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MARIETTE DiCHRISTINA is editor in chief and senior vice president of Scientific American. She has been a journalist for more than 25 years. JOHN HOUTZ is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His books include The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hampton Press, 2002). JULIA CAMERON is an award-winning poet, playwright and filmmaker. Her book The Artist’s Way (Tarcher, 2002) has sold almost four million copies worldwide. She is also author of The Writing Diet (Tarcher, 2007)....

The international agency that regulates global telecommunications agreed to new radio-frequency standards on 21 November. Meteorologists say the long-awaited decision threatens the future of weather forecasting worldwide, by allowing transmissions from mobile-phone networks to degrade the quality of Earth observations from space. Wireless companies are beginning to roll out their next-generation networks, known as 5G, around the world. The new agreement is meant to designate the radio frequencies over which 5G equipment can transmit....

When Nathalie Feiner spotted a tiny nematode worm wriggling in an embryonic lizard’s brain from the French Pyrenees, she thought it was a freak accident. She was dissecting hundreds of common wall lizard embryos for a study and had never encountered this invader before—but soon she started finding them in more of the still unhatched reptiles’ brains. Intrigued, Feiner, then with the University of Oxford, and a colleague examined the embryos’ parents....

Defining the Line “The Doping Dilemma,” by Michael Shermer, suggests that the possible penalties of using artificial enhancements in sports should be made greater than the possible rewards. But it is impossible to determine what is and is not an unacceptable artificial enhancement. With advances in medicine, biology and even prosthetics, the broad gray line will only get wider and murkier. We have reached the stage in our “progress” where meaningful contests between individuals are no longer possible....

Twenty-five years ago international teams of scientists showed that a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could produce a “nuclear winter.” The smoke from vast fires started by bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would envelop the planet and absorb so much sunlight that the earth’s surface would get cold, dark and dry, killing plants worldwide and eliminating our food supply. Surface temperatures would reach winter values in the summer....

The spines of a cactus, the proboscis of a mosquito, the quills of a porcupine: straight, pointed objects serve a plethora of functions in nature. Yet no matter the size, from bacteriophages’ nanometer-scale tail fibers to narwhals’ two- or three-meter-long tusk, these structures tend to be long and slender cones whose base diameter is much smaller than their length. Now researchers have used physics to explain why this narrow shape is optimal for stingers and other piercing objects—including human-made tools such as hypodermic needles....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. What would Saturn be without its beautiful system of rings? Over the past 13 years, the Cassini space probe has shown us just how complex and dynamic the rings truly are. The 20-year mission is coming to an end later this month when the probe makes its final destructive plunge into Saturn. As part of its grand finale, Cassini has flown closer to the rings than ever before, first grazing the outermost edges of the rings before taking the risky leap of diving through the gap between the rings and Saturn....

Every day our brains grapple with various last-minute decisions. We adjust our gait to avoid a patch of ice; we exit to hit the rest stop; we switch to our backhand before thwacking a tennis ball. Scientists have long accepted that our ability to abruptly stop or modify a planned behavior is controlled via a single region within the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area involved in planning and other higher mental functions....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The last few months have witnessed the unraveling of the remarkable life sciences company Theranos, culminating in the latest news that federal regulators may ban founder Elizabeth Holmes from the blood-testing industry for at least two years. The company is also facing a federal criminal investigation into whether it misled investors about its technology and company operations....

In his lab at Rice University synthetic biologist Jeff Tabor is creating a kind of Lilliputian naval academy. The midshipmen are so small they can’t be seen with the naked eye. But they’re part of a vital mission to protect U.S. naval forces from internal enemies, ranging from metabolic disorders to anxiety and depression. In 2014 Tabor received a three-year grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) to genetically modify a harmless species of Escherichia coli bacteria normally found in the human gut....

Particle physicists typically aren’t looking for a cure to an illness or a solution to an underlying societal problem. Propelled by curiosity, they are searching for answers about what makes up, well, everything. And they have a long way to go—roughly 95 percent of the universe seems to consist of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know next to nothing. So what is the nature of that mysterious dark stuff?...

Last april, as reactors at japan’s fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant were melting down following a lethal earthquake and tsunami, a maintenance worker in his 20s was among those who volunteered to reenter the plant to try to help bring things back under control. He knew the air was poisoned and expected the choice would keep him from ever marrying or having children for fear of burdening them with health consequences....

Interest in governing experiments to alter Earth’s climate is growing as scientists increasingly look at geoengineering to slow global warming. From cooling the atmosphere with special aerosols to sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, scientists have proposed a number of technologies that could potentially alter the climate system and reverse temperature increases. For now, they’re mostly theoretical. But with scientific interest quickly growing, and some high-profile experiments planned in the near future, some experts say the possibility of large-scale geoengineering projects is no longer a fantasy....

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a boy memorizes each word of a lecture in English, a language he does not speak. The learning happens as the boy sleeps within earshot of a radio broadcast of the lecture. On awakening, he is able to recite the entire lecture. Based on this discovery, the totalitarian authorities of Huxley’s dystopian world adapt the method to shape the unconscious minds of all their citizens....

Origami-inspired engineering techniques could help researchers develop stretchy conductors for flexible plasma-screen displays and, eventually, solar panels that can bend to follow sunlight, according to a new study. Increasingly, researchers worldwide are developing flexible electronics, such as batteries and solar panels, that could one day make their way into clothing and even human bodies. But in order to make parts such as wires and electrodes, the scientists need conductors that are just as flexible....

His Finalist Year: 2006 His Finalist Project: Finding ways to measure the mass and age of brown dwarfs What led to the project: From ages three to five, Long Island, N.Y., native Adam Solomon thought dinosaurs were pretty cool. Then at age five he read a book on the planets and his loyalties shifted completely. Studying heavenly bodies “is what I wanted to do,” he says. “There was no other choice....

The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most successful and most beloved science experiments of all time, is 25 years old this week. But its lifetime has been full of drama. It ended up launching seven years late in April 1990, costing significantly more than expected. When NASA engineers first turned it on, its images were blurry, caused by a flaw introduced in manufacturing its primary mirror. The telescope and the space agency that launched it were redeemed when seven astronauts flew onboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 1993 to install a new camera and a package to fix the instrument’s optics....

Yes, ask for the spin in the third trigger pull. If you don’t have me spin again before the third pull of the trigger, you have a 1 in 3 chance of losing the vase on that shot–which is the same as if you do ask me to spin. But the advantage of asking for the spin anyway is that if I spin first and the vase survives the third trigger pull, then you will return to the 1-in-4 chance of losing the vase on the fourth trigger pull....

How can an already bike-friendly city such as Copenhagen entice even more of its citizens to ride? A research group led by Carlo Ratti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SENSEable City Lab hopes to find out by distributing smart tags to cyclists that track the routes they take and allow them to connect with one another. Together Copenhagen and M.I.T. will distribute by November about 1,000 smart tags, each costing less than $30 and subsidized by the research group, so riders will have been using them for a time before the United Nations Climate Change Conference hosted by the city in December....

Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our Endangered Polar Regions by Camille Seaman Princeton Architectural Press, 2014 (($55)) The steady disappearance of Earth’s polar ice is illustrated beautifully, but devastatingly, in this large-format book. Seaman’s photographs, shot over a period of roughly a decade, document the architectural wonder of icebergs, many of which are visibly diminishing in response to warming temperatures. Playful penguins, majestic polar bears and other arctic creatures also appear here, but, as Seaman shows, their habitats are shrinking rapidly....