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You can’t teach an old dog new tricks—or can you? Textbooks tell us that early infancy offers a narrow window of opportunity during which sensory experience shapes the way neuronal circuits wire up to process sound and other inputs. A lack of proper stimulation during this “critical period” has a permanent and detrimental effect on brain development. But new research shows the auditory system in the adult mouse brain can be induced to revert to an immature state similar to that in early infancy, improving the animals’ ability to learn new sounds....

For generations, it was a basic tenet of donating sperm: Clinics could forever protect their clients’ identities. But, increasingly, donor anonymity is dead. The rise of consumer genetic tests—which allow people to connect with relatives they never knew they had, including some who never intended to be found in the first place—is forcing sperm donation clinics to confront the fact that it is now virtually impossible to guarantee anonymity to their clients....

Coral reefs aren’t just bleaching—they’re literally dissolving away because of climate change. And before the end of the century, most reefs around the world may be dissolving faster than they can build themselves back up, according to new research. It’s an often overlooked—but potentially serious—consequence of ocean acidification, says a new study published yesterday in the journal Science. Ocean acidification occurs when carbon dioxide dissolves out of the atmosphere and into the ocean, where it chemically reacts and lowers the water’s pH....

When people need more water, they often build dams to increase supply. But can dams increase water use in an unsustainable way, leading communities to live beyond their water means? That appears to often be the case, according to the authors of a recent paper in Nature Sustainability. Las Vegas is a textbook case. Decades ago the population was projected to reach 400,000 by 2000, so the city built a pipeline to tap into Lake Mead, a reservoir created by Hoover Dam....

THE CLAIM Routine use of proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs)—drugs such as Nexium and Prilosec, used to treat heartburn, gastroesophageal reflux disease or peptic ulcers—may cause or accelerate dementia in elderly individuals. THE FACTS A direct link between PPI use and dementia remains unproved, but the association is plausible and warrants further investigation given the debilitating nature of dementia and lack of effective treatments for it. THE DETAILS As was widely reported in the media in February, German researchers discovered a possible link between PPI use and dementia....

“The region is primed to have record fire activity,” says forecast co-author Douglas Morton, a remote-sensing expert at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. More broadly, a team led by Morton and James Randerson, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, says that it can predict fire risk across much of the globe—based in part on the influence of the weather pattern El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña....

There are roughly 3 trillion trees on Earth—more than seven times the number previously estimated—according to a tally by an international team of scientists. The study also finds that human activity is detrimental to tree abundance worldwide. Around 15 billion trees are cut down each year, the researchers estimate; since the onset of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, the number of trees worldwide has dropped by 46%. “The scale of human impact is astonishing,” says Thomas Crowther, an ecologist now at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen who led the study while at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut....

NOVEMBER 1956 RESEARCHING “THE GAME”–“Our working hypothesis was that when two groups have conflicting aims–i.e., when one can achieve its ends only at the expense of the other–their members will become hostile to each other even though the groups are composed of normal well-adjusted individuals. To produce friction between the groups of boys we arranged a tournament of games: baseball, touch football, a tug-of-war, a treasure hunt and so on. The tournament started in a spirit of good sportsmanship....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineFossilized teeth of early human ancestors bear signs that females left their families when they came of age, whereas males stayed close to home.A chemical analysis of australopithecine fossils ranging between roughly 1.8 million and 2.2 million years old from two South African caves finds that teeth thought to belong to females are more likely to have incorporated minerals from a distant region during formation than those from males....

It began like many other spring mornings on my leafy college campus. Birds were singing outside the dormitory windows, and the sun was shining. As I started to sit up, however, panic hit me: I couldn’t get out of bed. Any effort to prop myself up on my elbows or shift my feet and legs met with waves of pain that rolled up my body. I grabbed my nearby cell phone and called the campus nurse....

