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My Scientific American column this month concerned a sneaky problem that not many people are paying attention to: file-format rot. That’s when our digital files become unopenable not because their storage media becomes obsolete, but because the software programs that created them are no longer available—or, in the case of Microsoft Word, can no longer open their own oldest documents. The Word situation is especially bizarre; Microsoft is the curator of the world’s most common word-processing format....

In 1982 all anyone could talk about in the planetary science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the cancellation of NASA’s latest flagship mission, the Venus Orbital Imaging Radar (VOIR). One of us (Dyar) was a graduate student there at the time. (The other two were still in college and elementary school.) Graduate students wept openly in the hallways, and veteran faculty shook their heads. The newly elected Reagan administration had enacted sweeping cuts to space exploration, and VOIR was one of the casualties....

GREENLAND Geologists discovered what some think may be the oldest known fossils on earth. The scientists said the objects are 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolites, layered structures created by lime-secreting cyanobacteria. U.K. The British government imposed a tax on companies that sell products with added sugar. Proponents hope the levy will help reduce obesity among children. SYRIA An analysis of mortality data from 22 countries in the Middle East and northern Africa found that conflict and civil strife have decreased life expectancy across the region....

Margaret Burbidge, an astronomer who made vital contributions to our understanding of what happens inside stars and who worked on instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope, has died at 100. The University of California, San Diego, where Burbidge had worked from 1962 to 1988, announced her death on Twitter Monday (April 6), noting that she had died on Sunday (April 5). Burbidge was most famous for her work establishing how stars produce increasingly heavy elements and distribute them throughout the universe....

If you were like most children, you probably got upset when your mother called you by a sibling’s name. How could she not know you? Did it mean she loved you less? Probably not. According to the first research to tackle this topic head-on, misnaming the most familiar people in our life is a common cognitive glitch that has to do with how our memories classify and store familiar names. The study, published online in April in the journal Memory and Cognition, found that the “wrong” name is not random but is invariably fished out from the same relationship pond: children, siblings, friends....

A metal pin adorning a military uniform signifies rank; a ring on the left hand’s fourth finger announces matrimony. Most scientists thought that the capability for such symbolic thinking was unique to modern humans, but a new study suggests that it dates back to before the Neandertals. Archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues found 50,000-year-old perforated painted seashells and pigment containers on the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe, a region that was inhabited solely by Neandertals at the time....

Parents of teenagers often view their children’s friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to prod its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult....

An experiment to test the limits of human vision has provided the strongest evidence yet that our eyes can sense flashes of light as feeble as three photons. The study, which involves firing photons into the eyes of people sitting in a dark room, could ultimately show whether people can sense single photons, according to Rebecca Holmes, a physicist from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She presented her team’s results at a meeting of the American Physical Society on June 10 in Columbus, Ohio....

ANTIOXIDANTS AND HEALTH Although I would not go so far as to say Melinda Wenner Moyer’s “The Myth of Antioxidants” established “myth” status for antioxidants, it was an eye-opening account of recent experimental evidence demonstrating that an increase in free radical levels in living systems does not consistently correlate with shorter life spans and that the aging process contains more uncharted territory than initially believed. More important, however, no reader should come away feeling that vitamins from food products are in any way overrated or are “killers....

CLEVELAND—A Texas delegate tilted his hat back when asked about climate change and said, “Ew.” A delegate from Florida lamented his party’s inaction on warming. And one from Wyoming claims it’s a conspiracy to hide the government’s involvement in the spread of a damaging beetle. Reactions here to the issue of rising temperatures swing sharply between rejection and acceptance, with many falling somewhere in the middle. ClimateWire asked 51 delegates and alternate delegates attending the Republican convention if they agree with scientists that climate change is happening and whether people contribute to it....

