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Scientists have a new tool to systematically track the evolution of glaciers and ice sheets as the climate warms. The US$1-million system, which is funded by NASA and uses data from the Landsat 8 satellite, was unveiled this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California. The Global Land Ice Velocity Extraction project (GoLIVE) is the first to provide scientists with regular, semi-automated measurements of ice movement across the entire world....

The people who happen to be in a city center at any given moment may seem like a random collection of individuals. But new research featuring a simple mathematical law shows that urban travel patterns worldwide are, in fact, remarkably predictable regardless of location—an insight that could enhance models of disease spread and help to optimize city planning. Studying anonymized cell-phone data, researchers discovered what is known as an inverse square relation between the number of people in a given urban location and the distance they traveled to get there, as well as how frequently they made the trip....

Yasuyuki Fujita has seen first-hand what happens when cells stop being polite and start getting real. He caught a glimpse of this harsh microscopic world when he switched on a cancer-causing gene called Ras in a few kidney cells in a dish. He expected to see the cancerous cells expanding and forming the beginnings of tumours among their neighbours. Instead, the neat, orderly neighbours armed themselves with filament proteins and started “poking, poking, poking”, says Fujita, a cancer biologist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A report from the parliamentary National Audit Office into the WannaCry ransomware attack that brought down significant parts of Britain’s National Health Service in May 2017 has predictably been reported as blaming NHS trusts and smaller organisations within the care system for failing to ensure that appropriate computer security measures such as software updates and secure firewalls were in place....

Between the ages of one and two, toddlers typically rapidly expand their vocabularies. Tots seem to suddenly go from babbling hesitantly to confidently chatting up a storm. But it turns out the leap from mama to precocious follows a simple mathematical pattern: the bell curve. Cognitive scientist Bob McMurray of the University of Iowa set up a relatively simple mathematical model of word learning on a commonly available spreadsheet, assessing the potential to learn each of some 200 words....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A heat dome occurs when a persistent region of high pressure traps heat over an area. The heat dome can stretch over several states and linger for days to weeks, leaving the people, crops and animals below to suffer through stagnant, hot air that can feel like an oven. Typically, heat domes are tied to the behavior of the jet stream, a band of fast winds high in the atmosphere that generally runs west to east....

Every so often a news article appears that shows a disabled person directing movement of a computer cursor or a prosthetic hand with thought alone. But why would anyone choose to have a hole drilled through his or her skull to embed a computer chip in the brain unless warranted by a severe medical condition? A more practical solution may now be here that lets you hook up your brain to the outside world....

Getting overwhelmed with emotion isn’t pretty. Think fist-shaped holes in the drywall, a blowout bar fight, or throwing your soon-to-be-ex’s stuff out a window, preferably ablaze. But overwhelming emotion can also turn privately inward, resulting in cutting, drinking yourself into a stupor, or a massive binge. In some ways, all the drama makes sense: big emotions often feel scary. But it’s not the big emotions themselves that are dangerous, it’s the way we choose to react to them....

This story is a supplement to the feature “No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving the Soil by Parking Their Plows” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. A fundamental drawback of conventional farming is that it fosters topsoil erosion, especially on sloping land. Tillage leaves the ground surface bare and vulnerable to runoff, and each pass of the plow pushes soil downhill. As a result, the soil thins over time....

Uric acid is almost always mentioned in the context of gout, an inflammatory type of arthritis that results from excessive uric acid in the blood. It may be surprising, then, that it has also been linked with a vastly different type of disease: bipolar disorder. Elevated uric acid has been observed in patients with acute mania, and reducing uric acid improves symptoms. New evidence supports its potential as a treatment target....

Computers inch ever closer to behaving like intelligent human beings—witness the ability of IBM’s Watson to beat the all-time champs of the television quiz show Jeopardy. So far, though, most people would doubt that computers truly “see” a visual scene full of shapes and colors in front of their cameras, that they truly “hear” a question through their microphones, that they feel anything—experience consciousness—the way humans do, despite computers’ remarkable ability to crunch data at superhuman speed....

Noninvasive brain stimulation is having its heyday, as scientists and hobbyists alike look for ways to change the activity of neurons without cutting into the brain and implanting electrodes. One popular set of techniques, called transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), delivers electrical current via electrodes stuck to the scalp, typically above the target brain area. In recent years a number of studies have attributed wide-ranging benefits to TES including enhancing memory, improving math skills, alleviating depression and even speeding recovery from stroke....

His finalist year: 1997 His finalist project: Measuring fluorescence to determine the structure of proteins What led to the project: As a kid, New York City native Carl Bialik always loved science and math. So, when an opportunity came via a family friend to work in a biophysics lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine during his sophomore year at The Bronx High School of Science, he leapt at the chance....

Editor’s Note: We are reposting this article from the October 1996 issue of Scientific American in commemoration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday this week. After lunch on September 16, 1876, Charles Darwin stretched out on his drawing-room sofa, as was his unvarying routine, smoked a Turkish cigarette and read the “bloody old Times.” He often fumed at its politics (the editors supported the South in the American Civil War), and his wife, Emma, suggested that they give up the paper altogether....

America is continuing its exodus from coal. Alliant Energy Corp. announced Friday it will close its coal-fired Edgewater power plant outside Sheboygan, Wis., in 2022. A few weeks earlier, Great River Energy said it plans to shut its Coal Creek Station north of Bismarck, N.D., in two years’ time. And in New Mexico, Arizona Public Service has moved forward the retirement date of the Four Corners Generating Station—long one of America’s largest CO2 emitters—from 2038 to 2031....

Key concepts Light Physics Color Eye Introduction Have you ever wondered what the world would look like without colors? Most of us take them for granted because we see them everywhere: blue sky, green grass, yellow flowers and countless more. Your eyes are actually able to distinguish up to 10 million colors! But where do all the colors come from? And how do our eyes detect them all? Find out with a little help from some shadows....

Aristotle thought eels were spontaneously produced by mud, and 17th-century Europeans believed ostriches could digest iron. Filmmaker Cooke, who has a background in zoology, sifts through some of the most egregious myths about the animal kingdom and sets the record straight. In her quest for the facts, she watches panda porn, narrowly escapes a pack of hyenas and stalks drunken moose. She is especially eloquent in defending her beloved sloth, which she calls “one of the world’s most misunderstood creatures,” unfairly maligned as indolent and lazy when it actually efficiently makes use of its available resources....

For all the progress that scientists have made in breeding crops that feed more people, these breakthroughs typically elude a core demographic in low-income countries that rely on agriculture: women. Advances in seed genetics are estimated to be responsible for up to 60 percent of yield increases in farmers’ fields in recent years by making crops hardier and faster-maturing. However, only a third of crops grown by sub-Saharan African farmers in 2010 were the latest varieties of genetically improved plants; the uptake is as low as 5 percent for women-led households in that region....

On June 22, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew into Dayton, Ohio, for dinner at Orville Wright’s house. It had been just a month since the young aviator’s first ever solo nonstop crossing of the Atlantic, and he felt he ought to pay his respects to the celebrated pioneer of flight. Forty-two years later, on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong was allowed to bring a personal guest to the Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch of NASA’s towering Saturn V rocket....

It is safe to bet that a flying motorcycle will never be a practical transportation option, but that has not stopped Samson Motorworks, a small engineering firm in northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, from playing the long odds. The company is building a prototype of its Switchblade Multi Mode Vehicle, or flying motorcycle, and hopes to sell a $60,000 do-it-yourself kit as early as 2011 (engine and avionics are sold separately, for about $25,000 total)....