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When Lydia Alvarez-Erviti started her postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford, UK, in 2008, her goal was to develop gene therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. She had identified her target—α-synuclein, a protein that accumulates in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease—and designed a short interfering RNA (siRNA) to reduce the amount of α-synuclein made in mice. But she needed to get the siRNA into the brain. The method would have to protect the RNA, cross the barrier between circulating blood and the brain, and be safe enough to use repeatedly....

UNITED NATIONS – Earth’s human population is expected to coast upward to 9.6 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100, up from 7.2 billion people alive today, a United Nations agency has projected. The U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs yesterday released revised numbers for the coming century, raising median estimates for population growth in 2050 and 2100. The agency’s prior best guess had humanity at 9.3 billion in 2050 and 10....

Before he reimagined our planet as a giant information-storage device for the August 2015 issue, César A. Hidalgo, associate professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, wrote for Scientific American about big data—what it can do and why its critics are wrong. Last April, in an essay published in SA’s Forum, Hidalgo argued that “it has become fashionable to bad-mouth big data,” but that “most of the recent criticism…has been weak and misguided....

At first glance, the bacterial colonies that dot a petri dish in the Boston University laboratory of James J. Collins do not seem all that special. Each Escherichia coli bacterium has been genetically altered to manufacture a specific protein once the population density of the colony around it reaches a predefined level. A skeptic might yawn. After all, genetic engineering isn’t new. But these cells haven’t just had a foreign gene spliced into them....

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Gregory Berns New Harvest, 2013 In How Dogs Love Us, Emory University neuroscientist Berns recounts the death of Newton, his pet pug of 15 years. With age, Newton’s spinal cord deteriorated, and the dog lost control of his hind legs, bowel and bladder. Berns recalls Newton’s look of shame after his first accident inside the house and how he interpreted this look as Newton’s plea to die....

Warning that famine in Somalia is likely to get worse before it gets better, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday pledged an additional $17 million in U.S. aid to East African countries racked by the worst drought in 60 years. The money comes on the heels of a $105 million relief package President Obama approved this week, bringing the level of U.S. assistance to the Horn of Africa to $508 million....

After his roughest days in a New York City emergency room, physician Matthew Bai feels his whole body relax when he sees his wife and 17-month-old daughter. “My light at the end of the tunnel is going home to family,” Bai says. When Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital started to overflow with COVID-19 patients in late March, however, Bai and his wife decided she should take their toddler and stay with her parents in New Jersey....

As more and more wireless gadgets suck up more high-speed Internet bandwidth, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is challenged to find new avenues for consumers to get their mobile connectivity. One controversial option that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is considering as part of his agency’s National Broadband Plan is to make slots of “white spaces,” unused airwaves on the broadcast spectrum, available to the unlicensed mobile phones and PCs that are typically used by the general public....

Key concepts Chemistry Food science Protein Elastic Introduction Do you remember the last time you baked cookies, bread or cake? Did your baked good turn out perfectly? Or was it a bit too flat or perhaps rubbery and tough, or maybe with clumps of dry ingredients? The problem might have been in how you mixed the dough—or with the type of flour you used. In this science activity you will knead, stretch and punch some pretty remarkable doughs and discover what provides structure and elasticity to your baked goods....

CLIMATEWIRE | Summer across the American West has become synonymous with extreme heat and poor air quality — and that combination can be particularly deadly, according to a recent study. Researchers at the University of Southern California analyzed more than 1.5 million deaths in California between 2014 and 2019, and found that the risk of death increased by 21 percent on days when there was both extreme heat and high air pollution....

Innovation matters in an enormous variety of professions. It elevates the careers of chefs, university presidents, psychotherapists, police detectives, journalists, teachers, engineers, architects, attorneys and surgeons, among other professionals. The contributions of creative thought can directly translate into career advancement as well as financial rewards. In an unfavorable economic climate, raising your creative game may even mark the difference between survival and failure. Psychologists broadly define creativity as the purposeful generation and implementation of a novel idea....

The toxic effects of lead—developmental delays, organ damage, even death—are well-known. But millions of Americans still rely on lead pipes to deliver drinking water. In an attempt to make them safer, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are working on a new technology that uses electrical current to rapidly build a protective layer on the insides of the pipes. In early tests they reduced the amount of the toxic metal entering water, but other scientists are skeptical of the method’s potential as a long-term solution....

What if drinking water could be drawn from desert air easily, without requiring enormous amounts of electricity from a grid? What if a doctor could do a biopsy for a suspected cancer without a blade of any sort? What if we didn’t have to wait too long to find out? Technologies that make these visions a reality are expected to become increasingly commonplace in the next few years. This special report, compiled and produced in a collaboration between Scientific American and the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, highlights 10 such emerging technologies....

One of the world’s richest science awards, given only in alternate years, will go to three discoverers of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing tool, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced on Thursday. Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginijus Šikšnys of Vilnius University will each receive a gold medal and share the $1 million that comes with the Kavli Prize in nanoscience (there are also Kavli prizes for astrophysics and neuroscience)....

There’s new hope for the more than 7 million American women (and their partners) who long for a child and are plagued by infertility. Australian researchers have developed a method for screening embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the ones that have the best shot of developing into healthy babies. The process, reported in Human Reproduction, utilizes DNA fingerprinting (an assessment of active genes in a given cell) to boost the success rate of IVF and lower the chances of risky multiple births by identifying which of several five-day-old embryos are most likely to result in pregnancy The new method, which will replace unproved alternatives such as choosing embryos based on their shape, is likely to up the success of women becoming pregnant and lower their chances of having multiple births....

How do falcons manage to catch prey midflight? Some animals, such as bees and tiger beetles, fly directly at their game. Others, like dogs and some fishes, pursue at an intercept angle based on the fleeing creature’s trajectory. Until now, however, falcons’ aerial pursuits have remained a mystery; because they take place across large distances and at high speeds, data collection on their techniques has been difficult. Suzanne Amador Kane, of Haverford College, decided to get a bird’s-eye view....

The first few days of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) have seen a flurry of announcements from world leaders promising to tackle climate change — from plans to phase out public finance for coal-fired power, to a pledge to end deforestation. This year, many big names — including US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — attended the first two days of the conference to make big announcements....

Plans for two experiments to potentially slow global warming by deploying tiny particles into the atmosphere have sparked an international debate over whether such tests should be allowed without some form of government scrutiny. The experiments are being planned by scientists who worry that the U.S. government, and others, is not equipped to move fast enough to mitigate greenhouse gases before the world reaches dangerous “tipping points.” Those stages of planetary change could accelerate the heating effect, perhaps to life-threatening levels, they say....

Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC....

Scott Pruitt suggested yesterday that U.S. forests would offset potential carbon dioxide emissions released by burning wood for energy. But his controversial decision on biomass was rejected by critics as an unscientific step to help the forest industry. The EPA administrator announced yesterday at a Georgia elementary school that the agency now considers biomass to be carbon neutral for the purposes of regulating emissions from stationary sources, like power plants that burn wood....