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Thousands of health and medical apps can be had for a minute or less of download time, and sometimes a dollar or two. Because choosing among mobile applications can be an overwhelming experience, Scientific American has put together a list—based on functionality, content and customer reviews—of ones you may find useful. Nowadays, an app exists for tracking most of your routine health needs, whether it be recording distance on a treadmill or finding a clinical trial for a recently diagnosed disease....

From the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Hollywood, humans have attempted to understand their fellow man through labeling and categorization. There was Hippocrates’s blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile; the classic dramatic archetypes of hero, ingenue, jester and wise man; and, of course, Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda from the famous HBO series More rigorously, psychologists have worked to develop empirical tests that assess core aspects of personality. The “Big Five” traits (extroversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness) emerged in the 1940s through studies of the English language for descriptive terms....

The oceanic pincushion known as the purple sea urchin relies on its many spines and pincers for protection and food. An inability to form its spiny shell would devastate the species, which thrives on rocky shores off North America’s west coast. Unfortunately for the purple sea urchin, higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as a result of human fossil-fuel burning presage a more acidic ocean that might make it harder to form such shells....

Questions answered in this episode: “Is there a maximum size for a black hole?” - Oliver Baker “Can matter exist without space?” - XENOpz6 “If we were able to overcome the problem of infinite energy for light travel and travel through space at the speed of light, would time dilation mean that from our perspective traveling anywhere would be instantaneous? And would this then mean that we would actually exist at every point in our vector at the same time?...

Christy writes: “I need your expertise! I am overweight and suffer from polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). For that, I’m told to follow a low-carb diet. But I also have mildly elevated cholesterol and a familial tendency toward fatty liver disease. For that, I’m told to eat lots of fiber and whole grains, which are loaded with carbs. So what should I do?” Maybe you’ve found yourself in a dilemma similar to Christy’s, where dietary recommendations for one health concern directly conflict with dietary advice for another....

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential to meet the Paris Agreement’s looming climate targets, according to a major report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s all but impossible to achieve net-zero carbon emissions—the key to halting global warming—without sucking massive amounts of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere using trees, technology and other carbon sinks, the report says. But there’s a catch. If the world relies too heavily on carbon removal, society runs the risk of overshooting the Paris targets—and experiencing increasingly severe climate impacts....

You may have never personally caught sight of Jesus Christ’s face in a potato chip, but you have likely succumbed to an equally improbable belief at some point in your life. Many people claim that ghosts exist or that their dreams can predict the future. Some individuals even think they have seen the face of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun....

Authors of self-help books often make grandiose promises that invite a skeptical look. Consider the title of a best-seller by Anthony Robbins: Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! (Free Press, 1992). The dust jacket describes Robbins as an “acknowledged expert in the psychology of change.” Yet he lacks any formal mental health credentials. Elsewhere, Robbins has made eyebrow-raising claims, such as that he can cure any psychological problem in a session, make someone fall in love with you in five minutes and even revive brain-dead individuals....

Few groups of animals encapsulate the extremes of longevity more than fish. While coral reef pygmy govies survive for less than ten weeks, Greenland sharks can endure more than 500 years. So when a team of biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to explore the genetics of aging, they grabbed their fishing gear. Their preferred catch was rockfish. Found in coastal waters from California to Japan, rockfish are a colorful group of more than 120 species in the genus Sebastes....

Talk about a land of fire and ice. The surface of Mercury is hot enough in some places to melt lead, but it is a winter wonderland at its poles — with perhaps a trillion tons of water ice trapped inside craters — enough to fill 20 billion Olympic skating rinks. The ice — whose long-suspected presence has now been confirmed by NASA’s orbiting MESSENGER probe — seems to be much purer than ice inside similar craters on Earth’s Moon, suggesting that the closest planet to the Sun could be a better trap for icy materials delivered by comets and asteroids....

