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When it comes to CRISPR, questions about if we can edit human embryos are fast giving way to discussions more focused on “But should we?” and “When?” as feats with the gene-editing technology have started to accrue. Today, biologists from Oregon report in Nature that they have had unprecedented successes using that gene-editing technology to alter early-stage, viable human embryos. The advance moves the field far past earlier attempts by researchers in China and underscores the need to come up with some answers—and fast, researchers say....

Imagine you are a young Bar-tailed Godwit, a large, leggy shorebird with a long, probing bill hatched on the tundra of Alaska. As the days become shorter and the icy winter looms, you feel the urge to embark on one of the most impressive migrations on Earth: a nonstop transequatorial flight lasting at least seven days and nights across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand 12,000 kilometers away. It’s do or die....

Locations on the road south of Santarém are found not by signs or named roads but by their kilometer number. My friend Adam and I were headed for a turnoff somewhere in the low 70s. There, we would meet some people who spent their days ripping trees out of a protected rainforest. Yet as much as I would have loved to befriend a secretive band of lumber pirates, I had had no such luck....

Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Centuryby James R. Flynn .Cambridge University Press, 2012 ($22)The average person today scores 30 points higher on IQ tests than his or her grandparents did. This observation is the starting point of the new book Are We Getting Smarter? by Flynn, an emeritus professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Best known for documenting the eponymous Flynn effect—the tendency for standardized intelligence testing scores to increase over many decades across the world—Flynn is the right man for the job....

By Reuters Staff CHICAGO (Reuters) - Overall tobacco use among U.S. middle and high school students has not changed since 2011, a period in which use of electronic cigarettes increased dramatically, U.S. health officials said on Thursday. Given that most adult smokers begin using tobacco before age 20, health officials are concerned over the lack of progress in reducing tobacco use among U.S. youth. According to the latest data from the U....

Science denialism can seem intractable, and studies on the topic are seldom encouraging. For example, research out of Yale Law School suggests that when people form their opinions on contentious topics such as climate change or evolution, political or religious values trump knowledge of the concept. A study published in March in BioScience begs to differ, at least when it comes to evolution. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and their colleagues measured participants’ knowledge of evolutionary theory, as well as their acceptance of evolution as fact....

Two months after al Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, analytical chemist John Butler found himself working late nights in his lab, developing DNA assays to identify 911 victims from the tens of thousands of charred human remains recovered at Ground Zero. Thinking back, he still clearly remembers the sense of rising to a national need that was shared by dozens of researchers recruited to the same difficult problem....

Like a team of laboratory gearheads, Arizona State University (A.S.U.) researchers have found a way to soup up microscopic “nanomachines” that may someday be used to deliver lifesaving medications or test the quality of drinking water in remote regions of the world. In place of turbochargers and high-octane gas, the scientists tweaked their engine design and used an additive to speed the oxidation of hydrogen peroxide into fuel to create nanomachines 350 times more powerful than any previously built....

This is the seventh of eight stories in our Web feature on self-experimenters. Most adolescents’ fond remembrances of childhood would not include lying motionless for spans of five to 10 minutes in the narrow confines of a giant, clanging machine. For Alexandra Giedd, known in her family as Sasha, it was an eagerly anticipated ritual. Once every three months from the age of four, she and her father would set out for his lab at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineThe Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in all of physics, is proving tougher to find than physicists had hoped.Last month, a flurry of “excess events” hinted that the Higgs could be popping up inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. But new data presented today at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India, show the signal fading....

Jupiter has been taking a beating lately. In September and October, observers spotted two different asteroids slamming into the massive planet just a month apart. While it’s not the first time observers have caught such a spectacle, successfully spotting an impact is fairly rare, and can tell us more about the solar system as a whole. And there’s the thrill of knowing a piece of the universe has just exploded in the atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet....

Science works by iteration.’ Scientists repeat their peers’ work and build on their findings. The literature of peer-reviewed scientific papers is the record of this step-by-step process. In recent years, however, prominent reports have suggested that many scientists are not able to replicate others’ published results. Is scientific progress going wrong on an unprecedented scale? Before we jump to that conclusion, it would help to consider the changing nature of science itself—particularly biology....

People sometimes feel that their ordinary way of making sense of the world is objective and impartial, but a growing body of research suggests that there might be more to the story. This research suggests that people’s moral judgments can actually exert a surprising influence on their whole understanding of the world around them. In one early study of this issue, I looked at the way people typically think about the “side effects” of human actions....

Special Issue: Cities The city is a solution to the problems of our age, and this week, we present it in the true urban spirit: best ideas forward » August 17, 2011 In 2001 Malaysia’s twin Petronas Towers tied each other for the honor of the tallest building in the world. By the middle of this decade they will no longer crack the top 10. Buildings currently under construction are expected to take spots two through seven on the world’s tallest list (for the time being the Burj Khalifa remains in a class of its own), another indicator that the world’s appetite for statement-making skyscrapers shows no sign of waning....

You can assume quite a bit about the state of a used car just from its mileage and model year. The wear and tear of heavy driving and the passage of time will have taken an inevitable toll. The same appears to be true of aging in people, but the analogy is flawed because of a crucial difference between inanimate machines and living creatures: deterioration is not inexorable in biological systems, which can respond to their environments and use their own energy to defend and repair themselves....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Wars of the Roses (1455-1487 CE) was a series of dynastic conflicts between the monarchy and the nobility of England. The ‘wars’ were a series of intermittent, often small-scale battles, executions, murders, and failed plots as the political class of England fractured into two groups which formed around two branches of Edward III of England’s descendants (r....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The autumn of 1793 saw the Jacobins consolidate their authority in France as the Reign of Terror intensified and the Jacobins’ defeated rivals were executed by guillotine. Yet the dominant Jacobins disagreed over the direction the French Revolution (1789-1799) should now take, causing them to devolve into factionalism....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The art of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) began to explore new possibilities in materials and styles with landscape painting and ceramics, in particular, coming to the fore. New techniques, a wider range of colours and an increase in connoisseurship and literature on art are all typical of the period....

The phrase “world changing” is overused. Yet how else do you capture the full world-historical influence of an invention like the transistor, or the World Wide Web, or the cellular phone? Some ideas really do bend history. It’s too early to know whether carbon-breathing batteries, ingestible robots, quantum satellites, and the seven other ideas described in these pages will have a similar effect. Most plans fail, and the biggest ideas tend to carry the greatest risk....

Editor’s Note (9/4/20): Understanding how the immune system goes awry in COVID-19 may help prevent the most severe and deadly cases. Earlier this year Scientific American explained how administering an antiviral protein called interferon at just the right time may help. When the immune system fights viruses, timing is key. And this maxim may be especially true for its defense against the deadly severe form of COVID-19. Several new studies of immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, suggest timing could be critical for a class of proteins known as interferons, which are being researched as potential treatments....