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Researchers have long known that sleep is important for forming and retaining memories, but how this process works remains a mystery. A study published in March suggests that strange electrical activity, involving neurons that fire backward, plays a role. Neuronal activity typically requires sensory input—for example, a taste or smell—that gets received by neurons’ dendrites and then transmitted as an electrochemical message to other cells via long axons. Yet the brain is mostly closed off to sensory input during sleep....

London, at an hour that made Rosalind glad she’d nicked her brother’s black cloak instead of wearing her scarlet one. The factory alongside her had quit belching smoke for the night, but it would start again soon. A noise caused her to draw back against the brick wall. Glancing up, she gasped. An oblong hulk was drifting across the sky. The darkness obscured the details, but she didn’t need to see; a brass-colored lock would be painted across the side....

If you had to pick a favorite microbe, a good candidate would be Saccharomyces cerevisiae, better known as brewer’s yeast, which transforms grape juice into wine, grain mash into beer and dough into bread. Over the past few decades scientists have hacked the yeast’s genome to make it produce less delectable but arguably more important substances, including hormones like insulin and drugs like opioids. Now it is churning out cannabinoids, the compounds found in marijuana....

Nigerian health officials won’t have to rely on flawed, decade-old census data when they plan deliveries of the measles vaccine next year. Instead, they will have access to what may be the most detailed and up-to-date population map ever produced for a developing country. Created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, and delivered to Nigerian officials on May 1, the map is based on a detailed analysis of buildings in satellite imagery and more than 2,000 on-the-ground neighbourhood surveys....

MORE THAN 500 brands of psychotherapy exist, with new ones springing up on a nearly monthly basis. Although a handful of these neophyte treatments have been tested in scientific studies, it is anybody’s guess whether the others actually work. Over the past 15 years or so, one of these new kids on the therapy block has stood out from the pack for the remarkable attention it has received from the media, practitioners and mental health consumers....

The Greater New York City region has done good work in the years since Superstorm Sandy to consider storm-related flooding, but a new report by the Regional Plan Association found that the more pernicious threat of sea-level rise needs more attention. The report breaks sea-level rise into “what-if” scenarios for 1-, 3- and 6-foot sea-level rise increments in the tri-state region. It finds that many of the major resilience policies, plans and projects under development fall short of addressing the long-term, existential threat of permanent flooding from sea-level rise....

At the end of June the World Health Organization declared that the 10th outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo was officially over, after two years and 2,287 deaths. It was the latest severe outbreak and most likely not the last. In this riveting first-person account of the even deadlier 2013–2016 outbreak in West Africa, Farmer, the renowned American physician and founder of Partners in Health, lays out both an intimate look and a 10,000-foot view of the dire public health situation there....

There was almost a religious reverence in the hush that descended upon the audience at the beginning of a Stephen Hawking lecture. Typically, every seat was taken, and if the fire marshals weren’t a force to be reckoned with, there were large clots of people near the exits and in the aisles, craning their necks to get their first view of the physicist. And as he wheeled out onto stage, the audience was palpably awed....

I have always been captivated by science’s seemingly inexhaustible ability to produce new findings. And my favorite insights often require some mental time travel and also involve mysteries surrounding objects we think we know well. This month’s cover story offers a bit of intellectual candy in providing both. In “The Secret Life of the Sun,” journalist Rebecca Boyle winds back the cosmic clock to our friendly neighborhood star’s younger years. In that earlier era, we learn, our sun had a “mother,” “aunts” and “uncles”—even “siblings”—now residing elsewhere in the Milky Way....

