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Think of a spinning globe and the patchwork of countries it depicts: such maps help us to understand where we are, and that nations differ from one another. Now, neuroscientists have charted an equivalent map of the brain’s outermost layer—the cerebral cortex—subdividing each hemisphere’s mountain- and valley-like folds into 180 separate parcels. Ninety-seven of these areas have never previously been described, despite showing clear differences in structure, function and connectivity from their neighbours....

Astronomers have discovered the largest known gas cloud in the Universe. The mammoth nebula may be the first imaged filament of a spidery arrangement of galaxies, gas and dark matter that traces the large-scale structure of the cosmos. The team used a brilliant quasar, seen as it appeared when the Universe was less than 3 billion years old, to illuminate the faint gas in the beacon’s neighborhood. The flood of light from the quasar (one of a class of intensely bright galaxy cores, thought to be black holes going through a spurt of growth) prompts hydrogen atoms in the gas to emit a characteristic wavelength of ultraviolet radiation....

Several times a week Brad Spellberg struggles with a difficult decision. A patient stumbles into his emergency room in southern California suffering from familiar symptoms: pressure when she urinates, pain in her side, fever and nausea. Based on these clues Spellberg can quickly diagnose the problem as a kidney infection, but the trouble lies in deciding what he should do next. He knows the patient is hurting and of course he wants to help, but more than his patient’s health hangs in the balance....

It might be called a shock finding. Coating plastic or rubber materials with antioxidants such as vitamin E stops static charge from building up on the polymer’s surface, chemists report today. The discovery could prove a cheap solution to problems such as dust clinging to plastic, static electric shocks, or the sparks that damage television circuits and fry computer motherboards. Children can have fun with static electricity — when they rub balloons on their hair, the rubber and hair stick together because of the attraction between transferred charged particles....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Technology is moving faster than ever into the mobile realm and with that the market for tablets has gone from one option (the Apple iPad which released in April 2010) to a ton of options in just the course of a few years. It’s interesting to think that before the iPad, there was no market for tablet devices and then overnight, tech companies fell behind Apple’s innovation!...

Did the resulting fragility of some of these cultures contribute to their attenuation or demise before the Europeans brought with them both disease and violence? The team expected to find that drought led directly to societal decline. But the data showed another picture. Some pre-Columbian cultures failed, while others endured. Resilience in the face of climate change depended on the type of land use the groups practiced, as de Souza and his colleagues describe in the June 17 Nature Ecology and Evolution....

For the first time in more than 80 years, the Maud is floating above the sea surface. The sturdy oak ship, made to withstand Arctic winters stuck in pack ice, was originally built for the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, the first human to arrive at the South Pole. In 1930, the ship sank in shallow water off the coast of Cambridge Bay, in northern Canada’s remote Victoria Island. This past summer, a Norwegian salvage expedition says they successfully raised the wreck onto a barge....

The average price of a new cancer drug now exceeds $100,000 a year. The patient does not pay the entire tab, but someone who needs a prescription can still spend $25,000, not reimbursed by health insurance. That steep co-payment equals about half of what the typical U.S. household earns in a year. It is not just new cancer therapies that bear stratospheric price tags. Last year Turing Pharmaceuticals, a New York City start-up, provoked widespread outrage after it bought a 62-year-old infectious disease drug called Daraprim and raised the price from $13....

Picture a Scientist by Sharon Shattuck and Ian Cheney Visit pictureascientist.com for screenings In limited release, starting June 12, 2020 Overt sexual advances are just one form of harassment against women in the sciences; the bulk of offenses are made up of quiet acts of discrimination and bullying that accumulate over time. This essential documentary by filmmakers Shattuck and Cheney gives disturbing first-person accounts of such abuse and mistreatment by prominent male researchers—from the rocky fields of Antarctica to the genetic laboratories of Harvard—and offers a powerful contribution to the larger conversation about inherent bias, unseen prejudice and personal accountability....

US citizens who had pinned their hopes on a company being able to offer stem-cell treatments close to home will now need to travel a little farther. Celltex Therapeutics of Houston, Texas, stopped treating patients in the United States last year following a warning from regulators. A 25 January e-mail to Celltex customers indicates that the firm will now follow in the footsteps of many other companies offering unproven stem-cell therapies and send its patients abroad for treatment — but only to Mexico....

