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Last November, Mark Davis spoke at a special meeting in South Africa to honor the 50th anniversary of Charles Elton’s seminal book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. From Asian kudzu conquering the U.S. South to brown tree snakes wiping out birds on Guam, the ecological havoc wrought by exotic plants and animals has become—along with habitat destruction and climate change—one of the most talked about problems in species conservation....

Camille Parmesan didn’t mind having her early work denigrated by Rush Limbaugh during his on-air program. “Actually, I was quite pleased with that,” she says of the radio show host, who derided her studies on the geographic shifts of a butterfly species because of climate change. “I thought if I got his goat that heavily, then I must be making an impact.” That was in 1996, and since then she has become one of the leading conservation biologists monitoring what rapid climate change is doing to the world’s plants and animals....

It’s a snowman! The latest images from NASA’s fly-by of space rock 2014 MU69 — the most distant world ever visited by humanity—reveal that it has two asymmetrical lobes. The space agency’s New Horizons spacecraft captured the close-ups of MU69 on 1 January, before it whizzed just 3,500 kilometres above the object’s surface. The rock is a ‘contact binary’, formed by the gentle merger of two objects. “It’s really, really cool,” says Sarah Hörst, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland....

Dear EarthTalk: Pharmaceuticals were in the news again recently, how they are polluting water and raising a host of health issues because we dispose of them both unused and used through bodily waste elimination. What can be done?—Lucy Abbot, Macon, Ga. Pharmaceutical drug contamination in our groundwater, rivers, lakes, estuaries and bays is a growing problem. Millions of us are flushing unused medications down the toilet and discharging them in our body waste—even though sewage treatment plants and septic systems were never designed to deal with such contaminants....

Antarctica is nature’s forensic freezer, preserving records of the past in layers of largely unsullied ice and snow that scientists have dug up to explore past geologic and atmospheric conditions. The southernmost continent has also proved an ideal hunting ground for meteorites, which stand out atop ice sheets and snowfields and tend to undergo little weathering and terrestrial contamination after arrival. A new analysis in the May 7 issue of Science comes from a France-based team working at Antarctica’s Concordia base that uncovered well-preserved meteorite samples from beneath the surface....

The National Science Foundation has closed its investigation into Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann after finding no evidence of scientific misconduct related to his research. It is the latest in a string of investigations to exonerate scientists involved in the so-called “Climategate” email scandal. Mann was a central figure in the fracas, where a sampling of correspondence from climate scientists purloined from a computer server at the University of East Anglia in Britain supposedly showed climate scientists colluding to fabricate data and smear critics....

FLATLAND: THE MOVIE by Seth Caplan, Jeffrey Travis and Dano Johnson. Includes DVD, original novel by Edwin A. Abbott, essays on making the movie and an introduction by Thomas Banchoff. Princeton University Press, 2008. Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote the mathematical allegory Flatland in 1884. Enmeshed in his two-dimensional world, the hero, A. Square, has an epiphany: there is an existence beyond his plane, a three-dimensional universe. By laying out how two dimensions relate to our three, Abbott entices the reader to imagine how our own world would relate to a fourth spatial dimension....

The days before every workstation came equipped with a PC, Internet connection and e-mail can seem quaint to us now—a simpler time when the clacking of typewriters filled the air in office buildings, an instant message was walking over to someone’s desk and talking to them, and file clerks were entrusted to organize and protect top secret information vaulted inside steel cabinets. Nevertheless, to a large extent, today’s sprawling array of software apps, wireless gadgets and social networks owe their existence to a team of researchers that was assembled 40 years ago in California’s fledgling Silicon Valley to envision and create “the office of the future”....

Research Report by Climate Central Record-breaking rain across Texas and Oklahoma this week caused widespread flooding, the likes of which the region has rarely, if ever, seen. For seven locations there, May 2015 has seen the most rain of any month ever recorded, with five days to go and the rain still coming. While rainfall in the region is consistent with the emerging El Niño, the unprecedented amounts suggest a possible climate change signal, where a warming atmosphere becomes more saturated with water vapor and capable of previously unimagined downpours....