It is a common belief that consciously thinking about what we are doing interferes with our performance. The origins of this idea go far back. Consider, for instance, the centipede’s dilemma: A centipede was happy – quite! Until a toad in fun Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?” This raised her doubts to such a pitch, She fell exhausted in the ditch Not knowing how to run. The centipede performs a very complex task with ease, unless she thinks about the task....

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich touted the merits of Intel’s manufacturing process compared with that of Apple’s new 64-bit A7 chip today after the company’s earnings report. During Intel’s third-quarter earnings conference call on Tuesday, an analyst questioned Intel about the advantages of going to a 14-nanometer manufacturing process, compared with Apple’s 28-nanometer A7 chip. “[Apple] has been able to show very impressive benchmarks on 28-nanometer silicon,” the analyst stated. Generally, the smaller the chip geometries, the more advanced the chip manufacturing process and thus the faster and/or more power efficient the chip can be....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency warned yesterday that minorities; single parents; and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are “more likely than others to be severely impacted by disasters” and may need extra help. FEMA’s annual National Preparedness Report, which historically has focused on threats including flooding, terrorism and the nation’s vulnerability, breaks precedent by drawing attention to classes of individuals who may lack the financial and social resources to withstand a disaster....

The Grenfell Tower fire in the UK has shone a spotlight on building materials—and how fire retardant they are—after initial analysis suggested the rapid spread of the blaze was aided by the combustible filler used inside panels of aluminium cladding on the building’s exterior. On June 14 flames ripped through the west London block’s 24 stories, killing at least 80 people and injuring dozens more. As footage showed fire rapidly travelling up the outside of the building, attention quickly shifted to the cladding that had been fitted in a recent refurbishment....

Sleeping with a lonely heart brings a hormone jolt in the morning. That surge is delivered by cortisol, a stress hormone often linked with negative biological effects, such as depression and obesity. But in daily life, researchers studying older people have found, cortisol might be helpful in getting the forlorn out of bed. Throughout the day, cortisol levels in the bloodstream vary. When people wake up in the morning, their cortisol is low....

The Obama administration announced a plan today for curbing the use of streamlined federal permitting for mountaintop coal mining and boosting efforts to protect rivers and streams from mining debris. The administration stopped short of prohibiting mountaintop operations, opting instead to curb what it considers the mining technique’s most environmentally damaging aspects with an agreement among the Interior Department, the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. EPA. “The Obama administration has serious concerns about the impacts of mountaintop removal mining on our natural resources and on the health and welfare of the Appalachian communities,” said Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality....

Humans are extremely social creatures. Anthropologists maintain that our hypersocial nature has helped us become a uniquely dominant species. Now social media allows a large percentage of people to communicate effortlessly worldwide (large graph), something no other animal can do. Yet despite running up hundreds of friends on Facebook and thousands of followers on Twitter, we are fooling ourselves, scientists say. We can really only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships at any time....

The din of what sounds like a high-pitched cocktail party fills the lab of neuroscientist Xiaoqin Wang at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But the primates making the racket are dozens of marmosets, squirrel-sized monkeys with patterned coats and white puffs of fur on either side of their heads. The animals chatter to each other, stopping to tilt their heads and consider their visitors with inquisitive expressions. Common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) are social and communicative in captivity, unlike the macaque that is more commonly used as a model primate....

Studies have surfaced in recent months that certain plastic products we use every day could be interfering with our hormone systems. Approximately 100,000 synthetic chemicals are approved for consumer products and industrial processes—and certain classes of them, it seems, are dangerous to our health. One compound in the news, known as BPA, is of particular concern. Only a handful of once approved substances have ever become banned or severely restricted, such as DDT, PCBs and benzene....

After hundreds of dogs and cats fell ill this past spring, government officials traced the source to melamine, a nitrogen-rich compound found in plastics and fertilizer that, when ingested by the animals, crystallized in their kidneys and caused renal failure. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration later announced that producers may have deliberately added the compound to wheat gluten and rice protein concentrates to inflate the measured amount of protein. The greater the protein level in the concentrates, the higher the market price the products fetch....