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The underdog creams a top-ranked opponent—and the crowd goes wild. But such a surge in the face of the odds is even more difficult than it appears, according to a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. If status is on the line, people try harder to win when they are pitted against lower-ranked opponents. Psychologists Nathan Pettit of Cornell University and Robert Lount of Ohio State University asked Cornell students to perform simple tasks in teams—for instance, writing down as many possible uses for a knife as they could come up with....

By Amanda MascarelliWith efforts to cap, contain and disperse the Deepwater Horizon spill failing to keep pace with the continuing gush of oil, a technical fix is desperately needed. Crowdsourcing–tapping into ideas and technologies thought up by the public at large–has emerged as a key approach to the emergency.On June 28, for instance, the X Prize Foundation in Playa Vista, Calif.–a non-profit institute that awards prizes for technological innovation–announced that it is considering offering between $3 million and $10 million for a viable solution to the Gulf of Mexico disaster....

The Y chromosome is the runt of our 46-chromosome litter. Despite its well-known role—determining whether a mammal will be male—it pales in comparison to the other chromosomes, especially its partner, X. Indeed, 200 million to 300 million years ago Y shared roughly 600 genes with X. Today they share only 19. Those losses, some geneticists noted in 2002, indicated Y was actually rotting away. Give it another 10 million years, they said, and Y would be extinct....

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is likely to cancel the US Antarctic program’s upcoming field season if the US government shutdown persists through mid-October—jeopardizing hundreds of scientists’ work in glaciology, ecology and astrophysics. The agency has kept its three Antarctic research stations open during the initial days of the shutdown, which began on October 1, under rules designed to protect human lives and US government property. But Lockheed Martin, the contractor that runs the NSF’s Antarctic operations, has told researchers that it will run out of money by mid-October....

Earlier this year a group of researchers published a controversial idea for giving law enforcement access to suspicious electronic communications. Instead of forcing tech companies like Facebook and Google to build backdoors into their software, the researchers suggested law enforcement simply exploit existing vulnerabilities in Web software to plant their digital wiretaps. This approach would turn security-compromising software bugs—a bane of software companies and their customers for the past couple of decades—into a tool for gathering evidence against criminals communicating via voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls, instant messaging, some video game systems and other Internet-based channels....

By Kate Helland LONDON, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Britain on Tuesday could become the first country to allow a “three-parent” IVF technique which doctors say will prevent some inherited incurable diseases but which critics see as a step towards creating designer babies. Parliament will vote on the technique, called mitochondrial donation, which would be a medical world first for Britain but is fiercely disputed by some religious groups and other critics....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Cavalry regiments were an essential component of both Royalist and Parliamentarian field armies during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651). Armed with a sword, carbine, and a brace of pistols, cavalry riders evolved to become fast, lightly-armoured shock troops whose job was to rout the opposition horse before turning on the infantry....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Editor’s note: This week the World Economic Forum is holding its Global Agenda Council meetings in Dubai. More than 1,000 experts (including Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina) have gathered to discuss big world problems such as climate change, poverty, water shortages, energy and innovation. This is the last in a series of articles by WEF’s Kristel van der Elst, head of Strategic Foresight, on discussions that have taken place in the past year under the Forum’s auspices about emerging technologies....

If you want a new job, don’t just rely on friends or family. According to one of the most influential theories in social science, you’re more likely to nab a new position through your “weak ties,” loose acquaintances with whom you have few mutual connections. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea in a 1973 paper that has garnered more than 65,000 citations. But the theory, dubbed “the strength of weak ties,” after the title of Granovetter’s study, lacked causal evidence for decades....

Chances are you’ve never heard the phrase “danger day” when it comes to weather. That’s because they’re rare. You’ll want to get to know it, though, because climate change is about to make them a lot more common over the next 15 years. A danger day is when the combination of heat and humidity (also known as the heat index) make it feel like it’s 105°F or hotter. Warming temperatures are about to push U....

