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Less than 24 hours after a commercial jet took a sudden detour into the Hudson River this past January, security camera video of the event from multiple vantage points began surfacing. In an age of ubiquitous surveillance, the public has come to assume that someone or something is always watching, ready to spot trouble as it is happening. Yet a novel strain of the influenza A (H1N1) virus jumped species and burst into the human population in March and April, and by late May health and agriculture officials were still trying to figure out where it came from....

ATLANTA — The yellow pills had already killed four before landing in Brian Hargett’s lab last month. They were clearly counterfeit — the letters P-E-R-C-O-C-E-T were as crooked as the dealer who had peddled them throughout central Georgia — but now his chemists had to figure out exactly what they were. And fast. Lives were still at stake; health officials wanted to alert the public about the phony pills. First, though, they had to know what was in them....

Read any Web forum, and you’ll agree: people are meaner online than in “real life.” Psychologists have largely blamed this disinhibition on anonymity and invisibility: when you’re online, no one knows who you are or what you look like. A new study in Computers in Human Behavior, however, suggests that above and beyond anything else, we’re nasty on the Internet because we don’t make eye contact with our compatriots. Researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel asked 71 pairs of college students who did not know one another to debate an issue over Instant Messenger and try to come up with an agreeable solution....

Can a case of strep throat lead to a mental disorder? Some children seem to acquire behaviors associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) after being infected with the Streptococcus bacterium, but for decades skeptics have claimed the connection is nothing but a coincidence. Now a new study in mice offers compelling evidence that strep can indeed affect the mind. In the 1980s Susan Swedo, a pediatrician at the National Institute of Mental Health, came across several cases of children who seemed to have developed tics and behaviors resembling OCD, such as excessive hand washing, overnight....

You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further; it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. On the eve of this new year, we have curated some of the most incredible science GIFs out there. A Rocket—to Escape a Rocket Credit: Francois Cadieux and Tim Sandstrom NASA Ames Would you ride a rocket to the moon—or to Mars?...

Several months into a pandemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and decimated economies around the world, scientists still lack a complete understanding of how the virus that caused it is transmitted. Lockdowns are already easing in some places, and people are preparing to return to a version of work and social life. But a crucial question stubbornly remains: Can the pathogen behind COVID-19 be “airborne”? For months, the U....

We know how the COVID-19 pandemic began: Bats near Wuhan, China, hold a mix of coronavirus strains, and sometime last fall one of the strains, opportunistic enough to cross species lines, left its host or hosts and ended up in a person. Then it was on the loose. What no one knows yet is how the pandemic will end. This coronavirus is unprecedented in the combination of its easy transmissibility, a range of symptoms going from none at all to deadly, and the extent that it has disrupted the world....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Urinary incontinence is definitely one of the most embarrassing health problems that many patients suffer from, but are afraid to ask about. It’s up there with anal itching, hirsutism, dandruff, and nipple discharge, all previous topics I’ve covered on Quick and Dirty Tips. It is so common that it is likely underestimated – research shows that 1 in 4 women over the age of 18 suffer from it....

Throughout 2011 researchers from the University of Havana prowled fishing docks in Cabañas and Cojimar on Cuba’s northwestern coast. The teams met returning fishing boats, noted the type and number of fish caught, and asked crews where they had fished, how long and what effort was involved. Oceanic whitetip sharks regularly appeared in catches, and fishermen reported hauling in smaller ones and using them as bait. Researchers say this could indicate the presence of a whitetip nursery area nearby....

If the statistic one in 166 has a familiar ring, perhaps that’s because you recently heard it on a television commercial or read it in a magazine. According to widely publicized estimates, one in 166 is now the proportion of children who suffer from autism. This proportion is astonishingly high compared with the figure of one in 2,500 that autism researchers had accepted for decades. Across a mere 10-year period–1993 to 2003–statistics from the U....

