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Babies’ ability to soak up language makes them the envy of adult learners everywhere. Still, some grown-ups can acquire new tongues with surprising ease. Now some studies suggest it is possible to predict a person’s language-learning abilities from his or her brain structure or activity—results that may eventually be used to help even the most linguistically challenged succeed. In one study, published in 2015 in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, a team of researchers looked at the structure of neuron fibers in white matter in 22 beginning Mandarin students....

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at an inflection point in health care. A 50-year span of algorithm and software development has produced some powerful approaches to extracting patterns from big data. For example, deep-learning neural networks have been shown to be effective for image analysis, resulting in the first FDA-approved AI-aided diagnosis of an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy, using only photos of a patient’s eye. However, the application of AI in the health care domain has also revealed many of its weaknesses, outlined in a recent guidance document from the World Health Organization (WHO)....

This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog. Two years ago, Margaret O’Neill brought her 5-year-old daughter to Children’s Hospital Colorado because the band of tissue that connected her tongue to the floor of her mouth was too tight. The condition, literally called being “tongue-tied,” made it hard for the girl to make “th” sounds. It’s a common problem with a simple fix: an outpatient procedure to snip the tissue. During a pre-operative visit, the surgeon offered to throw in a surprising perk....

No question about it: self-driving cars are big news. Already a long list of car models—from Honda, Volvo, GM, Ford, Audi, Mercedes, Tesla, and others—automate some aspects of driving. They offer smart cruise control that goes all the way down to 0 mph, meaning they can drive automatically in stop-and-go traffic, braking and accelerating without ever risking a collision. They can change lanes for you—or stay in the lane for you....

Humans are social animals, and our species has evolved some unique ways of enforcing the bonds of friendship. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, studies the behavioral mechanisms behind the number and nature of such relationships. His work suggests social cohesion and long-term bonding among primates—Homo sapiens included—are the keys to their evolutionary success. Primate societies are held together by unspoken contracts grounded in “social grooming,” whether in the form of physical affection or nonphysical activities such as storytelling....

Sounds great! But it’s rarely the full answer. Of course, the city is also home to high-paying institutions like Harvard University and M.I.T. But that, too, is part of the canonical definition of a cluster. Business scholars say it’s hard to build a tech cluster without at least one research university to generate ideas and qualified employees. And the ingredient list goes on. A base of older tech firms gives future start-up founders a place to train....

Like tricking a dog into chasing a stick that is not thrown, a stage magician can create the illusion she has tossed a ball into the air when actually she has palmed it. Researchers report that the illusion, which they found could be rather convincing, results simply from watching the magician’s face and not from glancing where the palmed ball would have traveled. “People claim they’re looking at the ball but really they’re making use of social cues,” says a co-author of the report, psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn of the University of Durham in England....

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico remained offline today (Sept. 21) after Hurricane Maria battered the island on Wednesday, leaving a trail of destruction that included a total loss of power. The Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico’s northwest, houses the world’s second-largest radio telescope. While the facility has been closed all week for the hurricane, a handful of staff members had remained inside the observatory, waiting for the storm to pass....

A fascinating study was published in 2015 showing that in cultures with higher rates of immigration, its citizens tended to smile more. Presumably among people who speak an array of languages, nonverbal communication is more crucial for everyone to understand one another and get along. The U.S., with 83 “source countries” populating its communities, scored far higher on this scale of emotional expressiveness than, for example, China, whose population is more homogeneous....

The final numbers are in: 2014 is officially the hottest year on record in the past 135 years, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Friday. The record does not come as a surprise as it’s another marker of the sustained accumulation of heat in the atmosphere thanks to the unabated emissions of greenhouses gases such as carbon dioxide. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century, with the exception of the blockbuster El Nino year of 1998....

Five decades after sending humans to the Moon, NASA is tasked with repeating the feat—and doing it by 2024, the ambitious deadline set by U.S. President Donald Trump’s team. But it is unclear how the space agency will surmount some formidable technical, political and financial challenges to pull off a lunar landing in just four and a half years. “If the pieces come together in the right way they can pull it off,” says Ryan Watkins, a lunar scientist with the Planetary Science Institute who is based in St Louis, Missouri....

The Science Of The Next 150 Years: 150 Years in the Future Predicting what next year’s (or next week’s) ipad is going to be like is hard enough. Knowing what computers in general will be like 150 years from now—an eternity in technology development—is nearly impossible. On the other hand, technology prophets, computer pioneers and researchers have never been known for their reticence on the subject of the future. So we thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask them....

Forests have a natural cooling effect for myriad reasons: they cycle water from the ground to the air, where the water takes heat with it as it evaporates (a process called evapotranspiration); their canopies provide shade; and their trees create a rough terrain, which dissipates heat more efficiently than smoother, clear-cut fields. So when forests disappear, the denuded land heats up. But this effect is not limited to the deforested areas, according to the new paper, published last month in Environmental Research Letters....

The recipe for succeeding in any given field is hardly a mystery: good ideas, hard work, discipline, imagination, perseverance and maybe a little luck. Oh, and let’s not forget failure, which Dashun Wang and his colleagues at Northwestern University call “the essential prerequisite for success” in a new paper that, among other things, is based on an analysis of 776,721 grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health from 1985 to 2015....

When female Aedes Aegypti mosquito sups on the blood of its human victims it too often deposits the virus that causes dengue, causing as many as 400 million infections per year worldwide. Severe forms of the painful, flu-like disease can be fatal, especially among children. And until recently there has been no truly effective prevention except avoiding getting bit. But the outlook against the disease is looking better. During the past month Dengvaxia, developed by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, has been approved for use in three countries: Mexico and the Philippines approved the vaccine earlier this month....

This is the second of a three-part series that examines our growing understanding of the scope and impacts of microplastics pollution. Mark Browne had a suspicion. He hoped the samples of dried blood taken from a blue mussel and placed under a special microscope would tell him if he was correct. As a fuzzy, three-dimensional image of the mussel’s blood cells appeared, there they were, right in the middle—tiny specks of plastic....

Some 550 years ago the last of the great city-states of the Maya civilization that had flourished in the Americas for centuries met their demise. As drought and warfare tore apart the social and political fabric and the Spanish conquistadors began claiming Maya land for plantations and subjugating Maya people to work on them, many residents of storied stone cities such as Yaxchilan and Palenque fled to the countryside in search of a better life....

On April 1, 1950, the New York Times carried a sensational front-page headline, “U.S. Censors H-Bomb Data; 3,000 Magazine Copies Burnt.” The story’s lead sentence read: “Gerard Piel, editor of the Scientific American, attacked the censorship policies of the Atomic Energy Commission yesterday when he disclosed ….” The article went on to report that the government had destroyed every trace of the original text by physicist Hans Bethe, melting down the “objectionable linotype slugs” at the printing plant and then incinerating the “complete file of proofs” along with those 3,000 printed copies....

Two years after breaking my leg in a freak running accident, I was logging up to 100 miles a week on the treadmill in preparation for a 36-hour adventure race. A veteran of 15 marathons and countless other athletic events, I was in peak physical shape. Or so I thought—until one Sunday morning when I could barely lift my arms. After years of lifting weights, I was too tired to lift the laundry basket....

Stem cell science has become notorious for obliging society to consider again where it draws the line between human embryonic cells and human beings. Less well known is that it also pushes us to another border that can be surprisingly vague: the one that separates people from animals. Stem cells facilitate the production of advanced interspecies chimeras–organisms that are a living quilt of human and animal cells. The ethical issues raised by the very existence of such creatures could become deeply troubling....