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A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart....

California and the Biden administration are pushing incentives to make the United States a global leader in a market that’s beginning to boom: the production of lithium, the lightweight metal needed for the batteries of electric vehicles and for the storage of renewable energy from power plants. At the moment nearly all the lithium used in the United States must be imported from China and other nations. But that trend could shift within two years if an efficient method is found to remove lithium from power plant waste in California....

Unemployment reached 23 percent and the GDP shrank by as much as 14 percent, so it’s hard to imagine a silver lining to the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. But could the general health of the U.S. population actually have improved when the nation’s economic fitness took multiple nosedives? And, if a floundering economy improves longevity, what does this say about our current recession? It turns out that the bleakest years of the Great Depression, as gauged by GDP and unemployment rate, saw the greatest gains in life expectancy and drops in mortality rates....

Animals and plants prepare their cells for sex in very different ways—but no one knows why. A team of UK researchers now thinks that it has worked out the puzzle. Humans and animals set themselves up for sex well before the act will ever take place. At the earliest stages of life, in the embryo, our germ cells begin to develop. These are the cells that will go on to form the sperm and the egg, with half the usual number of chromosomes....

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairy tales, kisses that revive princesses. Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers....

Astronomers have spotted water vapor and evidence of exotic clouds in the atmosphere of an alien planet known as HAT-P-26b. The researchers also determined that HAT-P-26b’s atmosphere is dominated by hydrogen and helium to a much greater degree than that of Neptune or Uranus, the alien world’s closest counterparts in our own solar system in terms of mass. “This exciting new discovery shows that there is a lot more diversity in the atmospheres of these exoplanets than we have previously thought,” David Sing, an astrophysics professor at the University of Exeter in England, said in a statement....

Fantasy writers have long been captivated by the possibility of preserving human life in a reversible state of suspended animation. In fictional tales the technique enables characters to “sleep” through centuries of interstellar travel or terrestrial cataclysms, then awaken unaffected by the passing of time. These stories are great fun, but their premise seems biologically far-fetched. In reality, we humans do not appear capable of altering our rate of progression through life....

Every year around the end of winter, baby spotted nutcrackers peck their way out of their shells, ready to learn as much as they can from their parents about how to live as a bird—such as how to bury seeds throughout the year for later consumption. Spotted nutcrackers are fairly unique, even among seed-caching birds, because they rely on the seeds from just one kind of tree: the Swiss stone pine trees of the Carpathian Mountains and the Alps....

Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer Karl Guthe Jansky was only looking for ways to cut down on shortwave radio static when he found radio waves coming from outer space in 1932. Yet Jansky’s serendipitous discovery soon gave birth to radio astronomy, which has since delivered paradigm-shifting revelations ranging from the cosmic microwave background to the presence of dark matter in the universe. That science is now on the verge of a 21st-century renaissance that promises even greater discoveries, ushered in not by traditional huge radio dishes but by vast, powerful arrays of smaller dishes....

At the height of the Ebola crisis in West Africa, an experimental drug produced in tobacco plants appeared to help save the lives of a few people who were infected, including some American aid workers. But in the midst of the outbreak, scientists were not sure if the treatment truly worked. Findings published Wednesday of the first randomized, controlled trial of the treatment, ZMapp, don’t provide a definitive answer either, but they could provide scientists with crucial data to consider in the case of future outbreaks....

The green computing movement demands that all computer users shed the energy-wasting practices to which they’ve grown accustomed—so you decide that you’re going to power down your PC at night, invest in an Energy Star–approved laptop, and only visit Web pages that eschew white space in favor of ostensibly more energy-efficient black backgrounds. Before you tune out and turn off, you should know that black isn’t necessarily the new green. Because computer monitors come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and not all monitors create black and white the same way, there’s no proof that, on the whole, increased usage of black images would save more energy than the continued use of white ones....

It is a law of physics that everything that is not prohibited is mandatory. Errors are thus unavoidable. They are everywhere: in language, cooking, communication, image processing and, of course, computation. Mitigating and correcting them keeps society running. You can scratch a DVD yet still play it. QR codes can be blurred or torn yet are still readable. Images from space probes can travel hundreds of millions of miles yet still look crisp....

Textbooks have traditionally taught that when it comes to the immune system, the brain and body are separate entities. When exposed to foreign objects such as bacteria or transplant tissue, the body stirs up a torrent of immune activity: white blood cells devour invading pathogens and burst compromised cells; antibodies tag outsiders for destruction. Except, that is, in the brain, where the blood-brain barrier bars both foreign bodies and immune cells from entry....

Haumea, the mini planet whose detection set off an international and as yet unresolved war of words in 2005 between the two teams claiming its discovery, is back on the astronomy scene with more intrigue. An elongated oddball, Haumea is roughly the same diameter as Pluto, with whom it shares the three-year-old “dwarf planet” designation. It spins exceedingly fast, rotating once every 3.9 hours, which may explain the fact that it resembles an American football....

Scientists have demonstrated a new way to reprogram adult tissue to become cells as versatile as embryonic stem cells—without the addition of extra genes that could increase the risk of dangerous mutations or cancer. Researchers have been striving to achieve this since 2006, when the creation of so-called induced pluripotent (iPS) cells was first reported. Previously, they had managed to reduce the number of genes needed using small-molecule chemical compounds, but those attempts always required at least one gene, Oct4....

Click here for an extended versionof this story. Which brain circuits do food and drugs activate in common? The system in the brain that both food and drugs activate is basically the circuitry that evolved to reward behavior essential to our survival. One reason humans are attracted to food is because it is rewarding and pleasurable. When we experience pleasure, our brains learn to associate the sensation with the conditions that predict it....

Beginning on July 23, physicians all over the world took to social media to post pictures of themselves in bikinis, using the hashtag #MedBikini. Against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and our broad social awakening to a second pandemic of systemic racism, why would thousands of doctors post pictures of something so seemingly frivolous as themselves in swimwear? We are both surgeons, and watched this play out in real time....

There have been over four million deaths resulting from COVID worldwide, including over 34 million cases and more than 610,000 deaths in the United States alone. Worse, we do not appear to be near the end of the pandemic. Recent increases in hospitalizations and deaths from COVID have occurred, mainly in people who are either fully unvaccinated or partially vaccinated. Making this all the more tragic is its preventability; we know that vaccines are still effective against the Delta variant, which is now the predominant strain in the United States of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID....

Do people get happier or crankier as they age? Stereotypes of crotchety neighbors aside, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age—but overall happiness depends on when a person was born. Previous studies that have compared older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy....

The suspense is killing me. In March physicists announced one of the most stunning discoveries in decades—the detection of gravitational waves produced just after the big bang. The finding prompted mass news coverage, and physicists in labs everywhere popped champagne corks. But soon significant doubts emerged. After much debate it became clear, even to the team at the BICEP2 experiment behind the original announcement, that the claims were premature. The experiment may have found primordial gravitational waves....