On this date more than two centuries ago a British scientist whose theory of evolution changed the way we look at the world was born. Charles Darwin is believed to have said, “It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.” It was his great interest in nature and detailed study of biodiversity that laid the foundation for modern biology....

Income inequality is growing in the U.S., and the problem is much worse than most people believe. For children, growing up poor hinders brain development and leads to poorer performance in schools, according to a study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics. It has long been known that low socioeconomic status is linked to poorer performance in school, and recent research has linked poverty to smaller brain surface area. The current study bridges these converging lines of evidence by revealing that up to 20 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income children may be explained by differences in brain development....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve always suspected that perfumes and colognes must not be too healthy simply because of the way the smell of most of them bothers me. Am I correct? Is there information available on this issue?—Lucinda Barry, Minneapolis Ahhh…the sweet smell of petrochemicals! The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reports that, while many popular perfumes, colognes and body sprays contain trace amounts of natural essences, they also typically contain a dozen or more potentially hazardous synthetic chemicals, some of which are derived from petroleum....

A study in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine contends that intellectual work—that’s right, I’m calling writing this stuff, ya know, intellectual—induces a big increase in caloric intake. The research had 14 Canadian students do three things at different times: sit and relax; complete a series of memory and attention tests; and read and summarize a text. (It was that last activity that disqualified rodents and U.S. students as study subjects.) After 45 minutes at each task, the kids were treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch....

Wilhelm Barthlott of the University of Bonn in Germany, discoverer and developer of the “lotus effect,” has a vision of a self-cleaning Manhattan, where a little rain washes the windows and walls of skyscrapers as clean as the immaculate lotus. Elsewhere, he sees tents and marquees using new textiles that stay equally spotless with no intervention from a human cleaner. He is not the only one with his sights set on a future populated with objects that rarely if ever need washing: in Japan, technologists are developing self-deodorizing and disinfectant surfaces for bathrooms and hospitals....

Luis von Ahn has heard it all before. As co-inventor of the CAPTCHA, those annoying images composed of wiggly letters and numbers that Web sites use to make sure you’re a human rather than a machine, von Ahn has received as many as 50 claims over the past decade of ways to beat his program. Make that 51. The start-up Vicarious, based in Union City, Calif., claims it has come up with artificial intelligence (AI) software that reads images nearly as well as humans and can crack a CAPTCHA 90 percent of the time....

Some people are truly exceptional at recognizing faces. Once they have seen a person, they can often remember the individual’s face decades later. Even if the person spotted was a youngster at the time and has meanwhile become a grown woman, or a man with a full beard, they can still make the ID. Psychologists from Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) have been looking for these “super-recognizers” for years, using a specially designed online test....

In March physicist Stephen Hawking passed away after living for more than 50 years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a devastating neurodegenerative disease that confined him to a wheelchair for most of his life. Revered for his description in the 1970s of the radiation emanating from black holes, he became a cultural icon, authoring best-selling books and appearing in documentaries and sitcoms as recently as March. His death spurred a global outpouring of tributes from fellow scientists, world leaders and celebrities....

While calling something “perfect” is the highest of compliments—a perfectly done steak, a perfect Olympic performance, the perfect prom dress—calling someone a perfectionist is anything but. Why? It implies a fussy control freak who can’t relax. Perfectionists have a reputation of being hard-driving. Uncompromising. Relentless. And often, it turns out, very successful. Steve Jobs was a notorious perfectionist. Martha Stewart calls herself a “maniacal perfectionist.” Serena Williams proudly wears the perfectionist label....

BOSTON—The quantum world and the everyday world of human experience are supposed to be two different realms. Quantum effects, as demonstrated in the lab, are usually confined to the tiniest scales. They last for imperceptibly brief instants. And they appear mostly in highly controlled systems operating at cryogenic temperatures near absolute zero. But experimental physicists are pushing across the assumed divide between the quantum and the ordinary by demonstrating quantum effects in more familiar environments....