian learned about science close-up from an early age. His father, public health expert Avedis Donabedian, moved the family from Lebanon to the U.S. (and ultimately to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) when Donabedian was six-years-old to further his academic career. Haig, too, thought research was worthwhile. The summer before his senior year of high school, in 1966, he attended a summer science training program at the University of Nevada, Reno....

New research shows how certain antidepressants work, paving the way to new, improved versions of the drugs used to treat depression, anxiety and attention deficit disorder. Two separate studies—published this week in Science and Nature—provide a window into the way tricyclic antidepressants, such as clomipramine and desipramine, provide therapeutic relief by adhering to proteins on the part of a nerve cell’s outer membrane that extends into the brain’s synapses (spaces between the cells)....

A bulbous corpse found bobbing off a tiny island in the Azores is the heaviest bony fish ever measured. The record breaker is a bump-head sunfish (Mola alexandrini). Taller than it is long, with a truncated back fin and mushroom-colored skin, the fish weighed in at just more than three tons (2,744 kilograms). This beats out the previous bony fish record holder, another bump-head sunfish caught off the coast of Japan in 1996 that tipped the scales at more than 2....

For HIV-negative men who have sex with men, taking preemptive antiretrovirals seems to reduce the risk of getting infected by about 44 percent, according to a new international study. Among those who reported having unprotected receptive anal sex, the prophylactic drug treatment was about 58 percent effective in preventing infection, and among all study subjects who took the recommended daily dose at least 90 percent of the time, the treatment had about a 73 percent efficacy in preventing transmission....

God moves the player, he in turn, the piece. But what god beyond God begins the round of dust and time and sleep and agonies? —Jorge Luis Borges, from “Chess,” 1960 The victory in March of the computer program AlphaGo over one of the world’s top handful of go players marks the highest accomplishment to date for the burgeoning field of machine learning and intelligence. The computer beat Lee Se-dol at go, a very old and traditional board game, at a highly publicized tournament in Seoul in a 4–1 rout....

A popular school of thought, dramatized in the recent TV drama Lie to Me, is that a careful study of facial expressions—especially eye movements—tells investigators if a perp is dissembling. Reality is neither as dramatic nor as decisive. Even experienced investigators average only about a 65 percent success rate, according to researchers. Could computers do a better job? Researchers at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (U....

On his 27th birthday, David Hillebrandt and his wife Sally began to climb Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa after Kilimanjaro. Instead of gearing up and heading straight for the mountain’s tallest peak—which reaches 5,199 meters—the couple started their journey more leisurely, trekking through scenic ridges and valleys around the mountain at an altitude of about 3,000 meters. David, who today serves as a medical advisor to the British Mountaineering Council, already had considerable climbing experience at the time: he had scaled a 5,790-meter peak in Pakistan and 3,960-meter peaks in the European Alps....

When I taught my first online course more than a decade ago, I was an oddity in my department. My primary motivation was to share information about the biology of HIV as part of an overall effort to combat the many misconceptions surrounding AIDS in the public mind. The course was made up of video captures of in-class lectures that were transmitted to the world as part of our continuing education programs....

A Frankensteinesque contraption of glass bulbs and crackling electrodes has produced yet another revelation about the origin of life. The results suggest that Earth’s early atmosphere could have produced chemicals necessary for life—contradicting the view that life’s building blocks had to come from comets and meteors. “Maybe we’re over-optimistic, but I think this is a paradigm shift,” says chemist Jeffrey Bada, whose team performed the experiment at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif....

Editor’s note: This story was originally posted in the February 1995 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes in Scientific American. I first saw Yoichiro Nambu almost 10 years ago, from the back row of a graduate seminar in physics at the University of Chicago. A small man in a neat suit, he was sketching long, snaking tubes on the blackboard. Sometimes he said they were vortex lines, found in superconductors; other times he called them strings, connecting quarks....

Editor’s Note (10/8/21): David Julius, one of the authors of this article from 2006, is the co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to how the human body senses temperature and touch. Throbbing, itching, aching, stabbing, stinging, pounding, piercing. Pain comes in a range of unpleasant flavors. But all pain has one thing in common: those who endure it want it to stop. Yet the most widely used analgesics today are essentially folk remedies that have served for centuries: morphine and other opiates derive from the opium poppy, and aspirin comes from willow bark....

The origin of Earth’s water has puzzled scientists for decades. Icy comets smashing into the planet seemed like natural donors, but many comets have water chemistry different from that of Earth’s oceans. Rocky asteroids that contain water might have soaked the young planet, but analyses of meteorites—the asteroids’ remnants on Earth—show that the planet today is missing the material that those impacts should have left behind. Research published today in Science provide evidence for a different theory: that water has been around since the Earth formed, trapped on grains of dust that aggregated to make a planet....

Scientists are playing a dogged game of hide-and-seek with one of the universe’s most plentiful components: dark matter. So far, dark matter continues to hide as scientists still seek. No one knows what comprises this invisible form of matter, but a leading candidate is a type of particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle). WIMPs are appealing because although they themselves neither radiate nor reflect light, they might produce other particles that do....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The different Buddhist schools of thought, still operating in the present day, developed after the death of the Buddha (l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE) in an effort to perpetuate his teachings and honor his example. Each of the schools claimed to represent Buddha’s original vision and still do so in the modern era....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Roman Republic was in death’s throes. Within a few short years, the “dictator for life” Julius Caesar would be assassinated, and, as a result, the government would descend into chaos. The consequence of a long civil war would bring the birth of an empire under the watchful eye of an emperor; however, it would also witness the loss of many personal liberties - liberties that were the pride of the people and the result of a long history of struggle and strife....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Disregarding the extremely inhospitable spots even the most stubborn of us have enough common sense to avoid, humans have managed to cover an extraordinary amount of territory on this earth. Go back 200,000 years, however, and Homo sapiens was only a newly budding species developing in Africa, while perceived ancestors such as Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis had already travelled beyond Africa to explore parts of Eurasia, and sister species like the Neanderthal and Denisovan would traipse around there way before we did, too....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The bulk of the “the land between the two rivers” lies in what we call today the Republic of Iraq. People have been living there, around and between the Euphrates-Tigris system for thousands of years. The earth of this land has been irrigated by these two rivers and throughout several millennia, a multitude of cultures, city-states, and empires flourished in Mesopotamia, resulting in a gradual development in each and every aspect of human life....

Federal prosecutors on Friday filed criminal charges against Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and the company’s former president Sunny Balwani—marking a pivotal turning point in a scandal that has rocked the business world and captivated the public imagination. So, what’s next for the Silicon Valley villains of the moment? Here are seven questions to watch as the case moves forward. Will the case go to trial? Holmes and Balwani are facing serious allegations: nine counts related to defrauding investors, patients, and doctors, carrying a penalty of up to 20 years in prison and up to $2....