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Our memories are imperfect. You can probably recall who you spoke to over dinner last weekend but have likely forgotten the details of the conversation. Remembering too much can have its downsides—in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, a distressing event can remain imprinted in an individual’s mind, causing continued anguish. On the other hand, excessive memory loss is also a problem. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, is marked by an inability to recollect....

Excerpted with permission, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, by Jonathan M. Katz. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2014. (Scientific American is part of Macmillan Publishers.) Port-Au-Prince was never an easy place to live. Sixty million years ago, the land under it was caught in the middle when the buoyant continental crust of North America crashed into the Caribbean Plate....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt adapted from the book, People Will Talk: The Surprising Science of Reputation, by John Whitfield (Wiley, 2011). Copyright © John Whitfield About one in every 100 people doesn’t care what others think of him. These people are hard to spot. They are usually physically healthy, and their intelligence is often above average. Yet, in the words of one psychiatrist, they lie without compunction, cheat, steal, and casually violate any and all norms of social conduct whenever it suits their whim....

In the early 2000s it was the height of geek fashion to run your own e-mail server—then along came Gmail with two gigabytes of free storage and excellent spam filtering. Now even most people with their own domain names use e-mail provided by Google, Microsoft or their Internet Service Provider (ISP). You may even be using Gmail or Hotmail without knowing it: over the last few years many universities and other organizations have outsourced their e-mail to these services....

This weekend brings us the return of the famous Leonid meteor shower, a meteor display that has brought great anticipation and excitement to night sky watchers around the world. This will be a favorable year to look for the Leonid meteor shower because the moon will be only crescent and will have set in the west long before the constellation Leo begins to rise into the night sky. The Leonids appear to radiate out of Leo (hence their name), and with the moon out of the sky completely, viewing conditions could be perfect for stargazers with clear weather and dark skies....

A rat pauses at the end of a track. He dips his nose into a cup containing food and munches contentedly, nose twitching. Meanwhile, brain cells in the hippocampus of his brain replay his recent route to this repast, according to the results of a new study. Previous research had shown that rats replayed specific brain firing sequences while sleeping. David Foster and Matthew Wilson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to find out what happened when they were awake....

NEW YORK CITY—On Monday morning, hours after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, subway platforms and cars here held more than their usual share of cops. Police officers will continue to clock overtime in the coming days and potentially weeks in the Big Apple. It’s been almost ten years since al Qaeda sleepers brought down the World Trade Center towers, but the city isn’t taking any chances with news of bin Laden’s death....

Nanotechnology is arguably one of the most overhyped “next big things” in the recent history of applied science. According to its most radical advocates, nanotechnology is a molecular manufacturing system that will allow us to fabricate objects of practically any arbitrary complexity by mechanically joining molecule to molecule, one after another, until the final, atomically correct product emerges before our eyes. The reality has been somewhat different: today the word “nano” has been diluted to the point that it applies to essentially anything small, even down to the “nanoparticles” in commodities as diverse as motor oil, sunscreen, lipstick and ski wax....

Wyoming’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions stands above a geological formation considered one of the nation’s best potential carbon storage sites, but because of technological hurdles, coal-fired power plants like PacifiCorp’s Jim Bridger facility remain decades away from rerouting their emissions into the ground. The Rock Springs Uplift geological formation has enough capacity to accommodate 100 years’ worth of carbon dioxide from the Rock Springs, Wyo., power plant, which produces about 18 million tons of the greenhouse gas each year....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Carthaginians are also considered to have an excellent form of government, which differs from that of any other state in several respects, though it is in some very like the Spartan. Indeed, all three states—-the Spartan, the Cretan, and the Carthaginian—-nearly resemble one another, and are very different from any others....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Magdala, known as Migdal in Hebrew (מִגְדָּל: tower) and also as Taricheae (Ταριχέα, from the Greek Τάριχος or tarichos: preserved by salting or drying fish), was an important fishing town during the first century CE on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee and below Mount Arbel....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pharsalus, in eastern Greece, was the site of a decisive battle in 48 BCE between two of Rome’s greatest ever generals: Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. After several previous encounters, Pharsalus, the biggest ever battle between Romans, would finally decide which of the two men would rule the Roman world....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. On 7 June 415 BCE, various statues of the god Hermes were desecrated in Athens. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) had been raging for decades as one of the biggest civil wars in Ancient Greece, and the Athenians prepared for the expedition to Sicily in 415 BCE. However, a few priests warned against it, and others spoke of disastrous omens....

Shipping noise and other sounds from human activity in oceans harm numerous marine species, according to a broad new assessment of existing research. The findings, published this month in Science, also include viable solutions—some already in use—that could buy time to address tougher problems such as ocean acidification and potentially save the lives of imperiled species such as southern resident killer whales, Maui dolphins and Atlantic cod. The researchers say their examination of more than 500 studies of marine noise pollution provides a solid foundation of evidence to support new policies and changing industry practices to restore the health of the global ocean soundscape for marine life and people who depend on it....

Earlier this summer marked the 50th anniversary of C. P. Snow’s famous “Two Cultures” essay, in which he lamented the great cultural divide that separates two great areas of human intellectual activity, “science” and “the arts.” Snow argued that practitioners in both areas should build bridges, to further the progress of human knowledge and to benefit society. Alas, Snow’s vision has gone unrealized. Instead literary agent John Brockman has posited a “third culture,” of scientists who communicate directly with the public about their work in media such as books without the intervening assistance of literary types....

“Awesome” has become a common descriptor, yet genuine awe is a profound emotion: the intake of breath at a starry night sky, goose bumps during soaring music or tearing up at the sight of a vast crowd holding candles aloft. Can this feeling make us better people? A recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that it does. Philosophers long ago suggested that awe binds people together, explains lead author Paul Piff, an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who began his investigation of awe in Dacher Keltner’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley....

Dully whining electric motors may soon compete with roaring turbofans in the sky as battery-powered planes and helicopters take flight. Aircraft are emerging as the new frontier in electric vehicles as new technology and market demand converge to drive development. More energy-dense batteries, lighter components and more efficient power electronics are making plug-in airplanes a realistic prospect. Talk of taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and more stringent noise regulations have sent engineers looking beyond pistons and turbines....

Bad things happen when bacteria start talking, most of the time. Via a process known as quorum sensing, the microbes send out chemical signals that build up until they are notified that there are enough of them present to initiate an infection. They then begin acting as a team, exuding a biofilm over the colony that helps protect the members from antibiotics and ramps up their rate of growth. Chemists have begun to design compounds that can interfere with this conversation and, thanks to new techniques that allow more rapid compound detection, have isolated species-specific ones....

As global temperatures rise, desert climates have spread north by up to 100 kilometres in parts of Central Asia since the 1980s, a climate assessment reveals. The study, published on 27 May in Geophysical Research Letters, also found that over the past 35 years, temperatures have increased across all of Central Asia, which includes parts of China, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In the same period, mountain regions have become hotter and wetter — which might have accelerated the retreat of some major glaciers....

Abrupt climate change is not only imminent, it’s already here. The rapid dwindling of summer Arctic sea ice has outpaced all scientific projections, which will have impacts on everything from atmospheric circulation to global shipping. And plants, animals and other species are already struggling to keep up with rapid climate shifts, increasing the risk of mass extinction that would rival the end of the dinosaurs. So warns a new report from the U....