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There is no shortage of parenting advice in books and on the Internet, much of it conflicting: for instance, “Do sleep train your baby” versus “Don’t, under any circumstances, sleep train your baby.” But the vast majority of this guidance is based on anecdotal experience and personal belief—very little of it relies on evidence, found science writer Melinda Wenner Moyer, a parent of two. She set out to discover what science has to say about one of the most profound questions a parent can ask: “How do I raise my children to help make the world a better place?...

The most prolific planet-hunting machine in history has signed off. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has discovered 70 percent of the 3,800 confirmed alien worlds to date, has run out of fuel, agency officials announced today (Oct. 30). Kepler can no longer reorient itself to study cosmic objects or beam its data home to Earth, so the legendary instrument’s in-space work is done after nearly a decade. And that work has been transformative....

Would you buy a product that promised that 60 percent of the time it works every time? Maybe for caricature news anchors like Ron Burgundy, there is no question that a method (exotic cologne) with this type of track record (for attracting women) would be a good investment. But what if that rate was found to be true for a surgery that cost tens of thousands of dollars and might save your life—with a small risk of serious complications?...

“I dare them to find the iPod on me,” Richie Sais told the New York Times in 2007, when he was preparing to run the Marine Corps Marathon. USA Track & Field, the national governing body for distance racing, had just decided to ban athletes from using portable music players in order “to ensure safety and to prevent runners from having a competitive edge.” Rais resolved to hide his iPod shuffle under his shirt....

There’s a prosaic explanation for at least some of the weirdness of “Tabby’s star,” it would appear. The bizarre long-term dimming of Tabby’s star—also known as Boyajian’s star, or, more formally, KIC 8462852—is likely caused by dust, not a giant network of solar panels or any other “megastructure” built by advanced aliens, a new study suggests. Astronomers came to this conclusion after noticing that this dimming was more pronounced in ultraviolet (UV) than infrared light....

As security concerns mount, networks proliferate and ever more data move online, personal privacy and anonymity are often the first casualties. For the Insights story, “A Little Privacy, Please,” appearing in the August 2007 issue of Scientific American, Chip Walter sat down with Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Latanya Sweeney, who discusses the new threats to privacy and ways to fight identity theft and other misuse of information. Why is privacy versus security becoming such a problem?...

Researchers turned off the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wind tunnel last year, satisfied with the most recent tests of a tough, new, ultralight composite material: a flexible, meshlike substance that snaps together like Lego bricks or K’nex. These pieces can be assembled to form 3-D chain mail–like structures that are 10 times stiffer for a given weight than existing ultralight materials. The researchers were testing how prototype airfoils and wing structures made of these new materials flexed and deformed in the strong air currents....

This article is a supplement to the feature “Cosmic Time Arrow: Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?” from the June 2008 issue of Scientific American If entropy always increases, then how do low-entropy objects such as eggs form in the first place? The law of entropy applies to closed systems. It does not forbid decreases in entropy in open systems, including chickens. A hen takes in energy and goes through a great deal of effort to produce an egg....

Just as an Irish brogue or a Minnesota lilt betrays one’s background, facial expressions and body language can also reveal our cultural origins. According to new research, such “nonverbal accents” also provoke stereotyped perceptions of others’ personalities. Many researchers regard nonverbal behavior to be a universal language—wherever you go, a smile looks like a smile. But a growing body of research suggests that where we hang our hats shapes both how we display emotion and how we perceive it in others....

Birds that show up outside of their normal range—vagrants or accidentals, as they are known, have long fascinated birdwatchers. Wildlife tours of the Alaskan archipelago, for example, lure customers with the possibility of sighting exotic vagrants like the Eurasian common cuckoo. Now scientists are beginning to consider the possibility that these misplaced birds might be more than curiosities, exploring the question of whether vagrants could provide clues about future bird distributions as climate shifts....