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KIGALI (Reuters) - A plague epidemic in Madagascar has killed 124 people since August in an outbreak that has hit the island’s two main cities the hardest, the authorities said on Wednesday. Plague is endemic in Madagascar, but the outbreak that has caused 1,192 suspected cases since August is especially worrying because it started earlier in the season than usual and has hit urban rather than rural areas. In addition, two thirds of the cases are of the pneumonic plague, the deadliest form of the disease....

Day care drop-offs and work deadlines may combine with financial woes to put a literal strain on your ability to think. New work by a team of psychologists and economists supports the notion that humans have limited bandwidth for decision-making. And the capacity to make choices can take a hit once that cognitive load becomes too heavy. The research, based on experimental data collected on people with varying levels of self-reported income in rural India and a New Jersey shopping mall, concludes simply that at least short-term financial stress can max out our mental reserves on par with the level of impairment that results from pulling an all-nighter....

In his best-selling essay entitled “Guns,” Stephen King contrasts a mass killer’s school yearbook picture, “in which the guy pretty much looks like anybody,” and the police mug shot of someone who looks “like your worst nightmare.” Do criminals look different from noncriminals? Are there patterns that science can discover to enable society to identify potential felons before they break the law or to rehabilitate them after? University of Pennsylvania criminologist and psychiatrist Adrian Raine attempts to answer these and related questions in his book The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime (Pantheon, 2013)....

A group of researchers from the US, South Korea and Germany has developed a liquid bandage that can map oxygen concentrations in skin wounds and burns. Damaged tissue requires a good blood supply to provide the regenerating cells with glucose and oxygen. Lack of either can lead to chronic sores, which means measuring oxygen levels is essential for wound treatment. However, ‘current methods to assess wounds are either very subjective [such as sight or smell] or require highly specialised staff or equipment,’ says Conor Evans from the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, US....

Driven by an explosion in photovoltaics, the U.S. solar sector has emerged “from a relatively small contributor to the nation’s total electric capacity into a one of comparative significance,” the Energy Information Administration reported this week in its latest Electricity Monthly Update. Since 2010, EIA said, U.S. solar capacity increased 418 percent from 2,326 megawatts, accounting for 0.2 percent of total U.S. electric generation, to today’s 12,057 MW, or 1.13 percent of U....

Tucked away in Tokyo’s trendiest fashion district—two floors above a pricey French patisserie, and alongside nail salons and jewelers—the clinicians at Helene Clinic are infusing people with stem cells to treat cardiovascular disease. Smartly dressed female concierges with large bows on their collars shuttle Chinese medical tourists past an aquarium and into the clinic’s examination rooms. In a typical treatment at Helene, clinicians take skin biopsies from behind the ear and extract stem cells from the fat tissue within....

The nose has long been viewed as a disorganized sensory organ, its odor receptors strewn about with very little rhyme or reason. A study in Nature Neuroscience, published online September 25, challenges that notion. It suggests that odor receptors are grouped by the pleasantness of the odors they detect. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The findings are creating “more than just a shake-up” among researchers who study olfaction, says Marion Frank from the University of Connecticut Health Center Graduate School....

We humans are a strange bunch. We have self-awareness and yet often act on impulses that remain hidden. We were forged in adversity but live in a world of plenty. Who are we? What is to become of us? To these age-old questions, science has in recent years brought powerful tools and reams of data. We know, for instance, that three million years ago, a group of primates known as the australopithecines was walking capably on two legs—the better to navigate the African savanna—and yet still had long arms suited to life in the trees....

For all the magnificent diversity of life on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life as we know it” exists. All these organisms are based on nucleic acids—DNA and RNA—and proteins, working together more or less as described by the so-called central dogma of molecular biology: DNA stores information that is transcribed into RNA, which then serves as a template for producing a protein....

HUMANS enjoy stereoscopic vision (a). As we mentioned in our essay last issue, because our eyes are separated horizontally images we see in the two eyes are slightly different and the difference is proportional to the relative depth (b). The visual areas in the brain measure these differences, and we experience the result as stereo—what we all have enjoyed as children playing with View-Master toys. Visual-image processing from the eye to the brain happens in stages....

