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Have rover, need payload. That’s the state of things for NASA, which is planning to launch its next rover to Mars in 2020. The rover has ambitious goals, including searching for signs of habitability and life on the Red Planet, and collecting rock samples to be stored for future return to Earth. Now, NASA is asking scientists to propose instruments that will help the spacecraft accomplish its mission. The space agency released an “announcement of opportunity” on September 24 calling for proposals by December 23....

During the past two decades mysterious kidney failure has killed more than 20,000 farmers on Central America’s Pacific coast. The chronic kidney disease continues to afflict those in the region, most of whom either worked or still work on sugarcane or cotton plantations and are men between the ages of 20 and 40. Chronic kidney disease typically affects older people60 is the average age. Patients usually exhibit symptoms like swelling and itchiness for years, some of which are compounded by other chronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress on Monday demanded that legislative analysts examine both the budgetary and healthcare impacts of a last-ditch effort by Republicans to repeal Obamacare. In a long-running war on former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, Republicans face a two-week countdown before Senate procedural rules make it much harder for them to advance their latest bill. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy propose replacing the 2010 Affordable Care Act, known informally as Obamacare, with a plan to give U....

More than 50,000 high-polluting diesel engines have been cleaned up or removed from U.S. roads in a federal program designed to reduce smog and greenhouse gases, according to a new Environmental Protection Agency report to Congress. While industry and environmental officials call the program a success, it is now threatened with a 70 percent cut in funding under the Obama Administration’s new budget. School buses and long-haul trucks accounted for almost 40,000 of the approximately 52,000 engines that were replaced or upgraded to cleaner technologies between 2008 and 2010....

One of the most memorable characters of Saturday Night Live from the 1990s was Mary Katherine Gallagher, the eccentric Catholic schoolgirl known for enjoying the smell of her own sweat. “Sometimes when I get nervous,” she says, “I reach my hands under my arms…and I smell ‘em like that.” Gallagher’s olfactory habits, though peculiar, may have been vindicated by science recently, as new research has emerged suggesting that people’s disgust for sweaty-smelling objects differs depending on whose sweat they think it is....

Fifty years ago Jane Goodall entered Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Game Reserve to study wild chimpanzees. Scientific American’s Kate Wong recently called Goodall to ask her what she has learned from observing our closest living relatives. Excerpts from their conversation appear in this December 2010 Q&A. Additional commentary from Goodall follows below, including answers to questions posed by Scientific American readers on Facebook. SA: John R. Harris asked via Facebook whether you have seen any behavior in primates that could shed light on the commonality of ritual music and dance in humans....

The first flyby of the planet Mercury in more than 30 years is resolving some long-standing puzzles about the closest planet to the sun. Among the findings: the planet’s iron-rich core seems to be shrinking, causing its crust to buckle and crack. These and other results, documented in 11 papers published today in Science, come from the first round of data from the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft, which buzzed Mercury earlier this year....

The air is a hostile place for a microbe. Often dry, lacking in nutrients and filled with deadly ultraviolet radiation, the atmosphere would seem to be the last place a microbe would want to find itself. Yet, a new genetic census of some air samples from Austin and San Antonio, Tex., finds that as many as 2,000 different kinds of microbes may be present in the air we breathe on any given day....

President Barack Obama on Tuesday called for the rapid development of tests, vaccines and treatments to fight the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects and could spread to the United States in warmer months. U.S. health officials are stepping up efforts to study the link between Zika virus infections and birth defects, citing a recent study estimating the virus could reach regions where 60 percent of the U....

Excellent article on metacognition [“The Power of Reflection,” by Stephen M. Fleming]. In reflecting on it, considering that metacognition is probably formed in large part with the help of external feedback, it occurs to me that for the past several decades, vast swaths of Americans have most likely had their metacognition impaired by unconditional positive reinforcement (for instance, unearned positive feedback or grade inflation), lack of punishment and drug abuse....

