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Key concepts Engineering Architecture Physics Earthquakes Introduction Have you ever wondered how tall skyscrapers can stand up so impressively to the force of gravity? But what about more violent forces, such as those produced by earthquakes? A well-planned and tested design, when combined with the right materials, can keep a building intact through all sorts of shakes and quakes. Once the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, stand at an amazing 452 meters tall....

CRISPR, the genome-editing technology that has taken biomedical science by storm, is finally nearing human trials. On June 21, an advisory committee at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved a proposal to use CRISPR–Cas9 to help augment cancer therapies that rely on enlisting a patient’s T cells, a type of immune cell. “Cell therapies [for cancer] are so promising but the majority of people who get these therapies have a disease that relapses,” says study leader Edward Stadtmauer, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is failing to adequately monitor communities with the highest flood risk to ensure they follow regulations meant to reduce damage, a government audit says. A report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that FEMA came nowhere near meeting its goal of visiting high-risk communities every five years. In many cases, the agency failed to visit them once during an 11-year span. FEMA uses the visits to determine whether communities are complying with federal flood regulations....

The right paint can add pizazz to your walls—and now it can also make them smarter. Researchers recently converted a wall into an outsize trackpad and motion sensor by using low-cost conductive paint to create a large grid of electrodes. Such a smart wall can sense human touch and track gestures from a short distance. It can also detect the locations of appliances and whether they are switched on. The technology could someday turn on lights when a person enters a room, track a player’s motion in an interactive video game or monitor a child’s television use....

By Jake Spring BEIJING (Reuters) - Automakers’ latest projections for rapid growth of China’s green car market have added to concerns of worsening smog as the uptake of electric vehicles powered by coal-fired grids races ahead of a switch to cleaner energy. Volkswagen AG plans 15 new-energy models over 3-5 years, its China chief told a green car conference in Beijing on Saturday, predicting - like the government - that Chinese production of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles would grow almost six times to 2 million annually by 2020....

Mirrors have held a peculiar fascination for people ever since one of our early hominid ancestors looked at her reflection in a pool and noticed an uncanny correlation between her own muscle movements—sensed internally—and the visual feedback. Even more mysterious—and perhaps not unrelated—is our ability to “reflect” on ourselves as the first introspective primates. This ability displays itself in ways as different as the mythical Narcissus looking at his reflection in a lake to Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier’s invention of virtual reality to transport you outside your own body....

We learn from experience: It sounds like a trite sentiment posted by a friend on Facebook, but neuroscientists would agree. Our interactions with the world around us strengthen and weaken the connections between our neurons, a process that neuroscientists consider to be the cellular mechanism of learning. Now researchers report that boosting signaling of a certain receptor in the brain with a small molecule can enhance these cellular changes and improve learning in people....

Two papers have dealt a fresh blow to the idea that Venus’s atmosphere might contain phosphine gas—a potential sign of life. The claim that there is phosphine on Venus rocked planetary science last September, when researchers reported spotting the gas’s spectral signature in telescope data. If confirmed, the discovery could mean that organisms drifting among Venusian clouds are releasing the gas. Since then, several studies have challenged—although not entirely debunked—the report....

The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann—or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. In this season, we peer into a fascinating moment in the postwar U.S. through the prism of Dán von Neumann’s work. We explore the evolution of early computers, the vital role women played in early programming, and the inextricable connection between computing and war....

In 2007, Cecilia Laschi asked her father to catch a live octopus for her seaside lab in Livorno, Italy. He thought she was crazy: as a recreational fisherman, he considered the octopus so easy to catch that it must be a very stupid animal. And what did a robotics researcher who worked with metal and microprocessors want with a squishy cephalopod anyway? Nevertheless, the elder Laschi caught an octopus off the Tuscan coast and gave it to his daughter, who works for the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) — Small nocturnal mammals surprisingly forage more on bright, moonlit nights when they can spot predators more easily, new research suggests. Out in the wild, eating is risky business. Stepping out to grab a bite raises an animal’s chances of becoming another animal’s meal. Nocturnal animals also calculate their eat-or-be-eaten chances by how bright the moon is. A full moon might make it easier for predators to spot them – or for them to spot lurking predators....

