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On New Year’s Day more than a few of us annually resolve to change our lives–or at least our more self-indulgent habits. On the hunch that all good things flow from physical and mental well-being, Scientific American Body offers this list of recommended resolutions based on the advice of health professionals and the scientific literature. Whatever your goals, it will help you understand why hardly anything you could choose to do would have a bigger impact on your quality of life....

Reprinted from The Lab Rat Chronicles: A Neuroscientist Reveals Life Lessons from the Planet’s Most Successful Mammals, by Kelly Lambert, Ph.D., by arrangement with Perigee, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright 2011 by Kelly Lambert. In the reality television shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, 25 potential mates vie for a desirable male or female during a series of artificial encounters and interactions. The most attractive candidates are given a rose each week, a gesture indicating their special standing among the others....

Training software that emulates brain networks to identify dog breeds or sports equipment is by now old news. But getting such an AI network to learn a process on its own that is innate to early child development is truly novel. In a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances, a neural network distinguished between different quantities of things, even though it was never taught what a number is. The neural net reprised a cognitive skill innate to human babies, monkeys and crows, among others....

“Sugar is a deep, deep ancient craving,” wrote the Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman in his book The Story of Human Body. In it, he traces our relationship with sugar to a genetic mutation that permits our bodies to easily convert sugar into fat. That fat serves as an energy-dense reserve to guard against lean times — a hunter-gatherer’s insurance policy. The trouble is humans are no longer hunter-gatherers. With sugar, fat and salt abundant and lifestyles becoming increasingly sedentary, rates of obesity and hypertension have been rising steadily since the 1970s....

Climate change is the biggest threat to the planet, the World Economic Forum said yesterday in a sweeping catalog of global risks. The institution’s annual analysis of economic dangers worldwide named extreme weather, natural disasters, man-made environmental disasters, biodiversity loss and failure to adapt to climate change as the chief perils to society. Of all the risks to the globe, “it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe,” the WEF said in its Global Risks Report....

On June 17, a 62-foot-long double-hulled canoe is slated to arrive in Honolulu, completing the first-ever round-the-world voyage by a traditional Polynesian vessel—a predecessor of the modern catamaran. The trip began in May 2014 when the Hklea (Hawaiian for Arcturus, a guiding zenith star for seafarers) sailed westward from Hilo on Hawaii’s Big Island. Since then it has plied five oceans, visited 19 countries and traversed more than 40,000 nautical miles....

Every evening around the world trillions of zooplankton, many smaller than a grain of rice, hover hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea, waiting for their signal. Scientists long considered these tiny animals to be drifters, passive specks suspended in the ocean, moved by the whims of tides and currents. And yet, just before the sun disappears, the swarms begin to rise on a clandestine journey to the surface....

This week, an anonymous podcast listener from Brooklyn, NY, wrote in and wondered if she should tell people about her social anxiety. She gets anxious when people watch her eat or drink, especially if she doesn’t know them well. She wonders if it would be helpful to announce it: “Sometimes eating in restaurants makes me nervous,” or if that would just elicit raised eyebrows and awkward questions. Coming out about your mental health can be tough in any situation....

We’ve all felt the fog come over us when we mistake someone’s name right after being introduced, fail to remember where we left our car in the parking lot or tell a friend the same story twice. Our memory is rarely as reliable as we’d like. But at times, it also surprises us. We may somehow remember family stories told to us long ago, the names of our middle school teachers or trivia facts buried deep in back of our brain....

Intrepid photographers in dark parts of the world managed to capture some stunning photos of the Perseid meteor shower as it hit its peak, despite the bright light of a nearly full moon. The Perseids peaked Tuesday night (Aug. 12) and into the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Though the bright moon probably did interfere with some observers’ view of the shower, NASA cameras still caught sight of brilliant meteors streaking through the sky....

