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Editor’s Note (02/08/18): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published August 1, 2012, in light of the 2018 Winter Games which begin on February 9 in PyeongChang, South Korea. We rarely see it happen on television, but one in 10 Olympians will get hurt during the games, if the past is any guide (left). About three quarters of the injuries occur during some phase of competition and one quarter during warm-ups or on-site training, according to Lars Engebretsen of the University of Oslo in Norway, who compiled the data....

The number of U.S. homes that face repeated flooding has grown significantly in the past decade despite federal and state agencies spending billions of dollars to protect at-risk properties, a new government report shows. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that government programs that move homes out of floodplains or fortify them through elevation or flood-proofing are not keeping up with the growing number of properties that are flooded multiple times....

His point of view changed, however, when he began treating women who were diagnosed as being “hysterical.” They suffered from what appeared to be suppressed sexual desires. These cases and others prompted him to discard his own model of the brain as a kind of neuronal machine and replace it with a model of the mind as an entity driven by secret desires. Freud constructed his fantastic theories of dreaming, repression, and ego and id based on years of listening to troubled patients tell of their woes while lying on his office couch–a career move from the brain lab motivated primarily by Freud’s need to make enough money to support his rapidly expanding family....

Men and women are not nearly as different as the media and pop psychologists would lead us to believe, according to a new metastudy of gender research. Girls don’t have the same mathematical proclivity as boys? Not true. Men can’t communicate as well as women can in relationships? Not so either. And it turns out that the self-esteem problems usually associated with teenage girls are just as pronounced in teenage boys....

In what they claim is the first direct evidence of the evolution of lactase-persistence (the ability to digest milk and other dairy foods), German and British researchers came up empty in their search for the gene variant that allows over 90 percent of northern Europeans to gulp down and properly digest milk. In many others around the world, lactose causes diarrhea and bloating, especially in adulthood. Lactase persistence (also called lactose tolerance), the continued production of the enzyme lactase that breaks down the sugar lactose in milk, correlates heavily with populations currently or once based on dairy farming, estimated to have begun in Europe roughly 8,000 to 9,000 years ago....

Edited by Dava Sobel Nothing’s wholly certain. A half apple lay beside the bed, bites taken out of it, when his corpse was found—though no one really tried to ascertain if it contained cyanide. After he had seen Snow White, off and on he would chant the haggish queen’s vile couplet. Did he dip the apple in the brew and let the Sleeping Death seep through? And did it make his dreams come true?...

For half a century dinosaur lovers have been fed a lie, or at least an unsupported claim. The early carnivore Coelophysis bauri was not necessarily the cannibal that museums and books have portrayed it to be, according to the first rigorous evaluation of its stomach contents. In fact only one of three dinosaur species thought to have yielded evidence of cannibalism truly deserves the designation, researchers say. The Coelophysis fossils in question were unearthed in 1947 from a bed of hundreds of the skeletons, which date back 210 million years to the upper Triassic period....

From the ashes of a devastating Zika virus outbreak last year, scientists are piecing together how it happened, and they’re using climate variables to get ahead of the next pandemic. The Zika virus rampaged through the Americas in 2015 and 2016, charging out of Brazil and into neighboring countries inside the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. Named for the Zika Forest in Uganda, where it was first isolated in 1947, the disease usually presents with mild symptoms, or none at all....

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — As wildfires engulf nearly 170,000 acres of Northern California wine country, questions are swirling about the role of climate change in causing damage of historic proportions. The fires, which started late Sunday night in the hills of Napa and Sonoma counties, quickly ballooned to 22 separate conflagrations in eight counties, killing at least 21 people by Tuesday evening. The Tubbs Fire, in Sonoma County, has been responsible for at least 11 deaths so far, making it the sixth-deadliest fire in state history....

