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Jazz legend Dave Brubeck died December 5, just one day before his 92nd birthday. The pianist and composer was an innovator, especially when it came to combining rhythms and meters in new ways. “He sort of tired of the traditional patterns of jazz,” says Patrick Langham, a saxophonist and faculty member of the Brubeck Institute at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. Time Out, the hit 1959 album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was one of the first popular jazz works to explore meters beyond the traditional 4/4 and 3/4....

Scientists scouring old Kepler Space Telescope data have tracked down 18 more relatively small exoplanets imaged by the famed planet-hunting observatory. While most of the planets orbit close to their parent stars and have scorching surface temperatures of up to about 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), one world orbits a small red dwarf star in an area called the “habitable zone.” That term is usually defined as the area around a star where a rocky planet could host liquid water on its surface....

When American psychiatrist Mark S. George stepped into the elevator of a London hospital in 1990, he had no idea the short ride would transform his research career. A fellow passenger was having a giggling fit for no apparent reason. When George inquired about the outburst of merriment, the man replied that a doctor had held a magnetic coil against his head and that it had made his thumb twitch uncontrollably....

More than 44,000 radio antennas will soon link over the Internet to create one of the most ambitious radio telescopes ever built. Its job will be to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and, potentially, signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. The array is designed to monitor low-frequency radio waves. One key source of these emissions are extraordinarily feeble signals from the cold hydrogen gas that dominated the cosmos during the so-called Dark Ages of the uni­verse....

Unlike many galaxies, our Milky Way spawns lots of new stars. To study these stellar infants observers often peer across vast distances to places such as the Orion Nebula, a star-making cloud of gas and dust 1,350 light-years away. Now astronomers have discovered that a nearby pair of red stars named EQ Pegasi is so young they shine primarily from the heat of their formation rather than from nuclear reactions. The discovery may give observers the chance to glimpse the glow of newborn planets, because EQ Pegasi is just 20 light-years from Earth—less than five times the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system....

In January 2001 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that reducing salt in the diet could lower blood pressure, even in people without hypertension. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the study, quickly posted a press release on its Web site announcing the findings. The Salt Institute, an industry group, was stung by the study’s results. Unable to challenge the data on scientific grounds, the institute found another way to attack them....

We live in a world of networks, write University of Pennsylvania physicist and MacArthur Fellow Danielle S. Bassett and Max Bertolero of Bassett’s Complex Systems Group in this issue. Consider the interstate highway system, the World Wide Web, the power grid, to name just a few. Our inner world is also networked—specifically, in the brain. In their article, “How Matter Becomes Mind,” the authors describe how “what the brain is—and thus who we are as conscious beings—is, in fact, defined by a sprawling network of 100 billion neurons with at least 100 trillion connecting points, or synapses....

“Ice it”: that’s the age-old commonsense advice to quickly soothe pain. Despite its effectiveness, the low-tech treatment is limited by its bulk and imprecision. But that seemingly crude solution is now demonstrating potential as an alternative to opioids and other pain-relieving drugs. That alternative comes in the form of an implantable device—an ultraminiaturized ice pack applied directly to a single nerve. Implanted in rats, the device produced pain-relieving effects, suggesting its utility for treating people for postsurgical pain or some other forms of localized pain....

From Nature magazine Once thought to be a low-level form of pain, itch is instead a distinct sensation with a dedicated neural circuit linking cells in the periphery of the body to the brain, a study in mice suggests. Neuroscientists Mark Hoon and Santosh Mishra of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, searched for the molecule that encodes the sensation of itch by screening genes in sensory neurons that are activated by touch, heat, pain and itch....

At the 2005 World Exposition in Japan’s Aichi prefecture, robots from laboratories throughout the country were on display. The humanoids came in all shapes and sizes: they moved on wheels, walked on two legs, looked like lovable little dolls or fantastic mechanical warriors. All, however, were instantly recognizable as artificial creations. Except one: it had moist lips, glossy hair and vivid eyes that blinked slowly. Seated on a stool with hands folded primly on its lap, it wore a bright pink blazer and gray slacks....

