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Formula E, the world’s only all-electric racing series, is in the midst of its fifth season. Scientific American interviewed Sylvain Filippi, managing director and chief technical officer of Virgin Racing, a British electric motor racing team, to learn more about the innerworkings of Formula E and how its technology might find its way into our everyday lives. Formula E is at the cutting edge of automotive technology. The cars in Formula E are by definition pure electric cars—no fossil fuel used here....

Two major philanthropic organizations, along with the United States and Britain, announced on Wednesday an ambitious experiment to combat mosquito-borne diseases in cities by infecting the insects with crafty bacteria. Researchers have used the bacteria, known as Wolbachia, in trials in places including Australia and Brazil in recent years. But those efforts were small, reaching areas with tens of thousands of residents. The new trials will cover urban areas with millions of people....

A few years ago Paolo Guidetti was leafing through a book on ancient art when he came across a Roman mosaic showing a man’s legs dangling from the mouth of an enormous fish. Struck by the picture, Guidetti, a biologist at the University of Salento in Italy, recognized the fish as one that he studies: the dusky grouper. Today fishers would be hard-pressed to find a dusky grouper that large and so close to the sea’s surface....

Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver. The precious metal has been used to fight infection for thousands of years — Hippocrates first described its antimicrobial properties in 400 bc — but how it works has been a mystery. Now, a team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has described how silver can disrupt bacteria, and shown that the ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance....

One afternoon in the summer of 1995, a curious incident occurred. I was fine-tuning my spoken commentary on a CD I was preparing about music and the brain. To detect glitches in the recording, I was looping phrases so that I could hear them over and over. At one point, when I was alone in the room, I put one of the phrases, “sometimes behave so strangely,” on a loop, began working on something else and forgot about it....

In health, as with so many things, our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness. Take our astonishingly sophisticated response to injury and infection. Our bodies unleash armies of cellular troops to slaughter invaders and clear out traitors. Their movements are marshaled by signaling chemicals, such as the interleukins, which tell cells where and when to fight and when to stand down. We experience this as the swelling, redness and soreness of inflammation—an essential part of healing....

Research teams in Australia and China are inching closer toward a solar cell design that could revolutionize the industry, but plenty of hurdles remain. The key lies with perovskite, a crystalline structure first discovered in Russia in the mid-1800s. Engineers want to use the material to build cheaper and more efficient solar panels—potentially in tandem with silicon-based panels, which are popular and more durable. “There’s a lot of emphasis now on improving efficiency, and that’s why there’s suddenly these tandem approaches,” said Thomas White, a research scientist and professor at the Australian National University (ANU)....

Everyone knows flu strikes most often during wintertime, but new research indicates a number of other infectious diseases are seasonal, too. Chicken pox often peaks in spring. Sexually transmitted diseases tend to strike most often in the summer, at least in the U.S. And bacterial pneumonia is most common in midwinter, according to a study of 69 infectious diseases, published Thursday in PLOS Pathogens. Lead author Micaela Elvira Martinez says she had expected to find acute infections, ranging from malaria to polio, had seasonal peaks....

Key Concepts Physics Engineering Geometry Centrifugal force Introduction Have you ever watched a train roll by? If so, you might have wondered how the train is able to stay on its tracks. The secret lies in the train’s wheels. Although they seem cylindrical at first glance, when looking more closely you will notice that they have a slightly semi-conical shape. (Of course, never get close to a working train!) This special geometry is what keeps trains on the tracks....

Our brains are crammed with a massive amount of memories that we have formed over a lifetime of experiences. These memories range from the profound (who am I and how did I get here?) to the most trivial (the license plate of the car at a stoplight). Furthermore, our memories also vary considerably in their precision. Parents, for instance, often know the perils of a fuzzy memory when shopping for a birthday gift for their child: remembering that their son wanted the G....

