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I was only five when John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on February 20, 1962. I don’t recall watching the flight on television but I do remember the issue of National Geographic with a cover painting of Glenn and his Mercury capsule plunging back into the atmosphere in a glowing trail of flame. Inside, the article explained that Glenn’s reentry was made even more harrowing by ground controllers’ suspicion—unfounded as it turned out—that the heat shield on his Friendship 7 spacecraft was loose....

We’ve all done it: forgotten an anniversary, left a mess in the kitchen, said something unkind about our in-laws, or offended our partners in some other way, even if unintentionally. To get out of the doghouse, romantic partners have employed a myriad of strategies, from flowers or jewelry to love notes, sexual favors, and even tears. If only science could tell us which of these strategies is likely to be most effective, we might reconcile more quickly with our mates and enjoy the many benefits of forgiveness....

NEW YORK—A company recycles a product, doing its part for the environment through reuse, only to be told it’s worth more to destroy it. Welcome to the wonderful world of the carbon market, especially for a company that deals in refrigerants. These gases, culprits in no less than two environmental crimes—the ozone hole and climate change—are required to efficiently cool your food and beverages. Yet, chlorofluorocarbons, to give them their proper name, are potent molecules that both exacerbate the blanket of greenhouse gases warming the world as well as chew up the stratospheric ozone layer protecting the planet’s inhabitants from excess doses of ultraviolet sunlight....

The Syrian civil war reached a nadir on August 21 when rockets with toxic chemical agents were launched at the suburbs of the Ghouta region just outside the capital city of Damascus. Officials have not yet confirmed how many died as a result of the chemical attack, but more than 100,000 lives have been claimed by the overall uprising since it broke out two years ago between supporters of Pres. Bashar al-Assad’s regime and those who called for his expulsion....

Add two extra neutrons to the lightest element and hydrogen becomes radioactive, earning the name tritium. Even before the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 regulators worried that this ubiquitous by-product of nuclear reactors could pose a threat to human health. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was only seven years old when it put the first rules on the books for tritium in 1977. But a lot has happened in the intervening decades, and it is not just a longer list of nuclear accidents....

The starship Enterprise began its mission to explore strange new worlds in 1966, and for the past 50 years Star Trek has inspired countless fans with stories of adventurers boldly going where no one has gone before. Although the original series ended in 1969, creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision went on to live long and prosper, inspiring five other television series and 13 movies. The latest film, Star Trek Beyond, debuted in July....

Everywhere scientists have looked for them they have found tiny bits of degraded plastic—including, now, in human poop. New research provides evidence of something scientists have suspected since microplastics were first detected in seafood, salt and bottled water: People are eating plastic particles, and excreting at least some of them. Although the study is a small one, geared toward showing microplastics can be detected in excrement and are actually found there, it tees up future work to look for broader patterns of human microplastic exposure and the potential associated health impacts....

The naked mole rat became an unlikely media star in 2008 when researchers showed it is highly resistant to certain types of pain. Physiologist Gary Lewin of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, biologist Thomas Park of the University of Illinois at Chicago and their colleagues found that the odd-looking creatures are insensitive to acid and capsaicin, the substance that gives chilies their burn. Lewin’s team has now investigated a range of mole rat relatives, revealing that the naked variety is not the only one resistant to pain....

NASA is facing a mind-boggling challenge: predict the state of astronomy two decades from now and design a telescope for that future. This feat of forecasting is necessary because NASA’s flagship missions, the Hubble Space Telescope–scale observatories that redefine our understanding of the universe, require at least that much advance planning. To that end, the space agency has just embarked on a set of studies to consider four possible major missions—one of which, most likely, will launch around 2035....

In the wake of dramatically dwindling populations of salmon and other fish, U.S. officials are grappling with ways to cut their losses—and stave off future damage. Overfishing and environmental damage have decimated ocean inhabitants—and climate change threatens to hurt them even more. Just this month, the Pacific Fishery Management Council in Portland, Ore., closed the coasts of California and Oregon to salmon fishing after observing an alarming drop in the species population there, which plummeted in just one river—the Sacramento— from hundreds of thousands in the 1990s to just about 58,000 this past fall....

