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Editor’s Note (6/14/22): The current hearings on the January 6, 2021, insurrection, held by a U.S. House of Representatives committee, have highlighted ties between mainstream supporters of former president Donald Trump and extremist groups in the mob that invaded the Capitol. Sociologist and militia expert Amy Cooter analyzed these connections in this recent Scientific American article. Is this Field Day?” I asked through my car window on a chilly, rainy April morning in central Michigan in 2008....

Quantum computers promise to perform calculations believed to be impossible for ordinary computers. Some of those calculations are of great real-world importance. For example, certain widely used encryption methods could be cracked given a computer capable of breaking a large number into its component factors within a reasonable length of time. Virtually all encryption methods used for highly sensitive data are vulnerable to one quantum algorithm or another. The extra power of a quantum computer comes about because it operates on information represented as qubits, or quantum bits, instead of bits....

Dear EarthTalk: Is using nitrogen to inflate my car’s tires really better for the environment than using air? And if so, how? – Roger Mawdsley, Abbotsville, BC Whether or not it makes environmental sense to inflate car tires with nitrogen instead of air is a matter of much debate. Proponents of nitrogen say the element is a smart choice for the environment primarily because it leaks from tires at a slower rate than air, so tires stay inflated longer at full capacity, which helps a vehicle attain maximum fuel efficiency, i....

For centuries scientists speculated that fish eggs reached isolated lakes and ponds by hitching rides on water birds’ feathers or feet. But according to findings published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the mode of transport for at least some eggs could be much more intimate: the new research provides the first evidence that soft-membraned fish eggs, eaten and pooped out by birds, can still hatch into viable young....

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Gene therapy for deafness is moving closer to reality, with new research on Wednesday showing the technique for fixing faulty DNA can improve responses in mice with genetic hearing loss. Separately, a clinical trial backed by Novartis is under way to help a different group of people who have lost their hearing through damage or disease. After missteps in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when safety scares set back research, gene therapy is enjoying a renaissance, with positive clinical results recently in conditions ranging from blood diseases to blindness....

A quantum computer capable of breaking the strongest codes protecting online communications and computer data is highly unlikely to appear within the next decade, a new report says. But leading experts still recommend the U.S. government should prepare for that eventuality as many countries race to develop practical quantum computers. Issued by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the report prescribes a healthy dose of skepticism for the quantum-computing fever that has infected tech news headlines and press releases in recent years....

Asteroid impacts have a bad reputation here on Earth—it’s the dinosaurs’ signature public relations victory—but it’s the moon that really bears the scars of living in our messy neighborhood. That’s because Earth has an arsenal of forces that slowly wear away the craters left behind by impacts. And that’s frustrating for scientists who want to better understand the debris hurtling around our solar system. So a new study uses the pockmarked lunar surface to trace the history of things smashing into both our moon and Earth, finding signs that our neighborhood got a lot messier about 290 million years ago....

Public Health How Can the World Prepare for the Next Pandemic? The COVID pandemic is not over, but countries must start to prepare for the next one to avoid a similar or even worse outcome November 15, 2022 — Richard Hodson Public Health COVID Communication Often Failed: How Health Policy Makers Can Do Better Health policy makers need to cultivate social trust and plan effective communication strategies well before the next pandemic...

After a suspenseful night waiting for a signal from the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, the European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed today that the spacecraft went silent less than a minute before it was set to reach the Martian surface Wednesday (Oct. 19). ESA mission managers said this morning (Oct. 20) that they need more time to understand what went wrong with Schiaparelli, and to figure out exactly where and in what condition the test lander ended up....

In court, many people assume that adult witnesses are more reliable than children. This bias may be unfair, according to a growing number of studies. Although adults remember a greater amount of accurate information, they tend to focus on the meaning of an event, which leads to more “false memory” mistakes—they recall something that makes sense in context but is actually a detail fabricated by their brain. Children, the new research shows, do not make such errors as often....

On a certain planet, it takes a village to beget a child. Well, not an entire village in fact, but instead of a father offering sperm and a mother providing an egg, five parents must get together to produced a fertilized egg. The egg will produce 1,000 children, 200 of each of the five sexes. Your job is to figure out which sexes are genetically important in determining an offspring’s (non sex-related) traits....

It was the middle of March in 2014. We were sitting under a mahua (Madhuca longifolia) tree in the hilly, forested heartland of India, breakfasting on locally grown rice, bean sprouts and fish curry. From time to time the fleshy, sugary petals of mahua flowers showered down on us, so we ended our meal with a refreshing sweet dish. My hosts were Gond tribals, residents of Mendha village in the Indian state of Maharashtra, who had declared a quarter of a century earlier that they, and they alone, would manage the region’s rich natural resources....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Q. Is there an online database that breaks out the soluble and insoluble fiber content of foods? I recently read about a study that stated if you consume at least 10 grams of soluble fiber a day it is helpful in reducing belly fat. However, online databases only seem to list total fiber only....

Stars shine so brightly that any planets orbiting them are lost in the glow. In fact, astronomers can only detect exoplanets indirectly by their effects on parent stars: either gravitational or, as the planet passes in front, by dimming. But a 50-meter-wide, daisy-shaped star shade could block stellar light, allowing direct observation of their planets, according to a new paper in today’s Nature. Webster Cash of the University of Colorado designed the star shade to be used in conjunction with orbiting telescopes....

A sandwich of two graphene layers can conduct electrons without resistance if they are twisted at a ‘magic angle’, physicists have discovered. The finding could prove to be a significant step in the decades-long search for room-temperature superconductors. Most superconductors work only at temperatures close to absolute zero. Even ‘high-temperature’ superconductors are called that only in a relative sense: the highest temperature at which they conduct electricity without resistance is around −140 ºC....

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.] Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna are getting lots of credit for vaccines. But didn’t you find that a lot of the groundbreaking work started in university and government labs? Yes. Several years ago, Barney Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, was working on respiratory syncytial virus, which affects infants and the elderly, and it was his real passion....

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired legions of computer scientists in 1979, but few were as inspired as Melanie Mitchell. After reading the 777-page tome, Mitchell, a high school math teacher in New York, decided she “needed to be” in artificial intelligence. She soon tracked down the book’s author, AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter, and talked him into giving her an internship. She had only taken a handful of computer science courses at the time, but he seemed impressed with her chutzpah and unconcerned about her academic credentials....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. A few weeks ago, our family took a ferry across the English Channel. On the way from England to France, the ferry was extremely crowded, and the crossing took about 75 minutes. On the way back from France to England, there was hardly anyone on the ferry, and the captain announced that the crossing would take 95 minutes....

The little blue pill, approved in the early 1990s to treat erectile dysfunction, may someday be a boon to those who suffer from the dulling effects of jet lag, according to a new study. The finding “opens a completely original way of dealing with this kind of disarrangement,” says Diego Golombek, a chronobiologist at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, and senior investigator of research that indicates that Viagra prevents time-change fatigue in hamsters....

New research suggests that one of the earliest horses started out small—then got even smaller. As temperatures rose 55 million years ago during the ancient Eocene epoch, a North American horse species shrank from the size of a small dog to that of a house cat. It would take millions of years and dozens of different genera until nature produced something approaching the modern horse (Equus ferus). The leggy show-jumper and powerful rodeo steed are of course products of modern breeding on top of eons of evolution....