Pupils are a rich source of social information. Although changes in pupil size are automatic and uncontrollable, they can convey interest, arousal, helpful or harmful intentions, and a variety of emotions. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, we even synchronize our pupil size with others—and doing so influences social decisions. Mariska Kret, a psychologist now at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and her colleagues recruited 69 Dutch university students to take part in an investment game....

More than 22 million visitors attended the Expo 2005 World’s Fair in Aichi, Japan. Not one got in with a bogus ticket. The passes were practically impossible to forge because each harbored a tiny RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip - just 0.4 millimeter (mm) on a side and 0.06 mm thick - that transmitted a unique identification number via radio waves to a scanner at the gates. Now Hitachi, the maker of that chip, is aiming even smaller....

Technological overoptimism lurks as a persistent risk to both professional and amateur watchers of advances, from artificial intelligence to the flying car. But sometimes new technologies actually live up to some of the wildest expectations for them. This year’s SciAm 50 awards are replete with instances of new machines or chemicals that come close to the true meaning of innovation as something entirely new. One winner has created an instrument that measures fl uids in zeptoliters, or sextillionths of a liter....

Sleeping sickness (or trypanosomiasis), endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, is a horribly debilitating disease. When the parasitic protozoan that causes it gets into the nervous system and brain, weeks or months after being transmitted by the blood-eating tsetse fly, it sends the victim into a steep decline marked by depression, aggressiveness, psychotic behavior, disrupted sleep patterns and—if untreated—death. Happily, a concerted multinational effort has reduced the reported incidence of the disease by 92 percent in this century, from 26,550 cases in 2000 to just 2,164 cases in 2016....

By Marius Zaharia The number of confirmed cases of Zika virus in Singapore rose to 82 on Tuesday, with some of the latest infections detected beyond the area of the initial outbreak. Several countries advised pregnant women or those trying to conceive to avoid traveling to the city-state. The mosquito-borne Zika virus was detected in Brazil last year and has since spread across the Americas. It poses a risk to pregnant women as it can cause severe birth defects....

In June a well-known climate scientist opined on Twitter that “I’d be more likely to believe the COVID lab-leak hypothesis if the people pushing it weren’t largely the same people pushing [bogus] conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and climate change.” He has a point. Early in the pandemic, the lab-leak theory was promoted by then president Donald Trump, who was dismissive of masks and social distancing. He speculated that COVID-19 infections might be effectively treated by irradiating sensitive lung tissues with ultraviolet light, using untested and possibly unsafe drugs, or injecting dangerous household cleansers....

Key concepts Gravity Friction Inertia (Newton’s First Law of Motion) From National Science Education Standards: Position and motion of objects Introduction Have you ever seen a magician sweep a tablecloth quickly off a table and leave all the plates and glasses still in place? The trick isn’t magic at all—it’s science! And you can use the same principle (without breaking any plates) to make a coin fall into a small container....

What does the future hold? Ultimately that’s determined by gravity. Our Milky Way galaxy is destined to collide with our closest large neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, in about five billion years. There’s no stopping it, but we can predict what’s going to happen, and thanks to powerful new telescopes, we can even watch previews by studying other galaxy mergers. In our cover story this month, astronomers Aaron S. Evans of the University of Virginia and Lee Armus of the California Institute of Technology foretell how our two galaxies will become one, creating energetic new star-forming regions and smashing their central black holes together in a burst of gravitational waves....

In the 19th century, Luxembourg built its economy around the iron and steel industries. More than 150 years later, the small European nation is looking again to minerals as a source of economic development. But, rather than going underground, the Grand Duchy is gazing skyward. In February 2016, the Luxembourg government announced the SpaceResources.lu initiative that would position the country as the European hub of space-resource utilization. “Space mining could really be the next big thing for Luxembourg,” says Étienne Schneider, the country’s deputy prime minister and minister for the economy....