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Have you ever met someone and known right away you’d found a new friend? Was it their smile, their laugh, a twinkle in their eye or maybe a clever joke they told? In truth, the clincher might have been an underappreciated item on your subconscious checklist. As is the case for many mammals, your instant bond may have developed right after the first sniff. Whether we notice it or not, we are constantly probing our surroundings with an olfactory radar just like rodents and nonhuman primates....

Editor’s Note (12/12/19): After this story was published, the author of the study it was based on retracted his paper because of classification errors in the data. Once such errors were initially discovered, the study’s author conducted a thorough examination of a larger sample of cases and found additional classification errors. When the data were reanalyzed, the findings did not replicate the original results. The author apologizes that these errors were not caught before the paper’s publication....

Courts in the United States process huge quantities of scientific information. Every day, they must determine the validity of expertise ranging from acoustics to zoology, in matters ranging from civil slip-and-fall cases to criminal prosecutions that may result in prison sentences or even execution. In federal courts and in virtually all states, judges are expected to be “gatekeepers,” responsible for assessing the validity of the scientific or technical expert testimony offered by the parties....

Besides their successful landing on the moon, the astronauts of Apollo 11 made another historic “first” in July 1969 when Buzz Aldrin radioed a message back to Earth: “Houston, the passive seismometer has been deployed manually.” That seismic experiment was the first ever set on the lunar surface. Several more would be placed during later Apollo missions, and collectively, they gave what remains the best-yet view of our sister satellite’s underworld....

The virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic probably sprang from North American domestic and wild birds, not from the mixing of human and swine viruses. A study published today in Nature reconstructs the origins of influenza A virus and traces its evolution and flow through different animal hosts over two centuries. “The methods we’ve been using for years and years, and which are crucial to figuring out the origins of gene sequences and the timing of those events, are all flawed,” says lead author Michael Worobey, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson....

This month the king of Sweden will honor these 10 people of science for their achievements. Three of them—Luc Montagnier, Yoichiro Nambu and Paul Krugman—have written for Scientific American. Physiology or Medicine: Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, for his discovery that the human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer, and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Luc Montagnier of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention in Paris, for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)....

The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the innumerable ways our health care system can rise to the challenge—and also how we fall short in caring for our most vulnerable patients. In March 2020, as cases of COVID began to climb, I spoke with staffers of the Family Van, a mobile health clinic that provides preventive health services in some of Boston’s most underserved neighborhoods. They emphasized the difficulty of finding multilingual COVID information and how this made it difficult for non-English speaking patients to protect themselves....

In early August, the Trump administration decided to end the 2020 Census count four weeks early. We should worry, because counting, data and measurement are at the core of our democracy. Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution mandates the enumeration of the population. The Founding Fathers knew that counting the people to determine representation was essential for the governed to have a voice in their government. But they did not foresee the fragility of our national measurement system....

Brown rats in New York City may be evolving smaller rows of teeth. Tiny fish across the Eastern US have adapted to thrive in polluted urban waters. Around the globe, living things are evolving differently in cities than in the surrounding countryside. It’s happening in plants: White clover in downtown Toronto is less likely than clover in surrounding rural areas to produce a cyanide that deters herbivores—a trend mirrored in cities in many countries, a new study finds....

Death used to be a simple affair: either a person’s heart was beating, or it was not. That clarity faded years ago when heroic medical technology started to keep hearts beating in­definitely. Although we have had decades to ponder the distinctions between various states of grave physiological failure, if anything our confusion has grown. When is it ethical to turn off a ventilator or remove a feeding tube? When does “life support” lose its meaning?...

To scratch an itch is to scratch many itches: placing nails to skin brings sweet yet short-lived relief because it often instigates another bout of itchiness. The unexpected culprit behind this vicious cycle, new research reveals, is serotonin, the so-called happiness hormone. Scientists thought itch was merely a mild form of pain until 2009, when Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues at the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University in St....

NOBODY KNEW HOW MUCH we needed nothing until we had a number for it. Without zero, negative and imaginary numbers would have no meaning, and it would be impossible to solve quadratic equations, a mainstay of applied math. Without zero to act as a placeholder to distinguish, say, 10 from 100, all but the simplest arithmetic requires an abacus or counting board. “If we didn’t have zero, our system of numbers would be incomplete,” says Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea....

The first time the three children’s brains grew, things went so completely off the rails that they developed severe epilepsy and autism. Now biologists have used stem cells from these patients, who have a devastating disorder called Timothy syndrome, to grow their brains a second time — in miniature, in a lab dish. The scientists reported in Nature on Wednesday that the mini-me cortices reprised the abnormal brain development so faithfully that the research might point the way toward preventing or treating the rare disorder....

Ice and rocks booted from their star during the planet-formation process may serve as the seeds for new worlds in other systems. Stripped from their parent suns, these objects can find themselves passing close by unfamiliar stars. Yet unlike the solar system’s first known interstellar visitor, ‘Oumuamua, which whizzed past our sun in 2018, such bits of interstellar flotsam may settle down to stay—while also catalyzing the formation of new worlds....

We spoke to Palmer about the hard choices her future Earth-dwellers have made, why utopian fiction may stage a comeback over dystopias and whether she would live in world that has eliminated both wars and free speech. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] You’re a Renaissance scholar, so how did you come to write a sci–fi novel? In effect, I think that science fiction and fantasy are much closer as genres to what I spend my time reading as a historian than to what we think of as mainstream fiction....

Biden will sign an executive order in Seattle today to protect forests as a way to soak up carbon emissions and reduce the effects of global warming. The order directs the Interior and Agriculture departments to jointly conduct a survey of the nation’s oldest trees on federal lands and develop a plan to protect them. It will also boost local and federal reforestation efforts in the United States and better manage wildfires....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Parasites are among nature’s most skillful manipulators — and one of their specialties is making hosts perform reckless acts of irrational self-harm. There’s Toxoplasma gondii, which drives mice to seek out cats eager to eat them, and the liver fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, which motivates ants to climb blades of grass, exposing them to cows and sheep hungry for a snack. There’s Spinochordodes tellinii, the hairworm that compels crickets to drown themselves so the worm can access the water it needs to breed....

Eleanor writes: “Can you comment on the benefits of prunes to stimulate bone growth? There are a lot of sites promoting prunes as a scientifically proven way to ward off osteoporosis. I’d love it if you would give these claims a critical look.” There has been quite a bit of research done on dried plums (aka prunes) and their effects on bone health. Some of the results have been quite impressive....

Cats are notorious for their indifference to humans: almost any owner will testify to how readily these animals ignore us when we call them. But a new study indicates domestic cats do recognize their own names—even if they walk away when they hear them. Atsuko Saito, a behavioral scientist now at Sophia University in Tokyo, previously showed that cats can recognize their owner’s voice. In her latest study, which involved 78 cats from Japanese households and a “cat café,” she homed in on responses to their names....

By Nic Fleming of Nature magazineThe movement of cholesterol in and out of cells takes much longer than previously thought, according to new measurements of the phenomenon in artificial cell membranes. The findings could lead to a better understanding of the movement of cholesterol in the body and might someday help improve treatments for some serious neurological diseases.Most people worry about the negative effects of too much cholesterol, but this lipid is essential for cells....