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As you read readers’ objections to a review you’ve written, you encounter one particular argument amazingly often: “[Name of disliked tech company] stole that idea from [name of preferred company]!” Absolutely right. The borrowing of tech ideas has become almost absurdly predictable. Apple introduced Siri, the voice assistant, in 2011 (after buying the company that developed it). Google’s copycat, Google Now, arrived a year later, and Microsoft’s Cortana followed in 2014....

The U.K. has taken a first step toward approval of a controversial technique that enables the birth of a child carrying genetic material from three parents. British legislators in the lower chamber of parliament green-lighted the procedure this week even as U.S. regulators have adopted a go-slow approach. The question now is how or if London’s action may influence U.S. plans about how to proceed with this complex reproductive method....

A government employee made an unsettling find on July 1 while cleaning out a laboratory refrigerator: it contained six vials of smallpox virus stashed in a cardboard box, likely forgotten since the 1950s, as Nature News reports. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). The discovery concerned health officials because only two laboratories (in the U.S. and Russia) are authorized by the World Health Organization to keep smallpox virus stocks, which they are to use only for research....

Football fans around the world are eagerly awaiting the kickoff of the World Cup in Russia on June 14. But some Russian researchers might find themselves with more time to watch the matches than they expected. Because of security and counter-terror measures enacted by the government ahead of the World Cup tournament, some Russian labs will go without the radioactive reagents that they urgently need for their research, according to molecular biologists and biochemists who spoke to Nature....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The British East India Company (1600-1874) was the largest and most successful private enterprise ever created. All-powerful wherever it colonised, the EIC’s use of its own private army and increasing territorial control, particularly in India, meant that it faced ever-greater scrutiny from the British government in the late 18th century....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The prosperity of the majority of Greek city-states was based on agriculture and the ability to produce the necessary surplus which allowed some citizens to pursue other trades and pastimes and to create a quantity of exported goods so that they could be exchanged for necessities the community lacked....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. When the Numidian king Massinissa (c.241-148) died, the people of Dougga (or: Thugga) decided to build a monument in his honour. A bilingual inscription (RIL 2, KAI 101) says the building was erected in the tenth reign year of his successor Micipsa (139/8 BC). One part of the inscription was written in Punic....

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory comprises about a dozen small buildings nestled among pine trees in the Palisades, 15 miles north of Manhattan. On the second floor of the observatory’s geoscience building, the shelves lining Columbia University paleontologist Paul Olsen’s labyrinthine office sag under the weight of hundreds of books about dinosaurs: The Dinosaur Data Book, The Ultimate Dinosaur, Dinosauri In Italia. Olsen has been studying them since he was a teenager....

When day draws to a close in New Zealand, the forests echo with screeches. There the male lesser short-tailed bat sings up to 100,000 songs a night—more than any other animal—to woo a mate. He serenades from a special singing roost used solely for the purpose of sexual display. But not every one of these Romeos is a one-man show. After a three-year study of the nocturnal mammals’ habits, Cory Toth of the University of Auckland found that males in nearly half the 12 singing roosts he observed in North Island turned the stages into time-shares....

Astronomers have spent five weeks studying a very strange star–one that is 10 times as massive as our sun and spews 100 trillion tons of gas into space each second–and have found a method to its mad behavior. Presenting their results yesterday at a meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society in Montreal, the researchers report that the object, WR123, undergoes a stable variation that repeats every 10 hours. Located about 19,000 light-years from Earth, WR123 belongs to a class of stars known as Wolf-Rayet stars, which are known for complex, irregular patterns in their brightness....

New research offers the promise of treatments for the one million Americans affected by Parkinson’s disease, the second most common degenerative nerve disorder (after Alzheimer’s) in the U.S. A team at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago reports that isradipine (brand name DynaCirc), a drug currently prescribed to reduce high blood pressure, may block the death of neurons in patients with advanced cases of Parkinson’s and may also be able to prevent the development of the disease....

Drought fueled by climate change is transforming California and costing billions of dollars, state officials said yesterday. California is spending $5.2 billion to upgrade water systems, improve water storage and provide water to parched communities as part of a historic $15 billion spending package to address the effects of climate change. “Drought is part of California’s natural environment, but is now supercharged by accelerating climate change,” said state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot during a virtual meeting with reporters....

Many people already use their smart­phones as far more than mere telephones—as gadgets for Web surfing, e-mailing or listening to music. Some scientists are now turning them into handheld tools to diagnose cancer or infectious disease, track treatment progress or check water safety. Given that the handsets are so common, they could bring cutting-edge health care technology to the developing world. Diagnosing cancer is a challenge because it requires expensive, time-consuming assays....

When considering the world’s worst killers, alcohol likely doesn’t come to mind. Yet alcohol kills more than 2.5 million people annually, more than AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis. For middle-income people, who constitute half the world’s population, alcohol is the top health risk factor, greater than obesity, inactivity and even tobacco. The World Health Organization has meticulously documented the extent of alcohol abuse in recent years and has published solid recommendations on how to reduce alcohol-related deaths, but this doesn’t go far enough, according to Devi Sridhar, a health-policy expert at the University of Cambridge....

As scientists seek to make crops resilient against disease and the effects of climate change, they are turning to what may seem like an unlikely champion: fungi. Specifically, they are studying endophytes, a type of fungus (or bacteria) that lives inside plant tissue and has no apparent negative effects on its hosts. Endophytes do, however, provide important protections to plants, which is why researchers are focusing on how the organisms could be used commercially to improve food security....

We’d like to believe that we make moral judgments based on rational thought, but the truth is that our moral thinking cannot escape our emotions. Let’s take a look at how anxiety, empathy, anger, and disgust shape our moral thinking, and how we can harness these emotions for making better moral decisions. The infamous Trolley Problem Imagine this scenario: As you’re walking by a train station, you notice there are some construction workers working on the tracks....

For almost a century, scientists struggled to explain how the extinct reptiles called pterosaurs managed to get off the ground. In regard to the smaller pterosaurs, bird models sufficed; flapping from standstill or a running start could work. But for the larger pterosaurs, some of which had a 26-foot wingspan and weighed 200 pounds, scientists could not find a bird model that explained takeoff. That is because they did not take off like birds, thinks Michael Habib, who studies functional anatomy and evolution at Johns Hopkins University....

When Shirley was in her mid-20s she and some friends road-tripped to Las Vegas on a lark. That was the first time she gambled. Around a decade later, while working as an attorney on the East Coast, she would occasionally sojourn in Atlantic City. By her late 40s, however, she was skipping work four times a week to visit newly opened casinos in Connecticut. She played blackjack almost exclusively, often risking thousands of dollars each round—then scrounging under her car seat for 35 cents to pay the toll on the way home....

I have a client—let’s call him Andre—who works hard all year at a demanding job. He could really use a vacation. But every year, he does the same thing. For one week in the middle of July, he goes to the same waterfront hotel about an hour’s drive from his home. He leaves the rest of his vacation time on the table. After many years of doing this, he’s let months and months of vacation time slip away....

Researchers are becoming so adept at mining information from genealogical, medical and police genetic databases that it is becoming difficult to protect anyone’s privacy—even those who have never submitted their DNA for analysis. In one of two separate studies published October 11, researchers report that by testing the 1.28 million samples contained in a consumer gene database, they could match 60 percent of the DNA of the 140 million Americans of European descent to a third cousin or closer relative....