From Nature magazine Summer thunderstorms across the United States inject water vapour far higher into the atmosphere than was previously believed, promoting a cascade of chemical reactions that could pose an increased threat to Earth’s protective ozone layer as the climate warms. James Anderson, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues made the discovery while investigating the origins of high-altitude cirrus clouds — thin and wispy formations that blanket the sky and trap heat, contributing to the greenhouse effect....

It’s no surprise that humans dislike greediness. But a study in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people sometimes punish generosity, too. The subjects played a computer game where opponents put points (worth money) into a common pot. Afterward, subjects often voted to kick out of the group computer-controlled players who put in more points and took less than the others. Perhaps people recoiled because the overgivers violated social norms—rules are rules, even if breaking them benefits everyone—or because they set high standards that players are reluctant to measure up to....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It’s troubling to think that at any moment you might open an email that looks like it comes from your employer, a relative or your bank, only to fall for a phishing scam. Any one of the endless stream of innocent-looking emails you receive throughout the day could be trying to con you into handing over your login credentials and give criminals control of your confidential data or your identity....

All routes to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees run through calculus classes. Each year, hundreds of thousands of college students take introductory calculus. But only a fraction ultimately complete a STEM degree, and research about why students abandon such degrees suggests that traditional calculus courses are one of the reasons. With scientific understanding and innovation increasingly central to solving 21st-century problems, this loss of talent is something society can ill afford....

Two leading candidates to serve as director of the National Institutes of Health in the next administration met with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday. The president-elect met at Trump Tower with Dr. Francis Collins, the current NIH director, and Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland, who has expressed an interest in serving in the administration. Collins, who has led the agency for eight years under President Barack Obama, previously told STAT he would be willing to stay on as director if asked by Trump....

I was at the beach the other day with some friends and after a rousing game of “apprehend the frisbee before it nails an unsuspecting stranger,” we all settled on the sand to chat and observe our fellow beachgoers. Being that I am a movement and fitness nerd, I started doing a mental tally of how many people were either frolicking (i.e. moving their bodies) or napping (i.e. recovering their bodies)....

A group of researchers from the US, in collaboration with a non-profit organisation, has designed a book with silver-impregnated pages that can be used to filter contaminated water. One page from this ‘drinkable book’ can potentially filter up to 100 litres of drinking water and may provide a cheap, sustainable solution for communities suffering from severe sanitation problems. Waterborne diseases, such as typhoid or diarrhoeal illnesses, kill 1.5 million people a year globally....

A key riddle in cosmology may be answered by the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson—now a leading contender for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 8. Two physicists suggest that the Higgs had a key role in the early universe, producing the observed difference between the number of matter and antimatter particles and determining the density of the mysterious dark matter that makes up five-sixths of the matter in the universe....

HONOLULU — When scientists search for alien planets, they get a special thrill when they find one that seems to reflect our own world back to us. TOI 700 d is the newest member of that elite club. The planet was discovered courtesy of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, as one of three worlds in a distant solar system. Unlike its neighbors — and the vast majority of planets scientists have identified so far — it seems to be about the same size as Earth and to orbit its star at a distance that would allow water to remain liquid on its surface....

Around 4,500 years ago, a mysterious craze for bell-shaped pottery swept across prehistoric Europe. Archaeologists have debated the significance of the pots—artefacts that define the ‘Bell Beaker’ culture—for more than a century. Some argue that they were the Bronze Age’s hottest fashion, shared across different groups of people. But others see them as evidence for an immense migration of ‘Beaker folk’ across the continent. Now, one of the biggest ever ancient-genome studies suggests both ideas are true....

Is a person hysterical if he or she complains of numbness in a limb but conventional tests reveal no underlying cause? A new study argues yes. While the term hysteria has fallen out of favor–replaced by the more reasonable sounding “conversion disorder,” after Freud’s explanation of such symptoms as the conversion of intolerable emotional impulses into physical manifestations–the condition has not disappeared. Recent fMRI scans of three women insisting they had no feeling in either a hand or a foot revealed that their brains really were malfunctioning when the numb appendage was stimulated....