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On arrival at a friend’s house for dinner one night in the fall of 2008, I joined the evening’s youngest guest, five-year-old Noah, who was playing on the couch. Little did I know he would single-handedly change the course of my career. As a professor of developmental psychology, hanging out at the kids’ table is not unusual for me. I study how children think about themselves and the people around them, and some of my keenest insights have come from conversations like this one....

Some people stop at nothing to get what they want, persisting in the face of continual hardship. Often seen as a sign of strength, this behavior may also be indicative of future illness, according to a new study. Psychologists asked 90 adolescent girls about their tendency to hold on to unattainable goals. Over the next year, they found that the girls who said they never gave up had more quickly increasing blood levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) as compared with the girls who were moderately good at letting go....

Record-breaking wildfires in Australia at the start of the year caused an extraordinary weather phenomenon. They spawned a spree of towering fire-induced thunderclouds, which catapulted smoke 20 miles into the atmosphere. Almost 12 months later, some of that smoke is still drifting around the planet. These “pyrocumulonimbus” events, or “pyroCbs,” are impressive but not uncommon. They form when the heat from a wildfire strengthens currents of rising air in the atmosphere, generating large storm clouds and sending smoke spiraling skyward....

Scientists in Japan now have permission to treat people who have heart disease with cells produced by a revolutionary reprogramming technique. The study is only the second clinical application of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are created by inducing the cells of body tissues such as skin and blood to revert to an embryonic-like state, from which they can develop into other cell types. On 16 May, Japan’s health ministry gave doctors the green light to take wafer-thin sheets of tissue derived from iPS cells and graft them onto diseased human hearts....

Oral cancer is straightforward for dentists to detect early on. They can easily identify lesions in the mouth that are precancerous. But for people living in parts of the world with few dentists, these lesions can go undiagnosed until it is too late for effective treatment. Now a patent application has been filed for a device that aims to tackle that problem, designed by Manu Prakash of Stanford University and his colleagues....

Local and state regulators have new ammunition in the fight to justify expensive air pollution rules: Cutting smog and soot has an immediate impact on climate change. A study published last week bolsters the link between air quality and climate, finding that across-the-board cuts in air pollution can spur “substantial, simultaneous improvement” in local air quality and near-term mitigation of climate change. Trimming smog and soot also represents an alternate and far more immediate global warming solution for regulators stymied by the complexities of other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences and the lead author of the study....

Often photographed clinging to Arctic ice floes as its habitat melts away into warming waters, the polar bear is the poster child for U.S. efforts to save wildlife on the brink of extinction using the Endangered Species Act. But the act is quickly becoming a target of the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans who have introduced at least 11 pieces of legislation that could weaken it or prevent some threatened wildlife from being protected....

The largest Arctic science expedition in history came to a close yesterday, as the German research vessel Polarstern sailed into the port at Bremerhaven, Germany. The Polarstern spent the past year drifting across the Arctic Ocean, frozen into the sea ice at the top of the world. As it floated across the central Arctic, scientists on board collected myriad data on the Arctic climate system—its clouds, atmosphere, ocean physics and biology, to name a few....

Long a staple of science fiction, self-driving vehicles that act as robot chauffeurs have been a cultural dream for decades. For most of that time, however, the dream seemed a part of some unattainable future. But now, led in large part by Google’s sudden and unexpected charge, autonomous robot cars come tantalizingly close to reality. As various mapping, sensing and location-based technologies have converged recently, Google has begun to position itself as the leader of our robo-chauffeur future....

Marta Zlatic owns what could be the most tedious film collection ever. In her laboratory at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, the neuroscientist has stored more than 20,000 hours of black-and-white video featuring fruit-fly (Drosophila) larvae. The stars of these films are doing mundane maggoty things, such as wriggling and crawling about, but the footage is helping to answer one of the biggest questions in modern neuroscience: how the circuitry of the brain creates behavior....

Heat gets a bad rap for fueling human hostility. But what’s the deal when the mercury drops? The cold effect has been somewhat less studied, although there are hints that being uncomfortably chilly can contribute to conflict in some situations and quell it in others. A Swiss-led group using tree-ring data to look at Central European summer climate patterns during roughly 2,500 years saw that periods of prolonged warming and of colder than usual spells coincided with social upheavals....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Flinching as a gunshot whizzes past your window. Covering your ears when a police car races down your street, sirens blaring. Walking past a drug deal on your block or a beating at your school. For kids living in picket-fence suburbia, these experiences might be rare. But for their peers in urban poverty, they are all too commonplace....

As a relentless severe weather pattern continues, part of the Heartland will be the target for two severe weather events this week. Two storm systems will roll out of the Rockies over the next several days, pulling together warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, a sweep of dry air from the west, cold air aloft and a strong jet stream. This is nearly the same setup as this past weekend, but there are some differences....

In my Scientific American column this month, I wrote about the culture of feature-stealing among the big tech companies. And I noted that if you’re a tech reviewer, you can’t write about some “new feature” without riling up the fanboys and fangirls, who are quick to point out that their favorite brand had it first. After much thought, I’ve come to realize that there’s only one way to please everyone: To give a full genealogy of any feature introduced in any product....

How much time do you spend doing research before you make a big decision? The answer for many of us, it turns out, is hardly any. Before buying a car, for instance, most people make two or fewer trips to a dealership. And when picking a doctor, many individuals simply use recommendations from friends and family rather than consulting medical professionals or sources such as health-care websites or articles on good physicians, according to an analysis published in the journal Health Services Research....

Most of us take it for granted that compasses point north. Sailors have relied on the earth’s magnetic field to navigate for thousands of years. Birds and other magnetically sensitive animals have done so for considerably longer. Strangely enough, however, the planet’s magnetic poles have not always been oriented as they are today. Minerals that record past orientations of the earth’s magnetic field reveal that it has flipped from north to south and back again hundreds of times during the planet’s 4....

More than three weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, much of the island remains without access to cell phone service and electricity. In addition to taking dozens of lives, the storm’s 175–kilometer per hour winds, heavy rainfall and flooding destroyed most cell towers and brought down the power grid entirely. Progress to restore these essential services has been slow, given the damage to the island’s infrastructure on the ground....

THE LENS IN YOUR EYE casts an upside-down image on your retina, but you see the world upright. Although people often believe that an upside-down image in the eyeball gets rotated somewhere in the brain to make it look right-side up, that idea is a fallacy. No such rotation occurs, because there is no replica of the retinal image in the brain—only a pattern of firing of nerve impulses that encodes the image in such a way that it is perceived correctly; the brain does not rotate the nerve impulses....

By Lisa Rapaport Scientists are testing an experimental medicine that’s designed to have the painkilling power of morphine without some of the dangerous side effects that can lead to overdose deaths. The compound is so new it doesn’t have a name, just a number. It’s only been tested in mice, and it needs years of additional animal studies before researchers can even start trials to see if it works safely in humans....

For the first time ever, scientists have managed to capture images of multiple planets twirling about another sunlike star. Yet despite its stellar host’s resemblance to our own, the snapshots of this planetary system reveal it to be no place like home. Named TYC 8998-760-1 and located about 300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Musca, the star is similar in mass to the sun. Its two known planets, however, are distinctly alien—orbiting their star at about 160 and 320 times the Earth-sun distance, respectively (spans that are about four and eight times greater than Pluto’s separation from our sun)....