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Cave-riddled hills jut steeply from the flat pine savanna of Runaway Creek Nature Reserve in Belize. Tapirs, jaguars and wild pigs call the forest-blanketed hillsides home. The territory also encompasses the range of a group of spider monkeys whose lives University of Calgary anthropologist Mary Pavelka and graduate students Kayla Hartwell and Jane Champion have chronicled for four years. The team has amassed a detailed record that goes beyond the animals’ daily comings and goings to include measuring stress hormones and the parasites that inhabit their intestinal tracts....

China’s test flight of a long-range hypersonic glide vehicle late last year was described in the media as close to a “Sputnik moment” in the race to develop new ultrafast maneuvering weapons. But even as senior U.S. military officials publicly fretted about missiles that are, for the moment at least, effectively invincible, the Pentagon was quietly making strides on an entirely novel way to help shoot down these weapons. Late last December the U....

Noise pollution in the oceans has risen dramatically because of an increase in commercial shipping, oil and gas prospecting, and other activities. Evidence is mounting that low-frequency noise from these and other sources can pulp delicate organs in squid, octopuses and cuttlefish. One way of protecting ocean dwellers would be to raise solid, heavy and potentially expensive barriers around either the sources of sound or the areas one would want protected....

No War On Terror “Talking about Terrorism,” by Arie W. Kruglanski, Martha Crenshaw, Jerrold M. Post and Jeff Victoroff, makes an important point. Whether we are antiterrorism, antiwar or anticancer, when we wage a war against the enemy we empower that enemy. Mother Teresa is reported to have said about her refusal to take part in antiwar rallies, “If you ever have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.” As a physician, I see the difference when people battle cancer or other diseases—they either win or lose the battle....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine A group that has used DNA evidence to free nearly 300 wrongly convicted people from prison reached out to scientists this week, asking chemists to engage with forensic science. Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in New York that investigates potential wrongful convictions, asked researchers at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to do more to improve the troubled field of forensic science....

Astronomer Jill Tarter, the inspiration for heroine Ellie Arroway in the novel and movie “Contact,” is retiring after spending 35 years scanning the heavens for signals from intelligent aliens. Tarter is stepping down as the director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the organization’s officials announced today (May 22). But rather than go lie on a beach somewhere,Tarter will continue to devote herself to the search for E....

The first COVID-19 vaccines have arrived, and the race is on to get them into as many arms as possible as soon as possible. But vaccination rates have fallen frustratingly short of what is needed to turn the tide of this pandemic, which continues to claim thousands of lives every day. The currently authorized vaccines are meant to be given in two doses. To speed things up, some scientists have floated the idea of delaying the second dose, only giving people only a single dose or halving the dose size....

BAKER, Nev.—Denys Koyle parked an 8-foot bucket on the lot in front of her small motel, here on a lonely stretch of pavement crossing the Utah-Nevada line. A sign on the bucket reads: “Don’t Let Las Vegas Destroy Nevada. Stop the Water Pipeline.” Koyle is an unlikely activist. She’s quick to point out that she’s no tree-hugger. But as she bustles between the Border Inn’s grill and gas station, she complains about the long reach and powerful thirst of Las Vegas....

Researchers have reprogrammed adult mouse cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, without the need for a stay in a Petri dish. The technique, published today in Nature, allows researchers to reprogram cells in living mice without removing those cells from their natural environment. Initial tests suggest that these cells are able to take on a wider variety of identities than those generated by earlier methods. The finding has the potential to accelerate efforts to develop regenerative therapies by avoiding the need to grow cells outside the body and then grafting them back in place, says George Daley, a stem-cell researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, who was not involved with the study....

The COVID pandemic is not just a public health crisis. It is also an environmental one. After more than 430 million reported cases of the disease around the world, the pandemic has generated huge amounts of medical garbage in the form of test kits, gloves, masks, syringes and other products that people at clinics and hospitals use once and then toss away. A recent report by the World Health Organization found the problem was global, but extreme in poorer countries where much of the refuse is simply burned in open pits and decrepit incinerators that lack pollution controls....

