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Déjà vu—that uncanny feeling of having experienced a situation before—may be triggered by the layout of a scene, according to research in the June issue of Consciousness and Cognition. Past studies found that déjà vu usually concerns places, so cognitive psychologist Anne Cleary of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and her colleagues wanted to see if spaces modeled in virtual reality could replicate the striking experience. It worked: subjects most often reported déjà vu when the spatial layout of new settings closely matched that of scenes they had already visited but was not similar enough for them to consciously recognize the resemblance....

A test to detect counterfeit coffee – ground beans that have been bulked up with cheap, low quality filler ingredients – has been developed by scientists in Brazil. There are currently very few ways to tell if the coffee we buy and drink contains things it shouldn’t. As one of the world’s most popular drinks there is a huge global demand for coffee, and when supplies are low the price rises, which encourages fraud....

Editors note: This story is part of a Feature “The Color of Plants on Other Worlds” from the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. What color will alien plants be? The question matters scientifically because the surface color of a planet can reveal whether anything lives there—specifically, whether organisms collect energy from the parent star by the process of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is adapted to the spectrum of light that reaches organisms....

Scientists are zooming out to get a more complete global view of volcanic eruptions—1.6 million kilometers out, to be precise. That is the distance to the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite originally conceived by former vice president Al Gore. Using an instrument onboard DSCOVR that can detect gases belched by volcanoes, researchers can now take snapshots of eruptions every one to two hours. Monitoring these events, which often spew ash that can trigger engine failure in airplanes, can help scientists quickly pinpoint potentially dangerous airspace....

Questions answered in this episode: “If I was able to stand on a Neutron Star would I become extremely dizzy? What effect would this extreme rotational speed have on the body? Would the Neutron Star rotate so quickly that the stars would appear trailed as they do in a long exposure photograph?” -Slymin “Hello there, My question is, what is a white dwarf made of and what is its energy output compared to our sun?...

Tesla Motors, the electric-car maker based in Palo Alto, California, has announced that it will sell versions of its battery packs directly to consumers to help to power their homes, as well as to businesses that run larger facilities, and utility companies. At a press conference in Los Angeles on April 30, the company’s charismatic founder Elon Musk said that the firm’s lithium-ion batteries would enable economies to move to low-carbon energy sources....

It took only 60,000 years to kill more than 90 percent of all life on Earth, according to the most precise study yet of the Permian mass extinction, the greatest die-off in the past 540 million years. The new timeline doesn’t reveal the culprit behind the die-off, though scientists have several suspects, such as volcanic eruptions in Siberia that belched massive quantities of climate-changing gases. But pinning down the duration of the Permian mass extinction will help researchers refine its potential trigger mechanisms, said Seth Burgess, lead study author and a geochemist at MIT....

Earlier this month scientists announced the surprising discovery of phosphine on Venus. This compound of phosphorus and hydrogen could be associated with life. While efforts to confirm the finding via observations from Earth or even fortuitously planned spacecraft flybys are underway, archived data from a decades-old NASA mission to Venus may have been hiding much sought-after verification in plain sight—with potentially more revelations to come. The apparent discovery of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere has been both widely heralded and greeted with caution....

Asia’s growing appetite for oil and gas is shifting the global energy balance and raising complicated new questions about the United States’ role in the Middle East, a new study finds. The report by the National Bureau of Asian Research deals only glancingly with the explosive emissions linked to Asia’s rising oil demand. But clean energy experts yesterday said the issue is very much in the forefront of internal energy discussions....

Kyburz, Calif.—Near the top of a 7,000-foot ridge in California’s Sierra Nevada, crews wielding gasoline-dripping torches began igniting piles of small logs and branches on an unusually cold morning late last September. Ignoring snow flurries and light rain, they trudged from one pile to another, nursing the flames that licked into pine needles and twigs on the surrounding ground and monitoring small trees that flared up like bonfires. The fire starters worked their way down the mountain north of Caples Creek over the next week, their blazes efficiently controlled with the help of “lanes” that had been cleared of forest debris....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), we’ve often looked for signs of intelligence, technology and communication that are similar to our own. But as astronomer and SETI trailblazer Jill Tarter points out, that approach means searching for detectable technosignatures, like radio transmissions, not searching for intelligence. Now scientists are considering whether artificial intelligence (AI) could help us search for alien intelligence in ways we haven’t even thought of yet....

Fields are ablaze in Bangladesh, as farmers struggle to contain Asia’s first outbreak of a fungal disease that periodically devastates crops in South America. Plant pathologists warn that wheat blast could spread to other parts of south and southeast Asia, and are hurrying to trace its origins. “It’s important to know what the strain is,” says Sophien Kamoun, a biologist at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK, who has created a website, Open Wheat Blast (go....

In the 1954 World Series, Willie Mays of the New York Giants made what many consider the greatest catch in baseball history on a long fly ball to straightaway center-field hit by Vic Wertz of the Cleveland Indians. Broadcaster Bob Costas talked about the catch for the Ken Burns documentary series Baseball: “It was more than just a great catch. It was a catch no one had ever seen before … it was a play that until that point was outside the realm of possibility in baseball....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. I’ve had a few listeners write in all with the same question: “How can I get better WiFi reception?” Ask and you shall receive! In this week’s episode I’ll be going over just how WiFi works and some quick (and free) fixes that might just take your WiFi signal from glacial to supersonic....

ONE DAY IN 1999, Duane Graveline, then a 68-year-old former NASA astronaut, returned home from his morning walk in Merritt Island, Fla., and could not remember where he was. His wife stepped outside, and he greeted her as a stranger. When Graveline’s memory returned some six hours later in the hospital, he racked his brain to figure out what might have caused this terrifying bout of amnesia. Only one thing came to mind: he had recently started taking the statin drug Lipitor....

By our third day at sea, we’d found it: a dozen bare and jagged piles of rock surrounded by ocean the color of Windex. It was smaller than I had imagined, all told about twice the size of a soccer field. There was no white sand, no volcanic peaks, no palm trees, none of the trappings of other tropical island chains at this latitude, just razor-sharp umber peaks iced in a thousand years of bird shit—the whole of it resembling a kind of sinister Gilligan’s Island....

Where and how fast will Antarctica lose ice as the climate warms, and how much will the sea level rise as a result? To answer these questions, scientists must learn as much as possible about the vast continent—despite the challenge of accurately surveying its topography underneath all that ice. The contours of Antarctica’s bedrock help determine the behavior of glacial grounding lines, the zones where glacier ice transitions from resting on ground to floating on ocean water; if the line moves inland, a glacier loses more ice....

CLIMATEWIRE | As an intern for Dow Chemical in high school and college, Jalonne White-Newsome thought she’d found her life path. There, the formulas she had learned in class — at a magnet high school in Detroit, then Northwestern University’s chemical engineering program — no longer seemed like abstractions. They were the stuff of real life. So instead of graduate school, she started her career as a project engineer at U....

In the early 1980s a group of Mayo Clinic doctors decided to look at old chest x-rays of patients who later developed lung cancer. The radiologists who had initially checked the scans had found them to be normal, but the team reexamining them saw that 90 percent of the tumors had actually been clearly visible. Should this astronomical error rate surprise us? Not at all, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan says, because it’s only human to make such “looked but didn’t see” mistakes....

A new organization called the Association for Mathematical Research (AMR) has ignited fierce debates in the math research and education communities since it was launched last October. Its stated mission is “to support mathematical research and scholarship”—a goal similar to that proclaimed by two long-standing groups: the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). In recent years the latter two have initiated projects to address racial, gender and other inequities within the field....