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FREETOWN, Sierra Leone—If you’ve even glanced at the news in the past several months, the grainy image of the microscopic, wormy Ebola virus as well as photographs of otherworldly workers dressed in hazmat suits have passed before your eyes. From afar, the contagion devastating West Africa can seem foreign or even reminiscent of bad science fiction—and perhaps that’s one reason why the world responds relatively slowly as the outbreak persists into its second year....

Videos circulating on social media show an 18-foot wall of water advancing on the horizon. The tremendous wave builds to a crescendo when it barrels ashore, submerging buildings already toppled by the deadly magnitude 7.5 earthquake that pummeled the northern part of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island last weekend (and triggered the inundation). The temblor and tsunami have killed well over a thousand people, with the toll expected to rise. The tsunami surprised the local population and, at first, some geologists, because the fault that ruptured was not the type typically associated with tsunamis....

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is starting to put the pieces together in its search for virtual Earth twins in other planetary systems. Kepler, which launched in 2009, is on the lookout for planets that are about the size of Earth and have temperate surface conditions. One half of that formula was realized on December 5 when mission scientists announced the discovery of a planet in the so-called habitable zone, called Kepler 22 b, a few times larger than Earth....

When our creative director, Michael Mrak, sent around the illustration for this month’s cover story—a conceptual rendering of so-called time crystals—our features editor, Seth Fletcher, responded, “Cool. Very prog rock.” The artwork certainly seems ready-made for a Pink Floyd album (Roger Waters, if you’re reading this, the offer’s on the table) or at least one of those velvet blacklight posters. And time crystals are indeed pretty trippy stuff. Whereas conventional crystals are orderly states of matter whose patterns repeat at regular intervals in space, these more exotic materials have patterns that repeat at regular intervals in time....

This Pi Day, as you’re enjoying your slice of pie, explore a bigger slice of mathematics. Most March 14 celebrations are obsessed with the number pi. If you think “obsessed” is too strong, take a look around: you’ll see things on sale for $3.14, Pi-K runs and, perhaps as in the past, a segment on daytime TV. As a mathematician, I’m tickled that honoring something mathematical has become a widespread phenomenon....

Light cannot be focused on anything smaller than its wavelength—or so says more than a century of physics wisdom. But a new study now shows that it is possible, if light is focused extremely close to a very special kind of lens. The traditional limit on the resolution of light microscopes, which depends on the sharpness of focusing, is a typical wavelength of visible light (around 500 nanometers). This limitation inspired the invention of the electron microscope for viewing smaller objects like viruses that are only 10 to 300 nanometers in size....

Chill a bacterium-size mirror to a cold enough temperature and it will begin to quiver not from heat but from its quantum state–a so-called superposition in which the object is both vibrating and still. Aside from the experimental thrill of conjuring up quantum states in big, messy things, such ultracold objects could form the foundation of exquisitely fine sensors for weighing individual atoms. Three new studies show that researchers are making headway in their efforts to create nearly quiverless mirrors....

Who says science isn’t fun? Visual illusions, such as the dozens you will find in this special issue, make great eye candy. But they also serve a serious purpose for researchers. How? Illusions push the mysterious and wondrous brain into revealing its secrets. From the confusing and fragmentary inputs gathered by our senses, our brains create our seemingly fluid conscious perceptions and a sensible narrative of the world around us. Brains do not, however, talk to us about how they perform those impressive tasks....

The logging of palm trees grown atop the decaying peatlands of Borneo and Sumatra helps drive the economy of Indonesia, and this fact alone is starting to make the nation a top global priority for efforts to mitigate the warming climate. The problem is three-pronged: First, cheap pulp and paper produced in Indonesia winds up in the glossy coated products we know as junk mail, luxury shopping bags or children’s books....

President Barack Obama’s talk about the need for a “smart grid” sounds, well, smart. What’s not to like about the idea of an electricity grid that can work at top efficiency? By wrapping power transmission lines in advanced information technologies and the Internet, a smart grid would enable us to integrate alternative energy sources such as rooftop solar panels and local wind turbines into the power supply, balance supply with demand and optimize the flow of power to each consumer—even down to the level of individual appliances....

