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By Brian Switek of Nature magazineA painstaking search through thousands of chunks of amber has unearthed 11 prehistoric feathers. They promise an unprecedented look at the history of these peculiar structures in both birds and non-avian dinosaurs.The amber samples are between 70 and 85 million years old, and come from a site called Grassy Lake in western Canada that was once home to a conifer forest. The site is well known for the wide range of insects found preserved in its amber....

Wastewater treatment plants not only struggle removing pharmaceuticals, it seems some drugs actually increase after treatment. When researchers tested wastewater before and after treatment at a Milwaukee-area treatment plant, they found that two drugs—the anti-epileptic carbamazepine and antibiotic ofloxacin—came out at higher concentrations than they went in. The study suggests the microbes that clean our water may also piece some pharmaceuticals back together. Carbamazepine and ofloxacin on average increased by 80 percent and 120 percent, respectively, during the treatment process....

In the trenches of consumer technology, there’s plenty to complain about. Today’s cell-phone contracts are exorbitant and illogical (why has the price of a text message doubled in three years?). Those 15-second voicemail instructions still seem to last forever and use up our expensive airtime (“When you have finished recording, you may hang up”—oh, really?). And laptop batteries still can’t last the whole day. But here and there, in unsung but important corners of consumer tech, some long-standing annoyances have quietly been extinguished....

Facebook has released statistics on abusive behavior on its social media network, deleting more than 22 million posts for violating its rules against pornography and hate speech—and deleting or adding warnings about violence to another 3.5 million posts. Many of those were detected by automated systems monitoring users’ activity, in line with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement to Congress that his company would use artificial intelligence to identify social media posts that might violate the company’s policies....

As a child, my brother would frequently challenge me to a game he called punch-for-punch. He’d let me hit him in the arm if he could hit me back just as hard. We’d exchange blows until one of us—the loser—quit. It wasn’t a long game; dull punches soon became bruising wallops. Being several years younger and many pounds lighter, I’d often concede quickly, fearing the next blow that, despite the game’s equally-hard rule, always felt more forceful than the last....

As the Canadian province of British Columbia prepares to open its annual grizzly-bear hunting season, conservation scientists are protesting the provincial government’s decision to expand the number of animals that can be killed. British Columbia officials estimate that there are 15,000 grizzlies (Ursos arctos horribilis) in the province, making up roughly one-quarter of the North American population. Although some sub-populations are declining and the species is listed as of “special concern” by some environmental bodies, it is not listed under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, which would afford the bears government protection....

The city looms large in the fiction of author William Gibson. In the September issue of Scientific American, Gibson’s essay, “Life in the Meta-City,” details how cities increase “the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts” and how they serve as “vast, multilayered engines of choice.” Cities that cease to provide choice—or which try to overcontrol their denizens—lose their spark and sometimes perish. In the interview that follows, Gibson shares his perceptions about existing cities and their links to his fiction....

A tiny tree frog seems to be using city drains to amplify its serenades to attract females. In research published today in the Journal of Zoology, researchers found that the Mientien tree frog native to Taiwan congregates in roadside storm drains during the mating season. Audio recordings revealed that the mating songs of the frogs inside the structures were louder and longer than those of their less-streetwise rivals, who gathered in patches of land next to the drains....

By Jeff TollefsonThe ivory-colored beaches of Cancún promise tourists a chance to forget their worries. But there is no such assurance for the international negotiators who will flock to the Mexican resort next week to attend the sixteenth gathering of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.One year after the near-collapse of climate talks in Copenhagen, participants will be hard-pressed to map a viable path forward. Global climate negotiations began in 1992 at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized countries agreed to curb their emissions....

As concern grows over faster-spreading variants of coronavirus, labs worldwide are racing to unpick the biology of these viruses. Scientists want to understand why SARS-CoV-2 variants identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa seem to be spreading so quickly, and whether they might diminish the potency of vaccines or overcome natural immunity and lead to spate of reinfections. “Many of us are scrambling to make sense of the new variants, and the million-dollar question is what significance this will have for the effectiveness of vaccines that are currently being administered,” says Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester....