It was August 1856, three years before Charles Darwin would publish On the Origin of Species. Workers in a lime quarry in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, unearthed a puzzle in a small cave: a number of ancient-looking bones. Thinking the bones were from a bear, the workers saved some of them for a local schoolteacher and amateur naturalist, Johann Carl Fuhlrott. Fuhlrott later worked with anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen to study these bones....

Jo Karabasz knew her dialysis clinic well. Before switching to at-home treatment this summer, the former high school English teacher spent five and a half years visiting some of the dozens of DaVita dialysis clinics that dot the Northern California landscape. Her beige chair in the front corner of one clinic, where she attended appointments three times a week, quickly became her home away from home. Since she was diagnosed with kidney failure in 2015, Karabasz has had around 820 in-center treatments, where a hemodialysis machine does the job her kidneys no longer could, filtering waste and excess fluid from her bloodstream....

In the decade since the birth of Dolly the sheep, in Scotland, cloning has plodded on as an inefficient science. Several mammalian species have been cloned using the same nuclear transfer technique. But even work with the mouse—the benchmark model organism for techniques and therapies destined for human application—has been hampered by low cloning efficiency rates on the order of one birth for every 100 implanted embryos. “The failure rate is so impressive, it’s a struggle every day to get anything to go,” says Peter Mombaerts, developmental biologist at the Rockefeller University in New York....

Hemorrhage—blood escaping profusely from a ruptured vessel—is a leading cause of potentially preventable death. Bandages often fail to stop the bleeding. But researchers say they have developed a better kind of dressing: one that repels blood and bacteria, promotes quick clotting and detaches without reopening the initial wound. While developing blood-repelling coatings for medical devices, scientists at the National University of Singapore and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich found that one mixture of carbon nanofibers and silicone had an unexpected effect: it boosted blood clotting....

A newfound comet is apparently on course to have an exceedingly close call with the planet Mars in October 2014, and there is a chance — albeit small — that the comet may even collide with the Red Planet. The new comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered Jan. 3 by the Scottish-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught, a prolific observer of both comets and asteroids who has 74 comet discoveries to his name....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Every year since 2006 in the U.S., the number of clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has gone down, while the number of industry-funded trials has gone up, a new study shows. Analyzing the ClinicalTrials.gov database, researchers found that after trial registration became a requirement for publication in major scientific journals in 2005, the number of newly registered trials rose from 9,321 in 2006 to 18,400 in 2014....

By Mitch Phillips LONDON (Reuters) - The London hotel at the center of an outbreak of sickness that has struck down scores of competitors at the World Athletics Championships said on Tuesday it was not the source of the illness. Several Botswana, German, Canadian, Irish and Puerto Rican athletes staying at the Tower Hotel, near Tower Bridge, have been taken ill over the last few days, with some put into effective quarantine and others forced to miss their events....

INNER SPEECH “Speak for Yourself,” by Ferris Jabr, is astounding in its implications. Helen Keller said she didn’t have self-awareness or consciousness before she met her teacher and learned language. An aphasic stroke victim who loses inner dialogue loses the ability to structure thoughts in terms of past and future and so can only exist. Is it possible that the evolution of a primitive language predated the expansion of the human brain and our rise to lofty heights of intelligence?...

A picture might be worth a thousand words—but inventing a way to take nanoscale pictures is worth US$3-million. The inventor of a ‘super-resolution’ microscopy technique that biologists are using to reveal the hidden molecular structures of cells is one of six big winners of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes—the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. The winners were announced on 17 October. The microscopy method’s lead inventor, Xiaowei Zhuang, is a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland....

After the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, claiming more than 1,500 lives, the international community took swift action to prevent similar catastrophes. Just over one month after the Titanic struck an iceberg late on April 14, 1912, the U.S. Navy dispatched the cruiser USS Birmingham to begin preliminary ice patrols of the North Atlantic, near where the wrecked ocean liner lay. By January 1914 an international conference produced the first of several conventions for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), dictating safety standards for mariners....