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Ocean acidification is likely to threaten the world’s fisheries without sharp cuts to carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities, the U.N. Environment Programme said Friday. As CO2 emissions have risen, largely from the world’s increasing appetite for burning fossil fuels, oceans have absorbed more and more of the greenhouse gas. That has shifted the chemistry of the seas, which are now 30 percent more acidic than they were before the start of the Industrial Revolution....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Quantum Computing with Ions” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. One method for building a trapped-ion computer is to connect the ions through their common motions. A string of ions is electrically levitated between two arrays of electrodes. Because the positively charged particles repel one another, any oscillatory motions imparted to one ion (say, by a laser) will move the whole string....

But even as entrepreneurs race their products to market, armed with millions of dollars in venture capital and government investment, the demand for covid testing has waned. Manufacturing and bureaucratic delays have also kept rapid tests from hitting store shelves in large numbers, though the industry was energized by the Food and Drug Administration’s greenlighting of two more over-the-counter tests Wednesday. Corporate giants and startups alike plan to offer a dizzying array of test options, most costing between $10 and $110....

DIRTY HYBRIDS “The Dirty Truth about Plug-in Hybrids,” by Michael Moyer, failed to present an accurate and complete picture of the environmental benefits of plug-in and all-electric vehicles. The “regions” that the article cites are subject to significant ­local variation, especially for communities where increased use of these vehicles might be targeted by local planners. For example, Virginia, which is lumped in with the rest of the Southeast, actually has an electricity production profile much closer to the Mid-Atlantic....

Seems we like to give to the poor, but only slightly more than we like to rob the rich, according to a new study published in Nature. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, selected and randomly separated 120 students into groups of four. Each subject was arbitrarily assigned a certain amount of money; players knew how much money the others in their group had, but not to whom each amount belonged....

The main story " Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein’s Spacetime," describes recent excitement over a quantum theory of gravity proposed by physicist Petr Hoava of the University of California, Berkeley. Testing theories of quantum gravity in the laboratory is not possible, but computer simulations may offer the next best thing—and they seem to be lending support to Hoava gravity. Jan Ambjørn of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues have been using computer simulations to model quantum gravity based on spacetimes built from self-organizing “motes” that fall into place naturally....

Ed Bidwell lived a nightmare before waking up to a better day. A debilitating brain bleed caused by a burst artery turned his life on a dime. He temporarily lost consciousness. With the left side of his body subsequently weakened and his ability to work compromised, he soon lost his job, and he went into a tailspin. Jail time followed. And then, like that, Bidwell was on the street, one of the legions of unhoused in San Diego....

Scientists are shocked and angry at the UK government’s sudden confirmation on January 26 that it wants to pull out of the European Union’s nuclear agency Euratom, as part of its arrangements for Brexit. Depending upon whether and how the UK negotiates a way back in to the organization, the move could endanger British participation in the world’s largest fusion experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, France. It could also curtail operations at the Joint European Torus (JET), a nuclear-fusion facility based in Culham, UK....

Researchers in Taiwan gave a sugar pill to 74 smokers, misleading half of them to think it was a vitamin C supplement. All the participants then took an unrelated survey and were told they could smoke if they desired. Those who believed they had taken a vitamin smoked twice as many cigarettes as those who knew they had taken a placebo. According to study co-author Wen-Bin Chiou of National Sun Yat-Sen University, the participants may have felt, consciously or unconsciously, that the healthy activity entitled them to partake, a concept known as the licensing effect....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineToday IBM unveiled a new “cognitive computing” microchip that, according to the company, emulates some of the brain’s abilities. The chip is the latest development in an ongoing program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Va., to develop systems that can analyze complex information. Nature takes a peek under the hood of the new chip. Does this use some new kind of technology?...

HAL 9000, the sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers an ominous glimpse of a future in which machines endowed with artificial intelligence reject human authority. After taking control of a spacecraft and killing most of the crew, HAL responds to a returning astronaut’s order to open the ship’s pod bay door in an eerily calm voice: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” In the recent science-fiction thriller Ex Machina, the seductive humanoid Ava tricks a hapless young man into helping her destroy her creator, Nathan....

Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock,” rose to fame in the 1960s as half of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. The singer, whom Rolling Stone once called one of the greatest of all time, was also, unfortunately, well known as a victim of domestic violence. Ike Turner was not only her musical partner but also her husband, and she suffered frequent and severe abuse at his hands. In 1976, while he slept, she crept out of their hotel room carrying only 36 cents and a gas card, fearfully shuttling from one friend’s house to another’s to escape him....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In 1533 CE the Inca Empire was the largest in the world. It extended across western South America from Quito in the north to Santiago in the south. However, the lack of integration of conquered peoples into that empire, combined with a civil war to claim the Inca throne and a devastating epidemic of European-brought diseases, meant that the Incas were ripe for the taking....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE was the high watermark in the First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE) regarding the tension between the two forces. With the Roman Empire transitioning from the Julio-Claudian emperors to the Flavian dynasty in the middle of 69 CE, there was much pressure to quell the rebellion across Judaea....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The medieval sources on the discovery and settlement of Iceland frequently refer to the explorers as “Vikings” but, technically, they were not. The term “Viking” applies only to Scandinavian raiders, not to Scandinavians generally. Some of the men, and women, who settled Iceland may have previously been involved in Viking raids but they came to Iceland as farmers looking to start a new life in a new world....

August 1963 Supersonic Dreams “Stimulated by a 20-month-old British-French plan to build a supersonic commercial jet transport, the Administration has asked Congress to authorize up to $750 million for the development of such an aircraft by U.S. manufacturers. It is felt that the cost of development, estimated at $1 billion, would be too great for private industry. This would be the first time the Government has provided a direct subsidy for the development of a commercial airplane....

Ever wonder how your body knows not to gorge itself to death on food? The hormone leptin brings about that well-known feeling of fullness, and now a study finds that after we’ve dined, leptin puts the brake on our taste for food, too. Researchers scanned the brains of two voracious teenagers whose fat cells were unable to secrete leptin normally, but after being given the hormone for a week became pickier eaters....

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson Orbit, 2015 (($26)) Robinson has built a career crafting scientifically realistic novels that probe our deep prehistoric past, our crisis-wracked present and our possible interplanetary futures. Here he turns his talents to the final frontier, envisioning humankind’s first interstellar voyage. Aurora is Robinson’s best book yet. The action takes place on a terrariumlike spaceship in which successive generations are born and die without ever making planetfall, bound for promising worlds orbiting the nearby star Tau Ceti....

DURBAN, South Africa—By 2020, human activity could produce some 55 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, up from roughly 36 billion metric tons currently. All the accumulating gas is enough to raise the global average temperatures by more than 3 degrees Celsius by century’s end—more than triple the amount of warming that has already occurred. Emission reductions pledged under the 2010 Cancun Agreements, which cover some 85 percent of all national greenhouse gas emissions in the world, are meant to slow that warming....

In the cover story of the August Scientific American Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe tackles a long-standing question in paleoanthropology: How did our species, Homo sapiens, disperse so far and wide? Other human species colonized Africa, Europe and Asia but only our kind managed to spread across the entire globe. Marean suggests that the emergence in our species of a special propensity for cooperation and the invention of a game-changing technology—projectile weaponry—powered our ancestors’ march across the planet, allowing them to go places no member of the human family had gone before....