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From corn to coal to cannabis, cultures and economies are shaped by their surrounding ecology. Nations have been built on tobacco, communities defined by migrating salmon, and wars fought in the name of spices. Political and economic decisions can also alter a region’s ecology. Post-Columbian maritime trade initiated the accidental and intentional redistribution of plants, animals, bacteria and viruses, which continues to this day. Ecological changes spurred by politics can also be positive; for example, wildlife thrives in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea....

The European Commission has selected six research projects—in areas from health and energy to artificial intelligence and cultural heritage—to compete to become one of its next billion-euro ‘flagship’ science initiatives, Nature has learned. The commission chose the 6 candidates in December from a list of 16 proposals, say scientists on the shortlisted teams. On 1 March, each team will receive €1 million (US$1.1 million) to develop a detailed feasibility proposal over the next year....

Three babies have been born in the United States with birth defects linked to likely Zika virus infections in the mothers during pregnancy, along with three cases of lost pregnancies linked to Zika, federal health officials said on Thursday. The six cases reported as of June 9 were included in a new U.S. Zika pregnancy registry created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency said it will begin regular reporting of poor outcomes of pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection in the 50 states and the District of Columbia....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Human noise is forcing animals around the world to go through changes, unknown and invisible to most of us. It will be another case of the survival of the fittest: some species will adapt and thrive; others will struggle to survive. Our loud lives matter as sound is crucial for many animals. Songs, grunts, roars or cheeps can be used to keep in contact with others, to warn of danger or defend territory, to attract a mate, or to beg for food from a parent....

The wave function—an abstract concept used to predict the behavior of quantum particles—is the bedrock on which physicists have built their understanding of quantum mechanics. But this bedrock itself is not something physicists have a perfect grasp of, literally or philosophically. A wave function is not something one can hold in their hand or put under a microscope. And confusingly, some of its properties simply seem not to be real. In fact, mathematicians would openly label them as imaginary: so-called imaginary numbers—which arise from seemingly nonsensical feats such as taking the square roots of negative integers—are an important ingredient of a wave function’s well-proved power to forecast the results of real-world experiments....

Rebekah Anderson, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, had just dropped her phone in the water. There was no real chance of recovering it, but she and Ronnie Brown were peering down, wondering if it could be salvaged, when Brown saw a fish laying in their net close to the surface. “Is that an Asian carp?” Anderson remembers him asking. Her mind raced in response. “Oh my gosh —that’s an Asian carp,” she recalls thinking....

Mercury is a world of extremes. Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator—hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C. But some places on Mercury are slightly more stable.Inside polar craters on the dim­inutive planet are regions that never see the light of day, shaded as they are by the cra­­ters’ rims....

Adapted from Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars, by Louis Friedman. Copyright © 2015 Louis Friedman with permission of the publisher. The University of Arizona Press. All rights reserved. Humans will become a multi-planet species by making it to Mars, but no farther. That is, they will never travel beyond Mars. Some find this to be negative—an absolute statement of limits and thus of giving up. My job here is to prove the opposite: humans exploring the universe with nanotechnology robotics, bio-molecular engineering, and artificial intelligence is something that is exciting and positive, and is based on an optimistic view of the future....

From Nature magazine. Lean steak is low in fat and cholesterol and high in protein — qualities normally considered healthy. But eating a lot of it can still cause heart disease. Researchers have now laid the blame on bacteria in the human gut that convert a common nutrient found in beef into a compound that may speed up the build-up of plaques in the arteries. The results are published in Nature Medicine today....

When a monkey has the sniffles or a headache, it doesn’t have the luxury of popping a few painkillers from the medicine cabinet. So how does it deal with the common colds and coughs of the wildlife world? University of Georgia ecologist Ria R. Ghai and her colleagues observed a troop of more than 100 red colobus monkeys in Uganda’s Kibale National Park for four years to figure out whether the rain forest provides a Tylenol equivalent....

