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CHICAGO—Little says “high tech” about Bronzeville, one of this city’s South Side neighborhoods where vacant lots and boarded-up buildings beg for attention even as new luxury condos and office towers rise a few miles to the north. But Bronzeville, a roughly 2-square-mile area of 40,000 people wedged between the rejuvenated South Loop and Hyde Park, home of the Obamas, represents much more than another Chicago neighborhood swimming against the economic tide....

Astronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants. We all know how Earth’s landscape came about, right? Oceans and land masses formed, mountains rose, and precipitation washed over its surface; rivers weathered bare rock to create soil and plants took root....

Earlier this year a group of more than a dozen health advocacy groups and individuals petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban lead acetate from hair dyes. The compound, a suspected neurotoxin, is found in many hair products—Grecian Formula, for example. Lead acetate has been outlawed for nearly a decade in Canada and Europe. Studies show it is readily absorbed through the skin and can cause toxic levels of lead to accumulate in the blood....

Jane Goodall discovered 40 years ago that chimpanzees wage war. Until then, she thought they were “rather nicer” than humans. But her shocking observation of animal warfare was not the first. It was the second. By then scientists had known for at least 80 years that we were not the only species to kill others of our own kind. Some insects do it, too. The Australian stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria is notorious for inciting war, usually to usurp the hive of another....

For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming....

On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower on the Austin campus and shot 46 people. Whitman, an engineering student and a former U.S. Marine sharpshooter, was the last person anyone expected to go on a killing spree. After Brown was assigned as the state’s consulting psychiatrist to investigate the incident and later, when he interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers for a small pilot study, he discovered that most of the killers, including Whitman, shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids....

On the heels of one of the most destructive wildfire seasons in California’s history, the state is once again beset by massive blazes that have burned down homes in some communities and threatened others. The Ranch firepart of the Mendocino Complex fire currently burning in northern California—is the largest wildfire in state history, having consumed more than 300,000 acres. It bested the record set just eight months ago by the Thomas fire near Los Angeles....

Some 28,000 years ago in what is now the British territory of Gibraltar, a group of Neandertals eked out a living along the rocky Mediterranean coast. They were quite possibly the last of their kind. Elsewhere in Europe and western Asia, Neandertals had disappeared thousands of years earlier, after having ruled for more than 200,000 years. The Iberian Peninsula, with its comparatively mild climate and rich array of animals and plants, seems to have been the final stronghold....

Valentine’s Day was a bummer in Mountain View, Calif. For the first time, one of Google’s self-driving cars, a modified Lexus SUV, caused a crash. Detecting a pile of sandbags surrounding a storm drain in its path, the car moved into the center lane to avoid the hazard. Three seconds later it collided with the side of a bus. According to the accident report, the Lexus’s test driver saw the bus but assumed the bus driver would slow down to allow the SUV to continue....

As you read this, your eyes are rapidly flicking from left to right in small hops, bringing each word sequentially into focus. When you stare at a person’s face, your eyes will similarly dart here and there, resting momentarily on one eye, the other eye, nose, mouth and other features. With a little introspection, you can detect this frequent flexing of your eye muscles as you scan a page, face or scene....

Biologist Elizabeth Blackburn grew up in Hobart on the Australian island of Tasmania. It was a long journey from there to a Nobel prize and the lab she runs at the University of California in San Francisco. Malaria researcher Clare Smith, an early-career scientist who attended this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany, is also a Hobart girl, and she’s trying to decide whether to follow in Blackburn’s footsteps and move overseas after she finishes her PhD....

Gina writes: “We have a new hydroponic veggie grower in town. How do they compare nutritionally to soil-grown veggies?” How Are Hydroponic Vegetables Grown? Hydroponics is a sort of high-tech farming. Instead of waiting until the right time of year, planting seeds in dirt, adding fertilizer, hoping for enough rain (but not too much), and combatting whatever pests, diseases, and or poachers might invade your field, hydroponic plants are nurtured indoors under grow lights, in a sterile medium that holds water and nutrients close to the plant roots, with precisely controlled temperature and humidity....

Dear EarthTalk: Could it really be true that a single large volcanic eruption launches more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the amount generated by all of humanity over history? – Steve Schlemmer, London, England This argument that human-caused carbon emissions are merely a drop in the bucket compared to greenhouse gases generated by volcanoes has been making its way around the rumor mill for years. And while it may sound plausible, the science just doesn’t back it up....

The embarrassing and damaging failure of U.S. policy on spent nuclear fuel can be repaired if the administration and Congress begin work now on new strategies, the co-chairmen of a presidential commission said yesterday. “The basic choice here is whether or not we’re going to continue a system that has not worked for 40 or 50 years … or do you try going toward with a new approach,” said former Indiana Rep....

A troubled utility in California repeatedly shut off power to homes last week to prevent wildfire ignitions, while Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has waived a major environmental law to allow expedited fire prevention efforts. Wildfire season is underway in California, and state and business leaders are deploying new strategies in a bid to avoid the kind of death and destruction seen in recent years. “The devastating 2017 and 2018 wildfires have made it overwhelmingly clear that more must be done to adapt and address the threat of wildfires and extreme weather with greater urgency,” said Tamar Sarkissian, spokeswoman at Pacific Gas and Electric Co....

The preponderance of scientific evidence makes clear that the earth is warming as a result of human activity. Now policy makers are faced with the question of what to do about it. Scientific American spoke with three leading economic policy thinkers on the topic of how cutting emissions of greenhouse gases would affect the global economy. Links to the edited interviews follow below. Sir Nicholas Stern Sir Nicholas Stern is an economist and professor of economics and government at the London School of Economics and Political Science....

General anaesthetics may extinguish consciousness through mysterious quantum biological effects that cause subtle changes in the electronic state of proteins, rather than through ‘conventional’ pharmacological mechanisms such as directly interfering with receptors or ion channels, new research proposes. The work, carried out by a team led by Luca Turin of the Alexander Fleming Research Centre in Athens, Greece, could go some way towards explaining a generic mechanism of action for general anaesthetics....

Post updated 9/5/2013. Was lack of government regulation at fault? It’s a common complaint these days: government regulations have gotten out of hand (see here and here), they’re stifling the American economy, “killing economic growth.” Generalities like those are hard to refute, or prove for that matter. So let’s take a look at specific regulations which were designed to protect the public from injection wells used to dispose of fracking wastes … but because they weren’t comprehensive, when it came to earthquakes, they were no better than, well, no regulation....

Keeping global temperatures below a dangerous threshold by 2020 risks becoming a distant dream, a new U.N. Environment Programme report finds. Greenhouse gas emissions levels are “considerably higher” than what will be needed to keep the global average temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius, making it increasingly likely that the world will have to rely on costlier technologies like carbon capture and sequestration in order to meet the threshold in the coming decades, the “Emissions Gap Report 2013,” says....

FINALIST YEAR: 1999 HIS FINALIST PROJECT: A way to send an encoded message without anyone knowing WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: In 1998 Keith Winstein, a student at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, had just read about a field called steganography in Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. The concept is that you can send a message in such a way that no one but the sender and recipient realizes it’s being sent....