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Welcome, Lucy’s neighbour. Fossilized jaws and teeth found in northern Ethiopia belong to an ancient human ancestor that researchers say lived around the same time as Lucy’s kind, Australopithecus afarensis, but is a distinct species. The remains of the new species, which has been dubbed Australopithecus deyiremeda and lived between 3.5 million and 3.3 million years ago, were uncovered just 35 kilometres from the Hadar site at which Lucy and other A....

In a new experiment, Iceland is looking to replace its smokestacks with well injectors to permanently sequester its carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers are now pumping CO2 underground in a process that will convert the greenhouse gas into rock. This technique may be a model for other power plants and factories to control their emissions, creating a climate change solution literally set in stone. “Carbon dioxide capture and storage is important because we depend on fossil fuels, and we will depend on fossil fuels for the next 50 to 100 years,” said Juerg Matter, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University....

Last year, I published a book about honesty, exploring what it means to live a more honest life. I examined my own struggles with honesty, and did my best to translate academic research about honesty and apply it to everyday life. Through interviewing many researchers and reading dozens of studies about ethics, deception, moral character, secrecy, and self-delusion, I learned that we know quite a bit about lying and the reasons people lie in a variety of relationships....

Natural Quasicrystals First cooked up in the lab in 1984, quasicrystals are unusual substances that lie somewhere between the crystalline and the amorphous. Specifically, they display ordered arrangements and symmetries but are not periodic—that is, they are not defined by a single unit cell (such as a cube) that repeats itself in three dimensions [see “Quasicrystals”; SciAm, August 1986]. After years of searching, Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University and his colleagues think they have finally found the first natural quasicrystal....

Is altruism learned or innate? In The Altruistic Brain: How We Are Naturally Good (Oxford University Press, 2015; 312 pages), neuroscientist Donald W. Pfaff argues that the human brain is wired for selflessness. To make his case, Pfaff postulates that our development and survival have hinged on the care we receive from loved ones, a relationship that has primed us to help others. Pfaff then proposes the altruistic brain theory, which, he writes, “explains exactly how altruistic behavior happens when it happens....

Parents assume that when a pediatrician prescribes a drug for their child, that drug has been tested and proven safe and effective. If only it were so. Only half of the medicines doctors prescribe to patients 18 and younger have been through the same rigorous trials as those drugs prescribed to adults. The other half are given off-label—that is, in circumstances for which they were never properly vetted, putting children at risk for overdoses, side effects and long-term health problems....

Ralph DeGayner knew he was seeing the work of a serial killer. All of the victims had been ambushed and mutilated; many had their throats ripped out. Every morning for several weeks DeGayner, a lanky octogenarian, found the bodies buried under leaf litter along Key Largo’s route 905, a county road that runs through the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The more disemboweled woodrats DeGayner encountered, the more his disappointment turned to rage....

The rapid rise in sea levels could cause a dramatic increase in volcanic eruptions, according to a new study. The study, published in the journal Geology, found that during periods of rapid climate change over the last million years, the rapid melting of continental glaciers and the resulting sea-level rise eventually increased volcanic eruptions as much as fold. “Everybody knows that volcanoes have an impact on climate,” said study co-author Marion Jegen, a geophysicist at Geomar in Germany....

As the world grapples with how to safely reopen society in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists have been racing to understand whether COVID-19 infection confers immunity—and how long such immunity might last. A lot hangs in the balance: A strong immune response could mean people who have already been infected would be able to safely return to work. And it would also bode well for vaccine development efforts. A small but suggestive new study finds that individuals who have had COVID-19 produce a robust response in immune cells called T cells....

For countless Americans, there was a dull but persistent pain to prepandemic life: high-priced housing, nearly inaccessible health care, underresourced schools, wage stagnation and systemic inequality. It was a familiar ache, a kind of chronic hurt that people learned to live with simply because they had no other choice. Faced with threadbare safety nets and a cultural ethos championing nationalist myths of self-sufficiency, many people did what humans have always done in times of need: they sought emotional comfort and material aid from their family and friends....

