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The Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt doesn’t look like a battlefield. It lies in peaceful, roadless isolation along the northeastern edge of Hudson Bay in Canada, more than 20 miles from Inukjuak, the nearest human settlement. From the shoreline, the open ground swells into low hills, some covered by lichens, some scraped bare by Ice Age glaciers. The exposed rocks are beautiful in their stretched and folded complexity. Some are gray and black, shot through with light veins....

Is salt bad for us? In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart disease, reduces your blood pressure, or has no effect at all. We called Scientific American advisory board member Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and the author of Food Politics, to help parse the latest thinking regarding salt and heart health....

Google “successful Thanksgiving” and you will get a lot of different recommendations. Most you’ve probably heard before: plan ahead, get help, follow certain recipes. But according to new research from Florida State University, enjoying your holiday also requires a key ingredient that few guests consider as they wait to dive face first into the turkey: a belief in free will. What does free will have to do with whether or not Aunt Sally leaves the table in a huff?...

All along the Gulf of Mexico, 2010 was the summer of the Oil Spill. As BP’s uncapped Deepwater Horizon oil well gushed away off of Louisiana, tourists stayed away from the Gulf Coast in droves, convinced by news reports that oil was coming ashore or would do so imminently. As far away as Fort Myers and Key Largo in Florida, beaches were deserted and hotel occupancy rates were down. In reality, the situation was never so dire—especially on the western coast of Florida....

If you ask the people of Yakutat, Alaska, the best part about living in this small, remote town is the breathtaking natural beauty. The worst part is the price of electricity. Yakutat’s 1.5-megawatt electrical system is completely reliant on diesel fuel, which is delivered four times per year at a price of $4.50 per gallon. In recent years, the community’s electricity prices have been consistently between 50 and 60 cents per kilowatt-hour....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Bronze Age frescoes from Akrotiri on the Aegean island of Thera (modern-day Santorini) provide some of the most famous images from the ancient Greek world. Sometime between 1650 and 1550 BCE Thera suffered a devastating earthquake which destroyed the town, and this catastrophe was soon followed by a volcanic eruption which covered the settlement of Akrotiri in metres-thick layers of pumice and volcanic ash....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. If one was looking to enjoy a fine meal in the medieval world then the best place to find a handsomely laid dinner table was in the local castle. There, in the magnificent Great Hall, feasts were regularly served for the local lord and his entourage of knights and ladies where a hearty appetite was considered a great virtue....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Bath, the famous spa town in Somerset England, has attracted people from near and far for centuries to its healing springs and baths. Today the city is known for its beautiful Georgian architecture and as the destination for the wealthy elite of the 18th and 19th centuries CE....

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada’s Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say. “Once we started to break fresh rock, we realized we had discovered something incredibly special,” said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in Pomona, Calif., and co-author of a new study announcing the find. “It was an extraordinary moment.” The Burgess Shale refers to both a fossil find and a 505-million-year-old rock formation made of mud and clay....

FEBRUARY 1908 SPORTSMAN’S NUMBER—“For this issue of Scientific American, a beautiful colored cover encloses a rare selection of appropriate articles interesting alike to the sportsman and to the general reader [see illustration].” FLYING AS A SPORT—“Up to the present time men have taken up flying partly from scientific interest, partly from sport, and partly from business reasons, but a time is rapidly approaching when the art will have reached a state of development such that men can practice it without the necessity of maintaining a private laboratory or a manufacturing plant....

The sight of a spider casts dread into some people’s hearts. This fear, known as arachnophobia, is perturbing, irrational and debilitating. But at its essence, fear is rooted in memory, and memory is plastic. For years the mainstay treatment for phobias has been exposure therapy—gradually familiarizing a patient with the source of his or her fear by repeatedly presenting it in a safe environment. A related approach aims to disrupt the fear memory itself....

Hardly a day seems to pass without a new report of a soldier or civilian being killed or maimed by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan or Iraq. Just such a weapon killed two coalition members on Monday in Iraq’s volatile southern region, according to NATO. Meanwhile, data published October 22 by Wikileaks indicates that IEDs are the biggest killers of British and US troops in Afghanistan, accounting for more than half of all fatalities....

