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Janet Rowley noticed something odd about the glowing chromosomes revealed by her microscope. It was the early 1970s, the first years of the so-called “war on cancer,” and she was using a new staining technique to examine cells from patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a cancer of the blood that was almost always fatal. The technique highlighted bands within the chromosomes, and she could see an extra piece on the end of chromosome 9....

Key concepts Food science Cooking Marinades BBQ Acids Introduction Have you ever tasted delicious grilled chicken and wondered how it got so much flavor? Maybe you have heard your family talk about marinating foods before cooking or grilling them. A marinade is a mixture of seasonings used to flavor or tenderize food. Some cooks have strong opinions about the best way to marinate their favorite food, be it a steak, tofu steak, chicken breast or veggie kebobs....

The smell of coffee may urge you out of bed in the morning, and the perfume of blooming lilacs in the spring is divine. But you do not see police officers with their noses to the ground, following the trail of an escaped criminal into the woods. Humans do not use smell the way other mammals do, and that contributes to our reputation for being lousy sniffers compared with dogs and other animals....

Thomas Van Dyke is chair of the Department of Applied Oral Sciences, vice president of clinical and translational research at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forsyth Institute and a lecturer at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. He studies the role of inflammation in gum disease and its impact on systemic health. Scientific American Custom Media: What’s the relationship between gum disease and inflammation? Thomas Van Dyke: The American Academy of Periodontology [now] categorizes periodontitis [gum disease] as an inflammatory disease induced by bacteria, rather than an infectious disease....

On July 8 President Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House and delivered a speech celebrating his administration’s environmental leadership. Flanked by his Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, and epa head Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, Trump extolled his team’s stewardship of public lands, its efforts to ensure “the cleanest air and cleanest water,” and its success in reducing carbon emissions....

In the mid-1980s, during our first few seasons excavating the long-dead city archaeologists call Harappa, my colleagues and I watched the passage of the annual spring fairs without realizing their implications for our studies of the ancient Indus civilization. Every year in Pakistans Indus River Valley, people living in villages travel to larger towns to attend festivals called sang–“gathering fairs” where musicians, performers and circus troupes entertain the crowds while itinerant merchants and traders hawk their wares....

A California whooping cough epidemic in 2010 was one of the worst U.S. outbreaks of the disease in the past several decades. Ten infant deaths occurred among the more than 9,000 cases—the most in that state since 1947. Now, a study reveals that parental refusals to vaccinate their children may have played a part in that epidemic and possibly in a concurrent nationwide resurgence of the disease. The research found significant overlaps of areas with high numbers of whooping cough cases and areas where more parents had sought legal exemptions to opt out vaccinating their children....

We asked MIND readers to send us their personal what-if stories in conjunction with our November/December 2015 cover story exploring the human propensity for counterfactual thinking—imagining alternative scenarios to what actually happened in their lives. We got a spectacular variety of responses, with a good mix of “upward” counterfactuals (imagining something better than what happened) and “downward” ones (imagining how things might have been far worse). Here’s a sampling of their imaginative offerings....

On June 5, 2019, lightning from an unusually early spring thunderstorm ignited a blaze deep inside the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in south-central Alaska. High temperatures at the end of May had reversed a wet spring and quickly dried out the forest floor. The resulting Swan Lake Fire, about five miles northeast of Sterling, spread relentlessly for a month as the extraordinarily warm weather continued. By July 9 more than 99,000 acres had burned, and more than 400 people were fighting the flames....

Understanding the thoughts and feelings of other individuals is essential for navigating the social world. But empathy is a complex process, based in part on fleeting facial expressions. Research suggests that we empathize by effectively putting ourselves in others’ shoes: for example, when we observe someone feeling sad, we simulate their experience by activating the same regions of the brain that are involved when we feel sad ourselves. A study in the Journal of Neuroscience in February bolsters this idea using rare individuals with “mirror-touch synesthesia....

