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Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall Ecco (HarperCollins), 2005 The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind Little, Brown and Company, 2005 Hiding In the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, From Plato to String Theory and Beyond by Lawrence M. Krauss Viking, 2005 What are theoretical physicists up to these days? Judging from the titles of the popularizations they are turning out, one might be forgiven for thinking that they are eating psychedelic mushrooms or chewing on lotus leaves....

There’s a drought in California. Perhaps you’ve heard a few things about it. Like the fact that it’s cost the state $2.7 billion in losses, helped burn up roughly 118,000 acres of forest this year to date and inspired Los Angeles to release a 96 million-strong armada of shade balls into reservoirs (though it was apparently a PR stunt). Oh, and the state is also missing a year’s worth of rain....

Researchers have found shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds on one of California’s Channel Islands, which they say is the strongest evidence yet that a comet exploded in the atmosphere above North America, causing widespread extinctions there around 12,900 years ago. Skeptics, however, say the debate is far from over. In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels....

INSIGHT INTO PARKINSON’S Shaken: Journey into the Mind of a Parkinson’s Patient Lila Films www.lilafilms.com/shakendvd.htm Watching Alan Alda host The Human Spark, you get the sense that he could teach basket weaving and make it entertaining and relevant. This program, however, aims for a much headier topic—the question of what makes human beings so unique. What is it about our brain that allowed us to take over the world? The three-part series investigates how our ancestors differed from Neandertals and from our closest relatives today, the chimpanzees....

A few weeks ago a clinic in Mumbai claimed to have identified a dozen patients with a strain of tuberculosis (TB) resistant to all known treatments. TB is a highly contagious lung infection that kills about 1.5 million people each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), so the development of a totally untreatable form of the disease would be cause for alarm. “It conveys that there is no hope, that not a single drug works,” says Madhukar Pai, a tuberculosis researcher at McGill University in Montreal....

Announced by the LIGO collaboration in February 2016, the discovery of ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves was momentous enough to merit the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Now, another Nobel laureate says LIGO has unknowingly made another spectacular discovery: gravitational waves from merging black holes that have been amplified by the gravity of intervening galaxies. Called gravitational lensing, this phenomenon is routinely used to study light from objects in the very distant cosmos....

The co-evolution of black holes, almost unfathomable in their bulk, and the even more massive galaxies that host them remains poorly understood—a kind of chicken-and-egg problem on mammoth scales. Do black holes, such as the lunker in our own Milky Way Galaxy, which contains the mass of four million suns (that’s about eight undecillion, or 8 x 10^36 kilograms), drive the evolution of galaxies around them; or do galaxies naturally nurture the gravitational gobblers at their centers; or perhaps do they come into being together, as a matched pair?...

For three weeks, Ukraine has been engulfed in a war of aggression. While Russian troops are forming around Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, government representatives are simultaneously struggling to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. But how exactly do such negotiations work? What contributes to the success of diplomatic talks—and what causes them to fail? Thania Paffenholz is an expert in international relations, based in Switzerland and Kenya, who conducts research on sustainable peace processes and advises institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)....

You’ve practiced your big presentation a thousand times. Your last rehearsal was perfect, and you’re ready to go. You tell yourself that for the real thing, you will focus on keeping your voice up, smiling, and enunciating clearly and slowly. Suddenly, at the podium, you freeze—all your preparation is for naught as you stand there like a deer in headlights. What happened? You choked— and we all have had the experience....

Gedankenexperiment, German for “thought experiment,” was Albert Einstein’s famous name for the imaginings that led to his greatest breakthroughs in physics. He traced his realization of light’s finite speed—the core idea of special relativity—to his teenage daydreams about riding beams of light. General relativity, his monumental theory of gravitation, has its origins in his musings about riding up and down in an elevator. In both cases, Einstein crafted new theories about the natural world by using his mind’s eye to push beyond the limitations of laboratory measurements....

