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When Magdalene Quintero was 14 years old, her mouth filled with painful ulcers that made eating and drinking unbearable. Her normally tawny skin flamed crimson red across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. The tips of her fingers burst into open sores, as if she had dipped them in acid. She spiked fevers, developed headaches, lost weight and was always tired. It took a year of visits to various doctors for Quintero to learn that she had lupus, a life-threatening and chronic autoimmune condition that can cause pain, inflammation and damage to any part of the body....

After wandering around an unfamiliar part of town, can you sense which direction to travel to get back to the subway or your car? If so, you can thank your entorhinal cortex, a brain area recently identified as being responsible for our sense of direction. Variation in the signals in this area might even explain why some people are better navigators than others. The new work adds to a growing understanding of how our brain knows where we are....

The sun is blazing down when I meet endangered Galápagos tortoises for the first time. They look like modern-day dinosaurs, lazily ambling around on scaly, dusty bowlegs. I proffer a carrot to the largest of the three—a 300-pound female—who grabs it with strong, beaklike jaws, neatly splitting it in two. After consuming it she extends her long neck forward, inviting me to gently rub her under the chin. This intimate encounter takes place nowhere near the wild deserts of the Galápagos Islands—I’m more than 3,000 miles away, in a white-fenced suburban backyard in Long Island, N....

Sixty-five years ago, a metal sphere the size of a basketball caught the U.S. science, military and intelligence communities by surprise. Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, launched into orbit by Russia, triggered U.S. policy makers to recognize that they were falling behind globally in educating and training scientists. In response, the government began investing in science education at every level from elementary to postgraduate. The aim was to scale up the nation’s scientific workforce and improve the public’s understanding of science, ensuring that we would never again face a comparable technology gap....

The world was dazzled by the first images released from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) this summer. These pictures reveal our universe in mind-boggling detail, from stars being born in dusty nebulae to the oldest galaxies racing toward the unknown. In a discussion at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, N.Y., John Mather, senior project scientist of JWST, and astronomer Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, a previous chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope’s board of directors, talked about the past, present and future of JWST with Columbia University theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin, director of sciences at Pioneer Works....

As winter sets in, the 800 hearty denizens of the coldest town on earth are bracing for one of the most frigid blasts yet, as forecasters predict that temperatures in Oymyakon, Siberia, could plunge to the coldest ever recorded in an inhabited location. There is no disputing that the mercury slides in Alaska and even in the Midwestern U.S. in the heart of winter. But if you want cold, visit Oymyakon, which this winter is expected to reach (or perhaps exceed) its record low temperature: a bone-chilling minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 68 degrees Celsius) reached on Feb....

1970 The Promise of Nuclear “The need to generate enormous additional amounts of electric power while at the same time protecting the environment is taking form as one of the major social and technological problems that our society must resolve over the next few decades. Nuclear reactors of the breeder type hold great promise as the solution to this problem. Producing more nuclear fuel than they consume, they would make it feasible to utilize enormous quantities of low-grade uranium and thorium ores dispersed in the rocks of the earth as a source of low-cost energy for thousands of years....

A look at the most innovative and impactful developments in science, technology and medicine of the past 20 years reveals an important common thread: access. Greater access in areas like information, knowledge-sharing and e-health technologies—often customized and delivered on-demand—is a hallmark of the sweeping change we see around the world. In the medical and dental fields, much of this change is being driven by empowered patients in developed markets seeking flexible, digital healthcare....

Health care today is a tale of two systems. One is based on the limitless potential of science and technology to beat disease. The other is the obstacle course of time, access, and cost that sick people experience in getting well. Bridging that divide requires more than incremental change. It requires a fundamental shift in how we think about and provide health care. Academic teaching hospitals are among America’s greatest engines of innovation....

Guilt-Free Christmas Which is the greenest Christmas tree: artificial or real? Artificial trees, which are gaining in popularity (and even come in “upside-down” ceiling-mounted models), are typically made in China from nonbiodegradable plastics. Although they can last for years, they ultimately end up in landfills. Real trees are renewable, recyclable and biodegradable. The nearest recycling program can be found at http://earth911.org. To keep your carbon footprint to a minimum, look for trees that are grown organically and as close to home as possible....

