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A major seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, holds genes that might help researchers breed crops to survive climate change. But the conflict tearing the country apart has rendered the bank largely inaccessible for the past four years. Now an effort to duplicate its seed collection at more-accessible locations is ramping up. On September 29, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which runs the bank in Aleppo, officially launched a sister bank in Terbol, Lebanon, which now hosts 30,000 duplicates....

Last year a striking video made its way around the Internet. In it, male sports fans sat, one at a time, opposite a female sports reporter who had been the target of abusive, misogynist tweets. Each man had to read the messages aloud to the woman who received them. One of the few printable examples was, “I hope your boyfriend beats you.” The goal of the project, created by a Web site called Just Not Sports, was to force the men to experience “the shocking online harassment happening to women in sports day in, day out....

Expectant parents have a lot on their mind these days. If the nightly news is to be trusted, dangerous pollutants lurk in our food, water and furniture, just waiting to invade a pregnant mom’s body and harm the developing fetus. The early stages of brain development are indeed uniquely vulnerable to interference from foreign substances—prenatal exposure to many of these chemicals has been linked with lower IQ, behavior problems and mental disorders in kids....

Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax? The answer to these questions is, “No,” yet a committed subculture of conspiracy theorists vigorously argues the opposite. Many scholars dismiss conspiracy theorists as paranoid and delusional. Psychological data bolster their case: people who harbor conspiracist thoughts are also more inclined to paranoid ideation and schizotypy, a mild form of schizophrenia. As conspiracy theory expert Timothy Melley of Miami University has put it, these beliefs are often dismissed as “the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe....

Given my research on the symbiosis between human and nonhuman intelligence, I’m curious to see what role technology might play in serving these twin goals: conserving biodiversity and securing Indigenous land rights. In particular, an advanced form of artificial intelligence called deep-learning neural networks, able to improve its performance without being programmed, is revolutionizing the analysis of sound data from at-risk ecosystems. This acoustic monitoring, often complementing visual monitoring and sometimes replacing it, is conservation for the 21st century....

Is intelligence innate, or can you boost it with effort? The way you answer that question may determine how well you learn. Those who think smarts are malleable are more likely to bounce back from their mistakes and make fewer errors in the future, according to a study published last October in Psychological Science. Researchers at Michigan State University asked 25 undergraduate students to participate in a simple, repetitive computer task: they had to press a button whenever the letters that appeared on the screen conformed to a particular pattern....

Growing demand for rechargeable lithium batteries used in consumer electronics and electric vehicles is driving efforts to expand battery recycling, primarily to recover lithium, cobalt, and other valuable metals. But typical battery recycling methods, such as smelting and acid leaching, have significant disadvantages: Smelting is a high-temperature, energy intensive process and both processes generate harmful waste. So Jeffrey A. Cunningham of the University of South Florida is looking for a greener way to recycle lithium batteries....

Nasa’s Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby of Mars in the summer of 1965. The spacecraft had a camera onboard to capture Martian vistas, but transmitting all the data to Earth was slow, taking 19 days. So while waiting for Earth-bound electronics to convert the data into fully processed images, Richard Grumm of the nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to take matters into his own hands. He stapled strips of paper with incoming pixel brightness values onto a wall and then hand-colored the numbers with corresponding pastels....

Earlier this month came the news that China plans to invest $361 billion into renewable energy projects over the next three years. A few days later, President Barack Obama penned a single author article in the journal Science, “The irreversible momentum of clean energy,” in which he outlined four reasons the trend toward increasing use of clean energy does not show signs of slowing down or stopping. Even in the currently very divided U....

Burned out cardiac surgeon seeks opportunities or empathy,” one message reads. “I feel stuck,” another confides. A third says simply, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore!” The posts come in from across the globe, each generating its own thread of commiseration and advice. “I just wanted to reach out and let you know I feel your pain,” a doctor-turned-MBA replies to one surgeon. “Your story is so similar to mine,” a respondent marvels to a fellow trainee....

