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Soil management doesn’t sound snazzy, but scientists say it offers huge potential for keeping carbon emissions in the ground—and out of the atmosphere. A paper published this week in the journal Scientific Reports estimates that improved land-use practices could increase the amount of carbon stored in the top layer of soils worldwide by between 0.9 and 1.85 billion metric tons each year. At the high end, that’s about as much carbon as is emitted by the transportation sector annually, the researchers note....

Scientific American talked to Orzel about the coolest clocks in history, the most complicated calendar systems and why we still need to improve the best clocks of today. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] How did the advent of clocks change history? There’s an interesting democratization of time as you go along. The very most ancient monuments are things such as Newgrange in Ireland. It’s this massive artificial hill with a passage through the center....

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Perhaps more significantly, faster and more powerful mobile devices hitting the market are producing and consuming content at unprecedented levels. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012, according to a recent report from Cisco, which makes much of the gear that runs the Internet. Yet the capacity of the world’s networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will reach the upper limit and what we will do when that happens....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. People rarely enjoy meeting a jellyfish. On the beach they appear limp, amorphous, and blistered in the sun. In the water it’s often a brush of a tentacle on exposed skin followed by a sting. They hardly evoke the serene elegance of a turtle or the majesty of a breaching humpback whale. But despite making a poor first impression, jellyfish are among the most unusual animals on Earth and deserve a second chance to introduce themselves....

His finalist year: 1981 His finalist project: Designing a cheaper, more powerful solar panel What led to the project: As a kid growing up in Omaha, Neb., John Geppert had two main interests: engineering, and international economics and development. His high school French teacher’s husband, a political scientist, helped him see the connection between both fields: Many problems in developing countries, he noted, require low-cost engineering solutions. In particular, Geppert became fascinated by how to produce cheap solar power....

Necessity is the mother of invention, if sometimes only indirectly, as was the case with structures called flexagons. English graduate student Arthur H. Stone faced a challenge when he arrived at Princeton University in 1939: how to fit large American notepaper into a small British binder. So he began trimming the margins from his notes and folding the leftover strips for fun. His idle origami ultimately led to a remarkable entity named a trihexaflexagon, which was shaped like a simple, flat hexagon but could be manipulated to reveal three different faces....

This story was updated at 5:00 p.m. The first microbe to live entirely by genetic code synthesized by humans has started proliferating at a lab in the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Venter and his colleagues used a synthetic genome—the genetic instruction set for life—to build and operate a new, synthetic strain of Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria, according to an online report published May 20 by Science. “This is the first self-replicating cell on the planet to have a computer for a parent,” said J....

Four African countries saw significantly fewer childhood deaths from malaria after distributing insecticide-treated bed nets and combination drug therapy, according to a new report released by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO recommends that malaria-stricken countries distribute so-called long lasting insecticidal nets to protect sleepers from mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite as well as a cocktail of medicines (artemisinin-based combination therapy, or ACT) designed to treat drug-resistant malaria (Plasmodium falciparum), a growing problem....

Scientists have always been fascinated by the question of human origins: When and where did modern humans—Homo sapiens—first appear? What distinguishes us from other members of the genus Homo and enabled us to develop such unprecedented culture and society? Indeed, hardly any question fascinates humanity as much as our own roots. For thousands of years, clerics, scholars and philosophers have been racking their brains about where we come from, who are we and where are we going....

LIFESAVING VESSELS “Heart Therapy,” by Gabor Rubanyi, explains how the heart can develop new blood vessels in response to blockages in the coronary arteries (although it does not do so enough to get around the blockages for most patients). It also describes investigations into how to promote these so-called collateral vessels. The article answers a question I have had for 28 years. Until my first, minor heart attack in 1989, I had been running four miles, five days a week for more than a decade....

Ever since 2000, when psychologist Michael E. McCullough, now at the University of Miami, and his colleagues published a meta-analysis of more than three dozen studies showing a strong correlation between religiosity and lower mortality, skeptics have been challenged by believers to explain why—as if to say, “See, there is a God, and this is the payoff for believing.” In science, however, “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds would want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were employed (and “God works in mysterious ways” will not pass peer review)....

In the hours after Joe Biden was sworn in as president on January 20, 2021, an online discussion channel followed by 35,000 QAnon believers was rife with disbelief. “It simply doesn’t make sense that we all got played,” one wrote. But they did get played. So did we all. Of course, we were played in different ways. QAnon devotees were fed a ludicrous story about Satan-worshipping, “deep state” pedophiles plotting to oust President Donald Trump....

Toward the end of my senior year at Dartmouth, I watched my peers line up in front of the Career Services building. Waiting for their interviews for corporate jobs, all seemed to be dressed the same—the men wearing navy jackets, the women dark dresses. I thought back to my first day on campus four years earlier when we all wore different colors and dreamed of different futures. It was as if our education, instead of enhancing our individualities and imaginations, had reduced them to sameness....

“Checking Facebook should only take a minute.” Those are the famous last words of countless people every day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos, commenting on Instagrammed sushi lunches, and Googling to find out what ever happened to Dolph Lundgren. If that sounds like you, don’t feel bad: That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say. People are wired to compulsively seek unpredictable payoffs like those doled out on the Web....

The holiday season is upon us again. With it, many of us brace for dinner-table debates. In an era of social discord, viral misinformation and pandemic-induced stress, arguing with other people is an invitation to exasperation. One common scene plays out as follows. You want to convince a friend or a family member of something you know they disagree with you about, so you share information and walk through your reasoning with them....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Edward R. Carr’s Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future. When we hit what we thought was another trash pit in the Ghanaian village of Dominase, we had seen so many of these that we did not expect anything terribly interesting. A quick glance at the first artifacts out of the pit confirmed a late 1800s fill date, much like all the other trash pits we found....

In April 2002, Fred Bledsoe was doing construction work on his parents’ lake house near Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he stepped on a rusty nail that bore through his shoe and lodged in the sole of his foot. Bledsoe cleaned up the wound and drove to a nearby hospital where doctors gave him a tetanus shot. Case closed, he thought. One week later, his foot swelled up, and the wound began oozing pus....

Key Concepts Biology Animals Engineering Materials Habitat Introduction Different species of birds lay their eggs in a variety of places. Some birds build tiny nests in bushes, and some build enormous nests in tall trees. Some lay their eggs directly on the ground or on rocky ledges. Those birds that build nests use many different types of materials. In this project you will try to build your own bird nest using only natural materials that you can find outside....

“Crap!” That was the first word out of Kevin Esvelt’s mouth as he scanned a paper published in Science last March. The work described the use of a gene-editing technique to insert a mutation into fruit flies that would be passed on to almost all of their offspring. Although intriguing, the report made Esvelt feel uneasy: if engineered flies escaped from a lab, the mutation could spread quickly through a wild population....

Human-induced climate and hydrologic change is likely to make many parts of the world uninhabitable, or at least uneconomic. Even if there are some “winners” from climate change—perhaps farmers in high-latitude farm regions where the growing season will be extended by warmer temperatures—there will also be large numbers of undeniable losers. Over the course of a few decades, if not sooner, hundreds of millions of people may be compelled to relocate because of environmental pressures....