For much of the past year, life in Western Australia has been coronavirus-free. Friends gathered in pubs; people kissed and hugged their relatives; children went to school without temperature checks or wearing masks. The state maintained this enviable position only by placing heavy restrictions on travel and imposing lockdowns—some regions entered a snap lockdown at the beginning of the year after a security guard at a hotel where visitors were quarantined tested positive for the virus....

The tragedy One hundred years ago, during the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, and in the small hours of the next day went down into the cold Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1,517 lives. There have been worse tragedies in history. Some were more violently spectacular, some still govern the daily routines of the survivors. Yet the Titanic disaster has strongly resonated with us for a century....

Looking for a cutting-edge foodie read, some vicarious cultural adventure or a glimpse into the shadows of a fundamental taboo? Bill Schutt’s Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History is scheduled to come out this February, and is the perfect literary entrée for those willing to contemplate mummy umami or Tex-Mex placenta while touring the history of animals and people eating their own kind. Schutt, a Long Island University biologist, is no stranger to the macabre and published his first book, Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures in 2008....

Pres. Barack Obama made good Wednesday on a years-old promise to begin to normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba. An authorization for U.S. companies to increase telecommunications connections between the two countries is a key component of the new U.S. policy. The administration foreshadowed these changes in April 2009 when Obama directed the secretaries of State, Treasury and Commerce to “take the steps required” to let U.S. network providers cut deals to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite links between the U....

Recessions are often accompanied by a drop in carbon dioxide emissions. Then comes the rebound. In 2009, the Great Recession pushed global emissions down almost 1%. The next year CO2 levels rose by roughly 5%, as governments around the world enacted stimulus measures to prop up their economies. The economic devastation wrought by the novel coronavirus is anything but typical. The United States reported 6.6 million new unemployment claims last week....

“What a piece of work is a man,” proclaimed Hamlet in the play of the same name, partly in admiration over our nobility and intelligence, partly in despair over our flaws. We Scientific American editors have to agree with Shakespeare’s sentiments, and in this special single-topic issue, we join him in his apparent obsession to try to understand our species anyway. We do have the benefit of perspective gained from the process of science instead of relying on storytelling alone....

Have you been sleeping well this year? If not, you’re not alone. Nightmares about COVID-19—fears of being in crowded spaces, touching germy surfaces, feeling exposed without a mask—have been disturbing the sleep of people around the world. The pandemic seems to have introduced a new shared unreality, with dreams that are as alarming as that one about being late for a final exam you haven’t studied for. Our cover story this month is from psychiatrist and dream researcher Tore Nielsen, who is busy studying the largest inadvertent sleep-disruption experiment in history....

The entire future of human space exploration may rest on a patch of lunar ice. For the past two years NASA has focused on designing a new crew vehicle and launch system that could return astronauts to the moon by 2018. The agency’s ultimate goal is to establish a permanent lunar base and use the program’s technology to prepare a human mission to Mars. But the grand plan hinges on a risky prediction: that NASA will find water ice in a permanently shadowed crater basin at one of the moon’s poles....

Generation Z has made Jean Twenge a lot of money. As a psychologist at San Diego State University in California, she studies people born after the mid-1990s, the YouTube-obsessed group that spends much of its time on Instagram, Snapchat and other social-media platforms. Thanks to smartphones and sharing apps, Generation Z has grown up to be more narcissistic, anxious and depressed than older cohorts, she argues. Twenge calls them the “iGen” generation, a name she says she coined....

In the winter of 2012, the Svalbard archipelago was hit with an extreme weather event of record-breaking heat and rain—a slush avalanche knocked out bridges and roads. Reindeer carcasses littered the landscape, as permafrost warmed and snow-dependent tourism took a major hit. Now, a group of scientists documenting the aftermath of the two-week event says that Svalbard’s experience offers a preview of sorts of what other Arctic regions may experience with ongoing warming....