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This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system, which has—for the first time—enabled scientists to make precise changes in the long stretches of DNA that make up the code of life for many organisms, including people. The prize was shared by Emmanuelle Charpentier, a microbiologist and director of the Berlin-based Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, and Jennifer A. Doudna, a professor and biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley....

Who we know determines who we are. Three new books reveal how much heroes and even distant acquaintances influence us. Surprisingly, a $10,000 raise may not make you as content as simply knowing a friend of a friend of a friend is happy, says sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis and political scientist James H. Fowler in their landmark book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (Little, Brown, 2009)....

Scientists have long hunted for a pattern of brain activity that signals consciousness, but a reliable marker has proved elusive. For many years theorists have argued that the answer lies in the prefrontal cortex, a region of high-level processing located behind the forehead; neural signals that reach this area were thought to emerge from unconscious obscurity into our awareness. Recent research, however, supports the idea that consciousness is a conversation rather than a revelation, with no single brain structure leading the dialogue....

Some snakes, including pit vipers and pythons, are known to hunt in the dark by sensing the heat their prey radiates. But how do snakes convert this warmth into the thermal images they “see”? A model proposed by University of Houston and Rutgers University researchers suggests a potential answer. Their paper, published in Matter, may also help in developing soft artificial materials that convert heat to electricity, useful for applications such as sensors and energy harvesting....

Well-meaning arguers often attempt to see things from their partner’s point of view, but doing so can backfire, according to a paper in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In problem-solving discussions among 111 couples, researchers found that the person who attempted to take his or her partner’s perspective had an increase in self-focus and overestimated how obvious his or her feelings were. After the discussion, the perspective-taking partner reported feeling less satisfied with the relationship in general, and the other partner reported no change in relationship satisfaction....

Drop the Thomas Piketty. Let’s all admit right now you weren’t going to read that 696-page economics tome anyway. And set aside Donna Tart’s “Goldfinch,” too. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, it won the Pulitzer. Yes, it’s 775 pages. It’s summer, people. Time for a little skin. A bit of fun. Something light and insouciant. Time, in short, for The Daily Climate’s annual summer reading list. Real blockbusters Before we get to books, let’s detour through Hollywood....

The new research is a direct response to a 2018 Science Advances paper that found untrained humans performed as well as a popular risk-assessment software called Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) at forecasting recidivism, or whether a convicted criminal would reoffend. That study drew a great deal of attention, in part because it contradicted perceived wisdom. Clinical psychologist “Paul Meehl stated, in a famous book in 1954, that actuarial, or statistical, prediction was almost always better than unguided human judgment,” says John Monahan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia School of Law, who was not involved in the most recent study but has worked with one of its authors....

In his book Entangled Life, scientist Merlin Sheldrake introduces us to vastly underappreciated players in the story of our planet. Fungal species count in the millions—the true number is unknown. And they serve as a platform for, and partner in, almost every aspect of life. No fungi, no us. Sheldrake’s book is a poetic letter to the associates we never knew we had. He recently answered questions about the nature of intelligence, psychedelic drugs, and creative home brews from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook....

Plants do not listen to the radio. But a team of researchers in Greece recently found a way to turn lemons into miniature “radio stations” that can broadcast information about their trees’ moisture content to a smartphone—the first step toward creating what the researchers call an “Internet of plants.” Scientists had previously attached sensors to trees to measure their water use, but “no other team had created a wireless [radio] network among plants, transmitting information while consuming only a few microwatts and costing just a few dollars,” says project leader Aggelos Bletsas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Technical University of Crete....

Several recent studies have suggested that winter-born babies are more likely than summer ones to develop conditions such as schizophrenia, depression and seasonal affective disorder (SAD). One study may help explain why: the amount of daylight to which newborn mice are exposed sets the behavior of key biological clock genes for life. A group of researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham raised one group of mouse pups as if it were winter, giving them eight hours of sunlight a day, and a second group as if it were summer, with 16 hours of sunlight a day....

