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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Around 50m people worldwide are thought to have Alzheimer’s disease. And with rapidly ageing populations in many countries, the number of sufferers is steadily rising. We know that Alzheimer’s is caused by problems in the brain. Cells begin to lose their functions and eventually die, leading to memory loss, a decline in thinking abilities and even major personality changes....

Co-sleeping, the practice of sharing a bed with your baby, has a controversial place in modern society. Proponents argue that it increases the parent-child bond, whereas detractors worry about safety. Now an anthropological study adds a new finding to the debate: fathers who sleep next to their babies tend to have significantly lower levels of testosterone than those who sleep in a different room. Lee Gettler, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, compared Filipino men’s testosterone levels before having a child and again four years later....

Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. Although these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe or not may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytic thinking. In 2011 researchers from Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God....

About 70% of the surface of our planet Earth is covered in water. We are nestled in our solar system at just the right distance from the Sun for this liquid water to exist. Any farther and that water would be frozen in ice. Any closer and temperatures would be too hot and we would be at risk for a runaway greenhouse effect similar to what’s happening on the scorching surface of Venus....

The unseasonable warmth which has been found across much of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic this week will quickly become a distant memory as Sandy approaches and colder air comes marches in from the west. With Sandy continuing to blast toward the Atlantic coast, AccuWeather.com meteorologists anticipate the storm to make landfall early next week somewhere along the Northeast or mid-Atlantic coast. At the same time, cold air advancing southeastward into the Ohio Valley, western Pennsylvania and West Virginia will drop temperatures a good 30 to 40 degrees cooler than they were on Thursday....

During their nightly energy-conserving cooldowns, hummingbirds may strategically adjust just how low their body temperatures go. These tiny powerhouses cool off by up to 37 degrees Celsius while roosting, entering a hibernationlike state called deep torpor. This state can save 60 to 90 percent of an individual’s energy per hour, says Anusha Shankar, a Cornell University ecologist and lead author of a new study about the phenomenon. Though crucial for the fleet fliers’ way of life, deep torpor comes with trade-offs....

By Nicola JonesIBM’s supercomputer Watson is going up against top players of the U.S. television quiz program Jeopardy! this week, stirring up excitement in the artificial-intelligence community and prompting computer science departments across the country to gather and watch.“It is, in my mind, a historic moment,” says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington, Seattle. “I watched Gary Kasparov playing Deep Blue. This absolutely ranks up there with that....

(Reuters) - Kentucky’s “unapologetically pro-life” governor and the state’s last abortion clinic will square off on Wednesday in a federal courtroom in a case that could make it the first U.S. state without an abortion provider. In a three-day trial, the state will argue before a U.S. District judge in Louisville that EMW Women’s Surgical Center does not have proper state-required agreements with a hospital and an ambulance service in case of medical emergencies....

Keeping track of our planet’s temperature is no easy task. The keepers of such long-term data sets, usually government institutions, know they have to account for numerous variations to keep a consistent measurement of temperatures through time. Without that, it is impossible to know how our world is changing. Yet today’s thermometers are not the same as those 100 years ago. The time of day that temperature measurements are taken has changed....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - More than half of all deaths have no recorded cause, making effective health monitoring and policymaking far more difficult, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. However, improved collection of statistics meant that 27 million of the world’s 56 million estimated deaths in 2015 were registered with a cause compared with only about a third in 2005, the U.N. health agency’s latest global health report said....

NASA’s tiny CAPSTONE spacecraft has begun its long, history-making journey to the moon. The 55-pound (25 kilograms) cubesat launched today (June 28) atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster, which lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula of New Zealand at 5:55 a.m. EDT (0955 GMT; 9:55 p.m. local time in New Zealand). “The launch was absolutely fantastic,” said Bradley Smith, NASA’s director for Launch Services Office, who was on hand for the nighttime moonshot....

On a Saturday morning in 1984, when Ken Ono was in high school, he opened his family’s mailbox in Baltimore and found an envelope as thin as rice paper covered in brilliantly colored stamps. It was addressed to his father, a reserved Japanese mathematician. When Ono handed over the mail, the elder Ono looked up from the yellow legal pad on which he was always scribbling equations and set down his ballpoint pen....

One of the things we’re proudest of at Scientific American is that we’ve helped train some of the best science writers, graphic artists and multimedia producers in the business. Our editors frequently teach classes, guest lecture, speak at scientific conferences or universities about journalism, and commission freelance articles from early-career scientists and writers. We also host fellows and interns who work with us full-time during the summer, and we’ve had two outstanding writers this summer....

Medusa brittlestem, hawthorn twiglet, olive earth­tongue—welcome to the weird and wonderful world of fungi, where the species have names that sound as though they could have been plucked from the pages of Harry Potter. Gorgeous color photographs, handy distribution maps and chatty descriptions celebrate edible and poisonous fungal varieties from around the globe. Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. Free Press, 2011 Recent discoveries suggest that the inhabitants of Easter Island were actually devoted stewards of their island’s natural resources....

For three days in September, an ordinary-looking cargo ship traveled up and down Norway’s Oslo Fjord. Few casual observers would have guessed that the 272-foot (83-meter) -long vessel was gliding on a carpet of air. Air pumped about 25 feet (less than 10 meters) below the waterline into subsurface cavities—broad, shallow recesses built into the underside of the ship’s hull—creates buoyant pockets that help reduce drag, allowing the craft to slip more easily through the sea surface, according to Jørn Winkler, founder of DK Group, the small Rotterdam marine-engineering firm that developed the new system....

To follow up on the big response to the recent episode The Two Big Beliefs Linked to Depression, I thought we could fry another big fish this week with The Two Big Beliefs Linked to Anxiety. The two beliefs that follow aren’t necessarily conscious. Your brain probably doesn’t say these things overtly; instead, these two thoughts are more of an undercurrent. But like a riptide, it can be dangerous to swim in these waters....

Data from the past few decades show that despite progress toward gender equality, many challenges persist. Women are still disadvantaged compared with men where access to economic and social opportunities is concerned. Some of these so-called gender gaps, such as the dearth of women in government, stem from societal attitudes about gender and leadership. Others arise from factors that by definition disproportionately affect women, such as restrictions on reproductive health care....

As an old saying goes, you can’t fight city hall, meaning government. But the people of St. James Parish, La., did just that—and they won a major court victory against a massive plastics plant supported by the governor, state and local legislators, the business community and local power brokers. Led by Sharon Lavigne of Rise St. James, a faith-based grassroots organization fighting to reduce pollution in the community, and lawyers at Earthjustice, a national nonprofit environmental law organization, and other community groups led the years long battle....

Sixty years ago, two New Yorkers, Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson, developed radioimmunoassay, a technique that permitted measurement of insulin levels in blood. That discovery allowed them to prove, for the first time, that type 1 diabetes is characterized by insulin deficiency while type 2 diabetes results from insulin resistance. Their work earned Berson and Yalow faculty positions at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1968, and led to a Nobel Prize in 1977....

There’s nothing like the cool relief of nightfall after a sweltering summer day. As the world warms, this natural balance may be shifting. New research suggests that a new trend is on the rise—extreme heat during the day followed by extreme heat overnight. A study published this week in Nature Communications finds that these day/night extremes have become both hotter and more frequent since 1960. Across the Northern Hemisphere, they’ve intensified by about 2 ½ degrees Fahrenheit, and they’re occurring about five days more frequently per year....