Editors note: This story is part of a Feature “The Color of Plants on Other Worlds” from the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. Aside from colors reflected by plants, these other features could be signs of life: Oxygen (O2) plus water (H2O). Even on a lifeless world, light from the parent star naturally produces a small amount of oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere by splitting water vapor. But the gas is quickly rained out, as well as consumed through oxidation of rocks and volcanic gases....

A picture is worth 100,000 Swiss francs. Or at least that’s what a photo earns for the first-prize winner of the Prix Pictet, an annual photography award. The competition highlights exceptional work that addresses urgent social and environmental issues. This slide show presents selected works from Power, the fourth theme of the Prix Pictet in 2012 that is part of an annual cycle, which has also included Consumption, Growth, Earth and Water....

Science has a way of transcending borders. It has done so from the beginning, going back to the ancient Greeks, but as the world grows more interconnected in so many ways, the pace of international collaboration in science has in recent years picked up markedly. To take just one indication of this trajectory, in 1996 25 percent of scientific articles were written by authors from two or more countries. Today it’s 35 percent and climbing....

New analysis from UK researchers suggests a previously overlooked group of plants could be key to providing sustainable bioenergy for the future. Traditional biofuels such as bioethanol are made from food crops like corn and sugarcane that require prime agricultural land—a commodity in relatively short supply. Competition between food and fuel crops means that large scale bioethanol production is therefore controversial. But plants that perform photosynthesis through a crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) system may enable bioenergy production without disrupting food supplies....

How do young children understand the natural world? Most research into this question has focused on urban, white, middle-class American children living near large universities. Even when psychologists include kids from other communities, too often they use experimental procedures originally developed for urban children. Now researchers have developed a methodology for studying rural Native American kids’ perspectives on nature and have compared their responses with those of their city-dwelling peers. The findings offer some rare cross-cultural insight into early childhood environmental education....

Chatbots—automated computer programs used, for example, for customer service or as personal assistants on smartphones—use dialogue that’s mostly pre-scripted, says Yann LeCun, director of Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) team. “If you go [off-] script they don’t perform very well.” Other types of chatbots are entertaining but not very useful for any particular purpose, he adds, citing the Tay AI Microsoft introduced last year via Twitter and quickly took offline after it “learned” how to produce offensive tweets....

The first death in the United States of Covid-19 was announced Saturday by Washington state health officials. The development, first reported by the Associated Press, comes soon after four people on the West Coast were reported to have the virus who had no known travel history and no known contact with anyone who’d previously been diagnosed. These cases took place in Northern California; in Snohomish County, north of Seattle; and outside of Portland, Oregon, and sparked concerns that the virus could be spreading furtively through communities in the Pacific Northwest, passing from person to person undetected because it doesn’t necessarily make individuals sick....

Oil and gas companies used a major international conference to publicly grapple with their culpability in warming the planet—and suggest they could be part of the solution. Industry representatives stressed at the triennial World Gas Conference that they understand the gravity of their most significant climate problem—leaks of methane, a potent gas responsible for 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The oil and gas industry accounts for at least one-quarter of methane emissions....

This type of artisanal mining is an important source of income for local people, supporting people in regions where jobs are limited. Similar mining methods were employed during the California gold rush in the mid-1800s. Yet artisanal gold mining is generally illegal, with little regulation. Efforts for formalizing this activity are ongoing but thus far have been limited. Gold mining causes deforestation, which converts forests to polluted ponds and mobilizes large amounts of sediment from river bottoms....

I recently saw a cartoon that depicted a young child looking up and asking about the scar on her mother’s arm. The mother points out that the scar is from the smallpox vaccine, and the young girl asks why she doesn’t have one. The mother’s answer, quick and simple: “Because it worked.” The smallpox vaccine is one of the earliest successful vaccines. It was so successful that the last known smallpox outbreak in the U....