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To feed the world’s growing population, farmers need to increase crop yields. Applying more fertilizer could help. But standard versions work inefficiently and often harm the environment. Fortunately, products that are more ecologically sound—controlled-release fertilizers—are available and becoming increasingly smart. Farmers typically fertilize crops in two ways. They spray fields with ammonia, urea or other substances that generate the nutrient nitrogen when they react with water. And they apply granules of potash or other minerals to produce phosphorus, also in reaction to water....

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the October 2005 issue of Scientific American. In May 1972 a worker at a nuclear fuel–processing plant in France noticed something suspicious. He had been conducting a routine analysis of uranium derived from a seemingly ordinary source of ore. As is the case with all natural uranium, the material under study contained three isotopes— that is to say, three forms with differing atomic masses: uranium 238, the most abundant variety; uranium 234, the rarest; and uranium 235, the isotope that is coveted because it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction....

Trees in the western U.S. have died off at an increasing rate over the past few decades, finds Phillip J. van Mantgem of the U.S. Geological Survey and his colleagues. They studied various plots in three regions: the Pacific Northwest, California and the continental interior near the Rocky Mountains. The culprit seems to be locally higher temperatures, which decrease the available water and boost the activity of a bark-damaging fungus. As a result, trees on average are younger and smaller—and less able to hold on to carbon....

Beetles may not look like superheroes, but they sure fly like them. Unlike other winged insects, beetles soar with their legs outstretched, a posture that helps them maneuver and turn, a new study finds. Insects such as dragonflies and moths reduce drag during flight by pressing their forelegs against their bodies. But even the largest beetle species, including the flour beetle Mecynorhina torquata in central Africa, keeps its thick, bulky legs unfurled as it glides through the air....

Like billions of people around the world, I am eagerly awaiting my turn for a COVID vaccine. But not everyone shares my enthusiasm. My sister-in-law, an alternative health practitioner, says she doesn’t trust “Big Pharma” to have formulated safe shots. She prefers to fortify her immune system with supplements and a healthy lifestyle. “I avoid all vaccines,” she told me. She is not alone. By now the term “vaccine hesitancy” has entered everyday pandemic discourse, joining “flatten the curve” and “social distancing....

After tens of thousands of overdose deaths and billions of dollars in lawsuits, the medical establishment has gotten the memo on opioids. Instead of prescribing OxyContin or Percocet for acute pain, doctors are increasingly offering patients prescription-level doses of popular painkillers sold over the counter: acetaminophen (Tylenol) and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen (Motrin or Advil). Five hundred milligrams (mg) of acetaminophen given with 200 mg of ibuprofen is more effective than opioids for postoperative pain and dental pain, research has shown, and the combo causes fewer side effects, with essentially no risk of addiction....

The search for new drugs that can reverse the course of Alzheimer’s has frustrated pharmaceutical companies, with several failures reported in recent years. Research advances have arrived, not in the form of new drugs but, rather, in technologies that track the underlying biology of the disease before the first symptoms appear. The capacity to track things early underlines the growing recognition that the disease process begins many years before a diagnosis, a realization that has placed new emphasis on the need for preventive measures to ward off the leading cause of dementia....

Every month, Scientific American—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Key information from this month’s issue: • Genetically Modified Crops In the U.S., more than 90 percent of soybean and cotton crops, and more than 80 percent of corn plants, are genetically engineered to resist herbicides and insects....

Frank Cowell, an economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, says the Gini coefficient is like the Kardashians: “It’s famous for being famous.” He’s speaking about one of the most commonly discussed measures of income and wealth inequality. The Gini coefficient has been in the news a lot since the U.S. Census Bureau released its most recent data on income inequality in September. The data show that income inequality in the U....

Editor’s Note (2/20/20): At the February 19 Democratic debate, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said India is more key to climate change than China. An exclusive article in Scientific American explains why: energy decisions that India makes in the next few years will profoundly affect how hot the planet becomes this century. A shimmering waterfall beckoned visitors into the India pavilion at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. Inside, multimedia exhibits and a parade of panelists proclaimed that the nation’s clean energy future was fast-approaching....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. There is a significant increase in the risk of chocolate poisoning in dogs over the festive period, our latest study reveals. Chocolate contains a caffeine-like chemical called theobromine that is toxic to dogs (and cats) because they cannot metabolise it as quickly as humans do. Mildly toxic doses will cause vomiting, diarrhoea, bloating and restlessness, but higher doses will cause hyperactivity, imbalance and tremors....