It seems like every conversation these days quickly turns to COVID vaccines: Which of your dear ones have gotten a shot, when are you due for your booster, did you have any side effects? Social media is filling up with selfies of people showing off their “I got vaccinated” stickers in the post-vax observation rooms, bursting with a mix of joy and relief and gratitude that you can see in their eyes above their masks....

The El Niño event underway in the Pacific Ocean is impacting temperature and weather patterns around the world. But its effects aren’t confined to the atmosphere: A new study has found that the cyclical climate phenomenon can ratchet up sea levels off the West Coast by almost 8 inches over just a few seasons. The findings have important implications in terms of planning for sea level rise, as ever-growing coastal communities might have to plan for even higher ocean levels in a warmer future....

One of the most frustrating and mysterious medical conditions affecting the mind is impaired consciousness, as can occur with brain damage. Patients in a coma or a vegetative or minimally conscious state sometimes spontaneously recover to varying degrees, but in most cases there is little that doctors can do to help. Now a rigorous study by a group at Liège University Hospital Center in Belgium has found that a simple treatment called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) can temporarily raise awareness in minimally conscious patients....

The new coronavirus that has infected millions of people around the globe can wreak havoc far beyond the lungs. Some of the symptoms of the disease it causes, COVID-19, are predictable enough: cough, fever, chills, headache. But the pathogen’s effects by no means stop there. The virus can cause problems in almost every organ, including the brain, heart, kidneys, gastrointestinal tract and skin. Physicians have been taken aback at what they now call silent hypoxia, or happy hypoxia, a phenomenon in which people with dangerously low levels of blood oxygen are astonishingly not struggling to breathe....

The story of President Trump’s energy policy centers on removing regulations. He says he’s good at it—even the best. “We have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history,” Trump said in his first State of the Union address (Climatewire, Jan. 31). That’s not necessarily true. But in some ways, it’s not necessarily false. While Trump took credit for a number of economic gains and claimed victory in bureaucratic battles, officials from prior administrations said the heavy lifting is just beginning....

Jeremy B. Jones, Cassini Navigation Team Chief at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains. The orbit of a spacecraft is primarily determined by the gravity of a single large central body like the sun, Earth, or, in the case of the Cassini spacecraft, Saturn. If the central body was the only gravitational body in the vicinity, then the spacecraft would follow an elliptical path around the central body with constant orbital energy and angular momentum....

The first programmable computer—if it were built—would have been a gigantic, mechanical thing clunking along with gears and levers and punch cards. That was the vision for Analytical Engine devised by British inventor Charles Babbage in 1837. Whereas Babbage is credited with the machine’s conception, it was perhaps his friend Ada Lovelace who best understood its promise and the potential that computers would one day fulfill. The daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lovelace was a gifted mathematician and intellectual who translated an Italian article on the Analytical Engine and supplemented it with extensive notes on the machine’s capabilities....

We already know that humans are depleting vital groundwater resources across the globe. But a new study shows one of the biggest causes of disappearing groundwater is the international food trade. About 70 percent of freshwater around the globe goes toward irrigation. Researchers from the University College London and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies now say that a third of that freshwater is drawn from the world’s aquifers—nonrenewable underground pockets of groundwater—and 11 percent of that nonrenewable groundwater is used to irrigate internationally-traded crops....

As the U.S. braces for the possible rollback of abortion rights later this year, seismic shifts are happening south of the border. A series of recent legal and legislative decisions has begun to loosen restrictions in Latin America, a region with some of the world’s harshest antiabortion laws. And they could chart a path toward reform for governments that still advocate for the procedure to remain illegal. The health and economic consequences of keeping longtime bans in place may provide cautionary lessons for the U....

The archetypal Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci is admired for his unequaled range of intellectual passions. The creator of the Mona Lisa and other artistic masterpieces in the second half of the 1400s and early 1500s was also an accomplished musician, scientist and engineer whose inventions included ball bearings, instruments to measure the specific gravity of solids, and fantastic war machines (although he abhorred the “most bestial insanity” of battle). Less well known—largely because hundreds of pages of his notes and detailed anatomical drawings went unpublished until the late 19th and early 20th centuries—are his remarkable and penetrating findings in the field of neuroscience....