The ongoing eruption at Kilauea, beyond scorching the earth and destroying property, has shown the volcano to be a meteorological magician. An amazing variety of volcanic weather is being created on Hawaii’s Big Island. The sky show is due to Kilauea’s lava, which is about as hot as lava is going to get. Its supply of heat to the surface and its idiosyncratic geochemistry are generating an abundance of beautiful and freakish wonders, from lava-launching whirlwinds to plumes of potentially lethal acidic haze....

God’s Universe by Owen Gingerich Belknap Press (Harvard University Press), 2006 The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 2006 The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Houghton Mifflin, 2006 The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan. Edited by Ann Druyan Penguin Press, 2006 Ten years after his death in 1996, science writer Walter Sullivan’s byline occasionally still appears in the New York Times on obituaries of important physicists, as though he were beckoning them to some quantum-mechanical heaven....

Slightly more than 21 years have passed since Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 broke apart and slammed into Jupiter. Although the physical scars of those cataclysmic collisions have long since vanished, researchers are still gaining new insights into the solar system based on that decades-old catastrophe. David Levy, who co-discovered the comet with Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker, reflects on his 50 years as a comet hunter in the February issue of Scientific American....

The system that supplies clean electricity to Vermont is not exactly a model of Yankee ingenuity. In 2011, the state adopted a plan to get 90% of its power from renewable sources by 2050. That led to a surge of wind-generated power from the northeastern part of the state and an expansion of solar. But transmission lines in this sparsely populated part of Vermont have such low capacity that much of the renewable energy is often unavailable because the lines are too congested....

A nearly two-million-year-old fossil find in the Republic of Georgia may be evidence of the first signs of early human compassion, scientists say. According to a report published today in the journal Nature, the remains are from an individual who spent the last years of his life with only one tooth. This shortcoming may have left him dependent on the kindness of others in order to find sufficient sustenance. The site at Dmanisi, Georgia, has in recent years provided multiple fossil discoveries that suggest the presence of members of our genus, Homo, roamed outside of Africa 1....

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - The vast majority of U.S. kindergarten-age children are vaccinated against preventable diseases but sizable pockets of unprotected children still exist, posing a public health threat, according to a government study. Only 1.7% of U.S. parents of kindergartners sought exemptions in 2014 from laws requiring children be vaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published August 28 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report....

The most sophisticated mechanical device of ancient Greece may finally be giving up its secrets. Researchers have long known the so-called Antikythera mechanism was a calendar of sorts that represented the positions of the sun and moon using a series of gears. In its complexity it outshined all other objects for a thousand years following its creation sometime around the second century B.C. Now an international consortium of researchers has probed the machine’s corroded fragments with sophisticated x-ray and light imaging tools to uncover the true sophistication of this geared wonder....

As the COVID-19 pandemic lashes countries in a second (and in some cases, third) wave of infections, patience and solidarity are giving way to frustration and blame. Officials in the United States and Germany say the latest upsurge in infections in their countries is a consequence of a selfish minority that is ignoring basic social distancing rules, while Berlin’s tourism authority has launched a colorful campaign—complete with an old lady and an offensive finger—chastising visitors who refuse to wear masks....

By Chris Prentice One of the top U.S. public health officials on Sunday warned that the mosquito-borne Zika virus could extend its reach across the U.S. Gulf Coast after officials last week confirmed it as active in the popular tourist destination of Miami Beach. The possibility of transmission in Gulf States such as Louisiana and Texas will likely fuel concerns that the virus, which has been shown to cause the severe birth defect known as microcephaly, could spread across the continental United States, even though officials have played down such an outcome....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. There’s one downside to 3-D printing: it can do so much. Additive manufacturing (AM), as it’s also known, has immense potential not only for streamlining industrial processes but also for producing objects that would be outright impossible to make with traditional methods. Nevertheless, that’s precisely the problem: as the technology develops, it creates new opportunities for intellectual property (IP) pirates and counterfeiters, not to mention the makers of contraband goods like plastic firearms....