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By Eric Hand of Nature magazineHadrian’s villa 30 kilometers east of Rome was a place where the Roman Emperor could relax in marble baths and forget about the burdens of power. But he could never completely lose track of time, says Marina De Franceschini, an Italian archaeologist who believes that some of the villa’s buildings are aligned so as to produce sunlight effects for the seasons.For centuries, scholars have thought that the more than 30 buildings at Hadrian’s palatial country estate were oriented more or less randomly....

This week, let’s ask the million-dollar question: How much sleep do you really need? We all know sleep is important. Shakespeare called it the “sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Less poetically, headlines these days seem to be shouting: “Sleep deprivation will make you slower and dumber!” “It will give you Alzheimer’s disease and heart attacks!” One mattress advertisement I saw simply said, “You can only live seven days without sleep....

“Look both ways before you cross the street!” “Look left, right and left again!” These classic childhood safety lessons span generations and cultures. Yet traffic accidents remain one of the most common sources of injuries and fatalities for children around the world. In the European Union, children younger than 14 years account for a higher proportion of pedestrian mortalities than any other age group except the elderly; in the U.S., among children killed by cars, nearly a quarter were on foot....

One of the pleasures of Scientific American is the way it invites us to journey to the frontiers of knowledge, accompanied by the scientists who are working on the boundaries. In this issue’s cover story, “Tiny Plants That Once Ruled the Seas,” researchers Ronald Martin and Antonietta Quigg conjure the idea of stepping into an imaginary time machine, with the dial turned back to 500 million years ago. There we witness the watery ways of early life on the earth, when clamlike creatures and trilobites dominated the seas....

The failure of experimental drugs that had once looked promising could have been prevented with better animal studies, according to a re-examination of past clinical trials. “I hear too many stories about patients who have used their one shot at getting into a trial on a drug that didn’t have enough legs to begin with, and that’s a tragedy,” says Steve Perrin, an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) researcher who led the work....

R. Eugene Turner has built a nearly 50-year career in Louisiana studying the effects of river diversions and other engineered solutions to the state’s disappearing coastal wetlands. Yet today he holds the unenviable position of bucking one of the largest wetlands restoration projects ever conceived: Louisiana’s nearly $2 billion Mid-Barataria Bay Sediment Diversion project on the lower Mississippi River (Climatewire, March 11). Experts say the project, currently under federal environmental review, is the most consequential piece of Louisiana’s 50-year, $50 billion coastal restoration effort....

Many Americans are considering cutting back on the amount of gluten in their diets or avoiding it altogether. However, nutritionists say that if this is not done carefully, the diet can be unhealthy. In a recent poll, 30 percent of adults said they wanted to “cut down or be free of gluten,” according to The NDP Group, the market-research company that conducted the poll. That’s the highest percentage of people to report having this goal since the poll began asking the question in 2009, NDP says....

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats have agreed in coalition talks to put a moratorium on fracking for shale gas, leading members of the two parties said on Friday.Ute Vogt, a Social Democrat (SPD) leader on environment issues in the talks, said that as a result fracking will not be possible in Germany before it is clear that the technology is safe. “We’ve agreed to a moratorium,” she told reporters....

MECHANICAL MYSTERY “Wonder of the Ancient World,” by Tony Freeth, describes the Antikythera mechanism, a Greek astronomical calculation machine. As a biologist with an interest in engineering, I was amazed by the device’s construction. Just how did the ancients make it? I doubt they had tools such as lathelike machines to cut the gears, dividing heads to index them, accurately made drills, and so on. Gerald Legg Hurstpierpoint, England Now that the design of the Antikythera mechanism is understood, my question is: Did it really work?...

For rare genetic diseases that affect the young, such as a neuro degenerative condition called spinal muscular atrophy, gene therapies bring muchneeded hope — a chance for the child to live a relatively normal life. But they also raise serious fears about their efficacy and the potential risks that accompany irreversible one-off treatments. The responsibility for balancing these hopes and fears lies with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)....