By 2030, scaled-up green power could meet the demands of a large grid 99.9 percent of the time, according to new research from the University of Delaware. A mix of offshore and onshore wind, along with contributions from solar power, could provide reliable power flow during all but a handful of days in the hypothetical four-year period under study. Moreover, researchers found that scaling up renewable generation capacity to seemingly excessive levels – more than three times the needed load, in some instances – proved more cost-effective than scaling up storage capacity, due to the high systems costs associated with storage technology....

Other than florists and allergy sufferers, most people don’t do much sniffing. But scientists in Israel see the ability as a way to assist severely paralyzed people. In the August 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Noam Sobel and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot described the first ever sniff-enabled device: a thin plastic tube with two short prongs that are inserted into the nostrils....

It’s official. Russian scientists announced today that they have reached Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, an ancient, liquid lake the size of Lake Ontario buried beneath more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) of ice for at least 14 million years. The revelation comes after days of speculation on whether the years-long effort had finally achieved its goal. News of the scientific milestone was evidently on hold, as Russian headquarters waited on some measurements from Vostok Station, the tiny outpost in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet where the Russians have been drilling toward Lake Vostok since the late 1990s....

By Emma Farge and Tom Miles DAKAR/GENEVA (Reuters) - Ebola probably remained latent in Liberia even after it was officially eliminated in May, health officials said on Friday, after test results showed the strain of the virus in newly detected cases closely resembled earlier infections. The preliminary findings, based on a new technique analysing the genetic sequence of the virus, suggest that transmission was either reactivated by an Ebola survivor, perhaps through sexual intercourse, or continued for weeks undetected, the sources added....

Editor’s Note: This story, originally printed in the August 1999 issue of Scientific American, is being reproduced as CERN on March 13 celebrates the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the World Wide Web. Last year a few of us from the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were flying to Taiwan. I had been trying for about three hours to make my new laptop work with one of those cards you plug in to download your calendar....

More than 2,300 years ago Aristotle famously wrote that we are more than the sum of our parts. This nugget of wisdom still resonates today, for at least one simple reason: connections. In the past two decades technology has transformed our understanding of what it means to be truly connected. Easy access to centuries of knowledge, and to like-minded thinkers worldwide, allows new ideas to coalesce at a startling speed. In this special issue of Scientific American Mind, we take stock of key advances that are altering the way we think about connectivity and the human brain....

Researchers believe that gold nanoparticles may breathe new life into once-promising drug candidates, in particular a compound designed to stop the spread of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) that was shelved because of side effects. The compound—TAK-779—was first proposed by researchers in 1996 and proved effective at blocking the virus from infiltrating body’s immune system. But it was scuttled by 2005, because recipients suffered severe irritation at injection sites and oral doses were ineffective....

By Emily Le Coz TUPELO Miss. (Reuters) - At least 34 people were killed in tornadoes unleashed by a ferocious storm system that razed neighborhoods in the southern United States over the last three days and threatened more destruction in heavily populated parts of the South on Tuesday. In Arkansas and Mississippi, the hardest hit of six states struck by the storm, there have been 27 confirmed storm-related deaths and more than 200 people injured as tornadoes reduced homes to splinters, snapped trees like twigs and sent trucks flying through the air like toys....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Dogs were an integral aspect of the lives of the people of Mesoamerica regardless of their location or culture and, throughout the region, were recognized as liminal beings belonging not only to the natural world and that of humans but to this world and the next. Dogs were believed by the Aztec, Maya, and Tarascan to travel between worlds, assist the souls of the dead, warn of dangers to the living and, at the same time, were regarded as a food source, companion, and guardian in daily life....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Neighbouring Arabs, Iranians uttered’s’ as ‘h’ and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indus. Sindhu is the name of the Indus River, mentioned in the Rig-Veda, one of the oldest extant Indo-European texts, composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent roughly between 1700-1100 BC....