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The anticipated film Watchmen, based on the 1980s DC Comics 12-part comic book series (later adapted as a graphic novel), hits theaters tomorrow. Die-hard fans of the original publication may fret over its faithfulness to the series, but studio execs also worried about their movie’s faithfulness to science. To set their minds at ease, they placed a call to Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. Kakalios, 50, began advising the film’s makers in the summer of 2007 on everything from the quantum mechanics of Dr....

A near miss with a personal drone forced a Shuttle America flight to pull up while on final approach to land at LaGuardia Airport in New York City earlier this year. It wasn’t the first such incident. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration currently receives about 60 reports from pilots every month that represent potential drone sightings. No one knows exactly the type or extent of damage that a collision with a small drone could cause to a jet airliner’s engine or airframe, but the agency plans to research that possibility in the next fiscal year....

(Adds details, changes dateline) By Joseph Campbell TIANJIN, China, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Two massive explosions caused by flammable goods ripped through an industrial area in the northeast Chinese port city of Tianjin late on Wednesday, killing 17 people and injuring as many as 400, official Chinese media reported. Authorities had lost contact with 36 firefighters on the scene, the official Beijing News newspaper reported, citing the Tianjin fire department. The force of the explosions unnerved residents across much of the city of 15 million people, with some posting videos on the Internet that showed giant fireballs shooting into the sky and shockwaves buffeting apartment blocks and cars....

My parents thought I would make a good doctor or engineer. I excelled at science and math, after all. Instead I chose to pursue journalism, even though it seemed better suited for a “creative person” than for me. I had a passion for writing but not necessarily a flair, and my early efforts were not pretty. Fortunately, as this special edition shows, creativity is not just something you’re born with. Most of us have more of it than we realize....

The story of a plant is etched in its leaves. A tree growing in a cold environment with plenty of water is more likely to have large leaves with many serrated teeth around the edges. But if the same species lives in a warm, dry region, its leaves are likely to be smaller and smoother. Now, an atlas that traces the shapes of 182,000 leaves from 141 plant families and 75 locations around the world shows promise for refining scientists’ ability to read that story....

Bowing to pressure from consumer advocates, Pennsylvania officials have dropped plans to bar farmers from revealing whether or not milk hails from hormone-enhanced cows. The state’s agriculture department on Thursday issued new guidelines that allow dairies to label milk so that customers know if it was produced from cows pumped with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) also known as recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). The move comes less than two weeks before a February 1 ban was set to take effect that would have barred dairies in the Keystone State from slapping certain labels on milk products, including “from cows not treated with growth hormone rBST’’ and “free of artificial growth hormones....

Want to build the largest radio telescope to fly in space? Here’s an easier technique: Design six tiny satellites to fly in formation and work together. That’s the approach of a NASA’s new Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) mission, which is scheduled to launch no earlier than July 2023. SunRISE aims to help scientists understand the complex relationship between the sun’s activity and a host of dangerous phenomena around Earth called space weather....

Key concepts Physics Energy Liquids Molecules Surface tension Introduction Have you ever wondered why a water strider bug can walk on water? Would you believe it is based on the same reasons soap can clean your dishes? In fact, if you look around you carefully, you can find dozens of interesting phenomena that depend on the surface tension of water. In this science activity you will make a little raft that is actually powered by surface tension—and use your vessel to investigate how surface tension works!...

Scientific American spoke with Nicholas to explore that advice and how she came to use it herself. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] A lot of your book focused on grief. Why did you feel you needed to cover that before you moved onto positive actions people can take? It is natural and right to grieve when something we care about is harmed or lost. The facts alone do not automatically implement themselves into policies and behavior change....

In researching my Scientific American column about the dismal prospects for online voting, I interviewed Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, technical director of Johns Hopkins’s Information Security Institute, and author of Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting. He’s been deeply immersed in the research surrounding electronic voting for decades. Since I have more room on the Web than I do on the printed page, I would like to share more of our conversation here....

Scientific American’s most popular stories published in 2013 included the following: The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life “Just a Theory”: 7 Misused Science Words Dear American Consumers: Please Don’t Start Eating Healthfully. Sincerely, the Food Industry Tread Lightly: Labels That Translate Calories into Walking Distance Could Induce People to Eat Less The sheepshead fish has human teeth, but it’s okay because it won’t give you a psychedelic crisis...

Kemal Ali ran a successful well-digging business for farmers in northern Syria for 30 years. He had everything he needed for the job: a heavy driver to pound pipe into the ground, a battered but reliable truck to carry his machinery, a willing crew of young men to do the grunt work. More than that, he had a sharp sense of where to dig, as well as trusted contacts in local government on whom he could count to look the other way if he bent the rules....

Did you take a holiday this summer, or were you too busy at work? You’re hardly alone if you fall into the latter category. In the U.S., 42 percent of us fail to use up our paid vacation days—to the tune of more than $52 billion in unclaimed benefits a year, according to a 2014 analysis by Oxford Economics. We work long days, too: the average full-time employee clocks about 47 hours a week....

Despite the astronomical sums that the U.S. spends on maternity care, mortality rates for women and infants are significantly higher in America than in other wealthy countries. And because of a shortage of hospitals and ob-gyns, especially in rural areas, many women struggle to access proper care during pregnancy. Moreover, the rate of cesarean sections is exceedingly high at 32 percent—the World Health Organization considers the ideal rate to be around 10 percent—and 13 percent of women report feeling pressured by their providers to have the procedure....

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to drastically alter the U.S.’s direction on climate and energy. His promises include actions like “canceling” the Paris agreement and dismantling the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as repealing restrictions on domestic energy development. Trump infamously tweeted that global warming is a “hoax,” and has selected Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, an outspoken climate skeptic, to lead his EPA transition team....

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are heading to Puerto Rico this week to study whether the mosquito-borne Zika virus will cause an increase in cases of a rare neurological disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome as the outbreak intensifies in this U.S. territory. The World Health Organization last month predicted that Zika would spread to all countries in the Americas except for Canada and Chile....

The animal runs toward me, its curly tail wagging and its loving eyes full of joy. It jumps into my arms and nuzzles my face, like a dog. But it is not a dog. It is a fox—a fox that looks and behaves much like a dog. The animal and its close relatives are the result (as of early 2017) of 58 generations of selective breeding, performed in an attempt to discover in general the secrets of domestication and in particular how humans may have transformed wolves into the first dogs....

The rollout of 5G wireless technology will make mobile communications dramatically faster and more efficient. But 5G could also lead to dangerous setbacks for weather forecasting. That is the worry voiced by national and international science agencies and independent experts. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), however, which regulates U.S. wireless networks, doesn’t seem concerned—and that’s a big problem. 5G promises better performance than earlier generations of wireless telecommunications. Some of 5G’s frequency bands, however, are perilously close to those used by weather instruments on Earth-orbiting satellites....

Viewers of a certain age (including my own) may remember the children’s TV show Big Blue Marble—reminiscent of the photograph of our water world taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 (top). I found myself reflecting on that image of a blue oasis in an inky cosmos as we put together this issue. Although we at Scientific American didn’t set out to plan a special report on life and our ocean planet, you’ll see a liquid line running through this edition’s feature “well” (as we editors call the section of main articles)....

“The terrible epidemic of cattle disease, by its continuous spreading, threatens to become one of the greatest scourges that has ever visited the country. The imagination is appalled at the contemplation of the thousands of herds from Maine to Texas being visited by this wasting and fatal malady. The dread of its loss among the agricultural community, and the fear of diseased meat in all our cities, may be partly conceived but cannot be fully realized....