So should you sign your kid up for a programming camp? Insist they take computer science classes? Maybe, maybe not. I learned coding as a child, and it has served me very well. I purchased a home computer with money I earned bagging groceries and learned the Basic programming language, as well as some machine language. It was fun, like solving puzzles—and I got my first job as a software developer in my first year in college....

Nearly one in five Americans currently suffers from a mental illness, and roughly half of us will be diagnosed with one at some point in our lives. Yet, these occurrences may have nothing to do with a genetic flaw or a traumatic event. Randolph Nesse, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, attributes high rates of psychiatric disorders to natural selection operating on our genes without paying heed to our emotional well-being....

Suicide rates in the U.S. have increased for the first time in a decade, according to a report published in October by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But what leads a person to commit suicide? Three new studies suggest that the neurological changes in a brain of a suicide victim differ markedly from those in other brains and that these changes develop over the course of a lifetime....

The Southern Ocean has some of the thickest clouds on Earth, made brighter in the summertime by marine microbes living in the waters below, according to new research that combines satellite observations and computer modeling. In fact, bacteria and plankton drifting in the ocean produce particles that get whipped up into atmosphere where they seed cloud droplets, and in turn, the brighter clouds reflect more sunlight away from Earth. “Life in the ocean increases the brightness of clouds and keeps the climate cooler than it would otherwise be,” says Dennis Hartmann, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington (U....

Nitrogen-rich forest bedrock – the geologic rock formation located under forest soil – may aid trees in better sequestering carbon, according to a recent study that offers a new understanding on why some forests store greenhouse gases more efficiently than others. While geologic rock isn’t a carbon sink itself, it plays an important role in helping the soil and trees above absorb CO2, say the study’s authors, who published their findings last week in Nature....

In a bid to reduce the number of dangerous and expensive convoy missions trekking to remote base camps in Iraq and Afghanistan and to dispose of trash at those bases, the Army is backing an industry project aimed at turning solid waste into diesel. Covanta Energy Corp. is using the $1.5 million boost from the Army Corps of Engineers to develop technology for converting garbage into diesel that would be indistinguishable from crude oil-based diesel fuel and usable for military vehicles and generators....

On March 22 the World Health Organization announced that the Omicron subvariant BA.2 had become the dominant form of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, worldwide. BA.2 shares many genetic similarities with its close relative BA.1, which fueled a global resurgence in COVID infections in recent months. But BA.2 is between 30 percent and 50 percent more contagious than BA.1. Now, as this latest version of SARS-CoV-2 sweeps the planet, pandemic-weary people everywhere are asking the same question: Is society doomed to confront a succession of new viral variants, each one more contagious than the last?...

Every metric ton of carbon dioxide humans emit comes at a cost—not only in terms of the financial toll of the damage wrought by floods, heat waves and droughts but also the price in human lives. Substantially curtailing emissions today could prevent tens of millions of premature deaths over the course of the 21st century, according to a new study that calculated this “mortality cost of carbon.” The research, published on Thursday in Nature Communications, breaks out one piece of the social cost of carbon (SCC), a metric that calculates the future damages from carbon emitted today to put a price on those emissions....

When lightning struck Saturday in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, 15 miles northwest of Fort Collins, conditions could hardly have been better for the wildfire that ensued. A dry winter and warm spring had left Roosevelt National Forest tinder dry, and strong, erratic winds whipping up from the southeast carried the flames easily through the pine trees. “The snowpack we had this year was below average – around 70 percent of average towards the end of February, followed by one of the driest, warmest Marches on record,” said Tim Mathews, a fire meteorologist with the Rocky Mountain Coordination Center....

SEATTLE—At a nonprofit providing health care and housing to the homeless population in the city, employees have begun a sprint to sanitize their facilities. Because the organization, the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), is located in one of the U.S.’s first hotbeds of novel coronavirus infection, workers are bracing themselves for a wave of medical needs in the homeless community, which is especially vulnerable during disease outbreaks. The situation in Seattle may be a preview of things to come for other cities around the nation whose population of people without homes could be hit hard as the virus spreads....