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A mop of light brown hair shakes as a slender nine-year-old boy named Jack bangs furiously at his keyboard. Jack’s eyes are fixed on a clock with six hands, which denote the month, day, hour, minute, second and 60th of a second. As soon as he types 10:28:2:14:56:32, a new clock appears, and he hammers out another set of numbers. An affable 14-year-old student named Marti had just taught me the exercise, and I guessed I could have solved one of these clocks in a few minutes....

Editor’s Note (10/22/20): The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved remdesivir today for adults and children 12 years and older who weigh at least 40 kilograms. It is the first approved treatment for COVID-19 in the U.S. An experimental drug—and one of the world’s best hopes against COVID-19—could shorten the time to recovery from coronavirus infection, according to the largest and most rigorous clinical trial of the compound. The experimental drug, called remdesivir, interferes with replication of some viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the current pandemic....

Pomegranate juice enhances memory: Probable. Many studies support the connection, including a recent brain-imaging study that showed that volunteers with age-related memory issues who consumed this antioxidant-rich drink performed better on memory tasks than those who drank a red placebo drink. Red wine staves off cognitive decline: Possible. A growing body of research continues to support the health benefits of drinking wine. One study, which followed a group of men and women over seven years, found that those who consumed moderate quantities of red wine performed better on cognitive tests than those who tended to abstain from alcohol or who consumed beer or liquor....

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine A gas cloud that is careering towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way may be the visible trail of a planet-forming disk surrounding a young, low-mass star, astrophysicists propose. Modeling work by Ruth Murray-Clay and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests that planets can form within the powerful gravitational field of a giant black hole....

Night is falling on the northern Sea of Cortez. It is eerily still. The terns and pelicans have gone to roost, and the dolphins no longer crisscross the water by the hundreds. The sea lions have hauled out for the evening. The usually temperamental water, the color of chocolate milk, is smooth as glass. Sundown is the best time to be on the upper Gulf of California, as the sea is also known, wedged against the Mexican desert, close to the U....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Every day the U.S. imports $1 billion worth of oil. Yet, the nation is no closer to weaning itself from such foreign oil than it was 40 years ago when President Carter called energy reform the “moral equivalent of war.” Enter ARPA–e, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, started in 2009 and tasked with taking scientific findings on alternative energy and turning them into deployable technologies. “The future of the U....

Key concepts Engineering Physics Force Speed Design Introduction Do you play or watch a sport where you use an implement to move a ball? Golf, baseball, tennis—there are many different sports where players use something other than their feet or hands to move a ball. In this activity you will design, build and test your own sports equipment using recycled materials. Background How many sports can you think of where the athletes use something to hit a ball or a puck?...

The status of women in science, the nature of black holes and the role of cattle domestication in human prehistory were the topics of some of our favorite long-form pieces of 2013. Taxonomy: The spy who loved frogs To track the fate of threatened species, a young scientist must follow the jungle path of a herpetologist who led a secret double life. 11 September 2013 Brain decoding: Reading minds By scanning blobs of brain activity, scientists may be able to decode people’s thoughts, their dreams and even their intentions....

In the not-too-distant future broadband speeds will be measured in gigabits per second rather than megabits per second, the former being 1,000 times faster than the latter. Such blazing fast data transmission will vastly improve the quality of streaming high-definition video, playing online video games, participating in video conferences and using voice over IP, all of which struggle with latency at today’s average data transfer rates, which range from less than one megabit per second (Mbps) to 10 Mbps (pdf)....

Editor’s Note (8/29/17): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published August 11, 2017, in light of claims by South Korean and Japanese officials that North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island, early Tuesday morning. The missile flew about 2,700 kilometers before landing in the Pacific Ocean to the east of Japan. This was the third time North Korea has fired a projectile over Japan since 1998....

NASA’s newest Mars rover is settling nicely into its new home. The Perseverance rover landed inside Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, on a mission to hunt for evidence of past microbial life and collectsamples for future return to Earth. For the past month, the mission team has been checking out Perseverance’s seven science instruments and its various subsystems, and the rover has jumped through every hoop. “So far, all of this has been going exceedingly well,” Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said on Tuesday (March 16) during a webcast presentation at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC)....

Special Report: Pollution, Poverty and People of Color Communities across the US face environmental injustices NORTH RICHMOND, Calif. – From the house where he was born, Henry Clark can stand in his back yard and see plumes pouring out of one of the biggest oil refineries in the United States. As a child, he was fascinated by the factory on the hill, all lit up at night like the hellish twin of a fairy tale city....

Artist Peter Trusler and paleontologists Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas H. Rich team up to explain the process of reconstructing scenes of prehistoric life from fossils of long-gone beasts. Paul A. Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, explores why many parents fear that vaccines will cause autism and other disorders and are therefore forgoing vaccination in increasing numbers....

Ten Republican attorneys general yesterday asked a federal court to swiftly block President Biden from raising a key metric for greenhouse gases. In a motion for preliminary injunction, the red states urged the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to prevent Biden’s interim social cost of carbon from taking effect across the federal government. “Plaintiff States are substantially likely to prevail on the merits of their claims and preliminary injunctive relief is necessary to avoid imminent and substantial injuries to their sovereign, quasi-sovereign and proprietary interests,” the motion says....

One day in spring 2018 astrophysics professor Jason Wright gave his students a tall order: make a substantial, novel contribution to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)—in a semester. That kind of research is usually reserved for Ph.D. dissertations, the culmination of years of toil and turmoil. But Wright was asking the students in one of his classes at Pennsylvania State University—the school’s first ever graduate course in SETI—to conduct such work because it seemed possible: in the way that 19th-century naturalists could simply trek around the tropics and discover new species, budding SETI scientists still have plenty of low-hanging (but juicy) fruit to pluck....

The 2020 United States election and the ensuing riot are further evidence—as if we needed more—of how deeply divided the country is today. The divisions are regional, ideological, cultural, moral and, some say, intractable. A team of prominent scientists recently warned of the dangers of a new foundational threat to the republic: political sectarianism, or the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with a political group and against another. In response to this enormous divide, politicians have pushed for greater unity and a return to the bipartisanship of the past....

Matthew Nagle lost the use of his limbs following a knife wound that severed his spine in 2001. But in 2004 the 25-year-old regained the ability to transform thought into action with the help of a new, implanted sensor. A similar sensor had previously enabled monkeys to move a computer cursor simply by thinking it across the screen but this marks the first time such a device has been demonstrated in humans....

Rick Perry, President-elect Donald Trump’s apparent choice to become U.S. Department of Energy secretary, was known for backing oil and gas development during his 14 years as Texas governor. But Perry also championed efforts to have his state store nuclear waste—an issue that will likely occupy a big part of his agenda if he is nominated and confirmed. The department—which Perry as a 2012 presidential candidate promised to abolish, although he famously forgot its name during a debate—is charged with the politically volatile process of developing an underground repository for highly radioactive spent fuel from commercial power plants at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas....

In the play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett writes: “What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.” What Beckett means by “Godot” is debatable. Throughout my career as an astronomer, I have waited for many “Godots,” including observational tests for my theoretical predictions....

In the beginning…. (Credit: Screenshot by Remember the dot) The big story in The New York Times on November 20, 1985, concerned Hurricane Kate’s advance as it smashed into northern Cuba and the Florida Keys before barreling north to threaten the Gulf Coast. But another big story – for the technology world – was about to unfold thousands of miles away in Las Vegas, where the Comdex trade show was getting under way....