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On September 9, 2018, a robotic telescope on its routine patrol of the night sky detected what looked like a new star. Over the next few hours, the “star” grew 10 times brighter, triggering a flag by software I had written to identify unusual celestial events. It was nighttime in California, and I was asleep, but my colleagues on the other side of the world reacted quickly to the alert. Twelve hours later we had obtained enough additional data from telescopes on Earth and in space to confirm that this was the explosion of a star—a supernova—in a distant galaxy....

Stefan Kühn studies biochemistry at Stellenbosch University in the wine country of South Africa’s Western Cape province. He was working on his master’s thesis last year and writing in his usual way, which he describes as messy and free-flowing. Then he took a massive open online course (MOOC) from Duke University called Think Again: How to Reason and Argue. It changed the way he approached his thesis. “It taught me what a good argument is, how to construct it, how to avoid general fallacies,” Kühn says....

Though burning natural gas produces much less greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal, a new study indicates switching over coal-fired power plants to natural gas would have a negligible effect on the changing climate. Tom Wigley, a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, reports that if natural gas were substituted for coal in energy production, climate change trends would not slow down and may, in fact, accelerate....

The IPCC was established by governments in 1988 to provide assessments of available scientific and technical information on climate change. The process used to produce these assessments is designed to ensure their high credibility in both science and policy communities. Government involvement is limited to the initial stage to provide a mandate for the work, to participation in the second of two reviews, and to the final stage to ensure that policymakers understand the key findings....

We stand on the verge of writing a nearly complete cosmic history. Astronomers have now observed galaxies going back 97 percent of the way to the big bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago. The light from one such galaxy, named SPT0615-JD, began its journey toward Earth 13.3 billion years ago. In 2017 it arrived at the Hubble Space Telescope, where we were able to glimpse it for the first time through a project I ran called the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS), which aimed to find some of the cosmos’s first galaxies....

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday charged Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes with fraud, capping off a remarkable downfall for a once high-flying company that promised to revolutionize the blood testing industry but instead became a parable for Silicon Valley hype and hubris. The SEC’s complaint alleges that the privately held company deceived investors by exaggerating or speaking falsely about what its technology could do. While the company told investors it could provide quick, accurate medical test results from just a few drops of blood pricked from a finger, it was in fact running most of its tests on machines manufactured by other companies....

Pulling off a great performance under pressure is one of the biggest highs out there—after all, they say a diamond is just coal that did well under pressure. The opposite—choking—is usually a sports term. It’s missing the extra point after the touchdown, blowing your putt, or watching your free throw roll around the rim and then sadly drop off. Entire teams can choke—for example, the 2004 Yankees. (“There’s no way the Red Sox will come back to win four in a row....

DECEMBER 1958 EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR— “But is it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group—just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today? Yes, it is possible! Let me give an example which, while seemingly trivial, has a bearing on this question....

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to make a huge mistake. If the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a true indication of the Court’s will, federal abortion rights in this country are about to be struck down. In doing so the Court will not only side against popular opinion on a crucial issue of bodily autonomy, but also signal that politics and religion play a more important role in health care than do science and evidence....

“Every technology has improved over the years except batteries! Why can’t someone invent a better battery?” Man, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone say that—well, I’d have about $17.50. In fact, though, the average gadget fan is missing three huge points about batteries. (In February, PBS aired a NOVA special called “Search for the Super Battery,” of which I was the host. After a year of visiting laboratories and interviewing scientists, I can admit that batteries are on my mind these days....

Inventor and physicist Thomas Senkel created an Internet sensation with the October 2011 video of his maiden—and only—test flight of a spidery proof-of-concept 16-rotor helicopter dubbed Multicopter 1. Now the maker of the experimental personal aviation craft, the European start-up e-volo, is back with a revised “volocopter” design that adds two more rotors, a serial hybrid drive and long-term plans for going to 100 percent battery power. The new design calls for 1....

Through their control over transport and logistics operations, companies have the power to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but business leaders are being wary as they select from a wide array of alternative fuels and technologies. Big retail, communications and package delivery companies use an enormous amount of fuel to power their own fleets and indirectly through their suppliers. According to the Department of Energy, medium- and heavy-duty trucks consume 16 percent of energy used by all modes of transportation....

More than 170,000 migrants were apprehended at the US-Mexico border in March, the highest number in a decade. Many of those are unaccompanied minors, and the Biden administration has scrambled to find accommodations for them, sending hundreds of kids to temporary shelters in convention centers and other ad hoc facilities. Conservative politicians and pundits have blamed Biden for “luring children to the border” by relaxing Donald Trump’s harsh immigration policies, describing the situation as “Biden’s border crisis....

By Douglas Kysar of Nature magazineThe US Supreme Court this week gave its opinion on American Electric Power v. Connecticut, a closely watched lawsuit that seeks to force some of the nation’s largest electricity generators to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions because they contribute to climate change, which is a public nuisance.In its second major encounter with climate change, the court held that federal judges have no authority to order emissions reductions using nuisance law, because Congress has delegated this authority to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Clean Air Act....

Experts have been worried for a while that time is running out for the last working cures for gonorrhea infections. On Wednesday, some revealed there may be even less time left on the clock than had been previously thought. Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Hawaii’s department of health reported a cluster of cases of gonorrhea in that state in which the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria showed high-level resistance to one of the drugs, azithromycin, as well as reduced susceptibility to the second drug, ceftriaxone....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Do you think math is fun? I absolutely think that it should be. After all, math problems are really just puzzles. And puzzles are fun, right? I realize that not all math problems are created equally—sometimes you have to use math to get real world work done. And that certainly isn’t always tons of fun....

Could Democrats bring back the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming if they retake the majority in November? Nobody is ready to say so—many House Democrats consider it taboo to even talk about what might happen if voters put them back in charge. But it’s almost universally accepted that one way or another, there would be an imperative to address climate change if Democrats controlled one or both chambers of Congress in 2019....

The most comprehensive assessment of the energy output in the nearby universe reveals that today’s produced energy is only about half of what it was 2 billion years ago. A team of international scientists used several of the world’s most powerful telescopes to study the energy of the universe and concluded that the universe is slowly dying. “We used as many space- and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible,” Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) team leader Simon Driver, of the University of Western Australia, said in a statement....

In just 17 years messenger RNA therapies have gone from proof of concept to global salvation. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19 have been given to hundreds of millions of people, saving countless lives. In 2005 Katalin Karikó and I created a way to make mRNA molecules that would not cause dangerous inflammation when injected into an animal’s tissue. In 2017 Norbert Pardi and I demonstrated that modified mRNA, carried into human cells by a fatlike nanoparticle, protected the mRNA from being broken down by the body and prompted the immune system to generate antibodies that neutralize an invading virus more effectively than the immune system could do on its own....

Sleep deprivation affects mental performance, as anyone who has tried to work after an all-nighter can attest. Yet some professionals, including surgeons, firefighters and military personnel, must routinely work on little or no sleep. A study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found the sleepy brain’s Achilles’ heel—open-ended problem solving—and thus may help improve worker training in these demanding fields. The study, which was published in Sleep in March, consisted of two types of learning tests....