In June 2018 the journal Science published research showing that chlorophyll-containing blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, that were grown in extremely red light could carry on some photosynthesis despite the light’s low energy. Soon after, the magazine Cosmos ran with that finding to produce a nice article entitled “Pushing the Limit: Could Cyanobacteria Terraform Mars?” The subhead read: “The discovery that blue-green algae can photosynthesize in extremely low light has implications for astrobiology....

At first, Suzanne Black didn’t imagine that the reason some of her students struggled was because they didn’t know how to read their textbooks. Black teaches the most advanced biology class available at her high school in Kenmore, Wash. As the years passed, however, the problem became clear. “The longer I do it, the more I realize that it’s hardest for the poor readers,” she says. Today her strategy is different....

Sheltered underneath nearly a mile of rock in Abruzzo, Italy, scientists are hard at work unraveling the secrets of the universe’s smallest bits of matter. When a radioactive process called beta decay occurs, it typically emits two particles: a negatively charged electron and a version of a tiny, neutrally charged neutrino. The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay (LEGEND-200) at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory is designed to figure out whether this process can occur without resulting in a neutrino at the end....

Jessica’s tiny fingers dart around the iPad, swiping through photos to get to a particularly entertaining video: a 12-second clip of her dancing clumsily to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies. The 18-month-old taps “play” and emits a squeal of delight. After watching the video twice, she navigates back to the home screen and opens up the YouTube app to watch an episode of the colourful animation Billy Bam Bam. Halfway through, she moves onto a Yo Gabba Gabba!...

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” —from Seduction of the Minotaur, by Anaïs Nin (1961) On the 10th of April 2019 Pope Francis, President Salva Kiir of South Sudan and former rebel leader Riek Machar sat down together for dinner at the Vatican. They ate in silence, the start of a two-day retreat aimed at reconciliation from a civil war that had killed some 400,000 people since 2013....

Darkness was falling at Kitt Peak National Observatory outside Tucson, Ariz. At this hour Michelle Edwards, the observatory’s associate director, would usually be inside prepping for a night on the telescope. But on this evening last December she stood alongside me in the twilight, watching two worlds collide. As the stars came out, electric lights dotting the landscape below turned on, too, leaving a diminished Milky Way arcing above the brighter civilization....

Over the course of a week in late 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a single tiny and seemingly empty patch of sky, an area no bigger than the apparent size of a period on the printed page of a book held out at arm’s length. The patch of sky was located far out of the Milky Way’s plane and was devoid of stars, gas and dust that could obscure light from distant galaxies, offering Hubble a chance to make remarkably deep observations of the cosmos....

In December of 2020, when scientists managed the incredible feat of cloning the endangered black-footed ferret, they took a leap toward the renewed global priority to combat climate change and biodiversity loss. The cloning success both fulfilled the founding vision of Earth Day and frightened its strongest proponents. By using biotechnology to achieve one of conservation’s most critical goals—to restore genetic diversity to a species faced with a limited gene pool—conservationists made a step forward in saving a beloved species....

When a dog rolls onto its back during play, does the maneuver indicate submission, akin to a person crying “uncle,” or does it signify something else altogether? A study published earlier this year, by Kerri Norman and her colleagues at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta and at the University of South Africa, comes down on the side of “something else.” Their report appeared in January in an issue of Behavioural Processes devoted to canine behavior....

Shifting winds have helped drive West Antarctica’s ice sheet melting for millennia, according to a new analysis that could help scientists better anticipate sea-level rise. The findings, published yesterday in the journal Nature, show that during the past 11,000 years, wind patterns have driven relatively warm waters from the deep ocean onto Antarctica’s continental shelf, leading to significant and sustained ice loss. That influx of warm water then halted for several millennia before beginning again around 1940....