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President-elect Donald Trump this morning named Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson to lead the Department of State, setting up a contentious confirmation battle and elevating Exxon’s positions on climate change to the national stage. In announcing the selection of the hard-charging 64-year-old Texas oilman with close ties to Russia, Trump on Twitter called Tillerson “one of the truly great business leaders of the world” and in a press release called his career “the embodiment of the American dream....

The endeavor known as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has long relied on radio telescopes to listen for broadcasts from potential alien callers. Yet in an expansive galaxy such as ours, how can we ever be sure that we have tuned in to the right station? A model simulating contact across the Milky Way suggests—perhaps unsurprisingly—that unless our galaxy is dense with long-lived intelligent species, the odds of stumbling across a signal are low....

Seasonal flu epidemics account for as many as half a million deaths worldwide each year. And the rapid spread of new strains can cause many more (the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic alone killed more than 16,000 people, according to the World Health Organization). Quickly detecting a regional rise in flu-like symptoms such as coughs, sore throats or high fevers can help public health officials take steps to dampen the impact. However, it can take days—even weeks—for trends spotted in clinics to be reported more broadly....

On a glorious January morning in 2015, the Australian icebreaker RSV Aurora Australis was losing a battle off the coast of East Antarctica. For days, the ship had been trying to push through heavy sea ice. It rammed into the pack, backed up and crashed forward again. But the ice, several metres thick, hardly budged. Stephen Rintoul, an oceanographer at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, nearly gave up his goal—to reach a part of the continent that had thwarted all previous expeditions....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Over Christmas vacation in 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch received puzzling scientific news in a private letter from nuclear chemist Otto Hahn. When bombarding uranium with neutrons, Hahn had made some surprising observations that went against everything known at the time about the dense cores of atoms—their nuclei. Meitner and Frisch were able to provide an explanation for what he saw that would revolutionize the field of nuclear physics: A uranium nucleus could split in half—or fission, as they called it—producing two new nuclei, called fission fragments....

Since the modern era of research on autism began in the 1980s, questions about social cognition and social brain development have been of central interest to researchers. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), and it is evident in this year’s meeting that the growth of social-cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades has significantly enriched autism science. For those unfamiliar with the term, social-cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain systems that are involved in the causes and effects of social behaviors and social interaction....

About 12,000 years ago human societies went big; tribes and villages grew into vast cities, kingdoms and empires within just a few millennia. For such large and complex societies to take root, people needed to maintain social cohesion and cooperation, even among complete strangers. What enabled this, many researchers have argued, was religion. Such a religion, the idea goes, would work particularly well if it established standards of morality and behavior—and enforced them with the threat of supernatural punishment....

Wildfires in Northern California laced the air with smoke as Patrick McCallum worked in Sacramento this week. He smelled the acrid scent and remembered the night that he and his wife nearly died. McCallum, a lobbyist, and his wife, Judy Sakaki, president of Sonoma State University, narrowly escaped the Tubbs Fire in October 2017. The wind-driven blaze raced across Sonoma and Napa counties, devouring 5,643 structures and killing 22 people. It was the third-deadliest fire in state history....

Editor’s note (10/9/2012): We are making the text of this article freely available for 30 days because author Serge Haroche is one of the winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. The full article with images, which appeared in the April 1993 issue, is available for purchase here. Fleeting, spontaneous transitions are ubiquitous in the quantum world. Once they are under way, they seem as uncontrollable and as irreversible as the explosion of fireworks....

HAMILTON, BERMUDA — “So, the sub is going to tip forward, that’s normal. Then it’s going to roll on its back, just tip back a little bit, that’s also normal. Here we go!” That’s my co-pilot Kelvin Magee. The two of us are barefoot inside the Nomad, a two-person submersible. The captain shouts orders as the crew work cranes and levers. Divers paddle nearby, ready to guide our path or rescue us....

LOS ANGELES — Pediatrician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy uses a stethoscope and otoscope, of course. But running a clinic for transgender youth means her pediatric medical supplies also include a selection of silicone penises and chest-flattening binders. Thanks to the openness of Caitlyn Jenner and others, public awareness of transgenderism — and demand for trans-specific medical care like counseling, hormone treatments, and genital surgery — is exploding, even for the youngest of patients....

There are nanosize particles in your food. Does this make you nervous? Food companies have been interested in using nanotechnology to intensify flavors and make products creamier without added fat. But that has nothing to do with the titanium dioxide nanoparticles, less than 10 nanometers across, that were found recently in the powdered-sugar coating on doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts and the now defunct Hostess. The microscopic flakes may have ended up there by happenstance—a result of the milling process used on the powdered-sugar mixture....

Beth Domingo watched in wonder as contractors uncovered the flaws in her four-bedroom suburban Maryland home. After living there for 18 years, she thought she knew it inside and out, but she was wrong. “There were all these little holes,” she remembers. Some were in the garage wall, drilled by her ex-husband during a sloppy rewiring job years ago. Others weren’t exactly holes, but cracks in the lining of her front door, back door and windows....

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution. A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency....

Just as the colors and patterns of the feathers that birds wear show tremendous variation, so, too, do the songs that they broadcast–but much more so. Songs may be absent, or they may range from a few simple genetically encoded notes endlessly repeated, to virtuosos of variety resulting from copying and learning, and even to seemingly endless improvisation. In The Singing Life of Birds, Donald E. Kroodsma, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, celebrates the diversity through carefully chosen examples, one for each of the 30 years that he has studied birdsong....

By Arran Frood of Nature magazineThe powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The study, by neuroscientist Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, is the first-ever quantitative meta-analysis of LSD-alcoholism clinical trials. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo....

Plastics have dramatically changed the way we live, allowing us to fabricate new and innovative tools, containers and even replaceable body parts like hips and knees, while also spawning a host of undesirable by-products, including nonbiodegradable trash and pollution from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. Now an emerging industry is trying to polish plastic’s environmentally tarnished image by using waste products such as carbon dioxide and Escherichia coli bacteria to make biodegradable and renewable polymers....

More than 50 years ago Polish-American mathematician Mark Kac popularized a zany but mathematically deep question in his 1966 paper “Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?” In other words, if you hear someone beat a drum, and you know the frequencies of the sounds it makes, can you work backward to figure out the shape of the drum that created those sounds? Or can more than one drum shape create the exact same set of frequencies?...

Women who live in low-income neighborhoods are more likely than their wealthier counterparts to get misinformation about emergency contraception from their local pharmacies, a new study finds. The results suggest that young women in areas where teen pregnancy rates are highest may struggle most in trying to get the morning-after pill, which can prevent ovulation — and thus pregnancy — after unprotected sex. The pill, sold under the brand names ella, Next Choice and Plan B One-Step, made headlines this month when the U....

Could paper be the future of power in electronic gadgetry? Just as plastics unleashed a revolution in the manufacture of everyday materials, a new power source composed of cellulose, carbon nanotubes and a dash of liquid salts could revolutionize the energy behind gadgets from iPhones to pacemakers. “We have a paper battery, supercapacitor and battery-supercapacitor hybrid device that could be used in a variety of energy storage applications,” says biological and chemical engineer Robert Linhardt of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R....