A human fetus in its second trimester is extraordinarily busy. It is developing skin and bones, the ability to hear and swallow, and working on its first bowel movement. Now, a study published on 14 June in Nature finds that fetuses are also acquiring a functioning immune system — one that can recognize foreign proteins, but is less inclined than a mature immune system to go on the attack (N. McGovern et al....

Key concepts Chemistry Gases Acids Reactions Combustion Introduction Do you have a fire extinguisher at home? Hopefully, yes! It can save your life in case there is a fire. But have you ever wondered how these extinguishers work? Some of them don’t even contain water, which is what you probably think of first when it comes to stopping a fire from spreading. What else other than water can extinguish a flame?...

By Julie Steenhuysen (Reuters) - Florida officials on Thursday announced a new area of Zika transmission in the Miami region and have called on the federal government for funding to help fight the outbreak. Florida Governor Rick Scott said state health officials have confirmed that local transmission of the mosquito-borne Zika virus is occurring in a new small area in Miami-Dade County, where the state believes two women and three men have been infected by the virus....

What’s the densest object in the universe? The brightest? The loudest? In his new book Extreme Cosmos (Perigee, 2012), astronomer Bryan Gaensler reveals the cosmic record holders of these and many other titles. In an excerpt below, from the chapter “Extremes of Temperature,” Gaensler explains the physics behind some of the hottest stars known: We all know that if you heat something up, it glows. A poker in a fire shines a dull orange or red, while a conventional (incandescent) lightbulb works by heating up a tungsten filament to several thousand degrees so that it glows yellow or white....

Tiger Woods revealed last week that he’d been playing golf on a bum left knee for nearly a year. And he hadn’t been doing badly: Recently, he finished second at the Master’s and won the U.S. Open after forcing a playoff last week. We’ll never know if perfect knee health would have meant another green jacket. What we do know is that he winced in pain after every shot and caused more damage to his knee....

By Hannah HoagA panel of top Canadian scientists has scrutinized research on the health and environmental effects of oil-sands development in northern Alberta, and found exaggerated claims for its impact on health. It has also identified weakness in monitoring and inadequate evidence to support some remediation technologies now in place. The panel, convened by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), finds fault with the media and environmental groups but most of its criticism focuses on the industry-funded body responsible for monitoring oil-sands and the Alberta and federal governments....

In a move that will mandate required federal safety assessments of chemicals found in everyday products from laundry detergent to toys, a June 7 U.S. Senate vote sends legislation to President Barack Obama for signature. The President is expected within days to sign the measure, which marks Congress’s first major overhaul of a federal pollution control statute in a decade. The legislation will fundamentally change U.S. regulation of the products of the chemical industry, from commodity substances that have been in use for decades to novel commercial compounds discovered and developed by research chemists....

Smart meters that give home and business owners more control over their electricity consumption patterns have been a huge success in North America, with penetration rates now approaching 35 percent and expected to reach nearly 70 percent by 2020. But the future of smart meters will be volatile, according to a new analysis from Pike Research, with North American deployments peaking in 2011 before an expected drop-off over the next two years as government incentives that helped drive demand expire....

While on his third deployment to Iraq in March, U.S. Army Sgt. Damon Warren’s vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb that left him with fractured ribs, a torn rotator cuff, and a shattered left femur that required a rod be placed in his leg from his knee to his hip. Despite the severity of his injuries, Warren was back on his feet by July with the help of a NASA-inspired rehabilitation device allowing him to defy gravity while working out on a specialized treadmill....

Editor’s Note: This story will be published in the December 2008 issue of Scientific American. Survey the sky at twilight on a summer’s eve, and you just might glimpse one of evolution’s most spectacular success stories: bats. With representatives on every continent except Antarctica, they are extraordinarily diverse, accounting for one in every five species of mammal alive today. The key to bats’ rise to prominence is, of course, their ability to fly, which permits them to exploit resources that other mammals cannot reach....