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The patient was clearly in pain. Doctors were not sure how Johnny, a middle-aged male, had hurt his left knee, but they wanted to assess the damage. So they reached for an arthroscope, a video camera on a flexible, pencil-thin tube, and inserted it into the joint through a small incision. Although arthroscopic surgery is fairly routine for diagnosing and treating knee injuries, Johnny’s procedure was anything but. That’s because Johnny is a monkey: an 11-year-old mandrill at the Pittsburgh Zoo....

When pet dogs are diagnosed with cancer, they typically get surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation—that is, of course, if their owner opts to treat it. Now, a Silicon Valley startup wants to offer precision medicine instead—by recommending targeted therapies that are normally used to treat humans. For a price tag in the low four figures, depending on the veterinary clinic, the One Health Company will sequence a dog’s tumor and generate a report with recommendations....

By Toni Clarke The U.S. surgeon general on Thursday called for action to reduce the use of e-cigarettes among young people, noting they have overtaken cigarettes to become the most commonly used tobacco products among this group. The nation’s top doctor, Vivek Murthy, weighing in on the subject for the first time since e-cigarette use took off, said young people are more vulnerable to the negative consequences of nicotine exposure than adults....

If you’ve ever wanted to edit an event from your history, then help may soon be at hand. Electrical engineers have used lasers to create a cloak that can hide communications in a ’time hole’, so that it seems as if they were never sent. The method, published today in Nature, is the first that can cloak data streams sent at the rapid rates typically seen in telecommunications systems. It opens the door to ultra-secure transmission schemes, and may also provide a way to better shield information from noise corruption....

Researchers have uncovered a mechanism in the Alaskan tundra that doesn’t seem to follow the climate change script for soil carbon. For years, scientists have shown that rising temperatures stimulate microbes that decay plant matter, releasing carbon more quickly into the atmosphere. But when Seeta Sistla, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, came to collect data for a 20-year-old experiment at the U.S. Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research site in northern Alaska, the soil carbon levels at the site were curiously stable....

Fifteen languages, multiple platforms and one great institution: that is Scientific American, which celebrates its 168th year in August. I had another occasion to appreciate all of the above recently when we held our annual meeting of the international editions in New York City for the first time in many years. The multicultural mix, I have always thought, simply reflects the global collaborative nature of science itself. During our meeting days, we shared ideas about how to improve what we do, discussed challenges in different markets and even had some laughs along the way....

The vaping-related condition that has sickened hundreds of people has a new name: EVALI, or e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury. The new name, noted Friday in newly issued guidance for clinicians from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a sign of the rapidly evolving investigation into the illness, which has sickened 1,299 people across 49 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The case count has continued to climb week after week....

Around a third of people complain of some sleeplessness, and one in 10 meets diagnostic criteria for clinical insomnia. The costs, in terms of well-being, physical health and productivity, are enormous. From twin studies, researchers know the inability to fall or stay asleep has a genetic component, but the identities of the culprits were mostly unknown. Now, two studies published in March in Nature Genetics provide first peeks at the biological basis of insomnia, implicating specific brain regions and biological processes, and revealing links with heart disease and psychiatric disorders like depression....

Six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea was a very different place than it is today. Plate tectonics had closed the Strait of Gibraltar separating modern-day Spain and Morocco, leaving the Mediterranean cut off from the Atlantic Ocean. The newly enclosed sea succumbed to evaporation, its water level falling by thousands of meters, turning it into a desertlike environment pockmarked with shallow pools as salty as today’s Dead Sea. One hypothesis suggests a megaflood rapidly refilled the Mediterranean....

One of the better gifts in Santa’s bag is the year-end edition of the British Medical Journal, which brightens the cold days of late December with research reports that are actually fun to read. Take the report entitled “Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident Prone Children.” The authors note that kid crazes, such as skating and scootering, often lead to emergency room visits. But traumatic injury as a result of widespread Harry Potter reading would presumably be rare, they say, “given the lack of horizontal velocity, height, wheels, or sharp edges associated with this particular craze....

