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In my Scientific American column this month, I wrote about the state of the art in self-driving car technology, as reflected by the Tesla Model 3. We’re nowhere near full, Level 5 self driving, where the driver has no duties except maybe to take a nap. But Tesla already offers features that go well beyond Level 2 (lane-keeping, adaptive cruise control, and exit-ramp-taking, on the highway). As a now-experienced Model 3 driver, I thought maybe I’d supplement that column with a feature-by-feature report card, to give you a better picture of the current tech....

That’s not nearly enough for state leaders who want to wage a fierce battle against climate change. They’re discussing a move that some consider radical: banning the sale of cars that run on gasoline or diesel. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) recently asked Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the state Air Resources Board, “Why haven’t we done something already?” The message, first reported by Bloomberg, came after China made an announcement to restrict internal combustion engines....

It’s easy to see familiar shapes in seemingly random patterns. Witness how many people see faces in clouds, for example—or in the ‘poured’ paintings of American artist Jackson Pollock, which he famously composed by dripping paint over the canvas. But Pollock disliked the idea that viewers of his paintings were distracted by such figures, which he called “extra cargo”. In fact, during his career, he is thought to have intuitively increased the complexity of his works to prevent the phenomenon....

Hurricane Harvey is drowning southeastern Texas for the fourth day, putting a vast area under feet of water. Experts say Harvey has been stuck longer in one place than any tropical storm in memory. That is just one of the hurricane’s extremes; the storm is off the charts by many measures. Scientific American wanted to learn why, and we asked meteorologist Jeff Masters for help. Masters is the co-founder of Weather Underground, a web site that meteorologists nationwide go to for their own inside information about severe weather....

Slowly but surely, Florida’s oranges are going sour. Since its discovery in 2005, a grave disorder known as huanglongbing (HLB), or citrus greening disease, has ravaged the Florida citrus industry. Borne by the Asian citrus psyllid, a small, invasive insect related to the aphid, HLB has spread to every county in the state, causing the citrus trees it infects to sprout misshapen, sour fruit. Once a tree is infected, there is no cure....

Hackers hit crowd-funding site Kickstarter and made off with user information, the site said Saturday. Though no credit card information was taken, the site said, attackers made off with usernames, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. “Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one,” the site said in a blog post, adding that “as a precaution, we strongly recommend that you create a new password for your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password....

SAN FRANCISCO — The moon and other rocky bodies in the inner solar system were pounded by long-ago impacts far more violently than previously thought, two NASA spacecraft have found. NASA’s twin Grail probes have created an ultra-precise gravity map of the moon, revealing that its crust is almost completely pulverized. The surprising find suggests that Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars endured a similar beating billions of years ago, researchers said....

The landmark climate report released by the United Nations on Monday called for a transformation in the way people use energy, buildings and vehicles. And for the first time it also focused on humans, themselves. The new report includes an entire chapter devoted to the social aspects of climate mitigation, the first of its kind to be included in an assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “In this report, we show how mitigation goes hand in hand with achieving many of the sustainable development goals,” said Ramón Pichs-Madruga, vice-chair of the IPCC working group that prepared the report, in a virtual announcement of the findings on Monday....

The National Institutes of Health is investigating roughly a half-dozen research institutions based on suspicions that researchers with federal grants failed to disclose significant financial contributions from foreign governments, Director Francis Collins said Thursday. The fact-finding operation, Collins said, will center in many cases on technology research. “We are concerned about circumstances where people have intentionally been deceptive about those connections, with an intention to divert intellectual property or perhaps use their access to peer-review materials to ship them overseas,” Collins told reporters after a Senate hearing....

The assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, the defiance of militants and public unease with President Pervez Musharraf’s government have raised questions about the stability of Pakistan and the security of its nuclear armament. Exacerbating these concerns is a nervous neighbor. In January, weeks after an Indian missile successfully crashed into another missile over the Bay of Bengal, an official announced that India could deploy a defense shield against ballistic missiles by 2011....

Moderate physical activity in old age appears to invigorate the mind as well as the body. B. M. van Gelder of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands and his colleagues have found that elderly men who partake in moderately intense activities stay sharper than their less energetic counterparts. In one of the few studies to assess physical activity and cognition over a long period, the researchers began in 1990 to track the exercise habits and mental abilities of 295 men ages 70 to 90....

As both a parent and a college professor, I have witnessed the destructive effects of test anxiety. Students with it can rattle off the material and explain complex content in a relaxed setting but crumble during an examination. When it matters the most, students with test anxiety can convey the least. Relief from the condition is often found in a combination of psychotherapy and antianxiety medication, though some students turn to neuroenhancing drugs (for example, prescription stimulants)....

This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo At first, Maurice Kakule Mutsunga suspected that the woman had malaria or typhoid: she was feverish and fatigued, and had been admitted to the hospital in Mangina in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with terrible headaches and abdominal pain. Then blood began to drip from her nose. The woman, who died from her illness, likely had Ebola....

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal. The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy—like a ticking clock that never needs winding....

In the wake of Cyclone Aila in 2009, swollen seas washed over the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. The storm surge breached the embankments surrounding a small island that was home to 10,000 families, turning the land into a muddy hell. The deluge of salty water washed out fields, homes, roads and markets just as people had begun to recover from the damage caused 18 months before by Cyclone Sidr....

The ways people conceptualize and discuss abortion will become more important in coming years. The Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health could overturn 50 years of national precedent establishing abortion as a fundamental right of individuals prior to fetal viability. If the question is returned to the state level, as many people expect, more than half of U.S. states have processes in place designed to swiftly ban abortion....

Environmental groups yesterday pressed U.S. EPA to backtrack on its plans to exempt biomass from climate regulations for the next three years, arguing that such a step would prompt more fuel switching to biomass and spark an uptick in unregulated carbon emissions. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) opposed a proposed rule from EPA that would allow facilities burning woody waste, landfills and ethanol facilities to be exempt from carbon regulations for the next three years....

Scientists may have finally found a drug candidate for reducing the mental retardation caused by Down syndrome. After as little as two weeks on the drug, mice with a genetic impairment similar to the syndrome performed as well as normal animals did on learning tests. The learning and memory problems characteristic of Down syndrome may occur because its sufferers’ brain cells are unable to form new synaptic connections with neighboring neurons....

Humans and killer whales parted ways millions of years ago, evolutionarily speaking, yet the stately cetaceans have a lot in common with us: complex brains, close-knit family groups and, not least of all, grandmothers. Even though orca grannies may not sport white hair and glasses, they, too, go through menopause—a rarity in the animal kingdom known to affect only two nonhuman species: orcas and pilot whales. The question for biologists is, Why would a species live long past reproductive viability?...

NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft is set to plunge to its doom on April 30, ending nearly four years of exploration of Mercury. Before it goes, the mission is sending back the best images of the planet ever taken. In the shots, released on 16 March, the bottoms of craters reveal ice materializing in pits and swirls, still frozen despite being so close to the Sun. Elsewhere on Mercury, short, staircase-like ridges appear, miniature versions of the huge ‘scarps’ that the planet is famous for....