The Head Lines section of Scientific American Mind’s May/June issue mentioned the following articles in brief. Click on the links to learn more about them. Prions, the proteins behind mad cow disease, also help us learn by strengthening the connections between neurons. Happiness may come from hitting a time-management sweet spot of not feeling rushed yet having little excess time, according to a recent survey. Good grades can be contagious: High school students whose friends get higher marks tend to raise their own grade-point averages over time....

Editor’s Note (1/7/21): We are republishing this story following the attack on the U.S. Capitol yesterday by right-wing extremists enabled by President Donald Trump. Some lawmakers are now calling on Vice President Mike Pence and the president’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment against Trump to remove him from office, citing the frightening prospects of his access to the nation’s nuclear codes. Scientific American argues that, no matter who is president, leaving the decision to launch nuclear weapons to one person is dangerous and should require a second opinion....

After the recent ruling by the Supreme Court overturning federal abortion rights, people have taken to the streets in protest. In multiple places, police attacked protesters with chemical weapons in the form of tear gas. In Arizona, law enforcement even fired canisters from the windows of government buildings. One irony inherent in this violence is that chemical weapons can cause spontaneous abortions, commonly known as miscarriages. In other words, law enforcement officers use dangerous, unregulated weapons against unarmed civilians, possibly violating protesters’ human rights by terminating pregnancies that, according to the Supreme Court, those same protesters have no constitutionally protected right to terminate themselves....

Dark matter “Mystery of the Hidden Cosmos,” by Bogdan A. Dobrescu and Don Lincoln, discusses the possible forms of dark matter. Could a potential explanation of dark matter not involve new particles? Could, say, gravity decrease with distance slightly less than described in Newton’s laws, noticeable only on a scale of light-years? And have scientists tried to quantify this possibility in a way that could explain galaxies’ rotational speed without dark matter?...

To ensure a bright future, Americans need to engage with science. Yet the incoming Trump administration has just picked Scott Pruitt, a fossil fuel industry ally, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. President-elect Donald Trump has also promised to roll back environmental regulations such as the Clean Power Plan, to gut the EPA and to renege on the Paris climate agreement. Meanwhile the planet continues to warm, sea levels keep rising and glaciers retreat even farther....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Snakes—the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra—may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter. The many-banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), also known as the Taiwanese krait or the Chinese krait, is a highly venomous species of elapid snake found in much of central and southern China and Southeast Asia....

(Reuters) - Tropical Storm Bertha, the second named storm of the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season, has formed east of the southern Lesser Antilles, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Thursday. The storm was located about 275 miles (445 km) east-southeast of Barbados, and about 385 miles (620 km) east-southeast of St. Lucia, with maximum sustained winds of 45 miles per hour (75 kph), the Miami-based weather forecasters said. The storm is moving toward the west-northwest at near 20 miles per hour (31 kph)....

New U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch, if confirmed, would fill the vacancy left a year ago by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he shares a similar conservative legal philosophy. His past decisions in cases involving health and energy issues indicate he believes it is up to the courts, not government agencies, to interpret laws cast with ambiguous language. This week Pres. Donald Trump selected Gorsuch, who has been on the U....

Climate change will drastically change vegetation patterns in the Arctic, which will in turn spur additional warming, according to a new study. The research, published yesterday in Nature Climate Change, outlines a counterintuitive side effect of climate change: As higher temperatures drive plants and trees into areas now inhospitable to them, their new distribution speeds up temperature rise via natural processes such as releases of heat-trapping water vapor into the air....

Toyota also used CES to introduce a futuristic self-driving car designed to get to know its driver and passengers. The egg-shaped Concept-i car—still very much in the concept phase—would be run by an AI system called Yui whose presence is felt throughout the vehicle, thanks to pulsating mood lighting, massage beads built into the seats and the ability to take control of the wheel if its eye-tracking sensors determine that a driver is not paying enough attention to the road....