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Editor’s Note (9-5-17): As Hurricane Irma rapidly intensifies, with winds exceeding 180 mph, Scientific American reviews some of the science involved in predicting, tracking and understanding these massive storms. This article—originally published on 08/23/2011—looks at whether we will soon be facing Category 6 hurricanes. Atmospheric researchers tend to agree that tropical cyclones of unusual ferocity are coming this century, but the strange fact is that there is no consensus to date on the five-point scale used to classify the power of these anticipated storms....

As Australia’s unprecedentedly catastrophic bushfires rage, the emerging images are apocalyptic: skies turned blood red by smoke, families sheltering on boats to escape the flaming shore, and landscapes littered with the charred bodies of iconic animal species such as kangaroos and koalas. The plight of the continent’s famously unique fauna has garnered particular attention around the world. One estimate says that just in the state of New South Wales, about 800 million animals have likely been affected by the fires....

Join SA editor Gary Stix and an academic panel which will discuss the topic of information overload, at 1 pm EDT today (September 18). The discussion, hosted by international academic talk show Crosstalks, will center on the contemporary flood of media information and whether the claim that it constitutes a significant disruption to our daily lives is hype. Some of the questions will include the following: Does technological change cause stress in our daily lives?...

Researchers have long recognized that a large surplus of young men can lead to social disorder, as happened on the frontier in 19th-century America. A counter theory, however, holds that a shortage of men can also be disruptive. The theory comes from the late Marcia Guttentag of Harvard University and Paul Secord of the University of Houston. They explored the dynamics of marriage and partnership among the African-American community, which has the largest recorded shortage of men of any ethnic subgroup in the world....

By Alex DobuzinskisLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Cooler weather helped firefighters make significant gains on Saturday against a massive wildfire in Southern California, as crews cut containment lines around nearly 50 percent of the blaze.The so-called Mountain Fire has burned across more than 27,000 acres of dry brush and timber and destroyed seven residences since it broke out on Monday. At least 5,600 residents remain under evacuation orders.The more than 3,000 firefighters tackling the blaze on Saturday managed to expand containment lines to encircle 49 percent of the fire, up from 25 percent earlier in the day, said Carol Jandrall, fire information officer for the multiagency team battling the conflagration....

A set of tiny ancient crustaceans has yielded the oldest — and some of the biggest — fossilized sperm cells ever discovered. The specimens, which are at least 16 million years old, were preserved well enough to show some of the structures within the creatures’ unusually large gametes, which researchers were able to reconstruct in three dimensions from X-ray data. Ostracods are a class of crustacean still around today. They are shrimp-like animals typically around 1 millimeter in length, but their sperm cells are disproportionately long — up to 1 centimeter....

In one hospital in Bayonne, N.J., a patient treated for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a respiratory ailment, could get a bill for $99,690. Just across the state line in New York, at another hospital in the Bronx, a patient with the same disease would be charged only $7,044. In the Los Angeles area, comparable joint replacement surgeries can cost $297,000 or $84,000, depending on the facility. Such wild disparities in health care costs are driven, in large part, by the different rates insurance companies negotiate with hospitals....

Dear EarthTalk: Diesel exhaust from trucks, buses, large ships and farm equipment is especially unhealthy. What progress has been made in curbing diesel pollution?—Jackie Mitchell, Barre, Mass. Gasoline-powered passenger cars plying American roads have been subject to strict pollution limits for some three decades already, but only recently have tougher standards for diesel-powered trucks, trains, barges and other soot-belching vehicles gone on the books across the country. Traditionally, older diesel engines produce less carbon dioxide per mile driven than gasoline-powered vehicles, but they produce more of the pollution associated with localized environmental trauma—such as smog and soot in the air—that can trigger respiratory and cardiovascular problems and have been linked to lung and other cancers....

Boy or girl? Even before a person is born, that’s the first thing everyone wants to know—underscoring just how much value human societies of all types place on gender. The great divide between male and female has inspired poets, intrigued biologists and spawned an entire industry of self-help books. It has also given rise to a few misconceptions along the way, such as the notion that smaller brains make the so-called fairer sex inherently less intelligent—or at least bad at math....

