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A curious phenomenon has long puzzled developmental psychologists: Why do babies seem incredibly smart in some experiments yet utterly clueless when tested with other tasks designed to measure the same knowledge? Hide a toy under a blanket, and babies under about seven months do not reach for it, suggesting that they have not yet grasped object permanence, the idea that objects continue to exist when out of sight. Experiments involving merely looking at objects, however, show that babies as young as two and a half months are aware of the concept....

PERILS OF E-READING “Why the Brain Prefers Paper,” by Ferris Jabr, is a fascinating study on how the brain reads paper versus e-texts. The differences seem to call for further study, especially given the increasing reliance on online, high-stakes testing in education. These tests involve a lot of reading, even the math tests. If studies show a definite decrease in comprehension when people read e-texts, then we are doing a disservice to our students, teachers and schools by imposing less beneficial testing on them....

If you’re like me, you’ve watched a lot of Star Trek. If you’re even more like me, you’ll read the new book Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds, by Mohamed A. F. Noor, professor of biology at Duke University and editor in chief of the journal Evolution. And being like me, you will turn immediately to Chapter 5: “Sex, Reproduction, and the Making of New Species....

This month, my Scientific American column tackled Net neutrality, the abstruse-sounding, legally embroiled issue that pits the nation’s Internet providers against lovers of free speech, even playing fields and the way things have always been. Net neutrality has been in the news a lot lately and will continue to be—but it’s not actually a new topic. In fact, you could write a whole timeline of Net neutrality’s recent history… 2002: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by Chairman Michael Powell, decrees that broadband Internet service is not a “telecommunications service,” which means that it can’t be subject to the same regulations that govern old-school telephone companies....

Since the modern inception of the Olympic Games in 1896, the international sports competition has not had two summer contests that look alike. Among a litany of oddities are the infamous 1904 St. Louis marathon, where under half of those starting were able to finish the race; the 1956 Blood in the Water water polo match between Hungary and the U.S.S.R. weeks after the Soviet invasion; and figure skating’s two appearances at the summer games, in 1908 and 1920....

Our human family tree used to be a scraggly thing. With relatively few fossils to work from, scientists’ best guess was that they could all be assigned to just two lineages, one of which went extinct and the other of which ultimately gave rise to us. Discoveries made over the past few decades have revealed a far more luxuriant tree, however—one abounding with branches and twigs that eventually petered out. In fact, a new species, called Homo naledi (not shown), as yet undated, was announced just last year....

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our universe could be just one big projection. In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity....

If life existed on Mars, it would have had to deal with harsh radiation—and any traces of that life might only be found deep under the soil today. During the Mars Society annual meeting on Sept. 22-25, held in Washington, D.C., Jennifer Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist and geologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, outlined the constraints on whether living things could have existed on the Red Planet and what obstacles they would have faced, as well as whether it’s possible that any life could still be there....

I sat at an oral surgeon’s office waiting for my daughter. The scene called to mind an assembly line. Patients went in, one after another, resigned to having their third molars, commonly known as wisdom teeth, taken out. They left with bandages, specially form-fitted with ice packs, wrapped around their heads. Each carried a gift T-shirt, preprinted home care instructions, and prescriptions for antibiotics and pain meds. Removal of the wisdom teeth is almost a rite of passage for young adults in America today....

Volcanoes that are thought to be mild-mannered, releasing steady lava flows, can sometimes erupt explosively without warning—as New Zealand’s Mount Tarawera did in June 1886, causing widespread damage and death. Geologists have long wondered why volcanoes make this sudden and dangerous transition, says earth scientist Danilo Di Genova of the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Di Genova and his colleagues propose in Science Advances that such a catastrophic switch may begin with crystal grains called nanolites, which can form in rising magma and are only about 1/100th the size of an average bacterium....

Thousands of U.S scientists are heading into their fourth week of enforced leave, the result of a prolonged government shutdown that began on 22 December. The Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are among the science agencies that have stopped processing grant applications, cut off access to key data sets and temporarily shuttered federal labs and offices. With budget negotiations between President Donald Trump and Congress stalled, there is a growing chance that the government will remain closed until at least 12 January....

Will collaboration or competition define international space science and exploration in the 21st century? The answer could come down to how two spaceflight superpowers, the U.S. and China, choose to engage with each other in the next few years. The U.S. remains the global leader in space by most metrics, but China is methodically advancing its own ambitious space agenda at a quickening pace, blueprinting and carrying out a succession of robotic interplanetary forays to destinations such as the asteroid belt and Jupiter, as well as a sample-return mission to Mars....

The core stage of yet another Chinese Long March 5B rocket is set to tumble uncontrollably back to Earth this week after delivering the third and final module to China’s fledgling space station. The roughly 25-ton (23 metric tons) rocket stage, which launched Oct. 31 to deliver the Mengtian laboratory cabin module to the Tiangong space station, is predicted to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, Nov. 5 at 11:51 p.m. EDT, give or take 14 hours, according to researchers at The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies....

Slipping on a pair of dark glasses, Agent Kay raises a mysterious handheld device before a crowd of shocked New Yorkers. Suddenly, the unit emits a brilliant flash of light that vaporizes all memory of a violent attack by space aliens from the minds of panicked earthlings who had just witnessed the horror. That little flashy thing, as Will Smith’s character calls it in this scene from the movie Men in Black, is not entirely science fiction; neuroscientists know how to erase memories of the recent past, while leaving well-established memories intact....

The places immigrants settle and how they disperse across the U.S. has more to do with family relationships than it does with economics, say Dartmouth researchers. In a study that compared the geography of immigration based on households rather than on individuals, professors Mark Ellis and Richard Wright found that, among other things, generational status, not income, has the most effect on immigrant dispersion. The team’s findings, reported in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences not only challenge current demographic analyses that track heads of households but reveal some of the social, political, and economic implications of doing so....

Imagine you are a doctor treating a patient who has been in nearly constant pain for four years, ever since the day he sprained his ankle stepping off a curb. Physical therapy only briefly dulled the agony. Painkillers were not much better, and the most effective drugs made your patient exhausted and constipated. He is now depressed, sleeping poorly and having difficulty concentrating. As you talk with him, you realize that his thinking also seems impaired....

When sperm meets egg not every match is a winning one. That is particularly true in the petri dishes of the scientific dating game called IVF, or in vitro fertilization. For the first two or three days after the arranged coupling, scientists carefully scrutinize the budding relationship for any signs that it has veered off course. Embryos with a good shape and rapidly dividing cells receive high marks and may be selected for implantation in a woman’s womb or frozen for future use....

Point two laser beams so that they cross each other, and each goes through as if the other one did not exist. Light rays cannot interact with other light rays—or can they? With the help of a single atom, physicists have devised a system in which one light beam can turn another on or off. Such a light switch could serve as the basic component of futuristic optical quantum computers and may help open the way to a quantum version of the Internet, which would offer unbreakable data security....

Last fall, as the horrific allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against entertainment titan Harvey Weinstein started to emerge, details of another alleged case came to light, not from a Hollywood casting couch but from remote scientific research stations in Antarctica. Two former graduate students of prominent Boston University geologist David Marchant lodged formal complaints against their onetime mentor, saying that he had sexually harassed them during research expeditions nearly 20 years ago....

This past July, Scientific American unveiled a bold new look for its flagship monthly magazine. In keeping with that theme of reinvention, we have now redesigned our web site. Visitors will still find the same cutting-edge daily news, in-depth features and fascinating columns and podcasts they’ve come to expect from SciAm.com. The layout is sleeker, more user-friendly and takes better advantage of the web medium, however. And we’ve added some exciting new features, too....