Distinctive bursts of sleeping-brain activity, known as sleep spindles, have long been generally associated with strengthening recently formed memories. But new research has managed to link such surges to specific acts of learning while awake. These electrical flurries, which can be observed as sharp spikes on an electroencephalogram (EEG), tend to happen in early sleep stages when brain activity is otherwise low. A study published in Current Biology shows that sleep spindles appear prominently in particular brain areas that had been active in study participants earlier, while they were awake and learning an assigned task....

Over the past three decades I have noted two disturbing tendencies in both science and society: first, to rank the sciences from “hard” (physical sciences) to “medium” (biological sciences) to “soft” (social sciences); second, to divide science writing into two forms, technical and popular. And, as such rankings and divisions are wont to do, they include an assessment of worth, with the hard sciences and technical writing respected the most, and the soft sciences and popular writing esteemed the least....

Several scholars in the humanities criticize the name itself, however, arguing that it perpetuates long-standing misconceptions about this relationship. Replacing “Anthropocene” with a name that focuses instead on its underlying causes might be more conducive to helping us tackle them. One problem with the term is hubris: naming a geologic era after ourselves suggests a certain awe at our own magnificence. And sociologist Eileen Crist holds that it was such an anthropocentric worldview that got us into this predicament in the first place....

Feeling tense? Paying attention to your breathing for a few minutes could soothe your nerves. Practicing such mindful breathing regularly may even lead to better mental health, according to two recent studies. In an experiment reported in May in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, researchers at Toho University School of Medicine in Japan taught healthy subjects to breathe deeply into their abdomen. After subjects maintained attention on breathing this way for 20 minutes, they had fewer negative feelings, more of the mood-boosting neurotransmitter serotonin in their blood, and more oxygenated hemoglobin in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with attention and high-level processing....

Clinicians have long suspected that depression worsens cardiac symptoms, but recent research suggests this combination is even more dangerous than previously believed. A study published in the journal Heart found that on any given day participants with both depression and heart disease were nearly five times more likely to die than their healthy peers. Depression alone doubled mortality risk, and heart disease increased risk by only two thirds. The study authors evaluated about 6,000 subjects, employing statistical models to see if other factors, such as age and medication use, affected the results....

The ease with which TV’s intrepid crime scene investigators employ science to analyze evidence and catch the perps belies the reality of most criminal investigations. Although fingerprints, gunshot residue and other forensic evidence is critically important in connecting a suspect to a crime, the very methods used to analyze such samples often corrupt or destroy them. In an attempt to spare delicate evidence, researchers at the University of Surrey in England are experimenting with a technique that uses ion beams to detect trace elements contained within particles found on a suspect’s body or clothing without contaminating or ruining the evidence....

In 2003 a young Amur tiger, seeming disoriented, wandered into a Russian village on the Chinese border. Wildlife Conservation Society scientists anesthetized the tiger and determined that she had canine distemper—the first case confirmed in a wild tiger. The feline patient zero died six weeks later. Since then, canine distemper, an untreatable virus that can infect many types of carnivores, has spread among Amur tigers across the subspecies’ range in Russia’s far east....

From the bags that find their way to the ocean and into the stomachs of whales to the straws that hurt turtles to the microscopic shards and synthetic fibers that have been found in the remote Arctic, plastic permeates the planet. The problem of plastic pollution has gotten dramatically worse as production has ramped up from two million metric tons a year in 1950 to more than 300 million metric tons a year today without much thought to what happens once it is discarded....

Stop being so skeptical of climate skeptics, says one researcher who believes there’s been a failure to understand the mounting cultural doubt around atmospheric warming. The national discussion on climate change is brimming with economic models, scientific findings and wonky plans to fix it. But something is missing: academic explanations of why people flout reams of scientific conclusions, bristle at the notion of cutting carbon and regard climate change as a sneaky liberal plot....

Astronomers say they have found a vast ring of dark matter, the enigmatic substance that seems to make up most of the mass in the universe, encircling a cluster of galaxies five billion light-years away. If true, the discovery would mark the first time that dark matter has followed a much different shape than that of the visible matter it surrounds, highlighting the difference between the two types of matter....