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Originally posted on SoapBox Science, a community guest blog from Nature.com Jon Spaihts is the screenwriter of The Darkest Hour, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and the upcoming Passengers and The Mummy. The one-time physics student and science writer has become one of the go-to writers for hard science fiction and space epics in Hollywood. He is currently working on a remake of Disney’s classic, The Black Hole and is writing Marvel’s forthcoming movie Doctor Strange....

By Devin Powell of Nature magazine A company that charged up the US battery industry with its lithium-ion technology has gone dead. After an 11-year run, A123 Systems filed for bankruptcy on 16 October. For insiders, the news is no surprise. A123, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, has been buoyed by government grants and private investment but has fallen on hard times in the past year (see ‘Manufacturing woes haunt high-tech battery maker’)....

You’re driving down the bustling main street of a picturesque little town you have never visited before. The traffic light turns red, you stop, and an old lady steps into the crosswalk from the left. All of a sudden you are overcome with a feeling that you have been here before–in the same car, at the same crosswalk, with the same woman stepping off the curb in the same way. Yet by the time she reaches your front bumper, you realize the scene no longer matches quite so well with what you thought you were recalling....

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazineMemories fade, events get conflated, names get attached to the wrong faces, or, in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, signals in safe environments can mistakenly evoke emotions that rightly belong to a battlefield tragedy. Understanding the proper functioning and malfunctioning of memory retrieval holds clues for how to deal with memory disorders and learning disabilities. In research published in Nature, a group led by neuroscientist Pico Caroni at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland reveal structural ’traces’ that help to keep memories precise by preventing unrelated events from evoking them....

In 2007 Susan Brown encountered the repelling power of period blood. While studying what menstrual fluid might reveal about a woman’s health, she wanted data from a cross section of subjects beyond the student volunteers at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where she worked as an evolutionary psychologist. Brown’s team members set up a booth near the entrance of a Walmart in downtown Hilo and hung a sign that said, “Menstrual Cycle Research....

Vaccines against COVID-19 have arrived with unprecedented speed. At least three candidates appear to be extremely effective and are likely to be approved in the U.S. in coming weeks. By the end of December, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the U.S. will have enough vaccines to treat 20 million people. Britain this week approved the vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech. But for the first time in modern U....

“What I find compelling is the immersion of people with strong technology backgrounds—hardware and software engineers—sitting next to people like myself,” says Mega. “The impact feels very, very large.” Mega’s decision to move in March to Google was one in a string of announcements by top-flight scientists and physicians who are enlisting in the mission, and pioneering a new type of career path in the process. Although academic researchers from fields such as computer science and engineering have led innovative Google projects (such as the Internet-connected eyewear known as Glass), Google and other technology companies are increasingly recruiting life scientists as Silicon Valley broadens its reach into health care....

Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) is back at it, taking swipes at federally funded animal research projects. First he took on the grizzlies—lambasting studies to gauge whether the mighty creatures were in danger of becoming extinct— and now he’s peeved about pigs—or pig odor, to be precise. The former presidential candidate last week mocked a federal set-aside for pig odor research, listing it on his Twitter feed as one of the “Top 10 Porkiest Projects” allocated funding in the latest federal spending bill being debated in Congress....

William Sieber was working in his garden. Wasn’t he? He was sure he had been picking tomatoes just moments ago. Now he appeared to be in some kind of rehabilitation hospital. And weren’t people looking at him a little strangely? What on earth were they up to? Sieber, a then 88-year-old retired pediatric surgeon, knew that something was not right. As he told his son, Fritz, a few months later, he was unable to shake the frightening fog of confusion and paranoia that enveloped him....

In the early 2000s many Internet users bonded over their common aversion to pictures that showed clustered arrays of small holes, such as a beehive or even the popped bubbles on the uncooked top of a pancake. For almost a decade “trypophobia,” literally “fear of holes,” was nothing more than an Internet phenomenon, but finally researchers have found evidence of its validity and investigated its possible cause. The story begins with the growth of online image sharing; soon many people realized they shared a revulsion that could reach the level of nausea to photographs of clusters of holes....

