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To glimpse the oldest light in the universe, simply tune an old television between channels: the tiny specs dancing on the screen result from the antenna being bombarded relentlessly by photons that were emitted shortly after the big bang, some 13.8 billion years ago. These photons fly uniformly through space from all directions, with an average temperature of 2.7 kelvins (°455 degrees Fahrenheit), composing a cloud of radiation called the cosmic microwave background (CMB)....

Donald Wilson, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of the 2006 book Learning to Smell: Olfactory Perception from Neurobiology to Behavior, sniffs around for an answer. In 2004 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel for their research showing that there is a huge family of genes that encode proteins called olfactory receptors. Their findings, published in 1991, opened many doors toward understanding the function of the olfactory system....

By Meredith WadmanCan the disease-causing capabilities of an organism be predicted from its DNA? This was a key question faced by a 13-member committee of the National Research Council (NRC). It was trying determine what it would take to develop a government system that spots bioweapons in the making by screening the genetic sequences routinely ordered from commercial suppliers of synthetic DNA.This week, the committee offered its answer in a 187-page report commissioned by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)....

Editor’s Note (06/22/18): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published November 28, 2017, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that law enforcement must first seek a warrant before obtaining historical cell phone location records from phone companies. A case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will tell a lot about how well the country’s privacy laws can protect people in the digital age. Carpenter v. United States specifically pits the privacy of information that wireless devices share with their service providers—the towers or “cell sites” devices connect to, the phone numbers they call and answer, and the time and length of those calls—against law enforcement’s authority to retrieve that data without a warrant....

Rain continues to fall (as it has for the past month) in record-breaking amounts across the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, swelling the two waterways and their tributaries. As some residents evacuate and others await word on whether they must flee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering its increasingly limited options for containing a major catastrophe already washing away homes and farmland. Most of those options depend on the volume of water and the length of time that water stresses the man-made infrastructure of levees, dikes and spillways built along the Mississippi....

Editor’s Note (10/12/21): This story from July on the use of “race norming” in the National Football League (NFL) is being republished following the resignation of Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden. Reports published in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times indicated that Gruden used racist, homophobic and misogynistic language in numerous e-mails dating back to 2010. In one e-mail from 2011, Gruden used an anti-Black trope to denounce DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association....

Editor’s note: This article originally was published March 4, 2009. We are re-posting it because thundersnow was observed in New York City during the storm that hit the East Coast in the past few days. It’s been more than 30 years—during the Blizzard of 1978 to be exact—since Neil Stuart saw “thundersnow,” a weather phenomenon featuring the unusual combination of thunder, lightning and snow. The National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist was 10 years old, living near Boston....

When a comet dips near the sun, it’s a spectacular and rare sight from here on Earth. Our solar system is brimming with these small chunks of ice, though, orbiting a great distance from the sun in the far-out Oort Cloud. Given comets’ ubiquity here, scientists figure that other planetary systems likely have them as well. Astronomers from the Main Astronomical Observatory (MAO) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv recently published a discovery of five new exocomets—comets orbiting a star other than the sun—in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)....

Travel across the galaxy with Ewine van Dishoeck to peek in on a stellar nursery. Van Dishoeck won the 2018 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for her work uncovering the chemistry of interstellar clouds, the vast areas of gas and dust between stars where new solar systems are born. Her research has revealed how molecules like water are created and destroyed in space. She demonstrated that the raw ingredients for life as we know it are not only present, but bountiful....

Mariska Hargitay, the 44-year-old actress who plays a tough but empathetic detective on Law & Order SVU, was diagnosed this week with a partially collapsed lung, also known as pneumothorax. The treatable condition can be caused by either lung disease or an injury that allows air to fill up the chest cavity, preventing the lung from properly inflating. Hollywood gossip site TMZ says this is the second time that Hargitay’s lung collapsed in the past month....