After 15 years, cold fusion got a second chance at legitimacy from the U.S. Department of Energy, often seen by cold fusion advocates as their greatest enemy. This rematch, many hoped, would vindicate the field or kill it once and for all. Instead history repeated itself, with a verdict that evidence remained inconclusive. Conventional physics holds that nuclear fusion ignites at multimillion-degree temperatures. In March 1989 controversy erupted when electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, then at the University of Utah, claimed room-temperature experiments with palladium electrodes in heavy water generated heat far in excess of any chemical reaction....

By Erika Check HaydenThe fiscal crisis at the University of California looks set to engulf the world’s largest collection of research materials focused on marine sciences.On February 11, Brian Schottlaender, librarian at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), proposed closing the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, along with four other libraries affiliated with UCSD, including the Medical Center Library and the Science & Engineering Library. Schottlaender had been asked to cut $6 million out of his $25-million budget as part of a $500-million reduction for the entire University of California system....

In 1845 James K. Polk succeeded John Tyler, Jr., as the 11th president. The U.S. an­nexed Texas as the 28th state, and the young nation’s “manifest destiny” to occupy all of North America became a popular ideal. The industrial revolution was burgeoning, easing people’s lives with mechanical marvels. By this time, for instance, Cyrus McCormick had created a labor-saving reaper for crops. And with a promise to explain “New Inventions, Scientific Principles, and Curious Works,” the painter and inventor Rufus Porter introduced the first issue of a broadsheet called The Scientific American on August 28, 1845....

With the flu now resistant to its two most common medications, doctors and drug developers have grown increasingly puzzled about how to treat the virus. A 900-megahertz magnet is offering some new clues. Biochemists at Florida State University and Brigham Young University have used a 40-ton magnet to obtain atomic-level images of the virus, not only confirming how the bug escapes annihilation but also revealing potential pathways for new drugs. The study focused on influenza A, the virus responsible for pandemic strains—more specifically, on one of the virus’s surface proteins known as M2, which plays an important role in reproduction....

… in three regions. When it comes to climate change, coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, is a definite baddie — BTU for BTU, burning it puts out almost 30 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2) than burning petroleum and about 78 percent more CO2 than natural gas.Want to fight climate change? Then you better curb coal-fired power plants.* And to the Obama administration’s credit, they have undertaken (or at least seem about to undertake) using the authority they have under the Clean Air Act to stop the building of new coal-fired power plants that fail to limit their carbon output and maybe even force existing coal-fired power plants to clean up their act....

For nearly two centuries, people have struggled to imagine what the great extinct dinosaurs looked like. Thanks to modern paleontology and physiology, their shapes, masses and even how they might have moved and interacted have been deduced. But one of the most basic questions about their appearance, their coloring, seemed unanswerable. A new study, however, proposes some of the first cellular hints. Extrapolating from primitive pigment-giving organelles known as melanosomes (which contain the coloring compound melanin and are still prevalent in modern animals) that have been found in fossilized dinosaur feathers from the Cretaceous period, a research team paints a picture of dark wings and brightly striped reddish tails....

Like cheerleaders forming a human pyramid, many particles might be able to assemble themselves into organized superstructures, a new study has found. An object’s shape can greatly affect how it responds to crowding, and some tiny material building blocks known as nanoparticles may be able to self-assemble into intricate patterns when forced to share space with neighbors. In the new study, researchers at the University of Michigan set out to perform a broad survey of how particle shape drives the formation of larger crystallike structures....

Federal regulators on Tuesday gave Juno Therapeutics the all-clear to resume testing an experimental cancer treatment, just days aftershutting down the trial because of three patient deaths. Juno is at work in a newfangled field of oncology in which scientists remove a patient’s own white blood cells and rewire them to home in on cancerous growths, part of the growing field of immunotherapy. The Food and Drug Administration put the study on hold last week after three young leukemia patients who had received Juno’s experimental therapy developed fatal brain swelling....