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The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three physicists, Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou, and Donna Strickland, for their innovative work to develop techniques that make lasers more widely applicable in everything from medicine to manufacturing. Half of the prize is being shared by Mourou and Strickland for their invention of what is known as “chirped pulse amplification” (or CPA for short), a technique they developed together in the 1980s....

A record-breaking heat wave is sweeping South Asia, threatening hundreds of millions of people with deadly temperatures well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As the world heats up, billions of people need air-conditioning. This 120-year-old technology used to be considered a luxury, but in the age of climate change, it is a necessity for human survival. Understandably, this has created anxiety over the climate threat of a world overrun with ACs. But the coming boom in air-conditioning is an essential shift toward reducing the enormous gap in cooling availability that exists between rich and poor people and nations—and toward producing a more equitable world....

WE SEEM TO REGARD seven to eight hours of unbroken sleep as our birthright. Anything less means that something is awry. And people are willing to try anything to achieve that solid slug of slumber. Like a new-millennium version of Goldilocks, they try firm beds, pillow-topped mattresses and all manner of sleep systems to find one that is “just right.” They shun caffeine and change their diet—porridge and warm milk, anyone?...

By Matt Siegel and Jane Wardell SYDNEY, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Hundreds of firefighters were battling on Tuesday to contain Australia’s worst wildfires in 30 years which have already swept across more than 12,000 hectares outside the southern city of Adelaide and destroyed at least 26 homes. The fires, which are burning across a 240-km (150-mile) perimeter in the state of South Australia, come as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology announced on Tuesday that 2014 had been the country’s third warmest year on record....

Two storms have joined forces to bring a major blizzard to New England Friday night into Saturday. There are already airline and rail delays. Roads may become impassable in many areas. The storm will do more than end a recent snow drought in part of New England. The list is long on storm characteristics and impacts. Some areas will be hit with an all-out blizzard and buried under a couple of feet of snow and massive drifts....

An event such as sexual assault or a battlefield injury is physically agonizing at the time, but it also can eventually sentence a person to a host of mental symptoms—often vivid flashbacks, anxiety and emotional detachment—known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The disorder afflicts 3.4 percent of men and 9.7 percent of women in the U.S., according to research estimates. Diagnosing PTSD is not necessarily simple. Psychological evaluations for PTSD cannot always easily distinguish it from other mental illnesses, such as depression, or determine if a patient is over- or underreporting the symptoms....

Join us below at 12:30 P.M. Eastern time on Wednesday (November 14) for a live 30-minute online chat with sex behavior specialist Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Berlin studies sexual compulsivity in humans, with a focus on the psychology behind our sex drive and addiction. His research touches on biological factors and social stigmas surrounding promiscuity. In light of the latest revelations surrounding former CIA Director David Petraeus, we’ll discuss the chemistry that could motivate extramarital trysts....

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated a controversial US$100 million study examining whether drinking small amounts of alcohol every day can improve health. The agency’s decision, announced on 15 June, came shortly after an NIH advisory council voted unanimously to end the trial. An agency investigation had found that NIH staff and outside researchers acted inappropriately by soliciting industry funding and biasing the grant review process to favor specific scientists....

If Pres. Obama has his way, the medical records of every American will be digitized by 2014. The stimulus package (read the text here) includes $19 billion in funding to pay for the effort and calls for the appointment of a chief privacy officer to advise the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on how best to protect this sensitive information. If a new study of how easily your medical records can be found online by others is any indication, the new chief privacy officer (to be appointed over the next 12 months) will have his work cut out for him because an increase in digital medical records would likely mean an increase in medical identity theft....

It takes a village to teach a bat how to communicate. Baby Egyptian fruit bats learn calls from their mothers, but research now shows that they can learn new dialects, or the pitch of their vocalizations, from the colony members around them. Learning to communicate by repeating the noises that others make is something only a few mammal groups—including humans, whales and dolphins—are known to do. Researchers call this vocal learning, and it’s something that they’re starting to study in bats....

From ill-advised Hollywood marriages to good ol’ oil and water, separation is an inevitable part of life. So it is with separation anxiety. Virtually every toddler goes through a totally normal developmental stage where being away from a primary caregiver is met with tears and clinging that falls somewhere between “baby koala” and “laundry with no dryer sheet.” And it makes total sense—of course a child would get upset about being away from the person who takes care of them....

What makes one species pair off, and members of a closely related species play the field? The answer may lie in their genes. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin were interested in how complex characteristics—such as monogamy—arise during evolution. “We chose to investigate this question using monogamous mating systems because animals with monogamous mating systems are available in all the different vertebrate clades,” says Rebecca Young, a research associate and evolutionary biologist, who led the study....

Nearly 200 nations are meeting today in Marrakech, Morocco, for the United Nations annual climate conference. The two-week 22nd Conference of the Parties, or COP 22, starts just days after the 2015 Paris climate accord entered into legal force—meaning that countries are legally bound to meet their targets—on November 4. And although many are celebrating this latest success, country representatives at COP 22 now must hash out how they are going to live up to their pledges—namely, curbing CO2 emissions so that the world can avoid climate change’s worst effects....

Taming the Baywatch effect A new study finds that breasts move up and down as much as eight inches during exercise—far more than ordinary bras are equipped to handle. Snicker if you must, but for researcher Joanna Scurr of the University of Portsmouth in England, it’s serious business. She recruited 70 women with bra sizes ranging from A to JJ (no, that’s not a typo) and measured their breast motions in three dimensions as they walked, jogged or ran....

Just 3 percent of adult cancer patients participate in clinical trials of experimental treatments. In a novel effort to boost that number, a national nonprofit is launching an unusual study—one that allows patients to move easily between several experimental therapies, without spending precious time trying to find and qualify for a new trial if the first one doesn’t help. Once they’re in, they’re in. “The current clinical trials system doesn’t match what a patient needs,” said Julie Fleshman, president and CEO of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, which organized the $35 million “Precision Promise” platform announced on Tuesday....

When people work together on a project, they often come to think they’ve figured out the problems in their own respective spheres. If trouble persists, it’s somebody else—engineering, say, or the marketing department—who is screwing up. That “local focus” means finding the best way forward for the overall project is often a struggle. But what if adding artificial intelligence to the conversation, in the form of a computer program called a bot, could actually make people in groups more productive?...

The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision (such as which vaccine to administer to a population) is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent....

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form. The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it’s my feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it....

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I couldn’t possibly pass up an opportunity to address this important topic. Superstar Angelina Jolie’s shocking decision to obtain a preventative bilateral mastectomy drew great attention and headlines towards the gene cancer testing that more women are contemplating to prevent breast cancer—the most common cancer in women in the United States. When my own sister was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago, I watched her experience each phase of this taxing illness with a very different patient perspective....

The channel, HBO, apologized and promised to avoid a repeat. But the incident was just one particularly public example of an increasingly urgent problem: with global Internet traffic growing by an estimated 22% per year, the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers’ best efforts to supply it. Although huge progress has been made since the 1990s, when early web users had to use dial-up modems and endure ’the world wide wait’, the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system....