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For many of us, living in a COVID-19 world feels as if we have been thrown into an alternative reality. We live day and night inside the same walls. We fear touching groceries that arrive at our doorstep. If we venture into town, we wear masks, and we get anxious if we pass someone who is not wearing one. We have trouble discerning faces. It’s like living in a dream. COVID has altered our dream worlds, too: how much we dream, how many of our dreams we remember and the nature of our dreams themselves....

“I get goose bumps every time I see it.” “I saw something so strange that I had to drop everything else to investigate.” “A tale of shark bites at a Scottish pub has led us to some new ideas about rebuilding broken bodies.” Those sentences appear in three of the feature articles in this issue written by the researchers who are doing the work. As a culture, we often focus on the achievements of science....

Since 1983 researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have plumbed the subatomic realm by smashing high-energy protons and antiprotons together in the Tevatron, the world’s most powerful particle collider. Next year, however, the high-energy frontier will move to Europe, where the even more powerful Large Hadron Collider will begin operations near Geneva. Fermilab intends to shut down the Tevatron by 2010. But rather than scrapping the device, lab officials have outlined an ambitious plan to use some of the collider’s parts to enhance a promising research program: the study of the mysterious neutrino, whose strange properties may offer clues to new laws of physics....

Edwin Meyer, a physics professor at Baldwin-Wallace College, explains. To understand how a mirage forms, one must first understand how light travels through air. If the air is all the same temperature–cold or hot–light travels through it in a straight line. If a steady temperature gradient exists, however, light will follow a curved path toward the cooler air. The standard freshman physics explanation for this phenomenon is that cold air has a higher index of refraction than warm air does....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Baroque era, which lasted from roughly 1580 and 1780, was a time of enormous contrasts: Opulence and innovation, on the one hand; death and crises, on the other. Ongoing religious wars and the opening of global trade networks led to mass migration and cultural exchange, but there was also famine and exploitation....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Aware of the power of appearances, Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603 CE) carefully controlled her image throughout her reign and through costume, hair, jewellery, and art, she presented herself as the great Virgin Queen. Like a goddess of antiquity, Elizabeth announced that she had sacrificed her own personal inclinations to rule for the good of her people....

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., and unlike with cancer and heart disease, we lack the tools to effectively diagnose and treat it. In sharp contrast to other illnesses and despite many efforts, huge expense and hundreds of clinical trials, no new treatments have been approved in the past 16 years. The emphasis has been on drugs targeting beta-amyloid proteins, which clump into plaques in the brains of afflicted people....

In 1957, civil war broke out in then Burma (now Myanmar) and Oman. In 1965, similar conflicts erupted in Burundi, Chad, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia and Peru. In 1997, the Comoros, Congo, Eritrea, Niger and Rwanda also saw battles over national power that each killed more than 25 people. What do all these years and countries have in common? First, they are all tropical countries, strongly affected by the weather pattern known as El Niño, a warming of equatorial waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean that occurs cyclically every three to seven years and generally makes the climate hotter and drier throughout the tropics....

Leland Melvin has very nearly been a member of two exclusive clubs: the National Football League (NFL) and the NASA astronaut corps. The first opportunity fizzled before it got very far. The second, however, recently afforded him a roundtrip to the International Space Station (ISS). The former NFL draft pick in February journeyed into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis—an opportunity he had prepared for since beginning his training in 1998....

Iceland is known as the “land of ice and fire,” but new findings suggest that the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean could easily take over that title. In addition to the 11 volcanic islands that make up this Antarctic archipelago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) recently discovered that 12 volcanoes lurk below the water’s surface.* Despite their icy environs, the South Sandwich Islands have fiery origins thanks to the volcanoes, some of which are still active....

The prescription of opioids for dealing with chronic pain saw a sharp increase starting in the late 1990s, before it was known that such medications were highly addictive. Now, an estimated 90 people die every day in the United States due to an opioid overdose. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, as many as 21% to 29% of prescription opioid patients misuse the drug, and about 80% of heroin users were first misusing prescription opioids....

When NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope snapped pictures of a distant quasar in the Draco constellation in October 2003, the photo shoot was only intended to calibrate the instrument. Those images, however, just may have provided a glimpse of the very first stars in the universe. “We think we are seeing the collective light from millions of the first objects to form in the universe,” explains Alexander Kashlinsky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who details the finding in the current issue of Nature....

When Yas Crawford started feeling the effects of her chronic illness, she says she felt as if her body and mind were at war. “When you’re ill for a long time, your body takes over,” she says. “Your brain wants to do one thing, and your body does something else.” Crawford has myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome. She says her illness made her ruminate on interoception, the perception of the body’s internal state....

Infidelity is easy to explain in males. By sleeping around, a guy can potentially impregnate more females and sire more offspring than if he just had one mate. But females cheat, too, even though a woman will only be able to have roughly one baby per year no matter how many male sex partners she has had. One leading evolutionary hypothesis suggests that a female who mates with multiple males ensures the genetic diversity and quality of her offspring; having higher-quality offspring could theoretically give her more grandchildren later....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Over the past few decades, researchers have worked to uncover the details of how the brain organizes memories. Much remains a mystery, but scientists have identified a key event: the formation of an intense brain wave called a “sharp-wave ripple” (SWR). This process is the brain’s version of an instant replay — a sped-up version of the neural activity that occurred during a recent experience....

U.S. President Barack Obama’s efforts advocating for a world without nuclear weapons, as well as his support for international diplomacy and institutions such as the United Nations, have earned him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today. “The Committee attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons,” according to a committee press release issued Friday morning. “The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations....

Newly published data suggest that a hiatus in rising global air temperatures in the 21st century is the result of heat sinks deep in the Atlantic and Southern oceans. The trend is likely connected to roughly 30-year global warming and cooling cycles, according to researchers. The study could put to rest a long-standing debate among scientists about why air temperature rise had halted after a period of rapid increases at the end of the 20th century....

Rumors of the electric car’s demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated, with so-called plug-in hybrids making the rounds from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., along with the sporty, new all-electric Tesla Roadster on offer. Now a new analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) offers more good news: existing electric power plants could fuel 84 percent of “light duty” vehicles if all 220 million cars and trucks converted to electric power overnight....

It’s been a slow two years for solar activity, with 2008 bringing the greatest number of blank, or sunspot-free, days in nearly 100 years. And now this year, albeit there are signs of stirring on the sun, is on pace to top 2008 as the sleepiest since 1913. One consequence of this deep and prolonged lull in solar activity is an unprecedented bounty of high-energy cosmic rays that stream in from violent astrophysical events outside the solar system....

The microbiology toolbox includes techniques to induce mutations in viruses that give the microbes new powers. Scientists perform these manipulations for many reasons, including wanting to understand how the microbes evade detection by our immune systems. But adding capability to a pathogen carries obvious risks, especially if this “gain of function” involves enhanced virulence or infectiousness. Escape from a lab, by accident or design, is a possibility. So why do it?...