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Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments Gina Perry New Press, 2013 ($26.95) Stanley Milgram’s studies of human obedience to authority figures are arguably some of the most infamous psychology experiments ever. Until now, little has been written about how Milgram’s subjects dealt with the experiments’ aftermath. In Behind the Shock Machine, Perry, a professor at the University of Melbourne and a psychologist herself, tracks down some of the participants and explores how the study affected their lives....

The scientist who helped deploy our own immune system’s power to beat back cancer snagged one of this year’s Lasker Awards, a prestigious group of medical prizes commonly known as the “American Nobels.” James Allison, a Houston-based immunologist, had already won a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and more recently he scooped up the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, an award that honors outstanding research in biology or biochemistry. His newest accolade is designed to recognize researchers whose contributions have improved the clinical treatment of patients....

Every day psychiatrists are called on to handle one of the most vexing problems in mental health: hot aggression. This impulsive, volatile behavior extends across many forms of mental illness, sending kids with autism or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder into rages and contributing to crimes by people with undiagnosed mood disorders. Surprisingly, the Food and Drug Administration’s approved medicine cabinet contains nothing for treating aggression. So dozens of psychiatrists recently laid out a strong case for drug development, telling FDA officials that practitioners need medicines specifically designed for hotheadedness....

A billion and a half years ago, life on earth was staggeringly dull. The ocean, once a steaming primordial soup, had become a cold, thin, dreary broth of look-alike organisms. Eukaryotic cells with internal structures had appeared, but multicellular creatures were scarcely a blip in the census. Life lazed through those doldrums for a million millennia. Then something happened: some unidentified combination of environmental circumstance and genetic novelty triggered crazy diversification in the variety and complexity of animal life over tens of millions of years, climaxing in the so-called Cambrian explosion....

For a variety of reasons—whether it be mitigating climate change, enhancing security, increasing economic incentives or even improving the health of indoor living—countries around the world have been investing in ways to boost energy efficiency. Worldwide, that market of cutting back on energy waste is growing and is now worth at least $310 billion, reports the International Energy Agency. “For many years, it’s been called the ‘fifth fuel’ because it came after oil, gas, coal and electricity,” said Hans Nilsson, a Swedish board member of the European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, of which the IEA is a member....

In 1833 a German researcher named Constantin Lambert Gloger noticed that birds from warmer habitats had darker feathers than those from cooler climes. His observations soon became known as Gloger’s rule; ornithologists later verified that tropical plumage indeed darkens closer to the equator. Mammals seem to fit the pattern as well. But why would latitude influence animal coloration? More than 180 years later a possible answer has emerged from a surprising place: flowers....

Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people. One common problem gifted kids face is that they, and those around them, place too much importance on being smart....

Last summer, puffs of white appeared in satellite images of western Greenland. These were not patches of snow and ice, but rather plumes of smoke from the island’s biggest wildfire on record, burning through miles of thawed peatland. Black carbon particles from smoke plumes can darken Greenland’s vast ice sheet, contributing to more heat absorption and more melting. Scientists who studied the wildfire said that nearly a third of the soot landed on Greenland’s ice sheet....

Remember 2016—it is the infamous year that has already recorded the largest annual change on record in the makeup of the air you breathe. Fueled by people’s pyromania and the El Niño global weather phenomenon, carbon dioxide concentrations reached 409.44 parts per million on April 9 at an air-sampling station atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, a rise of more than five ppm since the same date last year. And it could get worse....

More than 60 years ago Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid—better known as DNA. Today, for the cost of a one-year Netflix subscription, you can have your DNA sequenced to learn about your ancestry and proclivities. Yet while it is an irrefutable fact that the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring is the biological basis for heredity, we still know relatively little about the specific genes that make us who we are....

As a newly minted president, Barack Obama told NASA to steer away from the moon—a destination set by his predecessor George W. Bush—and head for Mars instead. Richard Nixon encouraged NASA to cancel its final Apollo missions to divert funds to the space shuttle program. Unfortunately, President-elect Donald Trump seems set to follow this precedent. “After taking office, we will have a comprehensive review of our plans for space and will work with Congress to set both priorities and mission,” he told SpaceNews a month before the election....

For electric cars to run as long as possible between charges, their batteries need to pack a punch. One option would be lithium-metal batteries, which have a key component made of this lightweight element. This gives them greater storage capacity than widely used lithium-ion batteries, with the same component made from graphite. Although lithium-metal batteries can store more energy than lithium-ion batteries of the same size, they also degrade faster, limiting how many times they can charge and discharge....

Polar bears have shifted to a diet of more land-based food in response to climate change and melting sea ice in the Arctic, new research finds. The results suggest that polar bears, at least in the western Hudson Bay area, may be slightly more flexible in the face of climate change than previously thought. “We found they were eating more of what is available on the land,” including snow geese, eggs and caribou, said study co-author Linda Gormezano, a vertebrate biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York....

Nearly 14,000 high-elevation lakes in California’s Sierra Nevada are showing acute stress from global warming, and their best chance at survival depends on the ability to stay under snow and ice in the spring. New research published by the University of California, Davis, shows that the summer air at Emerald Lake, a long-term study site within Sequoia National Park, is warming at a rate of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, one of the highest warming rates in the world but consistent with what has been seen in other mountainous regions....

A group of 18 prominent scientists—including some who helped develop CRISPR–Cas9, the current leading tool for gene editing—issued a call Wednesday for an international moratorium on gene edits to eggs, sperm or embryos, and for establishing a process to discuss how and whether it should ever occur again. The move follows Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s announcement late last year that he had edited the genes of twin newborn girls, in attempt to make them genetically resistant to HIV....

Anthony Fauci, who has been the top infectious-diseases adviser in the United States for almost 40 years, announced on 22 August that he would resign from his leadership roles in December. Although many scientists are saddened to be losing his guidance, they understand his desire to step down. No other federal scientist has held a top position for as long as Fauci. “Dr Fauci is the most dedicated public servant I have ever known,” says former US National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, who has worked closely with Fauci over the years....

Sixteen years ago, a sickly eleven-year-old became the human face of the AIDS epidemic that was sweeping South Africa. Standing up to speak in front of thousands at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, the diminutive Nkosi Johnson pleaded with the South African government to start giving the drug azidothymidine (AZT) to pregnant women with HIV so that they would not transmit the virus to their babies. “Don’t be afraid of us—we are all the same,” he told the tearful audience....

It has all the makings of a classic B movie scene. A gunman puts a pistol to the victim’s forehead, and the screen fades to black before a loud bang is heard. A forensic specialist who traces the bullet’s trajectory would see it traversing the brain’s prefrontal cortex—a central site for processing decisions. The few survivors of usually fatal injuries to this brain region should not be surprised to find their personalities dramatically altered....

In Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and a handful of other states, oil and gas production has triggered a surge of earthquakes unlike anything scientists have ever seen. Oklahoma once had an average of one or two earthquakes a year, but in 2015 it had nearly 900. Meanwhile the rate of earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S.—long considered seismically quieter parts of the country—rose from 29 a year to more than 1,000....

The Agency for International Development (USAID) today announced the launch of its $100-million Global Development Lab in Washington DC — a move that will elevate the role of science at the agency. USAID says that it will put in place a research-and-development pipeline for food security and nutrition, maternal and child survival, energy access and sustainable water solutions. The announcement marks a shift in USAID’s approach to global development, from funding organizations to meet specific goals with existing technologies to instead identifying problems and funding research into new technological interventions to solve them....