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A storm of criticism has rained down on a paper by genome-sequencing pioneer Craig Venter that claims to predict people’s physical traits from their DNA. Reviewers and even a co-author of the paper say that it overstates the ability to use a person’s genes to identify the individual, which could raise unnecessary fears about genetic privacy. In the paper1, published on September 5in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Venter and colleagues at his company Human Longevity, Inc....

As a physician who cares for adults with haemophilia, Annette von Drygalski sees patient after patient with bulging, painful knees and elbows caused by bleeding into the joint. The rise in cases of this crippling condition, which can lead to arthritis and disability, drives the work of von Drygalski and her team at the University of California’s San Diego Medical Center—part of a growing body of researchers studying haemophilic joint disease and the pain that it causes....

Imagine the worst cold you’ve ever had in your life. Your nose feels completely blocked. You struggle for air. The pressure in your sinuses sends pain streaking around your head. You can’t smell, so eating food is like chewing on cardboard, you are nauseated and you feel utterly miserable. Now imagine that the symptoms, even if they ease for a week or so, always come back. You are never free. Ever....

In 1878 in Sweden, a 10th-century Viking warrior was discovered in a grave packed with weapons, hinting at high military status. The assumption for the next century was that this individual was male. Questions about the warrior’s sex arose in 1970s, and DNA analysis conclusively upended the belief in 2017, showing that the grave’s occupant was female. The sex determination took so long largely because modern assumptions about gender roles—in this case, that all high-status warriors are men–got in the way of the science....

The seven minutes of terror are over. NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down safely on the surface of Mars early Monday morning, Eastern Daylight Time, sticking the landing in what had been one of the most anticipated—and feared—arrivals in the history of robotic planetary exploration. The 900-kilogram rover autonomously navigated its landing sequence, slowing from 21,000 kilometers per hour at the top of the atmosphere to a dead stop on the surface, with nary an apparent hitch....

After five years of gallivanting across the globe, Charles Darwin settled down at Down House in Downe, England. Other than day trips to London, he hardly left his neighborhood for the remaining 45 years of his life. After three days at a conference in London this past summer, I took a day trip to Downe to see Darwin’s house, which is now a small museum. What I did not know at the time was that I was visiting site number 043 in The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive (O’Reilly Media, 2009)....

International negotiations on climate change kicked off in Glasgow, Scotland, this week with countries and regions making a flurry of pledges to help stem global warming—everything from phasing out coal-fired power plants to reducing deforestation. At the heart of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) talks, however, are promises each party makes to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. As of this writing, the promises are not enough to limit the worst climate risks and damage....

Kindred Octavia E. Butler Gift edition. Beacon Press, 2022 ($27.95) Afrofuturism—a global, multimedia genre of art rooted in Black cultures—is often used as a liberating lens through which we can reexamine our world. From tales told around fires in the dark, to the creation myths carved in ancient stones, to the visions contained in new technologies, this storytelling art is one of our oldest tools for making sense of an increasingly complex society....

When engineers want to design robots capable of navigating complex real-world environments, they often turn to the animal kingdom. Such biomimicry has produced bots that run like dogs or cheetahs or hop like birds taking off in flight. But now researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have reached new heights by ignoring the constraints of biological models. Their 30-centimeter-tall jumper can spring more than 30 meters into the air—roughly the elevation of a 10-story building and 100 times its own height....

Editor’s note: The orignal online version of this story was previously posted. We often hear that teens are irresponsible because their brains are immature. But, contradicting that idea, teen turmoil is completely absent in more than 100 cultures around the world [see “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” by Robert Epstein; Scientific American Mind, April/May 2007]. Nevertheless, neuroscience studies do indeed suggest that the gray matter in the frontal cortex of teens, as compared with adults, is not fully developed....

What killed the dinosaurs? Scientists have long debated whether it was an asteroid that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago or a powerful wave of volcanic eruptions at that time. Two papers published today in Science say the real answer is— both, in a catastrophic coincidence. But the two teams of researchers disagree on a key point: whether the impact from space came first and boosted the eruptions into a climate-altering, dinosaur-killing frenzy, or whether they were two unrelated disasters with remarkably bad timing for the beasts that once stalked our planet and still stomp through our minds....

Every week in the United States in 2014, about 16 people were killed by trains—a 17 percent increase over the previous year and adding up to the highest number of rail casualties since 2007, federal government data shows. None of these victims died in fiery crude oil explosions like the ones visible for miles around train derailment sites this month in Illinois and Ontario. But in some regions, there are signs that the increasing deaths may be tied to a massive energy-driven transformation underway on U....

Sooner or later, everything goes online. Music, books, newspapers, magazines, TV shows, movies, software, classified ads, restaurant menus, maps, and on and on. It’s fun to watch these industries reinvent themselves in the digital age. At first, of course, the online marketplaces are literal interpretations of the physical ones. If you want to buy music, you pay a per-song or per-album price, and you own the music files, just as though you’d bought it on a CD....

Picture a pigeon perched on a telephone wire. Ready for takeoff, it raises its wings, springs into the air and flaps away, perhaps with the intention of leaving its calling card on your car’s windshield. This series of actions is so commonplace that you probably do not pay it much attention. But University of Manchester biomechanical engineer Ben Parslew does. He is trying to design robots that can jump like birds....

With the rising temperatures brought about by global warming, the risks posed by these pernicious pests could also be increasing. A warmer climate can mean expanded habitats for many pest species, as well as increases in their numbers. Here’s what research suggests will happen with four key summertime pests as the world warms: Mosquitoes Is there any pest more synonymous with summer than the mosquito? There are many species of the annoyingly buzzing biters found in different areas around the country....

I witnessed Hurricane Sandy up close and personal. In Morris County, N.J., we were without power for 10 days following the superstorm’s main blast on Oct. 29, 2012. Other areas had it even worse, with the final cost to my home state reaching nearly $30 billion. Sandy still casts a long shadow in the eyes of many families and communities in New Jersey. Sadly, this wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime storm either, which became clear recently with Hurricane Ida....

In my Scientific American column this month, I noted that in consumer electronics the promises of magic sells. And one of the most important areas for magic simulation these days is recognition. That’s when your phone or computer recognizes human speech, motion, visual cues and audio. You’ve probably heard of some speech-recognition efforts, like Apple’s Siri and the dictation program Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But the world is teeming with apps that recognize other sights, sounds and stimuli....

A new technique in paint making could soon make almost any surface germfree. Researchers have made paint that is embedded with silver nanoparticles known for their ability to kill bacteria and other microbes, in the hope that hospitals will coat their walls and countertops to fight infection. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one million people a year contract bacterial infections in hospitals. Silver itself is an excellent bacteria fighter, and in nanoparticle form it is even more potent at killing microorganisms....

In a long-awaited announcement on Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in adolescents aged 12 to 15. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met on Wednesday to discuss using the vaccine in adolescents and formally recommended immunizing this age group. While COVID-19 is not typically as serious in children as it is in adults, the disease is not necessarily benign in kids either....

A young man steals across the hallway, slips through a door and scans the room. He opens a drawer, snatches a wristwatch inside and puts it in his pocket. Then he hurries out the door. Sixty more people perform the same drill, half of them filching a watch and the others, a ring. Psychiatrist F. Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and his colleagues promised to give a bonus payment to anyone who could conceal the deed from the scientists, who planned to look into their brains for signs of a cover-up....