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In 2018 I visited twins in Bangalore, India who had recently underwent cochlear implant surgery. Their surgery had taken place the previous month and their implants had been activated, or turned on, a few weeks after the surgery. When I met them, they were fiddling with the processors that sat behind their ears and they massaged their still-tender scalps. They wanted to show me the big cardboard box that had held their processors, and that still held extra cables, magnets, and microphone covers to eventually be used....

In a world flooded with data, figuring out where and how to store it efficiently and inexpensively becomes a larger problem every day. One of the most exotic solutions might turn out to be one of the best: archiving information in DNA molecules. The prevailing long-term cold-storage method, which dates from the 1950s, writes data to pizza-sized reels of magnetic tape. By comparison, DNA storage is potentially less expensive, more energy-efficient and longer lasting....

Nancy Goodman wanted to spend as much time as possible with her dying child. But even as ten-year-old Jacob’s brain cancer worsened, Goodman spent months contacting pharmaceutical companies that were developing drugs that might help him. ‘Compassionate-use’ laws in the United States allow pharmaceutical companies to provide unapproved drugs to patients in desperate need, but many firms provide little or no information on how to request these treatments. They are often reluctant to supply drugs in response to such pleas, especially if drug stocks are limited, although media campaigns on behalf of individual patients can sometimes embarrass firms into providing unapproved treatments....

Theo did not seem like the type to become addicted to gambling. He was a literary star who had published his first novel at age 24 to great success. While traveling through Europe, he began visiting elegant casinos, at first dabbling in table games like roulette. With time, though, this pleasant diversion became a compulsion, and he lost nearly all his money in just a few years. He continued to produce critically acclaimed books—at one point churning out a new novel in less than a month to settle urgent debts—but he struggled to stay afloat, and his wife soon had to sell her jewelry....

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has successfully landed on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu, a historic moment in space exploration that could provide fascinating details on the origins of life on Earth. At 7:49 am local time in Japan the spacecraft touched down on Ryugu, having descended from a stable orbit about 20 kilometers above the surface. Taking place some 310 million kilometers from Earth—well past the point where even communication at light-speed is too slow for real-time control—the entire descent was automated, and took about 23 hours....

It’s pitch-black. We have been scratching our way through dense underbrush in northwestern Australia, guided only by the dim light from a GPS screen. The light is too weak to reveal fallen trees that fill the dry creek bed we are following, and we keep tripping over them. We are two geologists working in a remote region of the country known as the Pilbara: Djokic up front and Van Kranendonk several steps behind....

Brian McNoldy, a tropical storm researcher at the University of Miami, grabbed an image of the Earth as GOES-West, a satellite operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that shows the Earth at local midnight last night. It beautifully highlights the earth forming a perfect crescent as the midnight sun beams down on the far northern reaches of the globe. While the solstice is officially at 6:51 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, McNoldy explained in an email that the image captured is a pretty close representation of what it will look like from the same vantage point....

If divining personality from finger length sounds like nonsense, Peter L. Hurd understands. An assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, Hurd thought that such efforts “seemed like palmistry.” But now he is a believer. Research had shown that the shorter a male’s index finger is relative to his ring finger, the more testosterone he was exposed to as a fetus. Hurd has since found that men with a greater disparity are more prone to be physically aggressive throughout life....

Imagine you have a jigsaw puzzle with 10,000 pieces but no picture on a box. In fact, you don’t even have the box—it was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago. These puzzle pieces are fragments of frescoes in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii that were leveled or buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Some pieces are missing, others are broken. And instead of being precisely-cut shapes designed to neatly interlock, they’re damaged, irregular fragments....

A Montreal-based company that has pioneered the use of a small privately owned satellite to spot methane leaks plans to launch more of the microwave-sized greenhouse gas detectors into space. The company, called GHGSat, has raised $10 million in new funds that it will use to build two more satellites, improved versions of its earliest model, called Claire, which has been orbiting since 2016. It has monitored man-made emissions from over 2,000 sites around the world (Climatewire, March 9)....