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson William Morrow, 2015 (($35)) A cataclysm on the moon dooms Earth in this near-future epic tale by famed science-fiction author Stephenson. With less than two years to prepare before the planet becomes unlivable, humanity scrambles to devise a plan to live long-term in space. Nations join forces to augment the International Space Station to serve as a life raft for a sampling of the human species. Relatable heroes rise to the occasion, finding creative ways to acquire rocket fuel and battle space debris, and nefarious actors attempt sabotage in this scientifically rich and realistic picture of how people manage to endure....

Aha! moments are satisfying in part because they feel so right; all the pieces of a puzzle appear to fall into place with little conscious effort. But can you trust such sudden solutions? Yes, according to new research published in Thinking & Reasoning. The results support the conventional wisdom that this type of insight can provide correct answers to challenging problems. In four experiments, Carola Salvi, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, and their colleagues presented college students with mind teasers, such as anagrams and rebus puzzles....

People who have Down syndrome hardly ever get tumors, an observation that has long puzzled scientists. They suspected that patients might be getting a bonus dose of cancer-protective genes, because the disorder is caused by an extra copy of a chromosome—specifically, chromosome 21. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and their colleagues found that an added copy of DSCR1, one of the 231 genes on chromosome 21, could inhibit the spread of mouse and human tumors....

For millennia humans have gazed into the night sky and dreamed of traveling to the stars. Now that people have walked on the moon and lived in orbit on the space station, it seems inevitable that we will venture farther, to Mars, the rest of the solar system and beyond. The dream is common to many cultures and occupies the space agencies of nations around the world. Yet we know that space is dangerous....

Most people know of the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, which caused widespread famine among a population that relied on potatoes as a staple part of its diet. Perhaps fewer people know the blight was caused by a type of crop pest called an oomycete, which looks a little like a fungus. Even today, this category of pathogen is responsible for significant losses in the world’s potato crops. And because of climate change, it and many other crop pests and pathogens are spreading....

Bad science papers can have lasting effects. Consider the 1998 paper in the journal The Lancet that linked autism to the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. That paper was fully retracted in 2010 upon evidence that senior author Andrew Wakefield had manipulated data and breached several proper ethical codes of conduct. Nevertheless the erroneous paper continues to undermine public confidence in vaccines. After the Lancet article, MMR vaccination rates dipped sharply and haven’t fully rebounded....

Consider the following summer extremes: In 2003 Europe’s worst heat wave in history killed more than 30,000 citizens. In 2010 wildfires in Russia and floods in Pakistan caused unprecedented damage and death. The 2011 U.S. heat wave and drought caused ranchers in Oklahoma to lose a quarter of their cattle. The 2016 Alberta wildfires constituted the costliest disaster in Canadian history. And the summer of 2018 that the U.S. experienced was notorious: temperatures flared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end across the desert Southwest, heavy rains and floods inundated the mid-Atlantic states, and California had a shocking wildfire season....

My high school classmate Tom Gordon was everyone’s choice for “least likely to succeed.” He drank too much and drove too fast, and he got busted for petty theft again and again. He skipped school as often as he showed up, and he was too undisciplined for sports or other organized activities. When he did get hired for part-time jobs, he would either quit or get himself fired soon after. He was a loser....

Debris from the devastating tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 has turned up exactly where scientists predicted it would after months of floating across the Pacific Ocean. Finding and confirming where the debris ended up gives them a better idea of where it’s headed next. The magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami that struck off the coast of Tohoku in Japanwas so powerful that it broke off huge icebergs thousands of miles away in the Antarctic, locally altered Earth’s gravity field, and washed millions of tons of debris into the Pacific....

The 1992 tearjerker Lorenzo’s Oil told the true story of one family’s struggle to save their son from X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a deadly degenerative brain disease. Unfortunately, over the ensuing years, the oil of the film’s title, a dietary supplement, has not panned out as the cure many people hoped it would be. Now a paper in the November 2009 issue of Science suggests that the long-sought cure may come from gene therapy—a famously hyped approach to treatment that tragically caused the death of a teenage experimental subject in 1999....