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In 1962 someone at the Genetics Institute in Pavia, Italy, turned up the temperature in an incubator holding fruit flies. When Ferruccio Ritossa, then a young geneticist, examined the cells of these “heat shocked” flies, he noticed that their chromosomes had puffed up at discrete locations. The puffy appearance was a known sign that genes were being activated in those regions to give rise to their encoded proteins, so those sites of activity became known as the heat shock loci....

When Nancy Sutley moved in to her new office as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)—a 40-year-old White House environmental policy advisory office created by Congress—she found a lot of red pens. Immediately, she removed the pens from her desk and asked her staff to remove any red pens from their desks, as well. “The White House should not be in the business of editing science,” Sutley says. “Let the scientists do the science....

The photos from a historic flyby of our solar system’s largest moon are starting to roll in. On Monday (June 7), NASA’s Juno probe zoomed within just 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of Jupiter’s enormous satellite Ganymede, which is bigger than the planet Mercury. It was the closest any probe had come to Ganymede since May 2000, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft got within about 620 miles (1,000 km) of the moon’s icy surface....

Mammals make all manner of sounds, but their calls rarely resemble music. The culprit? A lack of rhythm—the temporal sequence that organizes sounds, and the pauses between them, into a repeatable pattern. Humans were previously the only mammals known to use rhythm to create music. To discover how we could have acquired this ear for timing, scientists are exploring the musical capabilities of other species. This is why a team of researchers recently trekked into the jungles of Madagascar, armed with microphones to record the remarkable calls of the indri lemur (Indri indri)....

Editor’s Note (June 26, 2018): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published on June 14, 2017, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision to uphold the Trump administration’s travel ban, which blocks travelers entering the U.S. from several majority-Muslim countries. The latest version of US President Donald Trump’s travel ban could make it harder for researchers from several countries to enter the United States to attend scientific meetings, perform research or visit relatives....

Online social networks are crawling with autonomous computer programs that spread propaganda in attempt to manipulate voters and otherwise influence political processes. Researchers are beginning to understand how these “bot” accounts are used to try to manipulate public sentiment on contentious issues including gun control and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But they are still unraveling whether large numbers of computer-generated tweets can really sway policies or elections—and how such influence might be countered....

Last month senior officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told staffers to avoid using seven words such as “science-based” and “fetus” in budget-related documents. The backlash was swift and strident; headlines accused the CDC of censoring scientific ideas, of attempting to substitute ideology for truth, of an Orwellian attempt to manufacture an alternate reality under the administration of Donald Trump. The CDC denies it “banned” any words, and further reporting by The Washington Post cast the “words to avoid” issue as an attempt to make the agency’s work more palatable to Republican lawmakers....

On a routine expedition in 1987, oceanographers in the submersible Alvin were mapping the typically barren, nutrient-poor seafloor in the Santa Catalina Basin, off the shore of southern California. On the final dive of the trip, the scanning sonar detected a large object on the seafloor. Piercing through the abyssal darkness down at 1,240 meters, Alvin’s headlights revealed a 20-meter-long whale skeleton partly buried in sediment. On reviewing the dive video­tapes, expedition leader Craig Smith and his team saw that the skeleton was probably either a blue or a fin whale....

The moon crosses Earth’s face in a spectacular new video captured by a spacecraft watching from a million miles away. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) studies the solar wind and snaps vivid shots of Earth’s surface from its position about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from the planet. Recently, the moon entered DSCOVR’s field of view, and the spacecraft caught the amazing lunar transit on time-lapse video. “It’s surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon,” Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement....

The updated standards will reduce Americans’ exposure to ground-level ozone, which is formed by reactions between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. It is hoped the new rules will improve public health protection, particularly for at risk groups like children, older adults and individuals with lung diseases like asthma, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency examined nearly 2300 studies in its review of the ozone standards, including more than 1000 studies that were published since the standards were last reviewed in 2008....

One day in 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina blew through Florida and devastated New Orleans, Susan Halbert stood before a pomelo tree on a farm outside Miami. Something about this tree did not look right. It seemed undernourished: its leaves were sparse, and its melon-size citrus fruit was lopsided. Yet all the other plants in the garden were thriving, and the woman who took care of them had carefully tended the pomelo with a fresh layer of fertilizer....

Laura Grego and David Wright damningly criticize the U.S.’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program to intercept incoming nuclear missiles in “Broken Shield.” But your readers should not confuse what amounts to a debate over priorities with a claim grounded in established nuclear theory. In fact, ballistic missile defense (BMD) can limit nuclear damage, buttress U.S. deterrence and empower arms control. The missiles BMD shoots down are not the only ones that it impacts....

Lobbyists for Shell Oil Co. told members of Congress this year that Shell supports a nationwide carbon tax and encouraged lawmakers to price greenhouse gas emissions, E&E News has learned. The company’s in-house lobbyists met with lawmakers in the Senate and the House, including Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who introduced a carbon tax bill last month. In a lobbying disclosure form dated last month, Shell said its representatives had taken part in “discussions in support of a robust, transparent federal carbon price” in the second quarter of the year....

After a slow start this year, tornado season made a deadly debut Wednesday night. An estimated dozen tornadoes touched down in north Texas. The damage included at least six people killed and whole houses that were suddenly yanked off their foundations to join the airborne debris. The twisters hit three Texas counties southwest of Dallas. Witness accounts suggest the largest funnel was close to a mile wide, and scientists estimate its wind speeds reached 210 miles an hour or more, according to Kurt Van Speybroeck, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service based in Fort Worth....

By the Editors “It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us,” wrote 16 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in an open letter in March that has since been signed by more than a million people. Decades after the end of the cold war and mere months after the U.S., Russia and other members of the United Nations Security Council agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the specter of nuclear apocalypse again looms over humankind....

The remains of plants processed for human purposes molder in landfills across the world. Whether waste paper or raked leaves, the plant remnants still contain cellulose, a sugar in greenery that bonds with the chemical compound lignin to furnish a plant’s structure. Microbes living in the landfills break down this cellulose into methane, which slowly seeps to the surface and into the atmosphere, where it is a potent greenhouse gas. BlueFire Ethanol, Inc....

“Did you call him yet?” my boss asked. We were under pressure to finish a big editorial project, and the phone call was key to crucial details. I replied reflexively, without thinking: “I haven’t reached him yet.” My boss’s eyes flashed. “Wait a minute,” he said impatiently. “You tried him and you didn’t get through, or you haven’t called yet at all?” Whoops. I admitted that, in fact, I hadn’t called....

U.S. health officials said Friday they would quarantine 195 U.S. citizens who were evacuated from Wuhan, China, amid an outbreak of a novel coronavirus—the first time in 50 years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken such action. The order will be effective for 14 days from the date of evacuation. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters health officials were prepared for the possibility that the outbreak of the coronavirus could become a pandemic—the worldwide spread of a disease....

Particle cosmology, which investigates how the smallest units of matter have determined the shape and fate of the universe, is one of the hottest topics in physics today. In recent years the field has received as much as half a billion dollars in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA. Scientists have made great strides in understanding the high-energy particle interactions that roiled the universe in the first moments of its history and influenced cosmic evolution in the billions of years ?...

There are 300,000 to 500,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania, and some of them might be leaking significant quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That abandoned wells may leak methane—which is 86 times as bad for the climate as CO2 on a 20-year time scale—has so far flown under the radar of regulators and industry....