In the summer of 1996 a small group of people met in northern California to share their experiences with intersex variations. One participant, Heidi Walcutt, said that doctors surgically reduced her clitoris as a young child “to more closely approximate a normal female appearance.” This resulted in nerve damage that would blunt sexual sensation later in life, as well as stigma that made Walcutt feel at times like hiding in the closet and at other times intensely angry....

Key concepts Chemistry Freezing Melting Freezing-point depression Introduction Did you ever wonder why they use salt to de-ice roads? Did you know that snow more readily sticks to pavement treated with salt? Why would this be the case? In this activity you will use the same principles to pick up ice cubes with a string. Is it possible to do this—without getting your hands cold? Do the activity and see what a pinch of salt can do!...

One day when Laurel was 11, she began to feel dizzy while playing with her twin sister and some friends in a park on Cape Cod. She sat down, and one of her friends asked her if she was okay. And then Laurel’s memory went blank. A sudden blockage in a key blood vessel leading to the brain had caused a massive stroke. Blood could no longer reach regions crucial for language and communication, resulting in permanent damage....

Delegates gathered at a U.N. climate conference in Morocco this week did not expect a U.S. election upset. “No one believes Trump can win so no real Plan B here!” wrote Saleemul Huq, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, of the GOP nominee, who was seen trailing in the polls before the election. “Hope we are right!” They weren’t. The election of the billionaire businessman and climate skeptic as president of the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter occurred overnight, while delegates slept....

If biology has an Indiana Jones, it is Christopher Ramsden: he specializes in excavating lost studies, particularly those with the potential to challenge mainstream, government-sanctioned health advice. His latest excavation—made possible by the pack-rat habits of a deceased scientist, the help of the scientist’s sons, and computer technicians who turned punch cards and magnetic tape into formats readable by today’s computers—undercuts a pillar of nutrition science. Ramsden, of the National Institutes of Health, unearthed raw data from a 40-year-old study, which challenges the dogma that eating vegetable fats instead of animal fats is good for the heart....

Although laptops, cell phones and other gadgets give us remarkable mobility, we can roam untethered only for as long as our batteries hold out. Photonics researcher Marin Soljacic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to eliminate that shackle by delivering wireless electricity, or WiTricity. Soljacic hung a copper coil 0.6 meter (two feet) in diameter from a ceiling, then hung another coil about 2.1 meters (seven feet) away, with a 60-watt lightbulb dangling from it....

Health officials in Florida announced Thursday that they’re investigating a second case of Zika infection that may have been locally acquired. The patient is in Broward County, which is adjacent to Miami-Dade County. The first patient, whose case was announced Tuesday and is still under investigation, is a woman living in Miami-Dade. The Florida Department of Health called the new case “a possible non-travel related case.” The statement did not indicate whether the department believes the two cases may be linked, nor did it give any indication about how far away the two people live from one another....

The Martian rovers Opportunity and Spirit have represented optimism, hope and even cuteness to millions of people dreaming about discoveries on the Red Planet. How appropriate, then, that the newest rover, Curiosity, should carry a sundial with sentiments and illustrations worthy of classic children’s literature. Curiosity blasted off onboard an Atlas 5 rocket on November 26 and is currently heading for Mars with an August 2012 landing date. The sundial doubles as the color-calibration target for the Mast camera (Mastcam) that will capture the Martian landscape....

A Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth $3 million, has been awarded to three researchers who devised a theory in the 1970s called supergravity, which attempts to unify all of the four fundamental forces of nature. Daniel Freedman, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sergio Ferrara, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of Stony Brook University collaborated on this approach to resolving the apparent conflicts between the two most fundamental theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which describes the microscopic world of atoms and particles, and general relativity, which describes the force of gravity and its influence on cosmic scales....

As worldwide coronavirus cases continue to surge, countries are grappling with how to manage big public holidays such as Christmas and Lunar New Year, which researchers are warning could become superspreader events. “We’re already at a high level of community spread, and we’re about to see a lot of people travelling and gathering indoors,” says Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “It’s hard to see any way that this is going to go well....