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Physicists at the world’s leading atom smasher are calling for help. In the next decade, they plan to produce up to 20 times more particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) than they do now, but current detector systems aren’t fit for the coming deluge. So this week, a group of LHC physicists has teamed up with computer scientists to launch a competition to spur the development of artificial-intelligence techniques that can quickly sort through the debris of these collisions....

Key concepts Resources Recycling Energy From National Science Education Standards: Populations, resources and environments Introduction Do you recycle paper when you finish using it? New paper comes from trees, which are chopped into tiny pieces and then ground up, mixed with liquid and turned into pulp. The pulp is then flattened and turned into paper. But paper is easily recycled, which helps to reduce the number of trees that have to be cut down....

The second-most shocking thing He Jiankui told the international genome editing summit in Hong Kong last November—right after announcing that twin girls had been born from embryos whose DNA he’d changed with CRISPR—was that he’d followed guidelines on embryo editing set forth by a panel of leading U.S. scientists and ethicists. That committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine basically said, in 2017: If society agrees this is OK, proceed with extreme caution....

Vaccine booster shots for COVID have recently been approved and are being rolled out widely. Wariness about boosters is still evident, however, along with debate over whether vaccinations should be required. All this seems new to us in 2021, but a similar situation played out in the U.S. and globally way back in 1872, when smallpox was raging. Scientific American published an article about the science, fears and debate over “revaccination”—boosters—and the discussion then is eerily parallel to the COVID discourse right now....

Using a smart phone in Singapore offers a glimpse of the future. The nation’s near obsession with the Internet—it’s home to the world’s highest mobile penetration rate, of about 150%, as well as the world’s fastest peak Internet speeds for mobile broadband, according to Akamai Technologies—belies what its government is looking to achieve. Ubiquitous connectivity, or what the nation calls its “Everyone connected to Everything, Everywhere, All the time” (E3A) atmosphere, is fundamental to Singapore’s Smart Nation drive, which was first unveiled by its Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in November 2014....

People often think of love and lust as polar opposites—love exalted as the binder of two souls, lust the transient devil on our shoulders, disturbing and disruptive. Now neuroscientists are discovering that lust and love work together more closely than we think. Indeed, the strongest relationships have elements of both. The bifurcated treatment of love and lust dates to antiquity. The study of love as an academic subject is nearly a century old, with the sentiment covered in introductory textbooks of social psychology....

Have you ever wondered whether you would get wetter if you ran through a rain storm rather than walked? At which angle should you incline your head to minimize the amount of water that hits you? This puzzle asks the same question, but concerns moving an object through the rain: a museum’s large, precious Delacroix canvas. To start, assume your museum’s canvas is of height H and side-to-side width W. Raindrops fall vertically at velocity vr ....

I usually work on general relativity and cosmology. I have always loved geometrical things. As a kid I was fascinated by map projections. When I was 14, I made a painted globe of Mars based on a flat Mercator Mars map by the astronomer E. M. Antoniadi. Since becoming an emeritus professor at Princeton, I have fondly returned to some of my childhood interests. I and my colleagues Dave Goldberg and Bob Vanderbei (who invented the “Purple America” map for showing election results) have produced what we believe to be the most accurate flat map of the Earth ever made....

Whatever else one might say about the Trump era in American politics, it’s provided a wealth of data for scientists studying public opinion. For those of us interested in “metanarratives”—the stories that groups tell themselves about who they are and where they’re headed—the 2016 and 2020 campaigns have been a gold mine. Every vision of America has a metanarrative at its core. Are we a land of endless opportunity, a beacon for the world’s huddled masses?...

When we look up at the night sky, it’s easy to appreciate how scientists have gained insights from the apparent movements of those twinkling orbs. But it’s striking how much of astronomy involves looking for indirect clues to something unseen. As an undergraduate, I reflected on how Neptune revealed itself by subtly shifting the orbit of Uranus. Then Pluto was found when astronomers thought (incorrectly) that something was pulling on Uranus and Neptune....