Why is it that I seem to think better when I walk or exercise? —Emily Lenneville, Baltimore Justin Rhodes, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, responds: After being cooped up inside all day, your afternoon stroll may leave you feeling clearheaded. This sensation is not just in your mind. A growing body of evidence suggests we think and learn better when we walk or do another form of exercise....

In 1950 the American Political Science Association issued a report expressing concern that Americans exhibited an insufficient degree of political polarization. What a difference a new millennium makes. As we approach 2020’s Election Day, the U.S. political landscape has become a Grand Canyon separating blue and red Americans. So why is this happening? In a review of studies published today in the journal Science, 15 prominent researchers from across the country characterize a new type of polarization that has gripped the U....

“I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into taking the bite, I taste only shame,” writes Jena Morrow in her memoir, Hollow: An Unpolished Tale (Moody Publishers, 2010). In her book Morrow recounts the pain and suffering she endured as she struggled to overcome the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Morrow’s silent battle echoes those of the 0....

Artificial intelligence could soon help screen for Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing writing. A team from IBM and Pfizer says it has trained AI models to spot early signs of the notoriously stealthy illness by looking at linguistic patterns in word usage. Other researchers have already trained various models to look for signs of cognitive impairments, including Alzheimer’s, by using different types of data, such as brain scans and clinical test results....

The chemistry skills and know-how needed to extract pigment from a plant or insect and create a solid dye date back some 4,000 years to ancient Egypt, new research concludes. Previous analysis had only confirmed such techniques to about 1200 B.C. Analyzing pigment has been an important way of identifying and studying artwork for decades. Chemical profiles of colored material can tell a detailed story about when, where, how, and sometimes even by whom a piece of art was made....

Scientists may have just snapped baby photos of an alien Earth. The planet-forming disk around a nearby sunlike star called TW Hydrae sports a gap at about the same distance from the star as Earth lies from the sun, new images captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile reveal. “Previous studies with optical and radio telescopes confirm that this star hosts a prominent disk with features that strongly suggest planets are beginning to coalesce,” study lead author Sean Andrews, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement....

Combining standard field biology techniques with a Web-accessible robotic camera positioned at the Welder Wildlife Refuge in Sinton, Tex., scientists and amateur ornithologists are trying to determine whether the sighting of subtropical birds well north of their natural habitat is proof of climate change and a profound shift in wildlife migration patterns. Amateur observers have witnessed—via the CONE (Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments) Welder Web site—the green jay, great kiskadee and white-tipped dove cavorting north of their known breeding areas in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, about 160 miles (255 kilometers) from Sinton....

Second in a series. Click here for part 1. In the fall of 1978, Steven Chu joined Bell Laboratories for what was supposed to be an enlightenment tour, a broadening of his horizons, before heading back to a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. Chu found the atmosphere “electric,” and he never returned to the university. “We felt like the ‘Chosen Ones,’ with no obligation to do anything except the research we loved best,” he wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiography....

Al Gore sought to buttress Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s candidacy yesterday by describing her as an environmental champion who can safely steer the world away from a dangerous climate cliff that threatens to fuel storms and handicap the economy. The former vice president’s appearance at the side of Clinton in Miami marked an effort by the campaign to energize younger voters to avoid the kind of razor-thin loss that Gore experienced in Florida 16 years ago, an outcome that tipped the election into the hands of President George W....

Archaeologists excavating a cave in the mountains of central Mexico have unearthed evidence that people occupied the area more than 30,000 years ago—suggesting that humans arrived in North America at least 15,000 years earlier than thought. The discovery, which includes hundreds of ancient stone tools, is backed up by a fresh statistical analysis that incorporates data from other sites. But the conclusion has stirred controversy among some researchers. “When I see a claim being made that is so dramatic, then the evidence has to be there to substantiate the claim,” says archaeologist Kurt Rademaker at Michigan State University in East Lansing....