Eighteen months ago, a gene that confers resistance to colistin — known as an ‘antibiotic of last resort’ — emerged in bacteria from pigs in China. Since then, the resistance gene, called mcr-1, has been found around the world at an alarming rate, according to several presentations at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, last week. In some places, nearly 100% of farm animals carry mcr-1, and an increasing number of people do as well....

I distinctly remember the moment when I started to feel my mind go. It was Tuesday, July 31. Or what happened was that day, and I heard about it the next day. Or I saw it live as it happened. Those details are not important. The only important thing is that I remember it distinctly. President Donald J. Trump was at a rally in Florida, explaining the need for strong voter-identification laws....

NASA scientists announced today the best evidence yet that Mars, once thought dry, sterile and dead, may yet have life in it: Liquid water still flows on at least some parts of the Red Planet, seeping from slopes to accumulate in what might be life-nurturing pools at the bases of equatorial hills and craters. These remarkable sites on Mars may be the best locations in the solar system to search for extant extraterrestrial life—but doing so will be far from easy....

On a clear day in Gibraltar, looking out of Gorham’s Cave, you can see the rugged northern coast of Morocco looming purple above the turquoise sea. Inside the cave, quiet prevails, save for the lapping of waves against its rocky beach. But offshore, the strait separating the Iberian Peninsula from the African continent bustles with activity.* Fishing vessels troll the waters for tuna and marlin, cruise ships carry tourists gawking at Gibraltar’s hulking limestone massif, and tankers ferry crude oil from the Mediterranean to points west....

Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth by Adam Frank W. W. Norton, 2018 ($26.95) Though once an aid for agriculture and navigation, astronomy—the study of the heavens above—is now often seen as disconnected from life on Earth, an academic pastime with scant value for human beings. Frank, an astrophysicist, combines his expertise with findings from planetary science, ecology, and more to show that lessons from distant stars and alien worlds could help humanity grapple with climate change, nuclear war and other existential threats....

Since 2003, fish biologist Arthur Devries of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign has not caught a single adult Antarctic toothfish—a species sometimes sold at grocery stores as Chilean sea bass. In the 1970s Devries would catch as many as 500 adults in a season as part of his research into the proteins that keep their blood from freezing. Or so Devries and David Ainley of the environmental consulting firm H....

If it isn’t torrential downpours, then it’s too dry. If there’s one thing U.S. farmers can count on, it’s bad weather and, perhaps as a result, many of them don’t think humanity is to blame for the long-term shifts in weather patterns known as climate change. But even though agriculture is a major contributor to global warming, it may not matter whether farmers believe in the environmental problem. Take, as an example of skepticism, Iowa corn farmer Dave Miller, whose day job is as an economist for the Iowa Farm Bureau....

A macaque monkey sat in front of a computer. A yellow square—the target—appeared in the periphery on the left side of the screen. After a few milliseconds of delay, a second target appeared on the right. The question was: Which target would the monkey look at first? So far so routine as neuroscience experiments go, but the next step was unusual. By non-invasively directing bursts of inaudible acoustic energy at a specific visual area of the brain, a team of scientists steered the animal’s responses....

Why do people sext? Why do they send racy or naked photos or videos and sexually loaded texts? For a short-term hookup, sexting might seem like a direct way to get what you want—or at least try to. But according to my research, sexting is actually most likely to occur within a committed relationship. Some research suggests that people often engage in sexting after being coerced by romantic partners or to avoid an argument with their romantic partner....

Where would we be without bananas? The silent-movie industry, founded on images of men in bowler hats being launched into the air by banana skins, might never have gotten off the ground, so to speak. Kids would have to pack drippy citrus into their lunch boxes. The band Bananarama could have been the more fetid Apricotarota. When Shakespeare “let slip the dogs of war,” what do you think they slipped on?...