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At some point in your life, you will likely experience the anxiety of sitting in a hospital room, waiting for a serious medical diagnosis. Even those lucky enough to avoid that situation will likely accompany a loved one—a parent, grandparent or child—who is receiving the news. You might remember the stiffness of the chair, the pattern of the hospital gown or the doctor’s folded hands. Whatever the diagnosis—cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes or even COVID-19—the event is not one you will easily forget....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. The definition of innovation has broadened in recent years. It used to refer to research and development done in laboratories and the results of scientific experiments published in journals. But innovation is now considered to be more general than that. It includes improvements in how people work in virtual teams, global supply chains and business models....

An itch, also known as pruritus, is a general sensation arising from the irritation of skin cells or nerve cells associated with the skin. While it can be a nuisance, pruritus serves as an important sensory and self-protective mechanism, as do other skin sensations such as touch, pain, vibration, cold and heat. It can alert us to harmful external agents, but can become unbearable if not treated. Pruritus is a dominant symptom of many skin diseases and also occurs in some diseases that affect the entire body....

Puns are divisive in comedy. Critics groan that they are the “lowest form of wit,” a quote attributed to various writers. Others—including Shakespeare—pun with abandon. The brain itself seems divided over puns, according to a recent study published in Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition. The results suggest the left and right hemispheres play different roles in processing puns, ultimately requiring communication between them for the joke to land. To observe how the brain handles this type of humor, researchers at the University of Windsor in Ontario presented study participants with a word relating to a pun in either the left or right visual field (which corresponds to the right or left brain hemisphere, respectively)....

Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard. The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron’s vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit Avatar. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees....

It’s official: 2014 has taken the title of hottest year on record. That ranking comes courtesy of data released Monday by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the first of four major global temperature recordkeepers to release their data for last year. The upward march of the world’s average temperature since 1891 is a trademark of human-influenced global warming with 2014 being the latest stop on the climb. All 10 of the hottest years have come since 1998....

Republican Representative Lamar Smith of Texas will retire from Congress in 2018. Smith has run the powerful House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology since 2013. Unfortunately, he did not use his position to seriously advance science policy but instead wielded it as a cudgel against perceived political enemies—including scientists. He sponsored legislation championed by lobbyists and trade groups that would, had it become law, have undermined the role of science in policy making....

After a detective hunt across China, researchers chasing the origin of the deadly SARS virus have finally found their smoking gun. In a remote cave in Yunnan province, virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world. The killer strain could easily have arisen from such a bat population, the researchers report in PLoS Pathogens on November 30....

Last December’s agreement in Bali to launch a two-year negotiation on climate change was good news, a rare example of international cooperation in a world seemingly stuck in a spiral of conflict. Cynics might note that the only accomplishment was an agreement to talk some more, and their cynicism may yet be confirmed. Nevertheless, the growing understanding that serious climate-control measures are feasible at modest cost is welcome. The arithmetic is becoming clearer....

Protection against skin cancer can be added to the list of health benefits that come with drinking coffee, a new study says. Women who drank more than three cups of coffee daily were 21 percent less likely to develop basal cell carcinoma (BCC), compared with women who drank less than one cup of caffeinated coffee per month, the study showed. For men, this risk reduction was 10 percent. “Most likely, the protective effect is due to caffeine,” said lead author Jiali Han, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston....

We’ve all encountered failure. Perhaps, it’s blowing a job interview, failing a final exam, or getting rejected from your dream school. Whether we like it or not, failure is part of life. But eventually, we’re told, overcoming difficult obstacles will make a future success taste so much sweeter. New research, however, may challenge this maxim. In expectation, at least, initial failure can lead people to underestimate how good it would feel to succeed....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every disaster movie seems to open with a scientist being ignored. “Don’t Look Up” is no exception—in fact, people ignoring or flat out denying scientific evidence is the point. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play astronomers who make a literally Earth-shattering discovery and then try to persuade the president to take action to save humanity....

To truly, deeply understand how the human body works—and how diseases arise—you would need an extraordinary amount of information. You would have to know the identity of every cell type in every tissue; exactly which genes, proteins and other molecules are active in each type; what processes control that activity; where the cells are located exactly; how the cells normally interact with one another; and what happens to the body’s functioning when genetic or other aspects of a cell undergo change, among other details....

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN A series of seismometers was recently set along the steep slopes of the Mariana Trench to study whether it could trigger large earthquakes. U.S. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, and San Diego State University will gather high-speed video this month or next to study kangaroo rats’ acrobatic escapes from rattlesnakes. CANADA Carbon dating of animal bone fragments in caves in the Yukon has revealed human occupation of North America 24,000 years ago—about 10,000 years earlier than previous studies suggested....

For the last two weeks, the nutrition world has been consumed by a rancorous debate, triggered by the publication of a highly controversial and hotly contested paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine. An international team of researchers undertook what they’ve pitched as the largest and most rigorous analysis to date of the effects of red meat consumption on human health. According to their analysis, the evidence that current consumption is causing harm, or that reducing consumption would lower risks....

Picture the stereotypical pot smoker: young, dazed and confused. Marijuana has long been known for its psychoactive effects, which can include cognitive impairment. But new research published in June in Nature Medicine suggests the drug might affect older users very differently than young ones—at least in mice. Instead of impairing learning and memory, as it does in young people, the drug appears to reverse age-related declines in the cognitive performance of elderly mice....

In 2015 Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and his colleagues caused a sensation when they unveiled more than 1,500 human fossils representing some 15 individuals, male and female, young and old, discovered in South Africa. It was one of the richest assemblages of human fossils ever found, recovered from a chamber deep inside an underground cave system near Johannesburg called Rising Star. The team deduced that the bones belonged to a new species, Homo naledi, which had a curious mix of primitive traits, such as a tiny brain, and modern features, including long legs....

The ‘mega-heatwaves’ that parched Europe in 2003 and Russia in 2010 were exacerbated by a vicious feedback loop between soil and atmosphere, researchers report today in Nature Geoscience. Drying ground added more heat into air close to Earth’s surface, a process that repeated over time to produce record-breaking warmth that shrivelled crops, set forests ablaze and claimed tens of thousands of lives. Without the extraordinarily dry surface and the anomalous high-pressure conditions in the lowest level of the atmosphere occurring at the same time, the extreme, persistent hot spells wouldn’t have occurred, says paper co-author Diego Miralles, a climate hydrologist at Ghent University in Belgium....

Picture the expression on your cat’s face when you stroke it. What makes it so happy? The answer lies in a particular type of sensory neuron that responds to pleasant stroking, say scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The neurons, identified in mice, are similar to certain human neurons, which could explain why we enjoy a massage too. Stroking skin produces a pleasurable sensation in many mammals, including humans, but until now, it was unclear which neurons detected that stimulus....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine has been surrounded for more than three decades by a 1,000-square-mile (2,600-square-kilometer) exclusion zone that keeps people out. On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl’s reactor number four melted down as a result of human error, releasing vast quantities of radioactive particles and gases into the surrounding landscape – 400 times more radioactivity to the environment than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima....