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The giant asteroid Vesta may possess ice buried under its surface, a new study finds. Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, a 330-mile-wide (530 kilometer) titan in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that is sometimes visible to the naked eye on Earth. The only larger asteroid is Ceres, which is also classified as a dwarf planet. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited Vesta from 2011 to 2012 to learn more about the asteroid and, potentially, the composition of the solar system....

Say you saw something unusual—such as a blue strawberry or a purple cat. You’d engage with it more, hoping to make sense of it. Psychologists have recognized this tendency for many years. Even infants stare longer at an object they find surprising. We have found that people will also use more words to describe something that defies their expectations for others rather than conforming to those expectations. We call this phenomenon the “surprised elaboration effect....

Forty-eight hours into an attempt to muscle a gusher of oil back into the deep-sea well from which it spewed, the flow of petroleum and gas refused to slow. Screen after screen in a special room at BP’s headquarters in Houston showed the oil gushing undiminished, silently witnessed underwater by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). The room—called the HIVE, for Highly Immersive Visualization Environment—was hardly the only place at BP buzzing with activity....

On Monday, it became illegal to talk about gender identity or sexual orientation in hundreds of classrooms throughout the state of Florida. This law is one of historic numbers of proposed laws and measures targeting trans youth in Texas, Arizona, Alabama, and more than one dozen other U.S. states. Tens of thousands of transgender children and teenagers currently live in states where lawmakers seek to exclude them from playing sports, eliminate mention of people like them in schools, or criminalize transgender-affirming medical care, and the introduction of these measures come despite growing social approval of transgender Americans....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Many common over-the-counter lice remedies are no longer effective, according to a study that has some doctors recommending prescription remedies instead. Two non-prescription options in - permethrin (Nix) and synergized pyrethrins (Rid) - can no longer keep lice away, said Dr. William Ryan, one of the study authors. “For decades they have been widely and easily available and have been used over and over, and it is inevitable that resistance will emerge when that happens,” said Ryan, former head of development at Sklice, a maker of prescription lice lotion....

The Head Lines section of Scientific American Mind’s May/June issue mentioned the following articles in brief. Click on the links to learn more about them. Our ability to metabolize alcohol goes back millions of years, according to a genetic study. Athletic performance is strongly influenced by our circadian rhythms—early birds often play better during daytime games. Professional football players who started the sport before age 12 were found to be more impaired in memory and intelligence than those who started at an older age....

“If I have seen further,” claimed Isaac Newton, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The key to comprehending such amazing vistas by all researchers is science’s incrementalist tradition of building phenomenon-explaining grand theories finding by finding as facts accumulate across decades of previous research. In the past dozen years or so scientists have increasingly turned toward “open access” (OA) publication, where full-text articles, research results or complete journal issues are freely available online, rather than accessible only to subscribers who pay for a subscription, as a way to make these metaphorical giants’ shoulders more widely accessible....

For all the delights and horrors human vision provides, it has only one way of collecting information about life: cells in the retina register photons of light for the brain to interpret into images. When it comes to seeing structures too small for the eye to resolve, ones that reflect too few photons for the eye to detect, microscopy must lead the way. The images displayed here, honored in the 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition for both their technical merit and their aesthetics, represent the state of the art in light micro­scopy for biological research....

For the first time, researchers have cured the deadly neurological disease sleeping sickness using pills instead of a combination of intravenous infusions and pills. The investigators presented the results from final clinical trials on October 17at the European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health in Antwerp, Belgium, providing hope that the treatment will help to eliminate the malady within a decade. The oral therapy — called fexinidazole — cured 91% of people with severe sleeping sickness, compared with 98% who were treated with the combination therapy....

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: How did you become interested in the neuroscience of reading? STANISLAS DEHAENE: One of my longtime interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose on our children’s brains. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. Reading raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact....

