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In recent years, there has been growing discussion around the topic of sexual assault on college campuses. Prominent statistics estimate that between one in four and one in five women will experience sexual assault or rape during her time as a college student. Researchers in the field have emphasized that caution must be taken when interpreting these figures; however, the fact that sexual aggression persists at all highlights its importance as an issue of societal concern....

Italy is a hotspot for hazardous volcanoes. As the crust of Africa’s tectonic plate burrows beneath that of Eurasia, magma rises from below, leading to nearly a dozen explosive mountains throughout the country. Vesuvius and Etna are the most infamous. But Colli Albani—a volcanic complex of hills some 30 kilometers outside Rome—has been a hidden threat. It seemed extinct because through all human history there was no clear record that it had erupted....

Ball lightning in the lab: Physicists concentrated the energy from a household microwave into a cubic centimeter and piped it into a ceramic, creating a hot spot. Withdrawing the pipe brought out the hot spot, which formed a buoyant, threecentimeter-wide fireball that lived for a few tens of milliseconds. Physical Review Letters, February 3 Mice lacking the Runx1 gene feel no pain or discomfort from heat or cold. The gene appears to be a master switch for neuropathic pain, or chronic pain that outlasts an injury and is associated with nervous system changes....

The first two dogs reported to have coronavirus probably caught the infection from their owners, say researchers who studied the animals and members of the infected households in Hong Kong. An analysis of viral genetic sequences from the dogs showed them to be identical to those in the infected people. Researchers suspected that the infection had been passed from the owners to the dogs, and the direct genomic link strongly supports that, says Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong who led the study, which is published today in Nature....

Although A. Garrett Lisi’s use of the mathematical group known as E8 to form a physics “theory of everything” remains controversial, other recent research into the group has been acclaimed as the scaling of a mathematical Mount Everest. German mathematician Wilhelm Killing first formulated E8 nearly 120 years ago, but it was only in January 2007 that a team of mathematicians completed a detailed map of E8’s inner workings. The “map,” a table of integers with more than 450,000 rows and columns, required 77 hours of supercomputer time to compute and occupied 60 gigabytes of disk space....

Climate change isn’t just exacerbating extreme weather. Some events wouldn’t happen without it, according to a major scientific report released yesterday. They include a marine heat wave in the Tasman Sea off the coast of Australia last year. Ocean temperatures soared 2.5 degrees Celsius, or about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, above normal. The record-breaking event would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, according to the report, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society....

MIAMI — One of the first sea-level rise maps Broadway Harewood saw was a few years back, when climate activists gathered in his neighborhood to talk about how global warming would affect people in less-affluent South Florida communities. Harewood had a realization, one that he illustrates with his hands. One hand represents the city of Miami Beach. The opposite hand, moving like the incoming tide, demonstrates how the seas will eventually rise, potentially bringing the coastline of South Florida closer to Miami’s historically black neighborhoods — properties like his investments in Liberty City that sit on comparatively higher ground....

For the villager, who asks to be identified only as Bernadette, life is a running battle. On tiny plots of corn, millet and sweet potatoes next to Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she and her neighbors scrape a bare subsistence for themselves and their children. Her sweet potatoes, she told us last year, are under constant attack from baboons and elephants that stray from the park in search of food....

A single hydrogen molecule just might be a real-life little engine that could, according to a new study. It would be hard to imagine an engine much tinier. Physicists in Germany and Spain have demonstrated that a hydrogen molecule dancing between two possible positions can induce regular vibration of a nearby cantilever—essentially a miniature tuning fork made of quartz. The molecule’s effect is no small feat, given the tiny size of a hydrogen molecule (H2) in relation to the cantilever....

Wealth typically begets health, as researchers have known for decades. Lower-income families have more medical issues during early childhood and adulthood than wealthier families do. Infants are more likely to be born premature and underweight. Children have higher rates of asthma. Adults are at higher risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Such disparities among teenagers, however, whose health problems tend to be subtler, had been harder to pin down. According to a new study by researchers at McGill University’s Institute for Health and Social Policy, the socioeconomic fault line divides adolescents, too....

