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I am sitting alone at the head of a large conference table when an oddly familiar voice greets me: “Hey, you must be Spiros!” I turn around to find Paul Rudd, the Hollywood actor, wearing his famed disarming smile. He is in sweats, on his way back from some type of superhero training. A few minutes later he and a bunch of other film people are sitting around me. Rudd cuts straight to the chase: “So what kinds of cool things happen when you shrink?...

Benjamin Adric Dunn, a data scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, shows me a picture of unevenly spaced dots arranged vaguely like the rocks at Stonehenge. The overall pattern is clear—at least, to a human. “When we look at this, it’s obviously a circle,” he says. But an algorithm would likely struggle to recognize this simple shape. “It very often misses the big picture.” Many scientific processes involve loops, or repetitions....

Many of the hundreds of thousands of homes that gave way in the earthquakes that have rocked Nepal in April and May shared one common feature: heavy roofs. Building collapse in Kathmandu and surrounding areas contributed to a death toll now rising toward 10,000. The destruction of buildings sharing the same flaw helped kill 200,000 in the 2010 quake in Haiti, more than 80,000 in China in 2008 and at least 80,000 in Pakistan in 2005, to name just the most recent deadly disasters....

When’s the last time a stereotype popped into your mind? If you are like most people, the authors included, it happens all the time. That doesn’t make you a racist, sexist or whatever-ist. It means your brain is noticing patterns and making generalizations. But the same thought processes that make people smart can also make them biased. This tendency for stereotype-confirming thoughts to pass spontaneously through our minds is what psychologists call implicit bias....

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has plumbed the depths of Jupiter, revealing that the planet’s famous bands of swirling winds extend thousands of kilometers down. The work is the sharpest glimpse yet into Jupiter’s interior. Jupiter’s colourful stripes are atmospheric patterns composed of winds that flow alternately east and west. Until now, researchers haven’t been able to say whether those bands are confined to a shallow layer or reach deeper into the planet....

Using biological building blocks found inside a living cell, researchers have created a material that moves itself. The researchers first made a gel comprising microtubules — stiff polymer filaments that, in living cells, act as guiding tracks for kinesin, a ‘motor protein’ that is propelled along the microtubule cables by the cellular fuel ATP. “It’s like a tyre,” says Zvonimir Dogic, a physicist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, who led the study....

After months of intense anticipation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the companies Pfizer and BioNTech—the first to be approved for use in the U.S. The news comes as a devastating surge in cases grips the country, with many hospitals approaching capacity and new records for deaths being set weekly. Immunizations will begin in the next few days and weeks for health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities such as nursing homes....

The outer limits of 21st-century physics involve arcane pursuits with strange and wonderful names like “M-theory” and “de Sitter universes.” Many of these endeavors rely heavily on Albert Einstein’s explanation of how gravity emerges from the bending of space and time. With the assistance of the Office for Creative Research (OCR), a New York City datavisualization firm, Scientific American decided to look for some measure of how often recent scientific papers in relevant areas of physics still lean on Einstein’s 100-year-old achievement....

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria may be tougher superbugs than previously thought: Not only are these bacteria harder to treat, they appear to be “fitter” in general, meaning they survive better in the host and cause more deadly infections, a new study suggests. The findings go against the prevailing view in medicine that when bacteria acquire resistance to drugs, they become less “fit” in some way, for example, they spread less easily. Although scientists have assumed this is true, evidence supporting this view is limited, the researchers said....

Romantic relationships can begin anywhere. When Cupid’s arrow strikes, you might be at church or at school, playing chess or softball, flirting with a friend of a friend at a party or minding your own business on a train. Sometimes, however, Cupid goes on vacation, or takes a long nap, or kicks back for a marathon of Lifetime original movies. Instead of waiting for the capricious arrow slinger to get back to work, many people today use online dating sites and apps to assert some control over their romantic lives....