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert waited 48 years for their theory to be proven by experiment, and then a year more for the ultimate scientific seal of approval: the Nobel Prize. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning that this year’s physics award will go to the two scientists, who in 1964 predicted the existence of a tiny, essential particle called the Higgs boson long before the technology to detect it existed....

The English language is not especially kind to rats. We say we “smell a rat” when something doesn’t feel right, refer to stressful competition as the “rat race,” and scorn traitors who “rat on” friends. But rats don’t deserve their bad rap. According to a new study in the December 9 issue of Science, rats are surprisingly selfless, consistently breaking friends out of cages—even if freeing their buddies means having to share coveted chocolate....

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology for basic research describing a fundamental housekeeping function of the cell—a process called autophagy. From the Greek for “self-eating,” autophagy is the straightforward mechanism by which a cell digests certain large internal structures and semipermanent proteins in a continual cleanup process. The process may have evolved as a response to starvation, in which cells cannibalized some of their own parts in order to continue living....

Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life Melody Moezzi Avery, 2013 ($26) A fine line separates creativity and madness. Bipolar disorder teeters along that line, with patients experiencing moments of impulsive thought, which can yield bold insights or quickly descend into confusion or rage. In her new book, Haldol and Hyacinths, Iranian-American author and activist Moezzi presents a captivating autobiographical account of her struggle with bipolar disorder. Using a series of vignettes, she reconstructs her downward spiral into psychosis, which eventually led to a suicide attempt and multiple stays in mental health facilities....

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a special report on the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016 produced by the World Economic Forum. The list, compiled by the Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, highlights technological advances its members, including Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina, believe have the power to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard the planet. It also provides an opportunity to debate any human, societal, economic or environmental risks and concerns that the technologies may pose prior to widespread adoption....

A plummeting body temperature usually means an accident. It conjures dire images of people falling into a frozen pond or wandering about in a blizzard. But for some mice—or rather the scientists who study them—a sudden chill recently proved to be a good thing. Neuroscientist Jan Siemens at Heidelberg University in Germany and colleagues engineered mice with deficient thermoregulation systems in order to investigate how the body maintains a particular internal temperature....

In this vast border region, tuberculosis control is a high-stakes game of chase. Some patients infected with the disease frequently cross into Mexico for work or to visit family, slipping off the radar of public health workers who must verify they are taking their medicines. It is through these cracks in surveillance that the disease sometimes escapes, like a thief through a back-alley exit. In the past few years, however, a new weapon has emerged that’s proved difficult even for mutating airborne bacteria to shake: the omnipresent smartphone....

Key concepts Genetics Inheritance Biology Development DNA Introduction Have you ever seen a child who looked just like his or her father when the latter was younger? We can often tell that two people are related because they have several similar physical traits, such as facial features or hair color. This is because children receive half of their DNA (genetic blueprints) from each parent. But what about something small, such as fingerprints—are they an inherited trait?...

Almost 40 years ago Russian scientist Victor Veselago had an idea for a material that could turn the world of optics on its head. It could make light waves appear to flow backward and behave in many other counterintuitive ways. A totally new kind of lens made of the material would have almost magical attributes that would let it outperform any previously known. The catch: the material had to have a negative index of refraction (“refraction” describes how much a wave will change direction as it enters or leaves the material)....

On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill walked into the cafeteria at Dawson College in Montreal and, without apparent motive, shot 21 people, injuring 19 and killing two, including himself. The same day a judge in West Virginia sent a woman to jail for, among other atrocities, forcing her six children and stepchildren to gorge themselves on food and then eat their own vomit. Also on the 13th, a court in New York sentenced a man for killing his girlfriend by setting her on fire–in front of her 10-year-old son....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Tuberculosis should be a specter of the past, something only our great-grandparents feared and died of. Alas, although almost all cases of TB today are both preventable and treatable, several different strains and manifestations of the disease still sicken and kill millions of people every year. Global tuberculosis interventions are usually tied to larger HIV/AIDS programs....