Do you misplace your keys or regularly miss appointments? Do you often forget the names of people you know well? Do you feel like your memory is slowly getting worse? If so, then you may find yourself considering those brain games advertised everywhere. Sales pitches such as “where the sweat is figurative, but results are real” and “your brain will thank you” are amusingly alluring. But you may find yourself wondering whether they are really worth the time and expense....

California last week adopted the first regulation in the world aimed at boosting sales of zero-emission trucks, marking a milestone in the history of regulating pollution from motor vehicles. The California Air Resources Board’s unanimous vote capped a marathon seven-hour Zoom meeting at which more than 130 people signed up to testify. The meeting was held in a virtual format due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. Dialing in, the vast majority of speakers voiced strong support for the Advanced Clean Trucks Regulation, which would require truck manufacturers to sell a certain percentage of zero-emission trucks in the state starting in 2024....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Many gallons of ink (and megabytes of electronic text) have been devoted to explaining the surprise victory of Donald Trump. Reasons range from white working-class resentment, to FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation, to low turnout. All likely played some role. It would be a mistake to think the election turned on one single factor....

Will Bondurant decided to get tested for COVID-19 after attending three racial justice demonstrations over a five-day period in San Francisco, where he lives. The first, on June 3, “was the scariest and most risky from the point of view of COVID infection,” said Bondurant, 31. Although most wore masks, participants were jammed in, unable at times to maintain the recommended 6-foot distance, he said. Bondurant did not have any COVID symptoms but went for the test because he had a meeting scheduled the following weekend with a friend in his late 70s....

Need another reason to hit the gym? New research suggests that working out builds more than just muscle. Exercise may improve memory by ramping up the creation of new brain cells. Previous research has shown that exercise causes neuron formation in mice, so scientists at Columbia University and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego wanted to know whether this neurogenesis also occurs in humans. Mature brains spawn new neurons in only two locations, one of which is the dentate gyrus, a region in the hippocampus linked to age-related memory decline....

Flu vaccines saved an estimated 40,000 American lives between 2005 and 2014, but they are not good enough.The vaccine used during the 2016–17 flu season, for example, was only 43 percent effective against the predominant influenza A H3N2 strain, and protection has been almost as low in other years. Two studies now suggest a new reason for the problem: The vaccine strain mutates during the manufacturing process in ways that cause mismatches with real circulating flu strains....

In Room 67 of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Francisco Goya’s Saturn enthralls viewers with a scene of abomination. The painting depicts the Greek myth of Cronus (Saturn in the Roman version), who ate his children for fear of being overthrown by them. Critics have interpreted Goya’s rendition—the cannibal god shown wide-eyed with apparent horror, shame and madness as he devours his son—as an allegory of the ravages of war, the decay of Spanish society, the artist’s declining psychological state....

CREATIVE ECCENTRICS Thank you for the excellent article “The Unleashed Mind,” by Shelley Carson. It’s very refreshing to read that people with eccentric, novel and even schizophrenic ways of thinking are often very high functioning, talented, intelligent individuals who can use their strange perceptual experiences to access beauty, originality and creativity. Greg Westlake Norfolk, England When I telephoned my partner, a highly creative person, and read her the paragraph in Carson’s article in which the question is posed, “Do you often feel like a square peg in a round hole?...

NASA’s Juno spacecraft whizzed by Jupiter on Saturday (Aug. 27), successfully completing the first—and closest—of 36 orbital flybys planned for the duration of the probe’s mission. Juno arrived at Jupiter July 4 after a five-year journey, and this will be the closest approach of the entire mission, with the spacecraft grazing over the tops of Jupiter’s clouds at a distance of just 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) at a speed of 130,000 mph (208,000 km/h)....

Last year, after a lengthy, circuitous journey through the solar system, a NASA probe known as MESSENGER entered into orbit around Mercury. No spacecraft had visited the innermost planet in more than three decades, and none has paid an extended visit. With MESSENGER’s arrival, NASA and its international counterparts now have spacecraft stationed at Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn—not to mention Earth and the moon. Two more NASA craft are en route to Jupiter and Pluto; yet another ought to reach the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015....