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Posing problems in science can be just as rewarding as solving them. The discovery of the black-hole firewall paradox — one of the most confounding puzzles to emerge in physics in recent years — has bagged its co-founder a share of one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough Prizes, the most lucrative awards in science. Joseph Polchinski, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is one of three string theorists to share the fundamental-physics prize — announced along with the life-sciences and mathematics awards on 4 December at a glitzy ceremony at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Many animals have adaptations that help them cope with specific environments or lifestyles. Antarctic fish produce antifreeze proteins that prevent their blood from freezing in subzero temperatures. Some desert rodents survive without ever drinking a single drop of water. Humans living at high altitudes have special adaptations to cope with the low oxygen concentrations....

It was a little before 4 A.M., on an airless morning in June 2018, when the arms depot in Baharka, Iraqi Kurdistan, blew up. Brightening the dawn sky for kilometers around, the blast sent rockets, bullets and artillery rounds hurtling in every direction. Officials say no one was killed. But were it not for the early hour and reduced garrison, the death toll might well have been horrendous. A year later, another arsenal exploded just to the southwest of Baharka, reportedly destroying millions of dollars’ worth of ammunition amassed during the fight against ISIS....

SAN DIEGO—In the textbook explanation for how information is encoded in the brain, neurons fire a rapid burst of electrical signals in response to inputs from the senses or other stimulation. The brain responds to a light turning on in a dark room with the short bursts of nerve impulses, called spikes. Each close grouping of spikes can be compared to a digital bit, the binary off-or-on code used by computers....

Certain disease outbreaks, including some of the worst pandemics of the 20th century, are linked to weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean, according to new research. Scientists said tracking these climate changes can help officials anticipate and plan for surges in illnesses. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle causes ripples through the global climate, changing rainfall and air currents. These shifts, in turn, can cause disease carriers to interact in new ways, creating novel pathogens....

Efforts such as these to slow deforestation have delivered some of humanity’s few gains in its otherwise lackadaisical battle so far against global warming. A gradual slowdown in chainsawing and bulldozing, particularly in Brazil, helped reduce deforestation’s annual toll on the climate by nearly a quarter between the 1990s and 2010. A new study describes how this trend has seen agriculture overtake deforestation as the leading source of land-based greenhouse gas pollution during the past decade....

About a year ago, Louann Brizendine, founder and director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, published The Female Brain. One of the most cited gems within its pages was a claim that women are chatterboxes, speaking an average of 20,000 words per day, nearly three times the mere 7,000 spoken by men. Seemed to make sense, given the rep of women as purveyors of gossip, not to mention creatures incapable of keeping their traps shut....

The hose has been turned back on full-force over Northern California: A stream of moisture is flowing over the drought-riddled state and dropping copious amounts of rain just days after the close of one of the driest Januaries on record. The influx of much-needed rain comes courtesy of a feature called an atmospheric river that is a key source of much of the state’s precipitation and water supply. A relatively recent meteorological discovery, these ribbons of water vapor in the sky are something scientists are trying to better understand....

The average temperature of the planet for the next several thousand years will be determined this century—by those of us living today, according to a new National Research Council report which lays out the impact of every degree of warming on outcomes ranging from sea-level rise to reduced crop yields. “Because carbon dioxide is so long-lived in the atmosphere, it could effectively lock Earth and future generations into warming not just for decades and centuries, but literally for thousands of years,” atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who chaired the report, said at a July 16 press briefing held to release it....

An injury sustained by a Neandertal who died 50,000 years ago has puzzled scientists for nearly half a century. The individual, found at the site of Shanidar in Iraq and known as Shanidar 3, has a deep slice in one of the ribs, indicating that he was stabbed with a stone implement. The question has been: by whom? There are several possibilities: Either a fellow Neandertal or an early modern human did it intentionally, or the hapless victim himself or a hunting partner inflicted the wound by accident....

Yet it is not easy to watch what you want when you want to. The reasons are not easily parsed and depend as much on technological circumstance as they do on the well-placed fears of entrenched industry powers. Digital distribution threatens their business models like nothing in the history of media, but as the music industry so dramatically illustrated, fighting the consumer’s desire for limitless content is a loser’s game. “I guarantee that five years from now TV as we know it is gone,” says Doc Searls, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University....

Burning incense has accompanied religious ceremonies since ancient times. Its fragrant presence may be more than symbolic, however—a May 20 study in the FASEB journal suggests that a chemical commonly found in incense may elevate mood. Raphael Mechoulam of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues injected mice with incensole acetate, a component of the resin of the Boswellia plant. This resin, better known as frankincense, is an ingredient in Middle Eastern incense....

For a monkey, not all images are created equal. A new report reveals that the animals value some pictures more than others and are willing to pay for the privilege of viewing the important ones. The results indicate that monkeys, like people, value information based on its social context. Robert Deaner of Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues studied male rhesus macaques that received juice rewards while looking at a variety of images of other macaques on a computer screen....

Amid the continuing decline of pollinators worldwide, U.S. lawmakers recently revived a perennially struggling bill that aims to save these helpful species. However, pollinator loss is more complicated than many headlines suggest. And curbing it, some scientists say, requires more than just stricter pesticide regulation—a major focus of the bill. This is the fifth iteration of the Save America’s Pollinators Act, which was introduced by Democratic Representatives Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and John Conyers Jr....

Key concepts Chemistry Chemical reactions Food science Carbonation Introduction Have you ever wondered how carbonated soda is made? As you sip it, the bubbles in soda tickle your tongue’s taste buds and propel the ingredients to your palate and nose so that you get a kick of flavor. But how do the bubbles, fizz and taste get into the water? In this tasty science activity you will work with baking soda, citric acid and sugar to create your own soda!...

With a little more than a day before the iPhone 5’s expected debut, Samsung has decided to sue Apple for patent infringement over its reported use of long-term evolution (LTE) connectivity in the next-generation smartphones.Expected to be unveiled at a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday, the iPhone 5 will reportedly feature the speedier fourth-generation wireless networking, for which Samsung holds numerous patents. Samsung, which has been locked in a series of high-stakes patent trials with Apple, had previously threatened to sue the iPhone maker if it were to release LTE-enabled products....

PARIS (January 31, 2007) — Beneath the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower, scientists and diplomats are working until midnight tonight to produce a global consensus on climate change. The process is at times contentious, but mostly painstakingly slow as every line in a 14-page “summary for policymakers” is scrutinized word by word. After presentations by lead authors of the 11 chapters of the final report—due to be fully released this fall—governments peruse the text of the final summary, probably the most read section of a 1,600 page document....

POLICY LEADER OF THE YEAR Al Gore U.S. Vice President The former presidential candidate is the preeminent spokesperson on climate change It sounds improbable: a documentary film about global warming, starring Vice President Al Gore, has become the third-highest-grossing documentary of all time. After his loss in the 2000 presidential election, Gore began giving a talk on global warming to audiencesaround the world. An Inconvenient Truth is the film version (also appearing in book form) of his multimedia presentation....

Imagining things that do not exist in nature and weaving them into narratives are unique signatures of the human psyche. These abilities are abundantly evident in the earliest example of narrative art, which was recently discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In these newly reported images, one or more Pleistocene-epoch humans on this Southeast Asian island depicted a scene containing several figures that seem to be people....

Editor’s note: We are posting the main text of this article from the February 1996 issue of Scientific American for all our readers because the authors have won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Subscribers to the digital archive may obtain a full PDF version, complete with artwork and captions. Often in nature things are not what they seem. A rock on the seafloor may be a poisonous fish; a beautiful flower in a garden may be a carnivorous insect lying in wait for prey....