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Seeing is believing when it comes to emotions. We smile, we gasp, we yawn when we see others do the same—a phenomenon called emotional contagion. A new study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that emotional contagion occurs even if the “seeing” step is bypassed. The blind patients in the study could not consciously see images of the faces of happy or fearful people that they were shown....

An emerging technique for analyzing genomes has given scientists a look at microbes that were until now difficult to study, revealing unexpected links among different branches of the tree of life. Led by Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, researchers used single-cell sequencing to read the genomes of 201 bacterial and archaeal cells taken from nine diverse environments, such as hydrothermal vents and an underground gold mine....

In recent years sensors stationed across the North Atlantic have picked up a potentially concerning signal: The grand northward progression of water along North America that moves heat from the tropics toward the Arctic has been sluggish. If that languidness continues and deepens, it could usher in drastic changes in sea level and weather around the ocean basin. That northward flow is a key part of the larger circulation of water, heat and nutrients around the world’s oceans....

Editor’s note (12/14/16): After weighing the latest science on general anesthetic and sedation exposure in young children, the U.S. FDA is requiring that warnings be added to the labels of these drugs about potential risks for children’s developing brains related to repeated or lengthy exposures. The game is a contemporary of the original Nintendo but it still appeals to today’s teens and lab monkeys alike—which is a boon for neuroscientists. It offers no lifelike graphics....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Pick a number, any number. Then multiply it by 9. Next, add its digits together and keep doing that with each successive number you get until you end up with a single-digit number. Now subtract 5. Find the letter corresponding to your number—where 1 is A, 2 is B, and so on—and think of a European country that begins with that letter....

Take a deep breath. About 20 percent of the air that just moved through your mouth or nostrils is oxygen—the gas much of life on Earth needs to survive. If you had taken that breath about 1.87 billion years ago, however, you would have croaked. Until recently, little was known about oxygen’s abundance in the atmosphere back then, when microbes were the only life on the planet. Now geologists doing fieldwork in northern Canada have confirmed for the first time that oxygen was extremely scarce....

HUMANS, LIKE ALL PRIMATES, are highly visual creatures. Most of the back of our brain is devoted to visual processing, and half of the cortex is involved with sight. In addition, when visual inputs conflict with clues from other senses, vision tends to dominate. This supremacy is why, for example, ventriloquists are so compelling. We see the dummy talking, and we are fooled into hearing the voice coming from it—a case of what scientists call “visual capture....

Barack Obama has promised the future First Daughters a dog, and his eldest, 10-year-old Malia, has zeroed in on a so-called hypoallergenic breed to accommodate her allergies. Her top pick is a goldendoodle, a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle, though the future prez has hinted about adopting a rescue dog, noting that “a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.” We asked Bernadine Cruz, a spokeswoman for the American Veterinary Medical Association, to explain the hypoallergenic concept....

Conventional wisdom in longevity studies used to be that the life span of a creature was roughly proportional to its body mass and heart rate—the big, slow elephant outlives the quick, small mouse. New research, however, presents a more complicated picture. Bats and birds, for instance, are small but tend to live longer than many larger creatures. Moreover, when scientists look within particular species, size does not correlate well with life span, although fast growth is often associated with reduced longevity....

For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places: Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota. Today, close to 70 percent of all antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are routinely fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists....

By Laura ZuckermanSALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Wyoming will challenge a U.S. government ruling that more than one million acres of the western state’s land still legally belongs to two Native American tribes, Governor Matt Mead said on Friday.In a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week, Mead said he has directed the Wyoming attorney general to take aggressive action to overturn the agency’s decision, which he said would adversely affect the state....

AUGUST 1959 WAVES—“Man would like to learn the ways of the waves merely by watching them, but he cannot, because they set him dreaming. Try to count a hundred waves sometime and see. The questions asked by the wave watchers are nonetheless being answered by intensive studies of the sea and by the examination of waves in large experimental tanks. The new knowledge has made it possible to measure the power and to forecast the actions of waves for the welfare of those who live and work on the sea and along its shores....

More than 100 years ago scientists and business leaders feuded over the incipient U.S. electrical grid: Should it rely on alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC)? Both are used to transmit electricity—DC flows steadily in one direction, whereas AC varies direction periodically. Thomas Edison championed DC as the better option—and even publicly electrocuted stray animals with AC to convince the public that it posed a danger. By the early 20th century AC prevailed, however, for technical and economic reasons....

With a few supplies and some careful cutting and pasting, you can build the gravity-defying structure that won the 2010 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Created by Japanese mathematical engineer Kokichi Sugihara, the magnetlike slopes illusion is cleverly designed to make marbles roll “uphill.” It’s a trick of perspective: The slopes actually tilt downward, but they are supported by leaning columns that look straight when viewed from a specific vantage point....

Korei Parker is a boisterous seven-year-old with an infectious smile who improvises her own songs and loves to share them out loud. On an April day two years ago in Memphis, Tenn., where she lives, Korei came home from school with strange bruises. She had bumped into some things, she said—maybe a desk—but not hard enough to cause deep marks. Her mother, Rhonda, called their pediatrician and set up an appointment for later that week....

THE QUESTION POSED in the title of this column may strike many readers as odd. How can medications that have proved helpful in reducing depression also cause suicide? After all, suicide is a tragic complication of some cases of depression. Yet research and clinical observations over the past 40 years have raised concerns that these drugs produce suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and possibly even suicide in a small subset of depressed patients....

The body of the lost and vilified English king Richard III has finally been found. Archaeologists announced today (Feb. 4) that bones excavated from underneath a parking lot in Leicester, “beyond reasonable doubt,” belong to the medieval king. Archaeologists announced the discovery of the skeleton in September. They suspected then they might have Richard III on their hands because the skeleton showed signs of the spinal disorder scoliosis, which Richard III likely had, and because battle wounds on the bones matched accounts of Richard III’s death in the War of the Roses....

The blizzard of January 2016, a crippling storm that buried the U.S. East Coast in snow, could be tied to a weakening ocean current that transfers heat from the tropics to northern climes, according to one leading scientist. Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Potsdam University, thinks that a slowing Gulf Stream may have contributed to excessively warm ocean temperatures along the East Coast. He discussed his theory on the blog RealClimate....

Mona Minkara is a bioengineer at Northeastern University, where she leads a laboratory focused on applying computational modeling to pulmonary research. She is also one of the only blind faculty members in her field. Recently, Minkara embarked on a different kind of experiment. She and 11 other individuals who have mobility, vision or hearing disabilities traveled on a parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation. The mission—which allowed participants to feel weightless but did not actually reach space—was organized by AstroAccess, an initiative dedicated to “advancing disability inclusion in space....

The world’s frozen places are shrinking—and they’re disappearing at faster rates as time goes by. In the 1990s, the world was losing around 800 billion metric tons of ice each year. Today, that number has risen to around 1.2 trillion tons. Altogether, the planet lost a whopping 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017. That’s according to a new study, published today in the journal The Cryosphere, calculating all the ice lost around the globe over the last few decades....