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Stephen Ornes has always found mathematics attractive. The journalist has written articles about the discipline, but lately he has focused on the startling visual attractions created by artists who follow mathematical rules of group theory or rotations. Ornes gave Scientific American readers a gallery of such images and sculptures in “Art by the Numbers” in the August 2018 issue. Now he is back with a larger collection in his new book titled Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations (Sterling Publishing, 2019)....

A radio telescope in Canada has proved its mettle in finding many new examples of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—giving astronomers one of their best shots yet at unraveling the mystery of these cosmic flashes. “Look! We see FRBs,” Deborah Good, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, on 7 January. Good reported the first results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a telescope that was originally designed to explore the early Universe but has turned out to be ideal for detecting FRBs....

Discoveries on the grandest scale in the cosmos, as well as findings a bit closer to home, share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Cosmologist James Peebles of Princeton University won half the award for helping to build our picture of how the universe formed and evolved. And the other half went to Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz of the University of Cambridge and the University of Geneva for finding 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star....

Once upon a time the factory, with its dirty, noisy machinery, was the standard workplace of industrialized nations; today it’s the office. Hundreds of millions of people—at least 15 percent of the population in developed countries—work at a desk, with or without a partition that separates them from the desks of their co-workers. That’s an awful lot of swivel chairs. But a cubicle is more than a mere physical workspace. In recent years social and organizational psychologists have begun to amass evidence that the character of people’s personal work environments affects their performance in profound and surprising ways....

On a warm day in late April, Frank Gallo is getting his steps in at one of his regular haunts: the sewage plant. He strolls along the paved trail outside the facility in Norwalk, Conn., scanning the pines on the left, the river on the right. Overhead eight Northern Rough-winged Swallows wheel in the cloudless sky, taking turns swooping into the water-treatment tanks to catch insects drawn to the nutrient-rich pools below....

IN WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST attempt at an electric car, Scottish inventor Robert Anderson built a “crude electric carriage” in the mid- to late 1830s. It didn’t get far. For one thing, its battery wasn’t good enough. (Today’s green car engineers can sympathize.) It also faced stiff competition from steam-powered cars. When rechargable batteries started to appear in the mid-1800s, electric vehicles got a fillip. In 1897 the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company in Philadelphia assembled a fleet of electric-powered taxis for New York City....

Editor’s Note (4/24/20): This article was originally published online on March 11. It has been updated for inclusion in the June 2020 issue of Scientific American and to address rumors that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab in China. The mysterious patient samples arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director....

More than one party at fault Honan admits that he’s partly to blame, for daisy-chaining three online accounts so that the failure of one would lead to the failure of the next; for putting his street address on his personal website’s domain registration (when a P.O. box would have worked); for not backing up his laptop to a physical disk; for not using two-factor authentication on his Gmail account; and, worst of all, for enabling his iCloud account to wipe his laptop’s hard drive....

Most people know of some of the tools that help us fight pandemics: safe and effective vaccines, antiviral and antibody treatments, and for respiratory infections such as COVID, public-health measures such as masks. But they have overlooked one tool that might help us prevent the next pandemic: zombie viral genomes. Zombie viruses are the crippled byproducts of viral infection that can’t reproduce without help. They are intriguing from a therapeutic perspective because they seem to do several things to lessen disease: they prompt the immune system to act, and, without adding to disease themselves, they suck up some of the machinery that their active counterparts use to copy themselves during an infection....

The most exciting interplanetary mission for the early 21st century is arguably not a robot named Perseverance currently roving around Mars gathering samples for a future return to Earth. Instead it is a NASA spacecraft that could launch later this decade to Europa, an enigmatic moon of Jupiter that boasts an enormous ocean—bigger than all of Earth’s oceans combined—beneath an icy crust. Called Europa Clipper, the mission could lift off as soon as 2024 to study the moon’s subsurface abyss with the goal of gauging its potential habitability and the distinct possibility of discovering a “second genesis” there....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Controlling malaria is a war being waged on many fronts. Mosquito nets and coils repel mosquitoes from their human feast; vaccines protect us from the inside and environmental measures clear the stagnant water where mosquitoes like to breed. But not content with the bedroom, scientists are looking further – to the intimate sex life of the mosquito....

The Obama administration on Friday brought a temporary halt to new coal mining leases on federal lands while it conducts a three-year review meant to bring coal leasing in line with U.S. climate policy. The moratorium comes just days after Obama said in his State of the Union Address that he would push to change the way the government manages its oil and coal resources to reflect the costs they impose on both taxpayers and the planet....

PARADOXES—in which the same information may lead to two contradictory conclusions—give us pleasure and torment at the same time. They are a source of endless fascination and frustration, whether they involve philosophy (consider Russell’s paradox, “This statement is false”), science—or perception. The Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar once said that such puzzles have the same effect on a scientist or philosopher as the smell of burning rubber on an engineer: they create an irresistible urge to find the cause....

It was late afternoon in the winter scrub desert within Namibia’s Etosha National Park when I spotted a family of elephants on the southern edge of the clearing. I was scanning the horizon from the observation tower where my colleagues and I conduct our research at Mushara water hole. Wind had deterred elephant families from visiting the water hole earlier—it interferes with their efforts to keep tabs on one another vocally—but with the air now still, our first customers of the day had finally appeared....

More and more visitors are traveling to Miami Beach to see how the poster child for sunny-day flooding is grappling with climate change adaptation. Visiting elected officials ask about funding for projects related to saltwater intrusion and rising seas. They tour the central sewer treatment plant on a barrier island that’s undergoing a multimillion-dollar upgrade. And if there’s a king tide, they have to pull their boots on, said James Murley, Miami-Dade County’s chief resilience officer....

Have you ever seen an asteroid? These space rocks, though small in size, are very numerous, but very few amateur astronomers have ever seen one. The next couple of weeks give stargazers an opportunity to view three asteroids in one night: Flora, Juno, and Iris. The asteroids Juno, Flora and Iris were among the first eight space rocks ever to be discovered. Juno was the third asteroid discovered, in 1804, very soon after Ceres — the largest asteroid — in 1801 and Pallas in 1802....

Key concepts Biology Senses Perception Receptors Introduction How many objects do you think you touch with your hands every day? A lot! Every time you touch something your hands are able to feel how smooth, cold, warm or rough the object is. In fact, your hands and fingers are so good at sensing details of shapes and surface textures that you are able to identify an object just by touch and without seeing it....

Sunday lived up to its name this past weekend, as countless skywatchers in the western U.S. took in a rare annular solar eclipse. An annular eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly in front of the sun but its apparent size, from Earth’s perspective, is too small to completely cover the solar disk. During the May 20 eclipse, the moon covered as much as 94 percent of the sun, leaving a narrow “ring of fire” in the sky....

Sponges are simple creatures, yet they are expert filter feeders, straining tens of thousands of litres of water through their bodies every day to collect their food. Their mastery of this complex behaviour is all the more remarkable because they have no brain, nor even a single neuron to their name. A study published on 4 November in Science now reveals that sponges use an intricate cell communication system to regulate their feeding and to potentially weed out invading bacteria....

Key Concepts Physics Mass Volume Density Engineering Introduction It’s one thing to build a boat that can stay afloat in calm water—but what about one that can survive large waves in a storm? In this activity you’ll put a new spin on a classic activity. You’ll build aluminum foil boats to carry pennies as cargo, but instead of testing them in flat water you’ll create your own storm to test them in waves!...