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The world of cybersecurity is starting to resemble a paranoid thriller. Shadowy figures plant malicious software, or “malware,” in our computers. They slip it into e-mails. They transmit it over the Internet. They infect us with it through corrupted Web sites. They plant it in other programs. They design it to migrate from device to device—laptops, flash drives, smartphones, servers, copy machines, iPods, gaming consoles—until it’s inside our critical systems. As even the most isolated systems periodically need new instructions, new data or some kind of maintenance, any system can be infected....

Listener Lynne wrote in and asked “how to find happiness—or at least comfort—in a world that is fundamentally broken in so many ways.” She writes, “I cannot help but be sad to think about things like plastics in the ocean, wildfires in the west, caravans of refugees about to be met with military force, and the extermination of the Rohinga. I have frequent reminders to be thankful for all I have… Nonetheless, I am often unhappy because of the many ways that humans are unkind to each other and to our planet....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. For some reason, my readers seem fascinated with embarrassing subjects. The single most popular article I’ve written is the one on bad breath. My April series on embarrassing subjects was also quiet popular. I am a little worried what this says about people who are drawn to me. I suppose the simple fact that they spend their time reading my stuff puts them out of the norm....

A few degrees of warming over the coming decades could trigger a series of extreme and fatal heat waves in India. In recent years, the number of deaths has skyrocketed as a result of extreme heat on the subcontinent, according to a new study published yesterday in Science Advances. That’s expected to get worse as rising temperatures worldwide bring more frequent heat waves. Deaths in India and in other countries where large numbers of people live in poverty will likely be a grim symbol of climate change, according to the study....

In a large shed near the headquarters of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore, a six-wheeled rover rumbles over dark grey rubble in a landscape designed to mimic the Moon’s rocky surface. This test and others scheduled for the next few weeks are crucial steps in India’s quest to launch a second mission to the Moon next March. The country’s much anticipated Chandrayaan-2 comes almost a decade after India began its first journey to the Moon, in 2008....

In the U.S., the ubiquitous For Dummies book series got its start with computer manuals and has since expanded to thousands of titles on everything from composing to composting. In England, a company called Rough Guides made its name selling travel books but has now branched out with about 70 reference books with titles such as The Rough Guide to the Beatles. Its latest entry is a 376-page, paperback-size book called The Rough Guide to Psychology, written by Christian Jarrett, a journalist who works for the British Psychological Society....

A small injury to a nerve outside the brain and spinal cord is relatively easy to repair just by stretching it, but a major gap in such a peripheral nerve poses problems. Usually, another nerve is taken from elsewhere in the body, and it causes an extra injury and returns only limited movement. Now researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have found an effective way to bridge such a gap—at least in mice and monkeys—by inserting a biodegradable tube that releases a protein called a growth factor for several months....

Add yet another reason for women to make sure they eat right and get plenty of exercise: if they don’t, their children may be at greater risk for becoming obese. Three to 8 percent of pregnant women in the U.S. each year develop gestational diabetes, a transient blood glucose condition that ends after delivery. As has long been known, those women are at higher risk for related health problems and for having abnormally large infants whose births may require either C-sections or potentially dangerous natural deliveries....

President Donald Trump has found one part of the federal health law palatable: He’s allowing Obamacare rules that require chain restaurants to post calorie counts to go into effect Monday. The rules, which are among the final pieces of the 2010 Affordable Care Act to be implemented, require restaurants to list calories on all menus and menu boards. Restaurants will also have to provide on-site additional nutritional information, such as fat and sodium levels....

You don’t have to be Mozart to correctly identify a tone as A-sharp or D-flat. In fact, says a new report, perfect pitch may be genetic In the midst of recruiting subjects for a genetic study on perfect (absolute) pitch—the ability to discern a note from nearly any sort of sound without a reference tone—scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered several interesting patterns among people who have the skill....

ASTEROID THREAT The search for near-Earth asteroids that could threaten our planet, as described in “Fear of the Unknown,” by Lee Billings [Advances], should be a worldwide undertaking, no less than the effort to tackle the human causes of global warming. And unlike that program, it should not be hampered by powerful commercial interests. But at present, it’s apparently entirely dependent on NASA funding, where it competes with various projects. Are other nations making any similar efforts?...

Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov has started gene editing in eggs donated by women who can hear to learn how to allow some deaf couples to give birth to children without the genetic mutation that impairs hearing. The news, detailed in an e-mail he sent to Nature on 17 October, is the latest in a saga that kicked off in June, when Rebrikov told Nature of his controversial intention to create gene-edited babies resistant to HIV using the popular CRISPR tool....

Ask a bride before walking down the aisle “How likely are you to get divorced?” and most will respond “Not a chance!” Tell her that the average divorce rate is close to 50 percent, and ask again. Would she change her mind? Unlikely. Even law students who have learned everything about the legal aspects of divorce, including its likelihood, state that their own chances of getting divorced are basically nil. How can we explain this?...

In the year since the COVID pandemic began, glimmers of hope have come on the horizon. Vaccines are on the way, and the percentage of patients who die has fallen in many places as doctors have learned how to save the sickest patients. These successes are not enough—and they overshadow the more limited progress made toward developing drugs that could prevent mild cases of the disease from worsening. Such treatments are urgently needed because many people will get sick with COVID until vaccines induce enough herd immunity in the population to keep the infections under control....

Pres. Donald Trump’s administration could be willfully blinding itself—and the nation—when it comes to the environment, according to many science policy experts startled by its new proposed budget for 2018. Released last week, the initial budget outline envisions dramatic cuts in funds for monitoring air and water quality, climate change and more. “It would cut off our eyes, ears and nose, with respect to what is going on in our surroundings,” says John Holdren, who served as former Pres....

Nobel laureate Martin Karplus is hoping to develop a vaccine against HIV. However, although the emeritus professor of chemistry has a lab at Harvard University, and is collaborating with biophysicist, Arup Chakraborty, at nearby MIT, they perform many of the experiments in the virtual world. Their research centers on the small number of people infected with HIV whose immune systems have managed to suppress the virus. Through molecular simulations in silico, they have determined what makes these people so ‘lucky’....

Something very old, very powerful and very special has been unleashed on Earth. Humans are strange. For a global species, we’re not particularly genetically diverse, thanks in part to how our ancient roaming explorations caused “founder effects” and “bottleneck events” that restricted our ancestral gene pool. We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet)....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. There’s a chilling moment in act 3 of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s great allegory of McCarthyism, that gives me the shivers every time. Threatening a witness whose wife has been falsely accused of witchcraft in 1692 Massachusetts, the zealous judge declares, “But you must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there is no road between....

In medicine, plasma usually refers to the liquid component of blood. Now scientists are researching how to better harness the plasma found in stars and lightning—the fourth fundamental state of matter, alongside solids, liquids and gases—to cut into the body like a blowtorch for bloodless surgery. Since the early 20th century, surgeons have used sparks of plasma to zap warts and other malignant tissues. Late in that century researchers began investigating how jets of plasma might be used to carve up flesh just as industrial plasma cutters have carved up metal since the 1960s....

Do deaf people talk to themselves? —Amelia Thomas, Rochester, N.Y. Cognitive scientist Gregory Hickok of the University of California, Irvine, and linguist Carol Padden of the University of California, San Diego, respond: ABSOLUTELY. Just like hearing people, deaf people can mentally rehearse a speech, mull over a conversation in their head or simply ramble internally about the day’s happenings, all in the form of mental images of signs. To get a sense of what talking to yourself in sign language might be like, imagine waving good-bye or blowing a kiss—you are “talking to yourself” in gestures....