“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow, and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience....

The migration routes of the iconic monarch butterfly across the North American continent have been mapped in unprecedented detail. New research shows that it may take as many as five generations for monarchs to make it north out of Mexico, venturing as far as southern Canada, before returning and flying back south of the border for the winter. Researchers captured monarchs from across 17 states and two Canadian provinces, before analyzing carbon and hydrogen isotopes in their wings to find out where the insects came from, said Tyler Flockhart, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario....

Karsten Kramarczik, a magazine art director from Schriesheim, Germany, never liked to fly. Even as a child, he found that the prospect of enclosing himself in a long metal tube and hurtling through the ether at nearly the speed of sound made him shiver. Nevertheless, for much of his life Kramarczik forced himself to get on airplanes. Then, four years ago, doubt mysteriously turned into full-blown panic on a trip to Barcelona....

President Barack Obama has called conservation “a cornerstone of my presidency”—and the numbers back him up. He has protected more American land and water than any of his predecessors, in part thanks to the Antiquities Act passed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The act gives the executive branch the relatively unrestrained power to protect land by proclamation, without having to go through Congress. The Obama administration has also overseen the removal of more recovering animals and plants from the endangered species list than all previous administrations combined....

While the Internet plays an important role in spreading ideas and encouraging political thought, it also constitutes a significant fraction of our global economy. It is commerce, not content, that drives the quest for better Internet security. Brett Pantalone Pittsboro, N.C. TRUE GRIT In “The Neuroscience of True Grit,” Gary Stix points out that the U.S. Army’s adaptation of Martin E. P. Seligman’s Penn Resiliency Program to assess and improve the “emotional and spiritual” well-being of soldiers is being launched to the tune of $125 million, although its efficacy has not been properly tested....

Despite our solar system’s relative isolation, the sun seems to have been born in a cluster of nearby stars, based on evidence that one nearby neighbor went supernova. From radioactive isotopes identified in meteorites in 2003, researchers were confident that a supernova blasted the nascent solar system when it was still a ball of gas. Now a group has found a simple way to estimate the range of possible distances between the solar system and the blast....

PROFILE NAMESSakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela TITLEStudents, Lusoti High School LOCATIONSimunye, Swaziland Why did you decide to enter the Google Science Fair? Shongwe: Being born and raised in Swaziland, I have experienced the challenges that our country is facing. My work in many community development projects, through the mentorship of our teacher and environmental club patron, stimulated me to ask questions. Mahlalela: At first it was just about helping my friend who has taken our teacher’s advice to think big and take part in such activities as the Google Science Fair....

Remember the old myth that people only use 10 percent of their brains? Although a new study confirmed that bromide to be apocryphal, it did find that we may only use 20 percent of the nerve cells in our midbrain to form memories. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto monitored neurons in the lateral amygdalae (two almond-shaped regions on either side of the midbrain associated with learning and memory) of mice to see whether the presence of the CREB (cAMP response element binding) protein plays a key role in signaling brain cells to make memories....

Galileo Galilei was puzzled. The Renaissance-era astronomer had noticed that planets appeared to expand with a “radiant crown” when viewed with the naked eye—but the effect was greatly diminished when viewed through a telescope. The discrepancy led him to wonder: Was this size illusion caused by moisture on the cornea? Light scatter? Neither possibility satisfied because these effects would persist even if one used a telescope. In fact, Galileo had hit on a visual riddle that researchers are still unraveling....

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China and its spread to more than a dozen countries has presented health experts with a rapidly evolving and complex challenge. That means there are a lot of unknowns. Here are some of the outstanding questions that doctors, scientists, and health agencies are rushing to answer. (And a reminder that, already, they’ve learned quite a lot.) When are people contagious? One of the luckiest breaks the world got with the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 was that people weren’t contagious until they developed symptoms....