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Your body would never get used to the perfect painkiller, says Susruta Majumdar, a chemist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. So unlike the case with common opioids such as morphine or Oxycontin, you would not need to take ever-increasing doses to relieve the same amount of pain. The ideal analgesic would not have the high risk of addiction, withdrawal or fatal respiratory slowdowns that have turned opioid abuse into a massive epidemic....

Imagine a dream in which you sense an intense feeling of presence, the truest, most real experience in your life, as you float away from your body and look at your own face. You have a twinge of fear as memories of your life flash by, but then you pass a transcendent threshold and are overcome by a feeling of bliss. Although contemplating death elicits fear for many people, these positive features are reported in some of the near-death experiences (NDEs) undergone by those who reached the brink of death only to recover....

By Marian Turner of Nature magazineWomen, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd. Enter the phage. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, and they are star players in the chain of events that led to this outbreak.Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold....

In the summer of 2015 University of Oxford zoologists Antone Martinho III and Alex Kacelnik began quite the cute experiment—one involving ducklings and blindfolds. They wanted to see how the baby birds imprinted on their mothers depending on which eye was available. Why? Because birds lack a part of the brain humans take for granted. Suspended between the left and right hemispheres of our brains sits the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of nerves....

Researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) have invented a real-life Transformer, a device that can fold itself into two shapes on command. The system is hardly ready to do battle with the Decepticons—the tiny contraption forms only relatively crude boat and airplane shapes—but the concept could one day produce chameleonlike objects that shift between any number of practical shapes at will. Self-folding sheets are just one facet of programmable matter, the attempt to build structures that can shape-shift on demand....

Share Your PhotosUpload This Wednesday people worldwide will celebrate the 45th annual Earth Day. The party started early this past Saturday, when more than 200,000 revelers showed up for an Earth Day concert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The event was solar powered but, unfortunately, there were not enough garbage bins, so people who attended reported heaps of trash throughout the Mall. The lesson: good intentions score big, good actions score bigger....

SEATTLE—“I think building an elevator to space is maybe the best thing I could do in the world,” Michael Laine says. His company, Liftport, has just raised over $62,000 on Kickstarter to build robot climbers on a skyward cable—an early step toward his eventual goal of putting a space elevator on the moon. A space elevator is just what it sounds like—a capsule that travels to and from space along a track or tether to provide reliable access to orbit....

States are stepping up efforts to regulate a group of potent greenhouse gases used in air conditioners, refrigerators and insulating foams. The push to restrict use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, playing out in state capitals across the country represents one of the clearest examples of interstate coordination on climate policy. It follows two years of inaction at the White House, where President Trump has not submitted a 2017 international treaty restricting HFCs to the Senate for ratification, and a federal court decision knocking down an Obama-era rule to phase out the chemicals nationally....

Humans demonstrate not only an extraordinary capacity for transferring knowledge from one generation to the next, they are also supremely skilled in building on this know-how to create novel technology, whether it be an Acheulean hand ax or the modern electrical grid. This vast web of interconnected knowledge and practical capability has required the labors of millions over the millennia. The subtleties of technologies from stone flaking to high-voltage transmission lines could take a substantial time to recover if humanity were ever forced to reboot civilization after a nuclear conflagration, an asteroid strike or some other global catastrophe....

A key data point has been buried in the back-and-forth over the Trump administration’s rollback of former President Obama’s climate legacy: EPA’s own research has found that lifting public health protections on air pollution could kill thousands of Americans. Much of the discussion has focused on what the reversals mean for the warming planet, weighed against the economic cost of those regulations. There’s a more immediate effect: Reducing CO2 is often linked to a reduction in fine particle air pollution, which kills millions of people globally every year....

ONE of the cornerstones of alcoholism recovery is a concept called emotional sobriety. The idea is that alcoholics and other addicts hoping to stay sober over the long haul must learn to regulate the negative feelings that can lead to discomfort, craving and—ultimately—relapse. Doing so is a lifelong project and requires cultivating a whole new way of thinking about life’s travails. But the recovery literature also says “first things first”—which simply means “don’t drink....

In the February issue of Scientific American biologist Carolynn “K-lynn” L. Smith of Macquarie University in Sydney and science writer Sarah Zielinski describe the surprisingly advanced cognitive abilities of the chicken. A number of recent insights into the chicken mind have come from experiments involving the use of video displays. Knowing that chickens will watch one another on screen led Smith and her collaborators to create a 3-D animated chicken, which they then used to probe how the birds display for and perceive one another....

Wind energy is soaring in the U.S.; the nation’s renewable energy capacity has more than tripled in the past nine years, and wind and solar power are largely responsible. Now businesses want to harness even more wind energy, at a cheaper price—and one of the best ways to lower cost is to build bigger turbines. That’s why an alliance of six institutions led by researchers at the University of Virginia are designing the world’s largest wind turbine at 500 meters tall—almost a third of a mile high, and about 57 meters taller than the Empire State Building....

Popular genetics-testing company 23andMe is partnering with drug giant GlaxoSmithKline to use people’s DNA to develop medical treatments, the company announced in a blog post yesterday (July 25). During the four-year collaboration, the London-based GlaxoSmithKline will use 23andMe’s genetic database to zero in on possible targets and treatments for human disease. “The goal of the collaboration is to gather insights and discover novel drug targets driving disease progression and develop therapies,” GlaxoSmithKline said in yesterday’s statement, where it also reported it was investing $300 million in 23andMe....

The December 2012 edition of Scientific American describes in detail 10 radical breakthroughs that are poised to change the world. In the process of choosing them, the editors decided to highlight seven other compelling innovations and trends that also have great promise. Here they are. An Air Bag for Your Bike At $600, the Hövding bicycle “helmet” is pricey. But the design is so ingenious it could change the nature of the traditional hard-shell helmets that cyclists and motorcyclists wear....

A blowout at the Macondo oil well five years ago today touched off what has since become known as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Oil washed ashore on long stretches of the Gulf of Mexico coast, killing animals and crippling communities. Last week we asked our readers to send us photos, video and written accounts of how the spill continues to affect their lives and livelihoods—including successes and failures in restoring the environment....

Growing up with three older sisters who were more than ten years older than me, I became fascinated with the connection I saw between women’s hormones and their mood. One of my sisters had such severe mood swings around her period that just asking her where she wanted to eat could send her into a hurling spiral of anger and meanness. As an adult, I was intrigued to learn that taking birth control pills could reduce period-related mood swings and that it had other beneficial effects on mental health, like decreased likelihood for depression....

COVID vaccines were developed with record-breaking speed. But their distribution has been anything but quick. As of Monday morning, about 47 percent of the doses distributed to states had not been administered, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This means that a month into the distribution effort, only about 6 percent of people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the two-dose vaccines that are now available....

Scientists have engineered a bacterium that can take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into fuel in a single enzymatic step. The process draws on sunlight to produce methane and hydrogen inside the bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris, in essence reversing combustion. These engineered bacteria could guide scientists toward better carbon-neutral biofuels. Researchers published their results yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-author Caroline Harwood, a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, said the report blossomed from her work studying an enzyme called nitrogenase....

The short, bushy pinyon pine thrives in the arid climate of the U.S. Southwest, where there may be little or no rain for months or even years. Yet, a drought that began in 2000 killed some 10 percent of the pines in the Four Corners region where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet—even in moister, high-elevation areas—and scientists wondered if the warmer temperatures resulting from climate change might be the cause....