The two-stage, 23-story-tall rocket lifted off at 6:27 p.m. EDT (2227 GMT) in the second launch in two weeks for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is ramping up its flight rate following an accident in September. Perched on top of the rocket, which sported a new upper stage and payload fairing, was the 11,645-lb. (5,282 kilograms) SES-10 communications satellite, which is intended to provide TV, internet and other services to customers in Latin America....

Editor’s Note (1/11/17): Update: A presidential transition national spokeswoman has said that the president-elect would like to a form a commission on autism, but no final decision has been made. WASHINGTON—Outspoken vaccine critic Robert Kennedy Jr. has accepted a position within Donald Trump’s administration as chair of a panel on vaccine safety and scientific integrity—the clearest sign yet of the president-elect’s suspicions about vaccines. The offer, which came in a Wednesday meeting between Trump and the scion of America’s most prominent Democratic family, is likely to concern scientists and public health experts who fear the incoming administration could give legitimacy to skeptics of childhood immunizations, despite a huge body of scientific research demonstrating that vaccines are safe....

If you drink two cups of coffee at 8 a.m., how much caffeine will be left in your body that night at 8 p.m.? Certainly after 12 hours it can’t be that much, right? Or could it be? Maybe even enough to mess with your sleep? I’m not going to spoil the answer, but let’s just say that after learning about the concept of a “half-life” today, you might be a little surprised....

Untold numbers of genetically modified Escherichia coli bacteria live in vats around the world, churning out useful things such as medical insulin, plastic polymers and food additives. When the reprogrammed bugs have served their role, they are packed away as industrial waste or repurposed for fertilizer. This arrangement currently poses little environmental risk because genetically modified E. coli is weak compared with its wild cousins; it would not survive for long outside the lab....

When University of Bonn psychologist Monika Eckstein designed her latest published study, the goal was simple: administer a hormone into the noses of 62 men in hopes that their fear would go away. And for the most part, it did. The hormone was oxytocin, often called our “love hormone” due to its crucial role in mother-child relationships, social bonding, and intimacy (levels soar during sex). But it also seems to have a significant antianxiety effect....

One of the most fundamental questions about climate change is also one of the thorniest: How much, exactly, will the Earth warm in response to future greenhouse gas emissions? The answer, scientists say, lies in the sky above our heads. Clouds are the fluffy, unlikely gatekeepers of climate change—they play a critical role in how quickly the world warms. A series of recent studies have shed new light on that role....

To our eyes, the world is arrayed in a seemingly infinite splendor of hues, from the sunny orange of a marigold flower to the gunmetal gray of an automobile chassis, from the buoyant blue of a midwinter sky to the sparkling green of an emerald. It is remarkable, then, that for most human beings any color can be reproduced by mixing together just three fixed wavelengths of light at certain intensities....

In January 2013 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cut the recommended dose of the nation’s most popular sleep drug, Ambien, in half for women but not for men. The FDA had determined that 15 percent of the 5.7 million women using zolpidem products (the active ingredient in Ambien) were experiencing driving impairment eight hours after taking the drug, compared with 3 percent of the 3.5 million male zolpidem users. Researchers had known for a long time that women, on average, clear zolpidem from their body much more slowly than men do....

One of science’s most challenging problems is a question that can be stated easily: Where does consciousness come from? In his most recent book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, philosopher Philip Goff considers a radical perspective: What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does but instead is a quality inherent to all matter? It is a theory known as panpsychism. He answered questions from former longtime Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook....

Rachel Levine has been sworn in as one of the top health officials in the United States, following her confirmation by the Senate earlier this week. Although she has made headlines for becoming the highest-ranking openly transgender official in the country, researchers familiar with her work as a public-health leader laud her drive to improve the health of marginalized people. She’s done this through conventional public-health measures, they say, but also by trying to remedy inequities arising from discrimination and from social and political factors....