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Chimpanzee research in the United States may be nearly over. On June 12, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that it is categorizing captive chimpanzees as an endangered species subject to legal protections. The new rule will bar most invasive research on chimpanzees. Exceptions will be granted for work that would “benefit the species in the wild” or aid the chimpanzee’s propagation or survival, including work to improve chimp habitat and the management of wild populations....

Existing technology can derive enough energy from renewable sources to meet the world’s needs several times over, according to a Worldwatch Institute report released in January. (For an assessment of the practical aspects, see “The Power of Renewables,” by Matthew L. Wald, on page 56.) The report also summarizes the fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the policies needed to survive a warmer world. Trillions of kilowatt-hours of global energy used annually: 132....

A nondescript gene that no scientist has studied before determines why some people gain more weight than others. A new study of nearly 40,000 Europeans found that people with mutations in both of their copies of the gene known as FTO are 70 percent more likely to be obese than those with regular copies of the gene. Researchers says that identifying a genetic basis for obesity could lead to novel treatments for the increasingly prevalent condition blamed for life-threatening heart disease and type 2 diabetes, among other disorders....

Before COVID-19 halted public life as we know it, professional soccer matches drew in enormous crowds. In stadiums filled with tens of thousands of people, a chorus of cheers, jeers, boos and moans would follow the ball, zigzagging from one player to another, as both teams tried to score. But in pandemic times, these games stay eerily quiet. The roaring masses are gone, and in their place, ghostly rows of empty seats remain....

Excerpted with permission from Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease, by Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell. Available from Saint Martin’s Press, LLC. Copyright © 2014. It was a bad omen when my beeper went off one morning at 6:10 as I warmed up my car in the garage. Trey, my senior ICU fellow, asked me to meet him in the emergency room to save time on an admission....

A couple of years ago the directors of a women’s clothing company asked me to help them develop better fashion recommendations for their clients. No one in their right mind would seek my personal advice in an area I know so little about—I am, after all, a male computer scientist—but they were not asking for my personal advice. They were asking for my machine-learning advice, and I obliged. Based purely on sales figures and client surveys, I was able to recommend to women whom I have never met fashion items I have never seen....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—The Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed farther into the universe than any observatory before, producing the first of six new “deep field” images that show objects from the first billion years after the big bang. The new photo was exposed for 50 hours to gather enough light, and reveals extremely faint, tiny galaxies that may be more than 12 billion light-years away. “It is the deepest view of the universe ever taken,” says project leader Jennifer Lotz of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore....

India has pledged to build the world’s most powerful solar plant. With a nominal capacity of 4,000 megawatts, comparable to that of four full-size nuclear reactors, the ‘ultra mega’ project will be more than ten times larger than any other solar project built so far, and it will spread over 77 square kilometers of land — greater than the island of Manhattan. Six state-owned companies have formed a joint venture to execute the project, which they say can be completed in seven years at a projected cost of $4....

Depictions of Neandertals, our erstwhile occasional mating partners, usually include facial features that are broader and thicker than ours, with a sloping, shorter forehead and beetle brow. By comparison, our eyes, nose and mouth are narrower and take up less facial real estate. Although many primates begin life with this more delicate appearance, we are the only ones to retain it into adulthood. One hypothesis for how humans transitioned from developing a robust Neandertal visage in maturity to retaining finer features throughout life is that we “self-domesticated” our face....

Of the many “firsts” from NASA’s Apollo program of lunar exploration, one often overlooked is that the Apollo missions included the first—and so far only—times that humans have driven on another world. Presaging today’s eco-conscious market for carbon-neutral transportation, Apollo’s battery-powered lunar roving vehicles were all-electric as well. Astronaut David Scott, who was the first person to drive one on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission, remarked that the “moon buggy” vehicles were “about as optimum as you can build....

