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This story is a supplement to the feature “Self-Cleaning Materials: Lotus Leaf-Inspired Nanotechnology” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Researchers inspired by a desert beetle are developing devices that will use a combination of the lotus effect and superhydrophilicity to harvest water from the air in remote, arid regions. . The beetle Stenocara sp. gathers water from wind-driven morning fogs in Africa’s Namib Desert by crouching with its back raised facing the wind (above)....

Many drugs can alter vascular tone, or the degree of constriction in blood vessels. When the blood vessels tighten, blood pressure increases, and when it is too high it can lead to heart attack or stroke. Conversely, when blood pressure is too low people may experience lethargy, sexual dysfunction and other problems. Some drugs designed to affect vascular tone can also have cascading effects in the brain. Whether these unintended outcomes are helpful or harmful remains an open question....

“For the first time, we’re seeing a genuinely changed landscape for the private sector,” said Edward Cameron, head of policy at We Mean Business, a group of investors and companies urging a shift from fossil fuels. “What we see now is growing momentum out of Paris.” The business and financial community didn’t even have a serious presence at the previous five U.N. climate conferences, said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, the sustainable investment advocacy group....

The rhythmic electric fields generated by the brain during deep sleep and other periods of intensely coordinated neural activity could amplify and synchronize actions along the same neural networks that initially created those fields, according to a new study. The finding indicates that the brain’s electric fields are not just passive by-products of neural activity—they might provide feedback that regulates how the brain functions, especially during deep, or slow-wave, sleep. Although similar ideas have been considered for decades, this is the first direct evidence that the electric fields generated by the cerebral cortex change the behavior of the neurons that engender them....

With his crisp blue suit and wire-framed spectacles, Garen Wintemute hardly looked frightening as he stepped to the podium on a spring day in 2013 to address a conference on pediatric emergency medicine in San Francisco. But his presence there made the organizers nervous. Wintemute, an emergency department doctor and longtime director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, today also heads the newly inaugurated University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, launched in July 2017 with a $5-million, five-year commitment of state funding....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Glasgow sits proudly on the banks of the river Clyde, once the heart of Scotland’s industrial glory and now a launchpad for its green energy transition. It’s a fitting host for the United Nations’ climate conference, COP26, where world leaders will be discussing how their countries will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change....

On a late summer day in Paris in 1783, Jacques Charles did something astonishing. He soared 3,000 feet above the ground in a balloon of rubber-coated silk bags filled with lighter-than-air hydrogen gas. Terrified peasants destroyed the balloon soon after it returned to earth, but Charles had launched a quest that researchers two centuries later are still pursuing: to harness the power of hydrogen, the lightest element in the universe, for transportation....

For the past four years, climate experts have watched with dismay as Donald Trump’s presidential administration has systematically weakened climate regulations, bolstered the use of fossil fuels that drive rising temperatures, and sidelined government climate science and scientists. These actions have combined to set the country behind on the crucial work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to keep the worst impacts of climate change at bay—and of protecting vulnerable communities and ecosystems....

This week Microsoft and Alibaba stoked new fears that robots will soon take our jobs. The two companies independently revealed that their artificial intelligence systems beat humans at a test of reading comprehension. The test, known as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), was designed to train AI to answer questions about a set of Wikipedia articles. Like the image-recognition software already deployed in commercial photo apps, these systems lend the impression that machines have become increasingly capable of replicating human cognition: identifying images or sounds, and now speed reading text passages and spewing back answers with human-level accuracy....

Florida is bracing for impact as Hurricane Ian barrels toward the state’s vulnerable Gulf Coast. The storm’s exact pathway remains uncertain, but it looks increasingly likely the Tampa Bay region will start feeling its effects Wednesday. In a worst-case scenario, the area would face its first direct landfall of a major hurricane in more than 100 years. There’s also the chance Hurricane Ian stalls out on the coastline, which could bring a catastrophic combination of heavy rains and storm surge....

Communities from New Orleans to Pensacola are being put on high alert for a direct landfall from future Category 2 Hurricane Isaac around Tuesday night. Residents, including those in Gulfport, Miss., and Mobile, Ala., should start making preparations now for Isaac’s arrival. Ironically, Isaac is expected to threaten lives and property along the northern Gulf Coast seven years to the date of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall. Even those living and vacationing westward to Houston, Texas, should monitor Isaac’s progress....

Science is, as many observe, a truly collaborative enterprise. It is also one in which practitioners are unafraid to examine evidence and, if the facts point the way, revise previous notions, even if they have been widely held. This issue’s cover story, “Mind of the Meditator,” is such a case. The authors, Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz and Richard J. Davidson, are, respectively, a Buddhist monk (originally trained as a cellular biologist) and two neuroscientists....

A new powdered form of tuberculosis (TB) vaccine may help save some of the nearly two million lives lost to the disease annually. In preliminary tests, the powdered form contained more active bacterial cells than a freeze-dried version similar to the existing vaccine. The result may pave the way for health workers to administer the vaccine as an aerosol to the lungs instead of as an injection, possibly leading to a more effective treatment....

When a Goodyear blimp–sized chunk of ice fell from a collapsing glacier on the Swiss Alps’ Mount Eiger in 2017, part of the rumble it produced was too low for human ears to detect. But these vibrations held a key to calculating the ice avalanche’s critical characteristics. Low-frequency sound waves called infrasound that travel great distances through the atmosphere are already used to monitor active volcanoes from afar. Now some researchers in this field have switched focus from fire to ice: dangerous slabs snapping off glaciers....

By Erwin Seba and Edward McAllister (Reuters) - An unknown amount of oil leaked from BP Plc’s Whiting refinery in Indiana into Lake Michigan after a mechanical glitch on Monday afternoon, the company confirmed on Tuesday. The discharge had stopped, and the leak was contained, the London-based company said in a statement on Tuesday. No injuries were reported, and the effect on Lake Michigan was not immediately clear. About 60 percent of the lake is covered in ice, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....

Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change. Recently at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely eroded. These islands lost to the sea range in size from one to five hectares. They supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old....

Peering deep into the sun’s churning plasma, solar physicists have discovered a way to forecast the emergence of sunspots before they reach the solar surface. Sunspots are dark patches marking magnetically active regions that often host solar flares and violent belches called coronal mass ejections. Trimming lead times on sunspot detection would allow for better forecasts of space weather—bursts of radiation and charged particles from the sun that can cause real problems on and around Earth....

Sometime around 400,000 years ago human ancestors went on an innovation bender. No longer content to make do with only the large hand axes and other hefty cutting tools that they and their predecessors had manufactured for more than a million years, they began fashioning sophisticated new kinds of stone tools. The novel tool types made more efficient use of raw material and were smaller, more portable, among other desirable traits....

An elaborate choreography of multiple spacecraft will play out among Jupiter and its Galilean moons in the decade of the 2020s, if plans now taking shape at NASA and other space agencies get the go-ahead in the next several years. The lion’s share of these coordinated and collaborative ventures will focus on orbiting—and possibly landing on—Europa, a scientifically intriguing world where evidence of a watery ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust points to a possible abode for extraterrestrial life....

How can the ripples from a collision of two black holes help us understand the universe? Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talks about imploding stars, gravitational waves, and the building blocks of our galaxy. Mavalvala is a World Economic Forum Young Scientist who will be speaking at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, from June 26 to 28. [An edited transcript of the interview follows] What do you do?...