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Prosthetic limbs can restore an amputee’s ability to walk or grip objects, but they haven’t yet been able to restore a person’s sense of touch. Researchers at Stanford University have taken a step closer to this type of prosthetic by creating an electronic skin that responds to pressure changes and transmits signals via nerve cells, much as human skin does. Zhenan Bao and coworkers made the artificial skin by connecting three components: microstructured resistive pressure sensors, flexible printed organic electronic circuits, and nerve cells containing light-activated ion channels (Science 2015, DOI: 10....

By Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio MITHI, Pakistan, Feb 2 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Worsening drought has led to over 80 percent of water resources in Pakistan’s southern Tharparker district becoming unfit for people to drink, a new study says. That has led to plans by the Sindh provincial government to invest 5.4 billion Pakistani rupees ($53 million) in installing 750 solar-powered reverse osmosis water purification plants across the sprawling desert district, to help get safe drinking water to the region’s over 1....

How big is humankind’s “footprint” on the planet? That depends on how you measure it. Since the mid-1990s environmentalists, politicians, researchers and others have often used a concept called the ecological footprint to quantify the relative health of the planet under the influence of human activity and industry. According to that measure, our footprint has outgrown the planet on which we tread: humans now use 1.5 Earths to support our well-being....

The steep and virulent rise of terrorism ranks among the more disturbing trends in the world today. According to the 2015 Global Terrorism Index, terror-related deaths have increased nearly 10-fold since the start of the 21st century, surging from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014. Between 2013 and 2014 alone, they shot up 80 percent. For social psychologists, this escalation prompts a series of urgent questions, just as it does for society as a whole: How can extremist groups treat fellow human beings with such cruelty?...

Starting this month, we’re celebrating our 170th anniversary with a series of editorial activities that will run through the end of the year, and we invite you to participate. Stay tuned. Scientific American readers have curious minds and a shared passion for lifelong learning. In the inaugural issue, Porter noted that the editors would foster student development. “As a family newspaper,” he wrote in his introduction, “it will convey more useful intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction....

What do you do when you’re stressed out? Talk to friends? Listen to music? Have a drink, or eat some ice cream? Or maybe practice yoga? These things are all pleasant options, and they’re obvious, effective ways to deal with stress. Chances are that you would not even think about doing something like, say, cutting your arm with a knife until you draw blood. Yet inflicting pain is exactly what millions of Americans – particularly adolescents and young adults – do to themselves when they’re stressed....

Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome, yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell. How does this gigantic genome—which would stretch 2 meters if you unwound it from its 5-micron-wide coil in the nucleus—actually go about its work?...

GHOST RANCH, N.M. – As United Nations delegates gather in Warsaw in the 19th annual effort to craft a global climate treaty, indigenous leaders from across North America met half a world away and offered a prophecy: The solution will never come via the UN talks. Tribal elders from the United States, Greenland and Mexico spoke of the need for individual action rather than government edicts, and of the difficulty – and urgency – of replacing economic questions with moral ones....

By Brendan Pierson NEW YORK (Reuters) - Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur vilified as the “pharma bro” for raising the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent, will go on trial on Monday for what U.S. prosecutors called a Ponzi-like scheme at his former hedge fund and a drug company he once ran. Prosecutors have accused Shkreli of lying to investors in the hedge fund and siphoning millions of dollars in assets from biopharmaceutical company Retrophin Inc to repay them....

YOU NEVER KNOW ON BEING CERTAIN: BELIEVING YOU ARE RIGHT EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT by Robert A. Burton. St. Martin Press, 2008. ($24.95) The day after the 1986 Challenger shuttle accident, psychologist Ulric Neisser asked 106 students to write down exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the explosion. When he interviewed the students two and a half years later, 25 percent of them gave strikingly different accounts....

The results are finally in: 2020 was one of the hottest years in recorded history, according to data released today by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By NASA’s reckoning, it tied with 2016 for the hottest year in the books, while NOAA placed it in the number-two spot. Regardless of its final placement, 2020’s feverish heat came without the major El Niño event that boosted global temperatures to a new high four years ago—and thus the year provides an important marker of the power of the long-term warming trend driven by human activities that emit greenhouse gases....

By Jim Christie NAPA Calif. (Reuters) - A 6.0 magnitude earthquake rocked wine country north of San Francisco early on Sunday, injuring dozens of people, two of them seriously, damaging historic buildings, setting some homes on fire and causing power outages around the picturesque town of Napa. The biggest quake in the region in 25 years jolted many residents out of bed when it hit at 3:20 a.m. local time (1020 GMT), centered 6 miles (10 km) south of the City of Napa, population 77,000....

Nina Corley, a science teacher at O’Connell College Preparatory School in Galveston, Texas, often avoids using the term “climate change” in her classroom. Corley, who has been a teacher for nearly 30 years, said that under the Trump administration she has experienced a lot more pushback than usual from parents and students who dispute that humans are causing warming. “I like to teach the science behind it without actually using those words,” Corley said....

Dark matter is one of the universe’s most befuddling, and elusive, components. It could make up roughly a quarter of the universe’s total mass and energy, yet no one knows for sure because no one has actually seen it. Well, it may be showing itself at last. nasa’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has recorded high-energy gamma-ray light emanating from the center of the Milky Way that fits well with dark matter predictions....

The United States’ short sojourn outside the Paris climate agreement is over. The U.S. formally reenters the international pact today, a move that thrusts the Biden administration into a race to craft new emissions pledges that could help shape global ambitions on climate change. White House officials are under pressure to identify a 2030 carbon goal within two months, when President Biden will host an international climate summit. Altogether the U....

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON Idaho (Reuters) - Conservationists said on Wednesday they will sue the Obama administration over its decision to deny federal protections for rare wolverines in the mountains of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. In a 60-day notice of intent to file the suit, a coalition of 13 conservation groups told the administration that politics underpinned this week’s decision, instead of the “best available science” as required by the U....

By 29 years old, Chris Daniel felt he had it all: a wife, two beautiful children and fulfillment of his lifelong dream of becoming a U.S. airline captain. But in the spring of 2022, after years of flying, Chris knew something was not right. Shadows from his past were reemerging, strained by post-COVID travel demand and long, taxing weeks on the road. Years earlier, Chris’s physician had suggested that his low mood and trouble sleeping might be symptoms of mild depression....

What did a dinosaur sound like? How would a Neandertal vocalize? Scientists have long used fossil evidence, DNA analyses and computer models in attempts to break the silence of the distant past. Now 3-D printing and body-scanning technology have lent a little bit of voice to a relatively young artifact: the more than 3,000-year-old mummy of an ancient Egyptian named Nesyamun. The results were published Thursday in Scientific Reports. For centuries, researchers have studied how the shapes formed by the human vocal tract—which runs from the larynx, or voice box, to the mouth and nasal cavity—affect the sounds that emerge from it....

Some 565 million years ago, life on Earth dodged a bullet. The magnetosphere—the magnetic field that surrounds our planet like a protective shield—had degraded to its lowest intensity ever, according to a study published January 28 in Nature Geoscience. Stripped of this shielding, Earth could have been blasted by atmosphere-eroding outbursts from the sun, gradually losing most of its air and water until it became as dry and desolate as present-day Mars....

The U.S. houses what percentage of the world’s airports? If you asked several people this question and averaged their guesses, you would probably end up closer to the right answer (30.5 percent) than if you asked just one person. This “wisdom of the crowd” effect has long been recognized, but scientists have recently gone a step further by showing that the strategy works even when the “crowd” consists of only one person....