NASA’s Dawn probe is snapping stunning new views of the dwarf planet Ceres as the spacecraft pushes ever higher above the small world. In one image, Ceres’ huge Occator Crater shows its central bright region, the brightest on Ceres. The crater itself is 57 miles wide (92 kilometers), and 2.5 miles deep (4 km). That makes it 77 times larger than the Barringer Crater in Arizona. Dawn took the picture when it was about 920 miles (1,480 km) above the surface, in early October....

Killer bacteria from outer space As if cosmic rays and hard vacuum didn’t make space dangerous enough, astronauts might have to contend with an unexpected threat: bacteria. Mice exposed to a strain of Salmonella typhimurium that spent 12 days in orbit on a 2006 shuttle flight were nearly three times as likely to die from the stomach bug than rodents infected with its earthbound ilk, a new study finds. Seems the microbes began to weave themselves into a resilient biofilm, possibly because the microgravity stilled the flow of the fluid bathing them, a study author told the Associated Press....

Barriers to birth control—from policies that portray sex as taboo to restrictions on long-term medical procedures—may be contributing to unintended pregnancies among U.S. servicewomen in combat Women in the U.S. Armed Forces have made significant inroads in the struggle for gender parity, including a recent victory that opened combat positions to women. But they face an important consideration that their male peers never have to take into account when choosing to enter the military—unintended pregnancy....

The body’s innate capacity for regeneration is what all stem cell therapies strive to emulate and improve upon. For that reason, the simplest route to many treatments may involve recruiting and activating the stem cells already hiding within our tissues. A major medical research effort now focuses on learning the subtle chemical language that directs stem cell behaviour during natural wound healing. Mastering this idiom could in some cases help to eliminate the need for therapeutic infusions of lab-grown cells....

Roger Smith (not his real name) never meant to become a popular scientist. But he saw no reason to avoid reporters a few years ago after publishing a major discovery in the research journal Science. Suddenly, his work was featured everywhere, including in the New York Times. Prestigious “ideas” conferences invited him to speak, and he found that he had a knack for explaining science to a general audience. His online TED talk attracted hundreds of thousands of views....

Geneticists are working hard to grow a tastier, more healthful Thanks­giving bird. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have mapped nearly 90 percent of the domestic turkey genome, which could help breeders produce improved meat in greater, cheaper quantities. Within the next three to five years the new map will allow farmers to take blood samples from young birds, extract DNA, and screen it for desirable genes, such as those for high fertility, resistance to disease, reduced fat and greater proportion of white meat....

It is no longer enough to just conserve energy. More and more corporations, government agencies and entire cities are making large, long-term commitments to ensure that the power they do use comes from renewable sources. To recognize these trendsetters, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency publishes a quarterly list of the top American users of green power: organizations that generate their own renewable energy, buy it from suppliers, or purchase offset credits to compensate for their traditional energy use....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Rubik’s Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math’s “Simple Groups”” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. All three new puzzles represent sporadic simple groups of permutations. Making sense of that statement takes a few preliminaries. NOTATION, NOTATION, NOTATION The “symmetric” group Sn is the group of all possible permutations, or rearrangements, of n objects or symbols in a row. The symmetric group S3, for instance, is the set of the six distinct permutations that give rise to the six possible arrangements of three different objects....

December in Moscow, and the temperature drops under 15 degrees below zero. The radiators in the bar have grown cold, so I sit in a thick coat and gloves drinking vodka while I ponder the fossil birds. The year is 2001, and Evgeny N. Kurochkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences and I have just spent hours at the paleontology museum as part of our effort to survey all the avian fossils ever collected in Mongolia by joint Soviet-Mongolian expeditions....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. As a young girl interested in archaeology and history, mummies always intrigued me. From the intricate Egyptian mummies to the naturally and beautifully preserved mummies of the Incas, they seemed to me to be beautiful pieces of art containing secrets of the ancient past. So imagine the disappointment I felt, when at the tender age of eight, I realised that the Persians did not have any mummies!...