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PERCEPTUAL PSYCHOLOGYand the brain sciences emphasize the communality in the way that people experience reality. Leaving aside cases of brain damage or mental disease, we all see the sun rise in the east, enjoy the scent of a rose and experience a jolt of fear when we are woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of breaking glass. This is a reflection of the great similarities of our brains compared with the brains of our close cousins on the evolutionary tree, the great apes....

Editor’s Note (8/25/20): This article is being republished today in light of the news that Africa is expected to be declared free of wild polio. The achievement comes after decades of vaccination drives succeeded in driving the virus out from its last foothold in Nigeria. In January 2014 an American public health worker was visiting northern Nigeria to observe a polio prevention campaign by local health workers. It was a big, festive event with a marching band to bring out parents and children for their immunizations....

In 1979 Francis Crick, famed co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, published an article in Scientific American that set out a wish list of techniques needed to fundamentally improve understanding of the way the brain processes information. High on his wish list was a method of gaining control over specific classes of neurons while, he wrote, “leaving the others more or less unaltered.” Over the past few years Crick’s vision for targeting neurons has begun to materialize thanks to a sophisticated combination of fiber optics and genetic engineering....

Building a railway across the unstable soil of the Tibetan Plateau was an improbable endeavor from the start, but an army of Chinese government engineers did it anyway. Now, with the frozen soil disturbed by the process of laying down the rail and a warming climate on the plateau, some scientists question whether the $4-billion rail line will survive as is or require major reconstruction. Three years after the railway opened in 2006, international research shows that the Tibetan territories are among the fastest warming, and fastest melting, on the planet....

The world’s smallest snowman has been created using a scanning electron microscope. The instrument’s operator at the western nanofabrication facility at Western University in Canada claims the tiny sculpture sets a new record, standing at just 3μm tall. Todd Simpson from Western University created the original ‘snowman’ by accident back in 2005. In an effort to create isolated silica spheres he deposited a solution of them on a polymer film pockmarked with nanoscale holes....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. President Joe Biden’s executive order calling for a review of supply chains for critical products put a spotlight on the decades-long decline in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing capacity. Semiconductors are the logic and memory chips used in computers, phones, vehicles and appliances. The U.S. share of global semiconductor fabrication is only 12%, down from 37% in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association....

One morning a few years back Roman Stocker was watching his cat, Cutta Cutta, drink, and began to wonder about the mechanism by which cats lap fluid into their mouths. For Stocker, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the thought was not an idle one. After investigating the mechanism via high-speed videography, experimental simulation and research on other feline species with visits to zoos and YouTube, Stocker and his colleagues have now produced a scientific description of cats’ lapping mechanism....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Biology is becoming increasingly digitized. Researchers like us use computers to analyze DNA, operate lab equipment and store genetic information. But new capabilities also mean new risks – and biologists remain largely unaware of the potential vulnerabilities that come with digitizing biotechnology. The emerging field of cyberbiosecurity explores the whole new category of risks that come with the increased use of computers in the life sciences....

The Geobacter bacterium could be the biofuel-generating machine of the future, producing energy-rich butanol costing as little as $2 per gallon. A project seeking to accomplish this, headed by Derek Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, received $1 million in funding today from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). It was not even the largest grant, with 37 projects receiving $106 million to further their research in this second round of funding....

Outrage over school shootings has been dominating headlines, not just because the victims are children but also because the attacks occur so randomly and in places—Parkland, Fla., Newtown, Conn.—where it once seemed such a thing could never happen. It’s much harder to stir a national debate about the persistent problem of gun homicides in the country’s poorest urban neighborhoods, even though more children die in urban gun violence than in school shootings, according to University of Pennsylvania criminologist John Macdonald....

In an age when the formula for success seems infinitely regressive—when having a good career means going to a good college, which requires acing your way through a top high school, middle school and even preschool—the onus is on the parent to push, push, push. We want our children to get a foot in the door before they even know how to tie the shoe that’s on it. But should we encourage our children through tender praise, or do we embrace the “tiger mom” strategy of punishment and criticism?...

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, is the author of the best-selling books, “How the Mind Works,” and “The Blank Slate.” But he is also a public intellectual, devoted to bringing the ideas of academia to questions of broad public interest. His latest work is an ambitious attempt to understand the origins, history—and perhaps the future—of human violence. The book is called “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” and it combines science with history to conclude that, by many measures, we live in the best of times, not the worst....

Elevator installation is a mature business, yet change is under way as office space and energy get pricey. Most buildings that are taller than four stories use traction elevators. A motor at the top of the shaft turns a sheave—essentially a pulley—that raises and lowers cables attached to the cab and a counterweight. Gears connect the motor and sheave in slower systems. Faster elevators are gearless; the sheave is coupled directly....

In 2016 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a two-drug combination of Mifeprex (also called RU-486 or mifepristone) and Cytotec (commonly known as misoprostol) to induce abortion without surgery. In 2019 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that approximately 42 percent of all abortions in the U.S. were medication-based. To start the process, a person takes mifepristone within 10 weeks from their last period. One or two days later they take misoprostol....

In 1878 Thomas Edison set out to reinvent electric lighting. To develop small bulbs suitable for indoor use, he had to find a long-lasting, low-heat, low-power lighting element. Guided largely by intuition, he set about testing thousands of carbonaceous materials—boxwood, coconut shell, hairs cut from his laboratory assistant’s beard. After 14 months, he patented a bulb using a filament made of carbonized cotton thread. The press heralded it as the “Great Inventor’s Triumph in Electric Illumination....

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? worries the classical Roman maxim: “Who watches the watchmen?” But the security vendors who stand guard over today’s networked information systems are under considerable scrutiny from their competitors, their customers, hackers and, increasingly often, governments concerned about national security. Scientific American’s editor in chief John Rennie sat down in Palo Alto, Calif., this past May with representatives from the security industry—and from some of the industries that will rely on the protections they provide—to discuss the challenges they will confront....

A DECADE AGO psychologist Ronald Levant, then at Nova Southeastern University, was telling some of his colleagues at a conference about patients with schizophrenia whom he had seen recover. One of them asked rhetorically, “Recovery from schizophrenia? Have you lost your mind, too?” Until recently, virtually all experts agreed that schizophrenia is always, or almost always, marked by a steady downhill progression. But is this bleak forecast warranted? Certainly schizophrenia is a severe condition....

I moved my eyes, and I realized that I was asleep in bed. When I saw the beautiful landscape start to blur, I thought to myself, “This is my dream; I want it to stay!” And the scene reappeared. Then I thought to myself how nice it would be to gallop through this landscape. I got myself a horse … I could feel myself riding the horse and lying in bed at the same time....

Recently a former medical college official cautioned that the American College of Physicians “stepped out of its lane” by placing gun control in the purview of medical education. Stanley Goldfarb, formerly the associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, argued in the Wall Street Journal that teaching social justice issues and population health comes “at the expense of rigorous training in medical science” at a time when subspecialists are in short supply....

By Erika Check Hayden of Nature magazineWhen the synthetic biology industry was in its infancy a decade ago, it offered some world-changing opportunities. As researchers showed that microbes could be engineered to produce cheaper medicines, or to turn renewable feedstocks such as sugar cane into substitutes for fossil fuels, start-up companies rushed to exploit these possibilities.But as the industry matures, it has become clear that it must diversify if it is to flourish....