By Wendell Roelf HOUT BAY, South Africa (Reuters) - In broad daylight, groups of poachers hidden among the rocks of a South African marine conservation area wade slowly into the icy, shark-infested waters of the Atlantic Ocean in search of ‘white gold’. Foot soldiers of a global criminal network stretching from the southernmost tip of Africa to the other side of the globe, they are scouring the rocks for abalone to meet insatiable demand from Asia for the gourmet mollusc....

By Helen Shen of Nature magazineThe nerves in a human brain form a three-dimensional grid of criss-crossing fibers, say researchers who have mapped them.The regular pattern creates a scaffold to guide brain development and support more complex and variable brain structures, says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “The grid structure, by dint of its simplicity and symmetry under deformation, allows for continuous re-wiring,” he says....

In Sandy Lake, Ontario (population 2,650), the diesel fuel that powers this remote community a thousand miles northwest of Toronto costs around $9 a gallon. And even then, in its harsh northern climate, it provides electricity only some of the time. “There’s always problems, there’s always power outages,” grumbles Harry Meekis, capital projects manager for the Sandy Lake First Nation. “Diesel is the only source of service that we have right now....

On April 14, 2002, while routinely patrolling the Indian Ocean, a French Navy vessel spotted a dinghy with two passengers onboard. They had been drifting for 20 days. After being shipwrecked, they had escaped in a seven-meter-long lifeboat. They survived exposure, the blazing sun and a failed motor by drinking rainwater and eating bream that they fished from the sea with harpoons. After drifting 750 kilometers, the passengers’ survival seemed miraculous....

Simply forcing the U.S. automotive industry to comply with tougher fuel economy standards won’t be enough to create substantial cuts in either greenhouse gas emissions or oil use, says a new report from the National Research Council. The study finds that while tougher fuel efficiency standards are a crucial part of any plan to reduce emissions and oil demand, better standards alone would only slow the growth in both categories. The transportation sector is responsible for about 25 percent of carbon emissions nationally and about two-thirds of the country’s oil use....

Editor’s Note: This story is a supplement to the Feature “The Chaotic Genesis of Planets” from the May 2008 issue of Scientific American. Meteorites are not just space rocks but space fossils—planetary scientists’ only tangible record of the origin of the solar system. Planetary scientists think that they come from asteroids, which are fragments of planetesimals that never went on to form planets and have remained in deep freeze ever since....

Despite surgeons’ best efforts, bacteria often manage to sneak onto medical implants such as bone screws, where they can cause severe infections. Research published today in Nature Communications suggests that using fluorescent antibiotics could reveal such infections before they become too severe. Lead author Marleen van Oosten, a microbiologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, says that the only way to distinguish normal post-surgical swelling from an infection at an implant site is to perform a biopsy on the affected tissue, which is itself an invasive procedure....

Pesticide DDT, industrial lubricants PCBs and now plastic BPA (bisphenol A) are all widely used industrial chemical compounds that have been discovered to cause ills such as cancer and/or environmental damage. Worried that the latest chemical craze—nanoparticles (molecules and even atoms engineered at the scale of one billionth of a meter or smaller)—may follow suit, a panel of scientists is urging federal government agencies to assess the potential risks posed by such engineered chemicals and particles before they are used in any more substances....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Not so long ago, people like my Aunt Muriel thought of sunburn as a necessary evil on the way to a “good base tan.” She used to slather on the baby oil while using a large reflector to bake away. Aunt Muriel’s mantra when the inevitable burn and peel appeared: Beauty has its price....

The western corn rootworm beetle grows to only the length of a grain of rice. But this unassuming yellowish-brown pest causes up to a billion dollars’ worth of damage to U.S. corn crops every year. Its larvae are particularly pesky; unseen, they wriggle through the soil to burrow into corn’s branching root system. The larval worms find tasty roots by sensing underground gases and other chemicals, says Ricardo Machado, a chemical ecologist at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland....