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Entombed below a thick layer of sea ice year-round and nearly devoid of nutrients, the central Arctic Ocean is a frigid wasteland where few creatures are capable of surviving. That is why researchers at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and their colleagues were so surprised to spot a thriving community of velvety deep-sea sponges below the ice in 2016. Their ice-breaking research vessel was north of Greenland just around 200 miles from the North Pole, when the submersible camera they were towing caught sight of a garden of fuzzy sponges carpeting the tops of several extinct volcanoes like mold covering a carton of raspberries....

The Arctic is experiencing a profound shift into a new state as it loses ice and breaks high temperature records, a clear sign that some of the worst effects of climate change are already happening. And as the region warms and ice melts, a new survey shows that sea levels may rise an additional foot on top of previous efforts if nothing is done to curb the amount of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere....

Peter Carruthers, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is an expert on the philosophy of mind who draws heavily on empirical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He outlined many of his ideas on conscious thinking in his 2015 book The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us about the Nature of Human Thought. More recently, in 2017, he published a paper with the astonishing title of “The Illusion of Conscious Thought....

When a meteorite containing graphite slams into the earth, the collision’s heat and pressure can transform this form of carbon into a rare and extremely hard type of diamond. Scientists have long debated exactly how this happens at the atomic level. Now researchers can answer some questions after simulating the precise moment of impact and watching this transformation take place in real time. In a first-of-its-kind collision chamber at Argonne National Laboratory, physicist Yogendra Gupta of Washington State University and his colleagues mimicked a meteorite impact by firing a lithium fluoride bullet at a graphite disk at 5....

The clock is ticking for US lawmakers, who have fewer than two days—as of January 18—to pass a new budget or face a government shutdown. Nature explains why politicians are struggling to reach a deal, what is at stake for science and whether a crisis can be avoided. So, what’s the problem? Because Congress failed to negotiate a spending plan for the full 2018 budget year, which began on 1 October 2017, the US government is operating under a temporary funding measure....

Hypothesis. Theory. Law. These scientific words get bandied about regularly, yet the general public usually gets their meaning wrong. Now, one scientist is arguing that people should do away with these misunderstood words altogether and replace them with the word “model.” But those aren’t the only science words that cause trouble, and simply replacing the words with others will just lead to new, widely misunderstood terms, several other scientists said....

For scientists, an answer to a question, or solution to a problem, is not true until proven so. And sometimes that means revealing what mere mortals already knew, like, say the fact that getting to the hospital quicker can save heart-attack victims, or, the seemingly far-fetched idea that exercise is good for you. Here are a few of the most obvious findings of 2012. Good partners make good parents Perhaps not the most shocking news in the world: Marry a good, secure partner, and you can expect them to become a good, secure parent....

Health authorities have uncovered an alarming surge in resistance to crucial HIV drugs. Surveys by the World Health Organization reveal that, in the past four years, 12 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas have surpassed acceptable levels of drug resistance against two drugs that constitute the backbone of HIV treatment: efavirenz and nevirapine. People living with HIV are routinely treated with a cocktail of drugs, known as antiretroviral therapy, but the virus can mutate into a resistant form....

I’ll never forget being creeped out by “Private Eye,” a 1949 short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. In it, a futuristic technology lets “forensic sociologists” replay anything that’s ever happened, going back 50 years, by analyzing walls and surfaces. The protagonist plans a murder entirely in his head, knowing that everything he says and does is being recorded. “It is nerve-racking to know you’re living under the scrutiny of an extratemporal Eye,” he thinks to himself....

A visit to a marijuana farm in Willow Creek, the heart of northern California’s so-called Emerald Triangle feels like strolling through an orchard. At 16 feet high and eight feet around, its 99 plants are too overloaded with cannabis buds to stand on their own. Instead each plant has an aluminum cage for support. Welcome to America’s “pot basket.” The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates 60 percent of cannabis consumed nationwide is grown in California....

Michael Mann is no stranger to the war against climate science. A climatologist at Pennsylvania State University who is currently studying the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, Mann is best known for the “hockey stick graph,” which he and his colleagues published in a 1998 scientific paper. The data visualization—featured prominently in former vice president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth—illustrates the precipitous rise in global temperatures since the dawn of the industrial era....

Who has not dreamed of a cure for the common cold? It might be a pill that banishes the sniffles, to be taken as soon as you notice the symptoms. Or better yet, a vaccine administered before kindergarten, along with those for measles and mumps. Imagine a world without colds—without weeks of wet Kleenex and phlegmy avalanches in your sinuses. It sounds pretty perfect. Scientists, in fact, are working toward a vaccine against rhinoviruses—the group that causes 30 to 50 percent of colds....

Sewage sludge used as fertilizer on farms can leave traces of prescription drugs and household chemicals deep in the soil, according to a new study by federal scientists. The findings suggest that the widespread use of biosolids could contaminate groundwater near farms with a variety of chemicals, including anti-depressants such as Prozac and hormone-disrupting compounds in antibacterial soaps. “These compounds are not sitting in top layer, we see vertical movement down through the soil, which means there’s the potential to get into the environment – groundwater or surface water,” said Dana Kolpin, a research hydrologist for the U....

Sarah remembers what it was like both before and after the treatment. The 36-year old vividly recalls how, after her depression lifted, she had to readapt to performing the tasks other people do routinely each day. Even the simple act of looking at a menu took readjustment. “I also had to learn, relearn,” she said at a press briefing, “how to actually have opinions about things and actually pick something on a menu and order it and not just go along with what everyone else wanted....

As a skeptic, I am often asked my position on immortality. “I’m for it, of course,” is my wiseacre reply. Unfortunately, every one of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived has died, so the outlook does not bode well. Unless you follow the trend line generated by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman in Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale, 2004): “The rate of technical progress is doubling every decade, and the capability (price performance, capacity, and speed) of specific information technologies is doubling every year....

Why is it wrong to enslave or torture other humans, or take their property, or discriminate against them? That these actions are wrong, almost no one disputes. But why are they wrong? For an answer, most people turn to religion (because God says so), or to philosophy (because rights theory says so), or to political theory (because the social contract says so). In The Moral Arc, published in January, I show how science may also contribute an answer....

In 1859, 14 years after the founding of this magazine, Charles Darwin published the most important scientific book ever written. On the Origin of Species revolutionized society’s understanding of the natural world. Challenging Victorian dogma, Darwin argued that species were not immutable, each one specially created by God. Rather life on Earth, in all its dazzling variety, had evolved through descent from a common ancestor with modification by means of natural selection....

Key concepts Chemistry Acids Oxidation Heat Introduction Have you ever wondered how spies and secret agents could leave secret messages? Invisible ink might sound high tech, but you can create—and read!—a top secret message with one simple kitchen ingredient: lemons. George Washington’s army used this same concept to send secret messages during the American Revolutionary War. What message will you write? Background Lemon juice—and the juice of most fruits, for that matter—contains carbon compounds....

BRIGHT IDEAS shone forth on many pages in Scientific American Mind issue Number 1 for 2005, starting with the image on the cover itself. “Unleashing Creativity,” by Ulrich Kraft, offered suggestions for tapping the inner muse. David Dobbs’s “Fact or Phrenology?” explored the search for the mind arising from the activity of intricate physical mechanisms in the brain. “Neuroscience and the Law,” by Michael S. Gazzaniga and Megan S. Steven, posited that a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying behavior could absolve criminals of fault—something to think about....

Quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the physics of the universe at very small scales, is notorious for defying common sense. Consider, for instance, the way that standard interpretations of the theory suggest change occurs in the quantum turf: shifts from one state to another supposedly happen unpredictably and instantaneously. Put another way, if events in our familiar world unfolded similarly to those within atoms, we would expect to routinely see batter becoming a fully baked cake without passing through any intermediate steps....