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, died yesterday at the age of 102, just 10 days after the 55th anniversary of his notorious bicycle trip while tripping on “acid”. Hofmann, who suffered a heart attack at home in Basel, Switzerland, was the first person to synthesize lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, and the first human known to experience its mind-bending effects. The drug was the 25th he created from the basic chemical ingredients of ergot, a fungus that forms on rye, in his search for treatments for circulation and respiratory problems....

As California’s San Joaquin River meanders down from the Sierra Nevada across the Central Valley toward the San Francisco Bay, it loses water to farms and communities along the way. Now, amid drought, a national river conservation agency is calling on California to manage the San Joaquin’s much-needed water more efficiently. The nonprofit American Rivers announced today (April 9) that it has deemed the San Joaquin the most endangered river in America....

Glass was a high-status item in the Late Bronze Age that was used extensively in prestigious artifacts. Much evidence has been uncovered to suggest that early glass making arose in Mesopotamia. But the recent excavation of a site in Egypt suggests that people in the region were adept glassmakers as well, a find that shines new light on how the commodity developed and was traded. Thilo Rehren of University College London and Edgar B....

VIRGINIA BEACH—Strolling along private beaches nearby, where waves lap against shores dotted with summer homes and volleyball nets, it’s easy to forget that the ocean has given up more than 250 dead bottlenose dolphins this summer. Sometimes dolphins wash up alive, emaciated and laboring with their final breaths. Some are missing small chunks of their fins—evidence that a shark took an exploratory bite when the animal was slowed by disease or after its organs gave out....

Bacteria are everywhere, silently going about their business of breaking down cellulose, fermenting foods or fixing nitrogen in the soil, among a host of other activities. Given their ubiquity and diversity of functions, biotechnologists have been searching for new uses for different strains of the microscopic organisms, such as consuming oil spills or even capturing images. Now biologists at the University College Dublin in Ireland have found that a strain of Pseudomonas putida can exist quite happily on a diet of pure styrene oil–the oil remnant of superheated Styrofoam–and, in the process, turn the environmental problem into a useful, biodegradable plastic....

Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts Bloomsbury, 2015 (($30)) Mathematician John H. Conway’s name pops up all over the mathematics world—group theory, game theory, knot theory, abstract algebra, geometry—and in the pages of this magazine, where he was frequently featured in Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column. It was there that his most famous creation, Conway’s Game of Life—a set of rules for propagating a pattern that generates incredible complexity—made its world debut....

Federal environment officials investigating drinking water contamination near the ranching town of Pavillion, Wyo., have found that at least three water wells contain a chemical used in the natural gas drilling process of hydraulic fracturing. Scientists also found traces of other contaminants, including oil, gas or metals, in 11 of 39 wells tested there since March. The study, which is being conducted under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, is the first time the EPA has undertaken its own water analysis in response to complaints of contamination in drilling areas, and it could be pivotal in the national debate over the role of natural gas in America’s energy policy....

For nearly 40 years scientists have observed their self-imposed ban on doing research on human embryos in the lab beyond the first two weeks after fertilization. Their initial reasoning was somewhat arbitrary: 14 days is when a band of cells known as a primitive streak, which will ultimately give rise to adult tissues, forms in an embryo. It is also roughly the last time a human embryo can divide and create more than one person, and a few days before the nervous system begins to develop....

It is a classic refrain in psychological research: people are more resilient than they realize. The acute upheaval of the early pandemic era led to a spike in depression and anxiety. A year or so later those numbers appeared, in many studies, to return to prepandemic levels, reflecting the science that says most of us tend to bounce back from traumatic events. But the longer-term disruptions, losses and volatile shifts from hope to fear to languishing are harder to parse....

Research In Motion’s BlackBerry service, which had been out since Monday in some parts of the world, has been fully restored, executives at the company said Thursday morning.Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie informed investors and reporters on a conference call that the service to all BlackBerry customers in all regions of the world had been restored as of the wee hours of Thursday morning. Lazaridis explained in slightly more detail what caused the problem....