In the Pacific, off the Galápagos Islands’ coast, a clever ploy leads to a hearty feast. Sea lions cannot typically catch massive yellowfin tuna—which can swim at speeds of around 40 miles per hour. But a few fishermen recently reported a peculiar hunting behavior among the Galápagos dwellers: Using teamwork, the sea lions have been chasing and trapping the tuna in coves along the archipelago’s ragged coast. Photographer Tui De Roy, a Galápagos resident, recently captured this behavior in a series of striking images....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The 2016 American presidential campaign has renewed concerns about the specter of violence in American electoral politics. The campaign has been marked by tense—and occasionally violent—altercations between supporters and critics of Republican nominee Donald Trump. Trump encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, and even suggested he would pay the legal fees of followers who assaulted his critics....

I know it sounds strange, but I feel very grateful to a database. It saved me from a lifelong fear of dropping dead of a heart attack. The database is known as ExAC, and I had my first experience with it after I got my genome sequenced. For a few weeks, I brought it from one lab to another to ask scientists to help me make sense of it. Their analysis brought up a doozy of a finding....

1 SUMQAYIT, AZERBAIJAN—This area gained the dubious distinction of landing atop the Blacksmith Institute’s list of the world’s most polluted sites. Yet another heir to the toxic legacy of Soviet industry, this city of 275,000 bears heavy metal, oil and chemical contamination from its days as a center of chemical production. As a result, locals suffer cancer rates 22 to 51 percent higher than their countrymen, and their children suffer from a host of genetic defects, ranging from mental retardation to bone disease....

The global emergency triggered with the rapid spread of Zika has caused countries around the world to join forces in order to improve the knowledge of the virus and its processes. Two studies recently published in Cell showed, in experiments conducted on female mice, how Zika is able to cross the placenta, infect the fetus and cause microcephaly—insufficient development of the skull—in their offspring. The first one, in Cell, led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, establishes the first models on how Zika spreads from a pregnant mouse to her fetus....

To travel westward across the U.S. is to experience a striking landscape metamorphosis. Stately hardwood trees give way to squat shrubs, verdant cornfields to brown wheat and lush grasslands to cacti and creosote bush. The air dries out and the land is often parched. This rather abrupt shift from the humid east to arid west occurs along a border that slices neatly through the Canadian province of Manitoba, then the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and into eastern Mexico....

What’s this guy thinking? Does he know what I know? Most of us develop the ability to make inferences about what other people might be thinking, the hallmark of “theory of mind,” at age four. Scientists have long known that the acquisition of language plays a role in this process, but so far it had been unclear whether social experience could substitute for it. A new study suggests it cannot....

Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cédric Villani Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 (($26)) Villani, a mathematician at the University of Lyon in France, won a Fields Medal—akin to a Nobel Prize—in 2010 for a new theorem describ-ing a phenomenon known as Landau damping that occurs in plasmas (the most energetic state of matter). By sharing conversations with colleagues, e-mail chains with his main collaborator, and anecdotes of insights that arrived via dreams and stray thoughts in airport waiting lounges, he illustrates the day-to-day process of devising a theorem, a task that took him two grueling and exhilarating years to complete....

By Sarah YoungLONDON (Reuters) - Britain should consider building a new runway at one of London’s two biggest airports - Heathrow and Gatwick - to address a capacity crunch that economists suggest could slow economic growth, a government advisory body said on Tuesday.The recommendations, which are not binding and subject to further revision, are likely to stir up a political debate about how to deal with what will be one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects this century....

The invention of the biplane marked the beginning of manned flight, and now some researchers believe that the wing-on-top-of-wing design was present in an early flying animal as well. A new reconstruction of a controversial feathered dinosaur called Microraptor gui has the small beast gliding between treetops on a stacked pair of wings. If the finding withstands scrutiny, then the biplane design is 125 million years older than the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight would suggest....

This El Niño, which has helped trigger more than 100,000 fires in Indonesia and spewed an estimated 1.75 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the atmosphere, will next threaten tropical forests in Southeast Asia and in southern Mexico, Guatemala and other countries in Central America, said James Randerson, an Earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine. The higher fire risk in the tropics is one of many of El Niño’s impacts that scientists are observing....