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AUGUST 1955 PLACEBO MEDICINE–“Society has never completely divorced the physician from the witch doctor, and for many patients the notion that the doctor lacks omniscience in his domain is extremely disturbing. When the patient expects or demands some tangible evidence of therapeutic capability, it is usually simplest (and wisest) for all concerned to prescribe a harmless pill or liquid. The well-known illegibility of the prescription scripts frequently makes it impossible for a curious patient even to guess at the nature of the medicament....

President Donald Trump has consistently opposed fighting climate change. His administration loosened fuel economy and emissions standards for new motor vehicles, for example—a measure that automakers had not even requested. He replaced the Clean Power Plan championed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, with new regulations that permit more carbon emissions from coal- and gas-burning power plants. In November 2019 he even initiated the year-long process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, an agreement that required nothing from its signatories except an unenforced pledge to help keep the rise in global temperatures below two degrees Celsius....

For a time it looked like the Google Lunar XPRIZE was a failure—another pie-in-the-sky space age dream never to materialize. When it was announced in 2007, the $30-million competition to land and operate a privately funded spacecraft on the moon was slated to conclude by 2012. Getting to the moon, its organizers thought, should not take more than five years. Instead, the contest has gone through multiple rule revisions and deadline extensions as its competing teams struggled to make progress....

In English the sky is blue, and the grass is green. But in Vietnamese there is just one color category for both sky and grass: xanh. For decades cognitive scientists have pointed to such examples as evidence that language largely determines how we see color. But new research with four- to six-month-old infants indicates that long before we learn language, we see up to five basic categories of hue—a finding that suggests a stronger biological component to color perception than previously thought....

Brazilian health authorities confirmed on Thursday a case of transmission of Zika through a transfusion of blood from a donor who had been infected with the mosquito-borne virus that is spreading rapidly through the Americas. The health department of Campinas, an industrial city near Sao Paulo, said a man with gunshot wounds became infected with Zika after multiple blood transfusions in April 2015. Officials said they determined that one of the people whose donated blood was used in the transfusion had been infected with Zika....

It was a triumph for particle physics—and many were keen for a piece of the action. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 using the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), prompted a pitch from Japanese scientists to host its successor. The machine would build on the LHC’s success by measuring the properties of the Higgs boson and other known, or soon-to-be-discovered, particles in exquisite detail. But the next steps for particle physics now seem less certain, as discussions at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Chicago on August 8 suggest....

Zack has decided to try out the online dating service Chix-n-Studz.com. He signs up for an account at the Web site and fills in several screens of forms detailing his personal profile and what he is looking for in a potential partner. In no time at all, the service offers him a number of possible soul mates, among them the very exciting-sounding Wendy. He sends her his e-mail address and what he hopes is an engaging opening message....

The company that makes the world’s only commercially available quantum computers has released its biggest machine yet—and researchers are paying close attention. Named 2000Q after the number of quantum bits, or qubits, within its processor, the machine, made by D-Wave of Burnaby, Canada, has almost twice as many qubits as its predecessor. Many researchers remain sceptical about the long-term potential of such machines, whose approach differs from that of other nascent quantum computers....

Researchers have identified a compound that could significantly improve treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. When administered to mice engineered to develop hallmarks of the disease, the drug reversed cognitive decline and reduced the two types of brain lesions–plaques and tangles–that occur in Alzheimer’s patients. Frank M. LaFerla of the University of California at Irvine and his colleagues gave Alzheimer’s mice and normal mice daily doses of the drug, known as AF267B, for eight weeks and then tested their ability to learn to locate a hidden platform in a tank of water....

But InSight isn’t going out without a bang. On 27 October, scientists reported that last year, the mission detected seismic waves created by the biggest meteorite impacts ever seen on Mars. Both meteorites hit the planet with the energy of a small nuclear bomb. By tracing how the massive seismicity rippled through Mars, scientists were able to study properties of the red planet’s crust thousands of kilometres from InSight, and resolve a mystery about whether the spacecraft happens to sit in a geologically unusual spot....

The Namib’s dunes may be unmatched in majesty on our planet, but not in the solar system. A billion kilometers away radar imaging by NASA’s Cassini orbiter has uncovered wind-sculpted dunes of similar size and shape. They snake across the equatorial deserts of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere. These dunes, however, are curiously askew. They point east, exactly opposite of what would be expected from the moon’s prevailing winds, which atmospheric circulation models suggest must blow westward....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineThe claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment.On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment....

When in 1986 I suggested a new project directed at identifying all human genes, one of my overriding goals was to find those genes involved in cancer development–a feat I hoped would lead to new tools for cancer research and, ultimately, to new therapies. That original human genome project has now been carried out and has demonstrated its usefulness for the discovery of genes involved in many diseases, including cancer. Moreover, the genome sequencing effort has been extended to other organisms–from bacteria to chimpanzees–and is showing the unity of life by revealing how many genes distant species share in common....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you haven’t done so in a while, try Googling yourself with a few key terms such as the city or state where you live. I bet you’ll be surprised by what comes up. But have you ever dug a little deeper? Have you ever searched images and videos? What about Googling your address?...

A Greek statesman who lived in the sixth century B.C. put forward the first explanation, shorn of theological trappings, that captured the essence of all things living and inanimate. Thales of Miletus noticed that water could exist as a liquid, gas or solid and posited that it was the fundamental constituent of matter from which the earth’s denizens—men, goats, flowers, rocks, and whatnot—somehow sprang forth. As with all natural philosophy (a pursuit now known as science), Thales’ observation immediately provoked an argument....

Many diseases of the central nervous system involve the death of neurons—so, theoretically, the replacement of dead cells should improve symptoms of degenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s, as well as stroke and brain tumors. Stem cell therapy may do just that even though evidence of its effectiveness is mixed. In any cell transplant procedure, the host organ—in this case, the brain—may reject its new additions....

Future doctors may ask us to say more than “Ahhh.” Several groups of neuroscientists, psychiatrists and computer scientists are now investigating the extent to which patients’ language use can provide diagnostic clues—before a single laboratory test is run. Increased computing power and new methods to measure the relation between behavior and brain activity have advanced such efforts. And although tests based on the spoken word may not be as accurate as gene sequencing or MRI scans, for diseases lacking clear biological indicators, language mining could help fill the gap....

SETI, as a modern astronomical endeavor, dating to 1959 (first paper) and 1960 (first observation). Modern UFO sightings date to the late 1940s. Though superficially similar, the two fields in practice have had virtually nothing to do with one another. SETI usually requires a graduate degree in astronomy, and its scientists tend to disdain UFOers for requiring nothing more than a camera that takes blurry photos and a butterfly net in case a little green man appears....

Most of us hold unrealistically optimistic views of the future, research shows, downplaying the likelihood that we will have bad experiences. Now a study in Nature Neuroscience last October has found clues to the brain’s predilection for the positive, identifying regions that may fuel this “optimism bias” by preferentially responding to rosier information. Tali Sharot, a University College London neurology researcher, and her colleagues asked 19 individuals between the ages of 19 and 27 to estimate their odds of experiencing 80 unfavorable events, such as contracting various diseases or being the victim of a crime....

Her finalist year: 1991 Her finalist project: Using computer models to simulate the effects of El Niño What led to the project: Growing up, Rageshree Ramachandran was no stranger to intense competition. This daughter of math and statistics professors at California State University, Sacramento, won the National Spelling Bee in 1988 when she was 13 by spelling the word elegiacal—which refers to a type of poetic meter—correctly. In high school, Ramachandran turned her attention to science....