Every day more than 1,000 infants worldwide are infected with HIV during gestation, delivery or breast-feeding, according to U.N. estimates. But the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says it will eliminate the transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies in just four years. It’s an ambitious goal that the fund is unlikely to meet without major changes, but it’s not impossible. “What it doesn’t require is a new scientific breakthrough,” says Jimmy Kolker, chief of UNICEF’s HIV/AIDS Programme....

Upstream at the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers may dither over the right national strategies to cope with climate change and some Republicans would prefer not to believe in it at all. But downstream, the largest facility of its kind in the world is busy preparing to protect the lawmakers and the capital from a foul-smelling catastrophe that could arise if the threat of sea-level rise is ignored. Two major, multimillion-dollar construction projects underway at the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority’s Blue Plains facility will demonstrate to other utilities that the time to prepare is now and, despite the expense, the alternative of doing nothing in the face of global warming could flood a city and its water source with raw sewage....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The recent WannaCry ransomware attack spread like wildfire, taking advantage of flaws in the Windows operating system to take control of hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. But what exactly does that mean? It can be useful to think of hackers as burglars and malicious software as their burglary tools. Having researched cybercrime and technology use among criminal populations for more than a decade, I know that both types of miscreants want to find ways into secure places—computers and networks, and homes and businesses....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), once thought to be the fault of lousy parents or a conspiracy propagated by drug companies, is a brain-based disorder, and quite the disorderly disorder it can be. The part of the brain affected is called the prefrontal cortex, which lies directly behind the forehead....

The repository, launched as an ‘electronic bulletin board’ in August 1991, just before the dawn of the World Wide Web, took 17 years to accumulate half a million manuscripts, but has taken just 6 more to double its holdings. Researchers now submit around 8,000 articles to the arXiv each month—more than 250 a day, on average. The site’s administrators make the raw, non-peer-reviewed manuscripts available in batches after a brief quality-control check, such as a cursory glance for appropriateness by one of 130 volunteer moderators, and automated filtering to check for text overlap with existing papers....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean on the northwest corner of the Barents Shelf. It is 800 kilometres (497 mi) north of mainland Norway and sits roughly midway between the top of Norway and the North Pole. It is bordered by Greenland (Denmark) in the west and Franz Josef Land (Russia) in the east....

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazineAnalysis of fossil traits suggests that Archaeopteryx is not a bird at all. The latest discovery of a fossil that treads the line between birds and non-avian dinosaurs is leading paleontologists to reassess the creature that has been considered the evolutionary link between the two.Archaeopteryx has long been placed at the base of the bird evolutionary tree. It has traits that have helped to define what it is to be a bird, such as long and robust forelimbs....

BANA, Burkina Faso — This small village of mud-brick homes in West Africa might seem the least likely place for an experiment at the frontier of biology. Yet scientists here are engaged in what could be the most promising, and perhaps one of the most frightening, biological experiments of our time. They are preparing for the possible release of swarms of mosquitoes that, until now, have been locked away in a research lab behind double metal doors and guarded 24/7....

If ever there was a wonder drug, aspirin might be it. Originally derived from the leaves of the willow tree, this mainstay of the family medicine cabinet has been used successfully for generations to treat conditions ranging from arthritis to fever, as well as to prevent strokes, heart attacks and even some types of cancer, among other ills. Indeed, the drug is so popular that annual consumption worldwide totals about 120 billion tablets....

By Alla KatsnelsonWASHINGTON DC - A mysterious phenomenon called ‘RNA editing’ could be unexpectedly widespread, according to a genome-wide examination of the effect in humans.The study, which has yet to be published, was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Washington DC this week. The findings suggest that as many as 97% of gene transcripts are being altered once RNA molecules have been assembled into a template from the DNA code....