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Breaking the rules is exciting, especially if they have held for a long time. This is true not just in life but also in particle physics. Here the rule I’m thinking of is called “lepton flavor universality,” and it is one of the predictions of our Standard Model of particle physics, which describes all the known fundamental particles and their interactions (except for gravity). For several decades after the invention of the Standard Model, particles seemed to obey this rule....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In a loudly bubbling laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, about 2,800 of the salamanders called axolotls drift in tanks and cups, filling floor-to-ceiling shelves. Up close, axolotls are just on the cute side of alien. They have fleshy pink bodies and guileless, wall-eyed faces. Unlike most salamanders, which metamorphose into land-dwellers as they grow up, axolotls usually keep their youthful aquatic form for their whole lives....

Although the authors are both on the side of science, they have not always agreed about the best ways to oppose religiously motivated threats to scientific practice or instruction. Krauss, a leading physicist, frequently steps into the public spotlight to argue in favor of retaining evolutionary theory in school science curricula and keeping pseudoscientific variants of creationism out of them. An open letter he sent to Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, urging the pontiff not to build new walls between science and faith, led the Vatican to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s acceptance of natural selection as a valid scientific theory....

You are at a party, and Alex is telling a boring story. You are much more interested in the gossip that Sam is recounting to Pat, so you tune out Alex and focus on Sam’s words. Congratulations: you have just demonstrated the human ability to solve the “cocktail party problem”—to pick out one thread of speech from the babble of two or more people. Computers so far lack that power. Although automated speech recognition is increasingly routine, it fails when faced with two people talking at once....

In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state. The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams....

The use of drugs by people hoping to boost mental performance is rising worldwide, finds the largest ever study of the trend. In a survey of tens of thousands of people, 14 percent reported using stimulants at least once in the preceding 12 months in 2017, up from 5 percent in 2015. The nonmedical use of substances—often dubbed smart drugs—to increase memory or concentration is known as pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE), and it rose in all 15 nations included in the survey....

The next time you come face to face with a dog wagging its tail, you can make a quick determination on whether to reach out and pet it or step back in deference: check the tail-wag bias. If the wagging tail leans to the dog’s right, you’re safe; if the tail leans to the dog’s left, don’t move. This tail-wagging bias was documented in a 2007 article in the journal Current Biology by Italian neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara and his veterinarian colleagues at the University of Bari....

A top advocate for carbon taxes argued in a report yesterday that a $40 levy on greenhouse gases would lead to a dramatic reduction in U.S. emissions—so much so that it would exceed the 2025 targets set by the landmark Paris Agreement. But there’s a catch. In order for the plan to work, Congress would have to pass a carbon tax as soon as next year and put it in place by 2021....

An ambitious effort to save a diminutive porpoise called the vaquita has received the official clearance to move forward. The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is found only in Mexico’s Gulf of California, where there are just 30 of them left. On April 3, the Mexican government announced that it would give US$3 million to the VaquitaCPR (conservation, protection and recovery) plan to save them. A further $1 million was donated on the same day by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Silver Spring, Maryland....

Scientists have begun to penetrate a mystery of climate change: the effects of smoke from forest and agricultural fires on the future warming of the Earth and how it influences the behavior of clouds. Using a more precise detection technique to measure aerosols—or the suspension of fine particles of black carbon and other residues from the blazes—researchers discovered a thin screen of what they call “old smoke” hanging over some of the planet’s most remote areas, including Antarctica and the Southern Ocean....

Apple is slated to release a new iPhone this year, and one premium model will reportedly feature a curved screen, news reports said. These curved displays seem to be all the rage, with companies designing the screens for everything from smartphones to televisions. But what, if anything, do you gain from the curve? Plenty of others phone makers have released curved screens, but Samsung was the first with the release of the concave Samsung Galaxy Round in 2013....

American and Chinese scientists are examining whether tiny particles drifting over the U.S. from Asia are shading North America, helping to cool parts of Earth as the globe warms. The researchers have developed a kit of new tools including an instrument the size of a cigar box that uses a laser to detect the tiny aerosol particles. They include man-made materials like soot and vehicle exhaust, as well as natural items such as desert dust and sea salt....

Join us below at 4:30 P.M. Eastern time on Thursday, July 12, for a live 30-minute online chat with physicist Michael Tuts of Columbia University, who will provide context for last week’s landmark announcement from CERN, a Switzerland-based lab for particle physics, about the discovery of a particle that could well be the Higgs boson. We invite you to submit questions in advance in the comments section at the bottom of this page....

A diamond is forever. So are sapphire, silica and Styrofoam. It is the hardest known naturally occurring substance, which explains why diamonds are excellent industrial cutting materials, not emblems of romance. They are no more rare than any number of minerals, no more dazzling. So although diamonds may have their genesis in the heat and pressure of the earth’s mantle billions of years ago, what a diamond represents is a very modern tale....

As trade tensions rise between the U.S. and China, rare earth minerals are once again in the political spotlight. Today Chinese mines and processing facilities provide most of the world’s supply, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping has hinted about using this as political leverage in trade negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. But in the long run, many experts say the global market involving these materials would likely survive even if China completely stopped exporting them....

For as long as I can remember, I have lived in two worlds. One is the environment that I physically occupy. In that reality, I am a wife and mom who lives in the suburbs and has a really interesting editorial job. But in my inner world, things change fluidly. When I was a shy little girl, for instance, I imagined I was bold and outgoing; I could tell great jokes, and everybody would laugh....

A mother’s age is often considered a genetic risk factor for offspring, but research is now pointing the finger at fathers, too—particularly when it comes to the mental health of their progeny. Males may have the advantage of lifelong fertility, but as they grow older, the rate of genetic mutations passed on via their sperm cells increases significantly—putting their children at increased risk for psychiatric disorders, especially autism and schizophrenia. Two recent studies support this link at least associatively, but experts remain uncertain if age is the cause of these problems....

Plans to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have underestimated the effects of climate change, one arm of the Interior Department is warning another. The Fish and Wildlife Service pointed to several aspects of climate change that were minimized or absent in the Bureau of Land Management’s draft environmental impact statement (EIS). In some cases, the service corrected BLM characterizations of climate research. It’s an unusual—but not unprecedented—critique within an administration that has downplayed climate change in its regulatory actions, experts said....

The past five years have brought a spate of astounding black hole observations: the first detection in 2015 of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes; an unprecedented x-ray look in 2018 at a dozen black holes spinning around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way; and the first-ever photo of a black hole (at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy) in 2019. Nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted their existence, the direct confirmations are rolling in and revolutionizing astrophysics....

Since Monday at least 12 potentially explosive devices have been found in or intercepted on their way to the mailboxes of Democratic political leaders, prominent public figures and CNN’s New York City office. Authorities have now arrested Cesar Sayoc, 56, of Aventura, Fla., in connection with the bombs, according to news reports. The packages found so far—whose intended recipients include former Pres. Barack Obama, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and, most recently, New Jersey Sen....