Twenty-two years ago a team of researchers traveled to some 200 U.S. preschools with a game board and a list. That now seminal study, in which 91 percent of the three- and six-year-olds they tested correctly paired mascot Joe Camel with his matching cigarettes, set off a cascade of antismoking legislation aimed at shielding American youth from aggressive tobacco ads. And in 2003 the World Heath Organization followed suit with an international treaty designed to limit the marketing power of tobacco companies in developing countries....

If some of the many thousands of human volunteers needed to test coronavirus vaccines could have been replaced by digital replicas—one of this year’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies—COVID-19 vaccines might have been developed even faster, saving untold lives. Soon virtual clinical trials could be a reality for testing new vaccines and therapies. Other technologies on the list could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by electrifying air travel and enabling sunlight to directly power the production of industrial chemicals....

Hoth. Coruscant. Endor. These names will ring familiar to fans of that galaxy far, far away—the setting for the Star Wars movies, including the new animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Now what about V391 Peg b? GJ 3021 b? WASP-15 b? If you guessed Star Wars droids, you’re wrong. They’re the names of actual planets found around other stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Slowly but surely researchers are learning that our stellar neighborhood is filled with extrasolar planets, better known as exoplanets....

A dump truck’s worth of plastic enters our oceans every minute. Tiny bits of plastic are in many of the foods we eat, to the point we may be ingesting about a credit card’s weight of the material every week. As with climate change, we’re running out of time to solve the plastics problem. According to the landmark 2020 report “Breaking the Plastic Wave,” if we delay dramatic action by just five years, an additional 80 million metric tons of plastic will end up in the ocean by 2040....

Contrary to expectations, perhaps, bulging veins during exercise have nothing to do with an increase in either blood volume or pressure in these vessels. In fact, both are known to decrease during stepped-up activity, including exercise. To explain the prominence of veins during exercise, it helps to understand the vascular system and its components. Blood that circulates throughout the body is pumped from the left ventricle of the heart. It first enters into the high pressure arteries, where systolic blood pressure, the highest pressure exerted there, is recorded around 120 mmHg (millimeters of mercury), and diastolic pressure, the minimal pressure exerted in these vessels, is recorded at around 80 mmHg....

You might have a sniffle and be done. You might run a fever with a cough and unshakable fatigue for five days—or 10. Or you might end up in a hospital, gasping air into congested lungs, an immunological storm raging in your body. And you might not make it through COVID-19 alive. What determines if someone gets desperately ill from the disease that is ripping its way across the planet? You are likely familiar with the broad categories of people who face greater risk: older individuals, men, those who have certain chronic conditions, and—notably in the U....

Climate change tends to bring out the worst in the weather, be it extreme cold or heat, rain or fire. A new study found that the warming atmosphere increases the likelihood that a wildfire in the Western U.S. will be followed by intense rainfall. This confluence of events raises the risk of landslides and flash floods. “Once you’ve had a wildfire burn through, you kill off all the vegetation, and you don’t have any root structures there holding the soil in place, so it’s a lot more vulnerable,” says University of California, Santa Barbara, climate scientist Samantha Stevenson, who was a co-author on the study....

Researchers working in Ethiopia’s remote Afar region have recovered evidence that humans began using stone tools and eating meat far earlier than previously thought. The finds—cut-marked animal bones dating to nearly 3.4 million years ago—push the origin of butchery back a stunning 800,000 years. Furthermore, these ancient butchers were not members of our own genus, Homo, but the more primitive Australopithecus, specifically A. afarensis, the species to which the celebrated Lucy fossil belongs....

Missing Microbes, by Martin J. Blaser. Reprinted with permission from Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2014 Martin J. Blaser, M.D. I never knew two of my father’s sisters. In the little town where they were born, early in the last century, they didn’t see their second birthdays. They had high fevers, and I am not sure what else. The situation was so dire that my grandfather went to the prayer house and changed his daughters’ names to fool the angel of death....

From Nature magazine Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is in danger of missing a self-imposed deadline for his hallmark priority: establishing an NIH center dedicated to speeding new treatments from the lab to the clinic. Collins vowed that the $723-million National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) would be up and running on 1 October — in time for him to oversee its first year in operation....