“I go with my gut feelings,” says investor Judith Williams. Sure, you might think, “so do I,”— if the choice is between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. But Williams is dealing with real money in the five and six figures. Williams is one of the lions on the program The Lions’ Den, a German television show akin to Shark Tank. She and other participants invest their own money in business ideas presented by contestants....

She was a stray mongrel picked up off the streets of Moscow, and her handlers called her by several names before someone in the budding Soviet space program tagged her as Laika. On Halloween of 1957 she was bundled inside Sputnik 2. Three days later—just one month after Sputnik 1 was launched and started the space race—she became the first living creature in history to leave Earth. That distinction was tragically brief because Laika died only a few hours later, apparently from a combination of stress and overheating, but she lasted long enough to suggest that humans, too, might survive weightlessness and find a future in space....

It’s tough to be a balloon over Antarctica. Most don’t last more than a few weeks, but the Super-TIGER cosmic ray detector has been floating over the South Pole for 46 days and counting. The Super-TIGER mission officially shattered the record for longest-running balloon-borne experiment in Antarctica on Saturday (Jan. 19), scientists said. The project launched from the southernmost continent’s Ross Ice Shelf on Dec. 9, and has already surpassed the previous record of 42 days, set by another cosmic ray detector, Cream I, which flew in the winter of 2004 to 2005....

In 1987 only 18 black-footed ferrets were known to exist, but thanks to captive breeding and intensive management, the animals are a few hundred strong now. Yet like many species that bounce back from such small numbers, all the individuals are basically half-siblings—genetic near clones, with the same susceptibility to hereditary health problems, to potential pathogens or to environmental changes that could lead to population collapse. In an effort to boost the ferrets’ genetic variability and odds of long-term survival, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is considering something extreme: a plan to reintroduce DNA that was lost to the population but still exists in long-dead specimens stored in zoos and museums....

Few of us have not paused at one time or another to marvel at the beauty of a soap bubble. The iridescent, evanescent orbs, which can persist for minutes before vanishing in an instant, have captivated bubble-blowing children and pensive bathtub recliners alike. They have also caught the eye of physicists and mathematicians, who have strived for hundreds of years to understand and predict the properties of bubbles at a fundamental level....

By K.S. Jayaraman Time is running out for an Indo-Australian plan to join the US Laser Inferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) network. The detector, to be installed at Gingin in Western Australia, is scheduled to begin collecting data in 2017 – but only if the two countries can commit the required funding by October 2011.Predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as part of his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time caused by objects moving with accelerated, non-symmetrical motion....

For nearly a month Iranians have been fiercely and relentlessly protesting against their government. Sparked by the death of a 22-year-old woman in the custody of the country’s “morality police,” who arrested her for “inappropriate attire,” the demonstrations have been led by young women who refuse to accept restrictive laws such as hijab requirements. Authorities have been suppressing the protests with violence, as well as less tangible techniques. Amir Rashidi is director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, an Austin, Tex....

Hospitals and community health centers are cornerstones of our communities. At our clinics at AltaMed Health Services in Los Angeles and Orange counties and Stanford Medicine in the San Francisco Bay Area, we treat hundreds of thousands of people per year, many of whom are young, disabled, low-income and/or people of color. Far too many of the people we serve are disengaged in democracy, and because policy at all levels of government shapes our health, this has to change....

Physicists are hatching a plan to give a popular but elusive dark-matter candidate a last chance to reveal itself. For decades, physicists have hypothesized that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are the strongest candidate for dark matter — the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the Universe’s mass. But several experiments have failed to find evidence for WIMPs, meaning that, if they exist, their properties are unlike those originally predicted....

Is it ethical to use a dead man’s sperm to father a child? Experts are calling for a consensus on policies surrounding this question, which currently vary widely across the country. It has been possible for a few decades to obtain a man’s sperm after his death and use it to fertilize an egg. Today, requests for postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR) are growing, yet the United States has no guidelines governing the retrieval of sperm from deceased men, said Dr....