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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The finalists are here, the exhibits are on display and now it is up to the judges to pick a winner. Given the quality and breadth of the 15 finalist projects in the inaugural Google Science Fair, choosing the top entrant is an unenviable task. The event is an online, global version of the good old student science fair, and it drew thousands of entries from 90 countries. (Scientific American is a partner in the Google Science Fair....

The late Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said that every species designation represents a theory about that organism—the species assignment is more than a mere naming; it is a classification of the organism within the context of all the other creeping, crawling, clinging and cavorting life on earth. As such, the discovery of a charismatic new species of animal or plant often piques the interest of both the scientific community and the lay public....

This month, my Scientific American column posed a question about art these days: Should we, the public, be allowed to know how much of it is human talent, and how much was assisted by technology? (I was thinking of, for example, Automatic mode on cameras, or Autotune, or GarageBand, which can produce finished, fully orchestrated songs even if you don’t know anything about music.) But what about lip syncing? Do we care when a singer is faking it?...

Halfway down Georgia’s coastline, Sapelo Island is surrounded by more than 4,000 acres of salt marshes, with vast stretches of lush grasses that blaze gold in the colder months. But this beautiful barrier island is experiencing some of the harshest effects of climate change: seawater intrusion, intense storms and flooding. And scientists have noticed something more subtle and unusual happening to the island in the past several years. A once inconspicuous burrowing crab is suddenly wiping out swaths of marsh cordgrass, a plant that holds much of the South’s coastal marshland in place and protects vulnerable species....

While some growing powers like China and India invest billions to make their exploding energy sectors cleaner, other developing nations are climbing up the economic ladder with few or no plans for improving their coal sectors, a new study finds. The trend is just one of dozens that appear in a sweeping new database of 60,000 power plants worldwide with emissions data going back to 2004. The Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) tool produced by the Center for Global Development, updated and released this week, shows that seven of the world’s 10 dirtiest power plants are in Asia – though none in China....

Recovering addicts are often told to avoid the people, places, and things connected with their addiction—tried-and-true advice that may be gaining support from neuroscience. A view widely accepted among addiction researchers is that drug abuse can cause the brain to form persistent, enduring associations between a drug and the environment in which it is purchased and consumed. These mental ties represent a subconscious form of learning and contribute to the tenacious grip of addictions....

Oil giant ExxonMobil will pay the equivalent of 24 hours worth of petroleum sales to the people impacted by the 11 million gallons (41.5 million liters) of crude oil spilled into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 when the drunken skipper of the Exxon Valdez allowed the tanker to run aground, according to a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The ruling caps the total damages assessed to the company at $507....

Russia is set to launch a robotic spacecraft to the Mars moon Phobos today (Nov. 8), marking the nation’s first attempt at an interplanetary mission in 15 years. The Phobos-Grunt mission is slated to blast off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome at 3:16 p.m. EST today (2016 GMT; 12:16 a.m. local time on Nov. 9). The main goal is to grab some dirt from Phobos’ surface and return the samples to Earth in 2014 (“grunt” means “soil” in Russian)....

It seems to be simply part of the natural process of growing old: as we age, our hearing becomes progressively worse, starting with high-frequency sounds. But compensating for the problem is more than a matter of turning up the volume. Most older adults, even those with good hearing, have trouble with certain aspects of auditory processing, such as picking out individual voices in a noisy restaurant. Clearly, age-related hearing loss involves more than just the ears, but researchers know very little about the neurological aspects of hearing loss....

Key concepts Biology Senses Olfaction Brain Memory Introduction Did you know that approximately two million people in the U.S. have no sense of smell? Lack of smell is a disorder known as anosmia and can be caused by damage to the nerves that transmit information from your nose to your brain. Our sense of smell serves an important purpose. We use it to distinguish between edible and inedible items in our lives, including foods that are fresh or rotten....

Sea level rise is a game of millimeters a year, but those millimeters add up to a huge amount of water entering the world’s oceans. And the rising tide could eventually swamp cities around the globe. With tide gauges distributed sparsely around the planet, scientists have turned to satellites to provide a global picture of sea level since the early 1990s. New research published on Monday in Nature Climate Change refines those satellite estimates and provides some good and bad news....

When Shirley Ann Jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, she would prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellow jackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and test which flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive. She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering, for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms by putting them under the dark porch in the middle of the day....

The M12 puzzle has 12 pieces arranged in a row and numbered 1-12 (see Fig. 1). There are two moves. The ‘Invert’ (I) move reverses the order of the pieces (Fig. 2) and the ‘Merge’ (M) move shuffles the pieces as a deck of cards (Fig. 3). The group of all possible moves we can get by repeating the I and M moves in arbitrary order is the Mathieu group M12....

Nearly 3,000 academics, including 13 Nobel laureates, have signed a petition denouncing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that bars people from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the US. Under the order, signed Friday, nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are prohibited from entering the US for at least 90 days, regardless of whether they have green cards or visas. The order is discriminatory, according to the petition, whose signatories include former Nobel laureates such as past National Institutes of Health Director Dr....

In Alaska patients are more likely to find an astronaut than a geneticist. William Oefelein, who piloted the space shuttle Discovery, retired there, but the state of more than 700,000 people does not have a single medical geneticist to call its own. Instead, patients must wait until one flies in from Oregon around 4000 kilometers away. Six times a year a geneticist or two comes to Alaska and visits a few clinics, seeing about eight patients a day, diagnosing genetic causes for developmental delays such as fragile X syndrome or discussing hereditary cancer risk....

The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World Porter Fox Little, Brown, 2021 ($28) With each new report about the impending—and ongoing—effects of climate change, it’s easy to catastrophize. In the coming decades, as glaciers around the planet melt and sea levels rise, hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal communities will be forced to relocate to higher ground. But the mountains are no safe space either, as wildfires increase and water becomes scarce—both of which are a result of disappearing snowfall....

Everybody knows that the passage of time is not constant. Moments of terror or elation can stretch a clock tick to what seems like a life time. Yet, we do not know how the brain “constructs” the experience of subjective time. Would it not be important to know so we can find ways to make moments last, or pass by, more quickly? A recent study by van Wassenhove and colleagues is beginning to shed some light on this problem....

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 Buxar (aka Bhaksar or Baksar) in Bihar, northeast India, on 22-23 October 1764 saw a British East India Company (EIC) army led by Hector Munro (1726-1805) gain victory against the combined forces of the Nawab of Awadh (aka Oudh), the Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II (r....

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 Mons Graupius was fought in 83 CE between the invading forces of Rome, under the general Agricola, and the Picts, the indigenous people of modern-day Scotland, under their leader Calgacus. The only account of the battle is found in the Agricola by the Roman historian Tacitus (56-117 CE) who was Agricola’s son-in-law....

After a bout of the flu, lingering germs can wreak havoc on the weakened immune system. These pathogens are not influenza organisms but, rather, bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, a microbe that normally lies dormant in the nose or throat of children but migrates on a path cleared by the flu to the middle ear where it causes an infection called acute otitis. There are more than 24 million cases of middle ear infections—which can cause pain, fever, vomiting and appetite loss—diagnosed each year in the U....