By Mike Saburi HWANGE, Zimbabwe, July 29 (Reuters) - Two Zimbabwean men who were paid $50,000 by an American hunter who killed ‘Cecil’, the country’s best-known lion, arrived in court on Wednesday facing charges of poaching. American hunter Walter James Palmer has also been accused by wildlife officials of killing Cecil without a permit. Palmer, who has left Zimbabwe, says he killed the lion on July 1 but believed it was a legal hunt....

By Steve Quinn AU Alaska (Reuters) - An Alaska volcano that has been spewing ash and lava for years began erupting with new intensity this week, pushing a plume of smoke and ash as high as 24,000 feet (7,315 meters) and prompting scientists to issue their highest volcanic alert in five years, authorities said on Tuesday. But the intense action at the Pavlof Volcano, located in an uninhabited region nearly 600 miles (966 km) southwest of Anchorage, has so far not disrupted any regional air traffic, thanks to favorable weather that has made it easier for flights to navigate around the affected area....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). America’s last major particle collider lies coiled beneath the pine barrens and sparse outbuildings of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), as it’s called, recently came out of hibernation equipped with new gear for spilling the secrets of atoms. RHIC pales next to Europe’s Large Hadron Collider when it comes to the energy with which its particles collide—energy that determines whether collisions will give rise to new, exotic particles....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Astronomers strive to observe the universe via ever more advanced techniques. Whenever researchers invent a new method, unprecedented information is collected and people’s understanding of the cosmos deepens. An ambitious program to blast cameras far beyond the solar system was announced in April 2016 by internet investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner, late physicist Stephen Hawking and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg....

In 2000 scientists at the University of Utah discovered a family of early risers who typically slept from around five at night to two in the morning. The condition, dubbed familial advanced sleep phase syndrome (FASPS), has allowed researchers studying circadian rhythms to understand how the human body clock works, which could pave the way for future therapies aimed at seasonal affective disorder, jet lag and insomnia. Now, a new study by a team out of the University of California, San Francisco, which includes members of the group that initially identified FASPS, has determined the operational mechanism by which the gene Per2 is implicated in adjusting the body clock’s response to light....

In 2011, a remarkable study in the New England Journal of Medicine detailed the successful treatment of six adults with haemophilia B, which is caused by a deficiency in the coagulation protein known as factor IX. All of the participants were able to eliminate or reduce the frequency of clotting-factor-replacement injections—the current standard treatment for the disease—after their livers began producing functional levels of factor IX. The experimental therapy came in the form of an adeno-associated virus (AAV) carrying a gene that encodes instructions for production of normal levels of human factor IX....

The June 24 decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade struck close to home for genetic counselors, the medical professionals who are often tasked with advising and consoling prospective parents when ultrasounds or other prenatal tests indicate a threat to their own health or the health of their future child. People seeking abortions based on health concerns during pregnancy are a small percentage of abortion seekers overall, but they are disproportionately affected by the new barrage of restrictions because detecting and confirming a prenatal diagnosis takes time....

I received a call several months ago from a publicist for a company promoting an infrared sauna–a machine that is supposed to heat the body, not the surrounding air, and so produce sweat more efficiently. The company, Sunlight Saunas, contends that users experience the “same healing energy that is released naturally by the sun.” On its Web site, it claims, as do abundant other Internet-based sellers of infrared saunas, an amazing list of health benefits: pain relief, weight loss, detoxification, increased circulation, cholesterol removal and a boost for the “immuse [sic] system....

A large new study adds to the evidence that inducing labor at 39 weeks is as safe as waiting for labor to occur naturally, a finding that experts say could change the way some women in the U.S. choose to give birth. In a paper published Wednesday, researchers found that inducing labor at 39 weeks—when a pregnancy has reached full-term—didn’t result in any higher risk of perinatal death or severe health problems in infants....

Nearly 200 nations pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement on climate change. But how will we know if some don’t follow through? The current inability to verify that a nation has made its promised carbon cuts remains a long-standing loophole that experts say must be closed to make the global pact effective. The National Research Council, representing some of the top scientists in the United States, framed the problem in a 2010 report....