New methods for picking up on Alzheimer’s disease warning signs years before patients develop irreversible symptoms are becoming a fast-growing target for brain researchers around the world. The disease is expected to afflict 115 million people by 2050 but still remains the only leading cause of death where there is no effective way to prevent or even stall its progression. A key challenge continues to be successfully predicting if the disorder will develop before it becomes symptomatic....

The U.S. appears to be plunging headlong into a new era of isolationism. The White House wants to pull out of international agreements, including the Paris climate deal and the North American Free Trade Agreement. It has issued executive orders trying to halt or slow the flow of refugees and immigrants to the nation. This is bad for the U.S. and terrible for hundreds of thousands of desperate people across the planet....

*Editor’s Note (11/19/18): After a five-year process considering more than 60 candidate sites, NASA has announced its sample-caching Mars 2020 rover will land in Jezero Crater. This 45-kilometer-wide crater lies just north of the Martian equator and hosts a dried-up lake and river delta, making it a prime target for seeking signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. Scientific American detailed the site-selection process for Jezero Crater and the other finalist sites in this story from October 2018....

Extreme weather induced by climate change has dire public health consequences, as heat waves threaten the vulnerable, storm runoff overwhelms city sewage systems and hotter summer days bake more pollution into asthma-inducing smog, scientists say. The United States – to say nothing of the developed world – is unprepared for such conditions predicted by myriad climate models and already being seen today, warn climate researchers and public health officials. “Climate change as it’s projected will impact almost every aspect of public health, both in the developed world and – more importantly – in the developing world,” said Michael McGeehin, director of the Environmental Hazards and Health Effects division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....

Vegetarianism is not exactly what springs to mind when considering spiders, which usually rely on web spinning and other finely tuned techniques to catch and eat other creatures. But one spider has now been observed to feed mostly on plants, shattering the common assumption that all spiders are strict carnivores. Of the 40,000-plus spider species known, only a few nibble on plants—typically, as a dietary supplement of nectar or simply as an accidental ingestion of pollen....

Editor’s Note (9/25/19): On September 25 evolutionary anthropologist Jenny Tung of Duke University was named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. Tung’s research on the consequences of early life adversity in baboons was featured in this article from our January 2019 issue. The MacArthur Foundation described her as “illuminating the epigenetic consequences of social behaviors and environmental conditions, thereby advancing the emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine and providing new insights for improving human health....

Arthur is an alleged john, a man who patronizes prostitutes. After his arrest on September 5, 2008, a photograph of this 41-year-old appeared on the Web site of the Chicago Police Department. Arthur (not his real name) was far from the only person so branded on this Internet portal. Samuel, 59, and José, 34 (whose names were also changed to protect their privacy), were on this online pillory for a month after their September 5 arrests....

MARCH 1960 MODERN AGRICULTURE— “The 20th-century Israelites came to a land of encroaching sand dunes along a once-verdant coast, of malarial swamps and naked limestone hills from which an estimated three feet of topsoil have been scoured, sorted and spread as sterile overwash upon the plains or swept out to sea in flood waters. The land of Israel had shared the fate of land throughout the Middle East. A decline in productivity and in population had set in with the fading of the Byzantine Empire some 1,300 years ago....

Scott Kelly is the first American to spend almost a year in space. The NASA astronaut lived for a record 340 days onboard the International Space Station (ISS) from 2015 to 2016. Like other astronauts, he endured the stresses of microgravity, cosmic radiation and “headward fluid shift,” in which blood and tissue fluid collect in the head. But Kelly’s experience was unique in that researchers painstakingly documented his physiology and cognitive performance while in orbit—and simultaneously monitored his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, as an earthbound control....

If you look across cultures and through history, there’s a deity for pretty much anything. The sun, ocean, harvest, lightning, love, poetry, all the good stuff. For some of us at Scientific American, our favorite is the ancient Egyptians’ Thoth, god of science, knowledge, wisdom and writing. Thoth is often depicted as a baboon—making him the only god in the pantheon whose animal representative was not native to Egypt. Egyptologists have wondered where, exactly, the mummified baboons buried with pharaohs came from and why a certain species was considered sacred....