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PREDICTING BIPOLAR Kevin A. Strauss’s otherwise excellent article, “Genomics for the People,” about the wonderful research and services being carried out for Amish and Mennonite families at the Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pa., gives the impression that there is a genetic test that can “inform us about a child’s risk for bipolar disorder 30 years hence.” Unfortunately, no such test exists. Bipolar disorder is associated with numerous genes and nongenetic risk factors....

In “The Unseen Universe,” Marcela Carena describes apparent discrepancies between the observed behavior of muons—one of the three types of charged leptons—and calculations based on the Standard Model of particle physics. If the discrepancies for muons are real, I would also expect discrepancies for tau leptons. VAN SNYDER La Crescenta, Calif. As a shade-tree quantum mechanic, I wonder if the vibrations of muons are the effect of waves of gravity—the crests and troughs of the waves....

By Adam Mann Documents made publicly available on October 14 have reignited a debate surrounding a proposed radiation experiment involving squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, N.Y.The heavily redacted papers, obtained by the animal-rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Norfolk, Va., under the Freedom of Information Act, are titled “Decision regarding the disposition of NSRL Proposal N-249,” the lab’s designation for the radiation research....

Sunscreen runoff from beachgoers may already be altering coastal waters. Researchers have begun to focus on the environmental and health consequences of nanoparticles, tiny shreds of elements used in a range of commercial products. One of them is the impact of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles used in sunscreens. David Sánchez-Quiles, a doctoral candidate at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Spain, explained that nanoparticles of TiO2 act as ultraviolet light filters in sunscreens, but are often coated with silica or alumina to avoid undesirable reactions on the skin....

What inspired your Google Science Fair project, in which you created six new potential flu drugs? I live in San Diego, where some of the first cases of 2009 H1N1 swine flu took place in the U.S. It was then that I made the realization that flu can kill a lot of people. I thought, “Why can’t we use the new computer power at our fingertips to speed up drug discovery and find new flu medicine?...

Global warming was hot news this year, literally. Perhaps the most unavoidable climate story of 2012 was the warmth that gripped much of the United States, and to a lesser degree, the planet, throughout the entire year. Heat waves brought “spring in March” to parts of the country, and broke all-time high-temperature records in a number of places. This, inevitably, led to a discussion of global warming and the degree to which it contributes to some types of extreme weather, in this case heat waves....

One of language’s great strengths is its flexibility—words can mean anything we want them to. But not all vocabulary is arbitrary. And according to a paper published in April in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, certain types of names are more likely to be given to boys versus girls, based merely on properties of their sound. For decades researchers have discussed the role of sound symbolism, in which the sound of a word carries meaning regardless of its definition....

Editor’s Note: We are posting this feature from our December 2007 issue because of a discussion on the semantic web at ScienceOnline09. Six years ago in this magazine, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila unveiled a nascent vision of the Semantic Web: a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine. They painted a future of intelligent software agents that would head out on the World Wide Web and automatically book flights and hotels for our trips, update our medical records and give us a single, customized answer to a particular question without our having to search for information or pore through results....

In late January 2014, Jakarta was inundated with heavy rain. So much rain fell that the region saw 16 inches more rainfall than normal for the month. Rivers rose and punctured their banks, spilling onto the streets of the Indonesian capital. Flood waters reached over 6 feet in some areas and affected nearly 135,000 residents. Those with smartphones and a Twitter account rushed to relay information about the extreme rise of waters to family, friends and follower alike....

Cosmologists think that in its first moments, the Universe ballooned from a subatomic size to bigger than a grapefruit. But testing theories about this period is difficult, because researchers cannot recreate such extreme conditions. Now, physicists have emulated this cosmic expansion in a lab by creating a model Universe made of ultracold atoms, they report in a paper published last week in Physical Review X 1. By rapidly increasing the size of a ring-shaped cloud of atoms, they induced behaviour in the system that mimicked how light waves were stretched and damped as space expanded in the early Universe....