Stress is often linked to heart disease and other ailments, but a new study suggests that the strains of living in crowded and challenging physical environments might mitigate against cancer. Scientists found that simply placing mice afflicted with cancer in a more complex living environment resulted in a remarkable reduction in tumor growth. While eating a healthy diet and reducing exposure to carcinogens are certainly important ways to reduce cancer risk, the results show that other components of the environment like an individual’s surroundings, social interaction and mental state may also have profound impacts on cancer....

Floating back under parachute from outer space to Inner Mongolia on November 17, China’s Shenzhou-11 astronauts brought to a close the nation’s longest piloted space trek, which lasted 33 days. The mission capped off a year that saw a series of noteworthy successes in China’s blossoming space program, including the country’s sixth manned space mission, the launch of a new space lab module and the inaugural use of a new spaceport....

Scientists have long known that the rise in average global temperatures is expanding the geographical presence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, because the animals that transmit them are adapting to more widespread areas. The link between respiratory illnesses, including influenza and COVID-19, and a warming planet is less clear. But some scientists are concerned that climate change could alter the relationship between our body’s defenses and such pathogens....

No one wants another government shutdown. Not President Obama, who needs the funding to fight ISIS and Ebola abroad. Not Speaker Boehner, who warned House Republicans last month that defunding the government would only backfire. And certainly not the 800,000 federal workers who were furloughed without pay during the last 16-day shutdown, in October 2013. Fortunately, it probably won’t happen. With a bit of political finesse, experts believe that Boehner can rally the GOP to fund the government before the December 11 deadline—despite Republican outrage over the president’s recent unilateral steps toward immigration reform....

On a warm spring day, disease ecologist Daniel Salkeld is hiking the hills of coastal scrub and chaparral of Marin County, north of San Francisco. It’s his favorite spot to collect ticks. As he walks, he trails a white flannel blanket attached to a pole, and every 20 meters, he stops, scrutinizes the flannel and picks off any ticks that have latched on. Ticks are passive predators of blood—they wait for an unsuspecting mouse, deer or person to brush past the blade of grass they are clinging to....

Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches of rain last August, was one of the most outlandish storms ever to hit the U.S. Ironically, it crossed a Gulf of Mexico that had been calm for days and quickly quieted again afterward. This rare situation allowed scientists to obtain unusually specific data about the ocean before and after the hurricane, and about the storm’s energy and moisture....

Parkinson’s disease, first described in the early 1800s by British physician James Parkinson as “shaking palsy,” is among the most prevalent neurological disorders. According to the United Nations, at least four million people worldwide have it; in North America, estimates run from 500,000 to one million, with about 50,000 diagnosed every year. These figures are expected to double by 2040 as the world’s elderly population grows; indeed, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative illnesses common in the elderly (such as Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) are on their way to overtaking cancer as a leading cause of death....

An international collaboration of scientists has discovered a previously unidentified source of tropospheric hydroxyl radicals generated by the interaction of ozone with the surface of clouds. Their simulations predict that the rate of hydroxyl radical production at the clouds’ air–water interface could be four orders of magnitude higher than in the rest of the atmosphere. ‘This is an important finding because the hydroxyl radical is the main “cleaner” of the atmosphere, and all the sources and sinks of this radical, which are gas phase, play a key role in the chemistry of the atmosphere,’ explains team member Josep Anglada, from the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia, Spain....

During his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson said “our ability to predict” the effect of increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere “is very limited.” That’s not entirely accurate. While “very limited” is subjective, scientists have differing degrees of confidence when attributing different phenomena to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. For example, scientists are nearly certain that increased CO2 levels from the burning of fossil fuels have caused over half of the global temperature increase since 1950....

Realistic stem cell therapies to replace diseased or damaged tissue may still be years away, but researchers have uncovered a promising new use for these undifferentiated cells: they can be programmed to become patient-specific laboratory models of inherited liver disease. These new tools could be useful for teasing out disease mechanisms and testing new drug therapies. Scientists from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Medical Research obtained skin cells from 10 patients—seven who had various forms of inherited liver disease, and three healthy controls....