At the bottom of the world, in a frigid Antarctic desert, sits a weird pond only a few inches deep that is so salty, it stays liquid even at temperatures of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 50 degrees Celsius). The source of the pond’s unusually heavy and pure load of salt has been a geochemical mystery since it was discovered during a 1961 expedition. Scientists had generally assumed that Don Juan Pond—a play on the names of the expedition’s helicopter pilots—was fed by deep groundwater, but a widely publicized 2013 paper suggested the salts came from a shallower source....

Babies scream for attention—and to get what they want. But, in some cases, their vocalizations may point to medical problems. Is your baby hungry, sleepy or in pain? A mobile phone app claims to know the answer. The program can tell users why a child younger than six months is crying, according to its developers from the Yun-Lin branch of the National Taiwan University Hospital. To do so, the “Baby Cries Translator” analyzes the frequencies of the baby’s wails, looking for small acoustic fluctuations....

By Lisa Baertlein Maryland has become the second U.S. state to pass a law banning the routine use of antibiotics in healthy livestock and poultry, a move aimed at battling the rise of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as “superbugs.” Maryland’s Keep Antibiotics Effective Act, which aims to end a practice that public health experts say can fuel the spread of superbugs, takes effect on Oct. 1 after Governor Larry Hogan declined to sign or veto it last week....

More than 15 months after landing in Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally begun its hunt for ancient life in earnest. On 28 May, Perseverance ground a 5-centimetre-wide circular patch into a rock at the base of what was once a river delta in the crater. This delta formed billions of years ago, when a long-vanished river deposited layers of sediment into Jezero, and it is the main reason that NASA sent the rover there....

SEPTEMBER 1956 EVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSE–“We have reviewed the questions that dominated the thinking of cosmologists during the first half of this century: the conception of a four-dimensional space-time continuum, of curved space, of an expanding universe and of a cosmos which is either finite or infinite. Now we must consider the major present issue in cosmology: Is the universe in truth evolving, or is it in a steady state of equilibrium that has always existed and will go on through eternity?...

A new telescope has revealed an important clue in the hunt for the astrophysical sources of powerful, enigmatic radio bursts. Canada’s Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), inaugurated last fall at a remote site in British Columbia, has spotted a new burst at a lower frequency than any previous detections. The new discovery should provide insight into the elusive origins of the strange bright signals, and augurs a dawning era in which they will be found and studied by the thousands....

His finalist year: 1978 His finalist project: Testing a process to remove sulfur belched from power plants What led to the project: Growing up in Saint Joseph, Mo., in the 1970s, Robert Duncan was “very fortunate to have supportive, very good teachers,” he says. For instance, the science department at Central High School, which he attended, saved up to purchase a gas chromatograph, used to separate and analyze the elements of gases....

An English racing team called the Bloodhound Project is a step closer to breaking the land-speed record—not just by 150 or even 300 kilometers (100 or 200 miles) per hour. The English team—the favorite to succeed in a field of at least five competitors—successfully tested a rocket in early October that is expected to help push its car to 1,600 kph (1,000 mph), nearly 500 kph (300 mph) faster than the previous mark....

The U.S. Mint recently announced the first two women who will be honored on quarters as part of a program to celebrate American women’s achievements: the writer, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou and Sally Ride, a “trailblazing astronaut,” as the agency correctly described her. Ride was also a physicist and science communicator whose zeal to get the public and students, particularly girls, more involved in science showed the same steely determination she’d taken into orbit....

Scientific consensus that humans cause climate change is akin to the scientific consensus that smoking causes cancer, says a report released today by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The report, called “What We Know,” marks the kickoff of a new AAAS initiative to increase dialogue on the risks of climate change. “Opinion polls show that more than half of the American public still think that there is a debate over whether climate change is happening or whether it is human-caused,” said James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer and co-chairman of the report....

Rose Abramoff drove from her home in Knoxville, Tenn., to the nation’s capital last week to chain herself to the White House fence. The climate scientist was among seven demonstrators arrested on April 6 (and later released). Their motivation: the dire warning that time is swiftly running out to meet the world’s climate goals, as detailed in a major report last week from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change....