Dear EarthTalk: What are Clean Energy Victory Bonds?—Max Blanchard, Wilmington, Del. Green America, a non-profit membership organization that promotes ethical consumerism, created the “Clean Energy Victory Bonds” concept as a way to give everyday Americans the opportunity to invest in clean energy and related fields in a fashion similar to how the federal government raised billions of dollars for the war effort during World War II over a half century ago....

A contentious U.S. EPA decision allowing higher blends of ethanol into gasoline is unlikely to spur immediate changes at corner gas stations, industry officials said yesterday. EPA approved the use of 15 percent ethanol in newer model vehicles yesterday, drawing fire from unlikely bedfellows, including some environmental groups and the auto industry, which called the decision “premature.” Meanwhile, ethanol advocates said the approval did not go far enough. But despite the crossfire on this issue, it appears the decision may not fuel much change in the ethanol market....

The waters of the African lake seem calm and peaceful. A few migrant swallows flit near the surface. Suddenly, leaping from the water, a fish grabs one of the famously speedy birds straight out of the air. “The whole action of jumping and catching the swallow in flight happens so incredibly quickly that after we first saw it, it took all of us a while to really fully comprehend what we had just seen,” says Nico Smit, director of the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa....

U.S. regulators have approved the first therapy based on RNA interference (RNAi), a technique that can be used to silence specific genes linked to disease. The drug, patisiran, targets a rare condition that can impair heart and nerve function. The approval, announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on 10 August, is a landmark for a field that has struggled for nearly two decades to prove its worth in the clinic....

Suicide rates and temperatures are both on the rise, but are these two occurrences connected? A new study suggests maybe so. The research revealed hotter-than-average months corresponded to more deaths by suicide—and the effect isn’t limited to the summer, even warmer winters show the trend. In the study, published in Nature Climate Change, the investigators looked at all of the suicides that occurred in the U.S. and Mexico over several decades (1968 to 2004 for the U....

By Elizabeth Dilts and Scott MaloneNEW YORK/BOSTON (Reuters) - A major snowstorm producing blizzard-like conditions hammered the northeastern United States on Friday, causing 2,000 U.S. flight delays and cancellations, paralyzing road travel, and closing schools and government offices.The first major winter storm of 2014 brought bone-chilling temperatures and high winds from the lower Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast, with nearly 2 feet of snow falling in some areas of Massachusetts....

In the 1980s, scientists discovered that oyster mushrooms are carnivores. The delicious, inescapable inference is that they’re the only vegan food that can itself eat meat. The meat in question is definitely meat, too. Nematodes, also called roundworms, are little animals complete with guts, nerves, muscles and their own primitive form of hopes and dreams. Oyster mushrooms poison and paralyze nematodes within minutes of contact, inject their filaments into the corpses, dissolve the contents and absorb the slurry....

As audiences across the world tune in to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, they will see athletes using an impressive array of high-tech prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and other assistive technology. These devices bear little resemblance to those for everyday use—and vary a great deal from sport to sport. “We design sporting equipment to get the best possible performance based upon the constraints and needs of that sport,” explains Bryce Dyer, a sports technologist at Bournemouth University in England, who develops prostheses for athletes with disabilities....

“People [experience] the fluid element to be … not yet solidified but remaining open to outside influences.”—Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing From of Water and Air, by Theodor Schwenk; Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965 Ketchup is famous for being hard to get out of the bottle even when there is plenty of it left. In fact, all liquid foods—from red wine to cooking oil—leave some residue in the container. The reason has to do with the wettability of the container and the viscosity of the substance....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called Conquering Garbage (click the link to see a table of contents). Published this month, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. Garbage is one of the oldest and most vexing of human creations. In early times, small-scale societies frequently relied on natural scavengers to make their discards disappear, but when trash accumulations grew too troublesome even for that convenient symbiosis, the entire community often pulled up stakes and moved....