It may be one of the greatest scientific mysteries yet to be solved: What is consciousness? It’s an explanatory gap that still plagues neuroscientists—that is, what forges the relationship between the brain and the subjective sensations we call “feelings” or “awareness?” In a special report in this issue, we include several fresh takes on what gives humans, at the very least, consciousness. In one article, Peter Carruthers sits down with editor Steve Ayan to explain his hypothesis that consciousness is mostly an illusion (see “There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought”); the thoughts and feelings that arise in your mind are a result of unconscious mental processes operating behind the scenes....

Rarely does a speaker at a conference have to abandon a talk because he’s seasick. But I saw it happen in August on a Scientific American/Bright Horizons cruise around the U. K. and Ireland, as our ship hit rough seas. The nauseated narrator finished his talk a few days later in calmer waters. And for the porpoises of this ocean-going column, all you need to know is that he was not Robert Sapolsky....

What does it feel like to be both alive and dead? That question irked and inspired Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in the 1960s. He was frustrated by the paradoxes arising from the vagaries of quantum mechanics—the theory governing the microscopic realm that suggests, among many other counterintuitive things, that until a quantum system is observed, it does not necessarily have definite properties. Take his fellow physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment in which a cat is trapped in a box with poison that will be released if a radioactive atom decays....

Dear EarthTalk: Who are the “Clean Air Ambassadors” and what are they trying to accomplish?— Brenda Coughlin, Pittsburgh Clean Air Ambassadors are everyday folks from across the U.S. who have committed to speaking up for everyone’s right to breathe clean, healthy air. The effort is part of the “50 States United for Healthy Air” campaign, a joint endeavor of Earthjustice, the American Nurses Association, the Hip Hop Caucus, the National Council of Churches and Physicians for Social Responsibility....

One of the two legal definitions of death is irreversible cessation of all brain function, commonly known as “brain death.” (The other is the halting of circulatory and respiratory function.) It was widely believed that brain cells undergo rapid—and irreversible—degeneration immediately after death. But a striking new study, published Wednesday in Nature, suggests that much functionality can be preserved or restored—even hours after death. A research team, based primarily at the Yale School of Medicine, managed to revive some functions in the whole brains of pigs slaughtered four hours previously and to sustain them for a further six hours....

An attempt to win a small court battle this week has put Mountain Dew in peril of losing a much larger war. PepsiCo, the soft drink’s parent company, defended itself against a man who claimed he found a dead mouse in a can of the citrus soda. Experts called in by PepsiCo’s lawyers offered a stomach-churning explanation for why it couldn’t be true: the Mountain Dew would have dissolved the mouse, turning it into a “jelly-like substance,” had it been in the can of fluid from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff opened it, 15 months later....

With cell therapy, clinicians are keenly aware of the point of no return. “Once my thumb hits the end of the syringe, the cells are in the body and we can’t get them back out,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a member of Eureka Therapeutics’ scientific advisory board. “We are with the patient on the rollercoaster until the ride is done.” Accordingly, there is a great deal of interest in developing the next-generation T cell therapy—built from genetically engineered T cells—that can deliver a response that is aggressive and controlled....

This year at least 31,000 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of their body, such as bones and lymph nodes. Most of them will be treated by highly skilled and experienced oncologists, who have access to 52 drugs approved to treat this condition. Yet eventually more than three quarters of these men will succumb to their illness. Cancers that have spread, known as metastatic disease, are rarely curable....

This scene—repeated dozens of times with various plants on the Hawaiian island’s tropical cliffsides as part of a new study—shows how drones can help scientists pluck rare and endangered plants from spots that would otherwise be dangerous, if not impossible, for humans to reach. Collecting samples is often necessary to better understand the plights of these species, and how to save them. “It’s a fabulous development and use of technology to get a lot more information than a person trudging around,” says Warren Wagner, a research botanist at the Smithsonian Institution....

To effectively protect a species, conservationists need key pieces of information: where it lives and what threats it faces. Yet scientists lack these basic data for thousands of species around the world, making it impossible to know how they’re faring—let alone to take steps to ensure their survival. For these “data deficient” species, a new study published in Communications Biology on August 4 suggests that no news is probably not good news....