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It is the central question in quantum mechanics, and no one knows the answer: What really happens in a superposition—the peculiar circumstance in which particles seem to be in two or more places or states at once? In 2018 a team of researchers in Israel and Japan proposed an experiment that could finally let us say something for sure about the nature of this puzzling phenomenon. Their experiment was designed to enable scientists to sneak a glance at where an object—in this case a particle of light, called a photon—actually resides when it is placed in a superposition....

“The shortest path to oneself leads around the world.” So wrote German philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling, who believed that travel was the best way to discover who you are. That was how 22-year-old Christopher McCandless was thinking in the summer of 1990, when he decided to leave everything behind—including his family, friends and career plans. He gave his bank balance of $24,000 to the charity Oxfam International and hitchhiked around the country, ending up in Alaska....

The study of planets outside the solar system was one of the hottest corners of the science world in the 2000s, a decade that saw the known tally of exoplanets increase by more than a factor of 10. By the end of 2009, more than 400 worlds had been discovered in the young field of study, and the scientists working on NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting mission were preparing to announce the first discoveries of their recently launched spacecraft....

Drive past a water tower, and it appears to be a silent, passive giant. But it is the central player in a high-pressure balancing act. Most municipalities obtain their water from a reservoir or well, purify it at a treatment plant and send it to a pump house that fills one or more elevated tanks. The pumps alone are strong enough to push water throughout a town’s network of pipes, but the system’s pressure–at your sink–would fluctuate as usage rose and fell and could drop too low to reach spigots during high demand....

Some of the mundane materials most of us take for granted—plastic, paper, glass—are miraculous when you think about them. Glass’s strength, for instance, protects us from the elements as its transparency allows light to shine through; without such a material houses and buildings would be decidedly dreary. Just what gives glass these properties? It’s all in the chemistry, materials scientist Mark Miodownik of University College London explains in his new book Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World (May 2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)....

‘Tis the season in the Arctic when the sun disappears below the horizon and twilight replaces daylight. Temperatures drop and ice that melted throughout the Arctic summer begins to cover the world’s northernmost ocean again. Scientists have used satellite pictures since 1979 to map the extent of such ice at its minimum, and the picture this year isn’t pretty. Covering 1.59 million square miles (4.12 million square kilometers), this summer’s sea ice shattered the previous record for the smallest ice cap of 2....

Although the Oribatula tibialis mite is only the size of a pin head, it packs a punch when it comes to defending itself from predators. It produces a compound that releases hydrogen cyanide – one of the quickest acting and most toxic poisons – when it comes into contact with an attacker’s saliva. Of the 80,000 known arachnid species many use toxins to kill their prey or protect themselves, but the soil-dwelling oribatid mite is the first to defend itself using hydrogen cyanide – a poison usually only found in plants like the South American cassava and in a handful of other animals, most of them insects....

ENCODE, the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements, is the most ambitious human genetics project to date. It takes the 3 billion letters described by the Human Genome Project in 2000, and tries to explain them. Remarkably, ENCODE scientists have managed to assign a biochemical function to 80% of the genome, including the genes and the parts of the genome that tell those genes what to do. This information is helping us understand how genomes are interpreted to make different types of cells and different people - and crucially, how mistakes can lead to disease....

Global warming isn’t just causing glaciers to melt—it’s making some collapse suddenly. That’s what scientists believe happened at Alaska’s Flat Creek Glacier, deep in the mountains of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. In August 2013, a 1,600-foot tongue of ice suddenly detached from the bedrock near the bottom of the glacier. It sent a flood of ice and debris hurtling nearly 7 miles down the mountainside. Then, two years later, the front of the remaining glacier crumbled again....

Americans have differing perceptions on which weather events are being triggered by climate change, according to a new study that looked at people’s Google searches over a roughly nine-year period. Using Google Trends—a public tool that shows how often a specific term is entered into the search engine—researcher Corey Lang found that people from all walks of life scour the Internet for information about climate change and global warming when the weather fluctuates....

Lemurs are primates, like humans, but they’re an odd bunch. Found only on Madagascar, an island off eastern Africa, this group includes some of the only primates known to hibernate—and some of the few that feast primarily on leaves instead of fruits. By itself, lemurs’ preference for greens might not seem all that notable. But Madagascar’s birds and bats also consume less fruit than their counterparts in Asia, continental Africa and the Americas....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pets were as important to the Norse of the Viking Age (c. 790-1100 CE) as they were to any other culture, past or present. The Vikings kept dogs and cats as pets and both feature in Norse religious iconography and literature. The Norse also kept pet bears and birds, such as the falcon, hawk, and the peacock....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. 17th-century Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) navigators were the first Europeans to set foot on Australian soil. Although there is a strong theory that the Portuguese explorer, Cristóvão de Mendonça (1475-1532), may have discovered Australia in 1522, the first recorded European landfall was made by the Dutch Willem Janszoon in 1606....

Scientists have theorized that the loss of Arctic sea ice over the last three decades is part of a recent, dramatic change in global climate. Now they have proof from an unorthodox collection of sources. Researchers with ARCdoc, a project based at the University of Sunderland in England, found that annual sea ice between Canada and Greenland blanketed much more territory up to 250 years ago—the result of a colder, wetter, stormier climate....

Many pregnant women indulge in an occasional—or even regular—glass of wine and then worry that it might put their baby at a mental disadvantage. A new study of more than 1,600 Danish five-year-old children shows that these nonteetotaler moms can breathe a sigh of relief. Kids whose mothers had up to eight drinks a week were just as smart as their peers born to abstaining moms, according to the study, which measured brainpower in several ways....

On any given day, millions of conversations reverberate through New York City. All these conversations are matched in number and complexity by much more elusive discourses. Even when speaking with others—and especially when alone—we continually talk to ourselves in our heads. Psychologists have attempted to capture what they call self-talk or inner speech in the moment, asking people to stop what they are doing and write down their thoughts at random times....

Rapidly warming Alaska is already a poster child for climate change, from its vanishing sea ice to its thawing permafrost. But over the last three years, the state’s northwestern coast has experienced a series of unusual climate-related changes—remarkable even for the long-altered Pacific Arctic. Beginning in 2017, a combination of abnormally high temperatures and unusually strong, southerly winds swept the Bering and Chukchi seas. An alarming cascade of ecological consequences ensued—record-low sea ice, shifting algae blooms, migrating fish populations and sudden seabird die-offs were just a few....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Between 50 and 100 million people are thought to have died, representing as much as 5 percent of the world’s population. Half a billion people were infected. Especially remarkable was the 1918 flu’s predilection for taking the lives of otherwise healthy young adults, as opposed to children and the elderly, who usually suffer most....

For Christmas, a few miniature pigs in a University of Southern California lab got new roots for their front teeth, courtesy of stem cells from human teeth. This regeneration of mammalian tooth root, reported in last week’s inaugural issue of PloS ONE, could have clinical applications that would have a big impact on oral surgery procedures such as root canals. An international team headed by dentistry researcher Songtao Shi focused its efforts on stem cells found in the root apical papilla, tissue connected to the tip of the root that is responsible for the root’s development....

Physicists have for months been buzzing about the possible detection of gravitational waves—a finding that would confirm one of the key predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. On January 11, that speculation exploded in a frenzy of media headlines, after excited physicists spilled some of the gossip online. What is the gossip? The rumours suggest that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a US laboratory with detectors in Washington and Louisiana, has spotted a signal of gravitational waves....