With the president and first lady’s stunning diagnoses of COVID-19, the couple will receive exemplary care. They will have all the support they need to—we hope—emerge fully recovered from this potentially lethal virus. That’s as it should be. But the tens of millions of Americans who could receive similar diagnoses will continue to be sent into spirals of uncertainty—and, for a tragically large number, death itself. Too many of those who fall ill will not have the means or wherewithal to follow even the most basic Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for those who have been exposed....

Over the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet, modern humans have managed to adapt to a huge range of climates—from the arid heat of the Sahara Desert to the icy chill of the Arctic. But we have our limits. If temperatures and humidity rise high enough, even a robustly healthy person sitting still in the shade with access to water will succumb to the heat. As heat waves grow hotter and more frequent, research has suggested some places will begin to see events that reach that limit of human tolerance in the coming decades....

Wormholes are a controversial topic in physics, to say the least. Not only is the idea of traveling through these theoretical passageways between two disparate regions of spacetime debatable, but their very existence is unclear. A forthcoming paper, however, suggests a method to look for a wormhole inside a black hole—and those observations could occur within a decade. On the preprint server arXiv.org, astrophysicists De-Chang Dai of Yangzhou University in China and Dejan Stojkovic of the University at Buffalo detail a test to determine whether Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, harbors a wormhole....

Researchers in Japan have shown that they can remove Escherichia coli from drinking water using tiny tubes made of human serum albumin. E. coli is a very common type of bacteria, many strains of which are harmless. Some strains, however, such as enterohemorrhagic E. coli O157, are life-threatening to humans. This is particularly problematic in the developing world, where fruit and vegetables washed in contaminated water can cause severe food-poisoning and even death....

In 2017, 22-year-old Brett Morrow descended 20 feet underground while working for Benchmark Construction Company, a Bartlett, Illinois-based firm contracted by the nearby Village of Streamwood to repair a 24-inch diameter sewer pipe by lining it with a plastic sleeve. Morrow would never make it out alive. A coroner later determined that he was likely crippled by styrene gas emitted by the plastic liner and then drowned in the liquid that lingered inside the pipe....

Biotech How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Medicine By channeling a flood of biomedical data, machine learning could transform basic research and clinical practice February 1, 2020 — Claudia Wallis Medicine Hunting for New Drugs with AI The pharmaceutical industry is in a drug-discovery slump. How much can AI help? February 1, 2020 — David H. Freedman Biotech Rise of Robot Radiologists Deep-learning algorithms are peering into MRIs and x-rays with unmatched vision, but who is to blame when they make a mistake?...

If a single medical objective could be applied to the entire range of cancers, it would be detecting the disease as soon as possible. “At the highest level, finding any cancer early gives you the opportunity for curative treatments,” says Andrea Ferris, CEO of research funding organization, LUNGevity. Although the goal of early detection emerged decades ago, much work remains to be done. Low-dose computed tomography (CT) scanning, used to detect lung cancer, has not changed much in the past ten years, and Ferris says that another part of the problem is a lack of public awareness of the “importance of screening and that it can save lives....

Springtime light may lift the spirits, but in Rattenberg, residents have a long memory for shadows. From late fall to midwinter, this tiny Austrian town, famous for its glassblowing, gets no sun at all. And it has been that way for centuries. Next time, though, the villagers may finally see the light–thanks to giant rotating mirrors known as heliostats. Bartenbach Light Laboratory in the Austrian Tyrol plans to begin construction of the heliostats this August....

The death of George Floyd in 2020 sparked intense emotion, and increased recognition of the need to take active measures in matters of race within science and academia. This piece considers the field’s immediate actions with regard to Black representation at neuroscience conferences, and whether we are rising to the occasion in an area under our control. In the spring and summer of 2020, there was a surge of emotion in the United States....