This much is uncontested: for most of the 20th century, blacks worldwide have scored, on average, 15 points lower on most IQ tests than whites have. What scientists cannot agree on is why. Most attribute the gap to differences in education, health and other environmental influences. Hereditarians, on the other hand, view the black-white difference as largely genetic in origin. They note, among other indirect evidence, that the disparity persists across time and around the world–a permanence that is crucial to the debate over what explains group dif?...

Winter is fast approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, and researchers warn that COVID-19 outbreaks are likely to get worse, especially in regions that don’t have the virus’s spread under control. “This virus is going to have a heyday,” says David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in California. “We are looking at some pretty sobering and difficult months ahead.” Infections caused by many respiratory viruses, including influenza and some coronaviruses, swell in winter and drop in summer....

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —For the crowd of mostly baby boomers, who’d just finished their healthy lunch of salmon fillet on a bed of grains and vegetables, the warning could not have been more dire: You’re running out of time. “We can’t sit still. We don’t have the time to do that,” bellowed Bill Faloon, the 63-year-old former mortician addressing them from the stage. To his left and right, giant screens projecting government actuarial tables reminded the group of the “projected year of our termination....

Supermassive black holes—objects containing hundreds of millions to billions of times the mass of a star—are one of the deepest mysteries of modern astrophysics. They lurk at the hearts of most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Given their ubiquity, these black holes may play a vital part in the formation and evolution of the universe. But how they grew so massive has long puzzled theorists worldwide. The most sensible suggestion—that these monstrosities could only have grown so great by swallowing enormous quantities of gas over billions of years—is now known to be wrong....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pirates have gained a reputation for wearing bright and distinctive clothing and accessories during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) even if, in reality, most of what we think they wore comes from works of fiction like Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island. Pirates were first and foremost seamen and so they wore the clothing typical of all mariners of the period....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The staggering quantity of gold the conquistadors extracted from the Americas allowed Spain to become the richest country in the world. The thirst for gold to pay for armies and gain personal enrichment resulted in waves of expeditions of discovery and conquest from 1492 onwards. In only the first half-century or so of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the continent....

Why did NASA decide to launch space shuttles from weatherbeaten Florida? Space historian Roger D. Launius, a senior curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, provides an answer (as told to John Matson): Florida was chosen as the starting point for U.S. manned missions—which began with the 1961 Project Mercury flights—for several reasons. One was that the location had to be on the coast, over the ocean, so falling debris or spent rocket boosters would not drop on inhabited places during ascent....

In this hubble space telescope image, the galaxies of the giant cluster Abell 2744 appear strewn through space like jewels on black velvet. Their light began its journey to Earth some 3.5 billion years ago, when our biosphere was in its infancy. Despite appearances, the galaxies constitute less than 5 percent of the cluster’s total mass, most of which resides in halos of invisible dark matter. There is, in fact, so much mass within this cluster that it behaves as a gravitational lens, warping space to magnify light from even deeper cosmic realms....

Chemists have designed a carbohydrate-based molecule that can surround and strangle bone cancer cells by self-assembling into a tangled web of nanofibers (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, DOI: 10.1021/ ja5111893). The molecule spares healthy cells because its assembly is triggered by an enzyme that’s overexpressed on cancer cells. The inspiration for spinning a molecular cage around cells came from nature, says Rein V. Ulijn of the City University of New York’s Hunter College....

In the fight to stay alive, many bacteria, such as MRSA, have developed resistance to commonly used antibiotics. But other bacteria are using a more insidious type of resistance: that imbued by transferable genes, which can spread among commonly circulating strains. One of these genetic elements, NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1), is an enzyme-based defense that renders a bacterium immune to beta-lactam-based antibiotics, which include penicillin, as well as carbapenems (often used as a last resort antibiotic against Escherichia coli infections), cephems (such as cephalosporins and cephamycins) and monobactams, making treatment extremely difficult....