Pregnant women exposed to lead had newborns who scored slightly lower on tests measuring reflexes and other skills tied to brain development, according to a new study from China. Scientists already have documented that low levels of lead can reduce children’s IQs and cause other neurological effects. But the new study is one of few to find that babies in the womb also could be affected, especially if exposed during the first trimester....

Some 130 years since Thomas Edison’s breakthrough with artificial light, nearly a quarter of humanity still lacks electricity, a fact officials here want delegates to the upcoming U.N. climate talks to consider. Vast swaths of the world also have no access to modern fuels like natural gas, kerosene or propane, relying instead on wood or charcoal as principal sources of energy. Switching to energy sources that are more efficient and less detrimental to human health is a prerequisite for raising billions out of poverty as nations promised to do, U....

If you’re pregnant and experiencing anxiety, you’re in good company. Approximately 60% of women will feel significant pregnancy anxiety at some point. This includes both mental components, like worrying about worst-case scenarios and riding extreme mood swings, and physical components like feeling tension and having a hard time relaxing into sleep. Pregnancy is amazing. In 40 weeks, two cells go from just meeting each other to having turned into a tiny human....

The top five greenhouse gas–emitting nations—the U.S., China, Russia, Brazil and India—collectively caused $6 trillion in global economic losses between 1990 and 2014, according to a recent study of available data. And those losses haven’t been felt equally. Dartmouth College climate scientists Christopher W. Callahan and Justin S. Mankin used climate models to determine how much of the planet’s warming could be attributed to each country’s emissions and calculated what those emissions have cost every other country....

The top half of the Democratic presidential field gathered last night in New York City for a seven-hour forum on climate change, and the marathon session revealed several unifying themes among the 10 candidates who appeared—and a few key differences. President Trump was a frequent target—more so than usual—as were fossil fuel executives. Climate change was described repeatedly by the field as a dire threat that would require trillions of dollars in government spending to address....

Several states are reporting only positive COVID-19 test results from private labs, a practice that paints a misleading picture of how fast the disease is spreading. Maryland, Ohio and others are posting the numbers of new positive tests and deaths, for instance, but don’t report the negative results, which would help show how many people were tested overall. “This matters because it gives you a false sense of what is going on in a particular location,” said Dr....

This page often focuses on the fascinating science featured inside the magazine, but this month I also want to tell you about what we are doing for science outside of our pages. As a Scientific American reader, you are most likely concerned about the sliding performance of U.S. students in science and math. Fostering learning in general is important, of course. (For more on that, see “Hearing the Music, Honing the Mind,” Science Agenda....

HOW WOULD WE KNOW if a machine is conscious? As computers inch closer to human-level performance—witness IBM’s Watson victory over the all-time champs of the television quiz show Jeopardy—this question is becoming more pressing. So far, though, despite their ability to crunch data at superhuman speed, we suspect that unlike us, computers do not truly “see” a visual scene full of shapes and colors in front of their cameras; they don’t “hear” a question through their microphones; they don’t feel anything....

Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) is an uncommon and frequently fatal lung disease, and the road to diagnosis can be long and difficult. No one is certain how many people are affected by PF. Research estimates that idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which is just one of more than 200 types, affects one out of 200 adults over the age of 70 in the United States. That translates to more than 200,000 people living with IPF today....

CONKLIN, Alberta—The challenge of pulling oil from sand near here has typically required scraping away the boreal forest and underlying peat to expose the tar sand deposits below. The thickened sand is scooped out, then boiled to separate out the bitumen, with the leftover contaminated water and muck dumped in vast holding ponds the size of small lakes. From orbit the enormous strip mines and tailings lakes created by this process stand out, like a spreading sore—a scar on the planet evidencing the American thirst for oil....