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Anyone who has worked on a laptop resting on their thighs for more than a few minutes has probably wondered whether there is a better way to keep it from overheating than with tiny internal fans. (The bad news: the problem will be aggravated as faster, and thereby hotter processors are crammed into ever-shrinking electronics.) The answer may lie in electro-hydrodynamic cooling, a technique where the air inside electronic devices is electrically charged so that heat disperses more efficiently....

Thomas Gillespie was supposed to be in Tanzania to train local researchers how to blow antibiotic-containing darts into endangered primates at just the right angle. But the global coronavirus pandemic has left him stuck in his home office in Atlanta, where he is trying to coordinate the effort via video chat. Tanzania was only one of a whirlwind of international stops Gillespie had scheduled for February through April. At the very moment when his work—studying the transmission of diseases between animals and humans—is most vital, he has been forced to scale back much of it....

The novel coronavirus can be carried through the air by aerosol particles to unsuspecting people who breathe them in. This is why we wear masks and try to stay socially distant. For months the rule of thumb has been for individuals to stay 1.5 meters apart to lessen transmission, although experts have more recently shown that very fine particulate matter, or PM, could carry SARS-CoV-2 virus particles farther. What has received little media coverage is that diesel exhaust particles could be a big part of this spread....

Scientists are still investigating the cause of a catastrophic flood that killed dozens and left around 150 people missing in northern India on Sunday. So far, experts believe a huge mass of ice or rock fell from a nearby mountain glacier and caused a surge of water in the Rishi Ganga river. The flood barreled down the mountainside, wiping out bridges, destroying two hydroelectric dam projects and prompting evacuations of villages in India’s Uttarakhand state in the Himalayas....

Earth’s most abundant mineral lies deep in the planet’s interior, sealed off from human eyes. Now, scientists for the first time have gotten a glimpse of the material in nature, enclosed inside a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite. The result: They have characterized and named the elusive mineral. The new official name, bridgmanite, was approved for the mineral formerly known by its chemical components and crystal structure — silicate-perovskite. The magnesium-silicate mineral was named after Percy Bridgman, a 1946 Nobel Prize-winning physicist, according to the American Geophysical Union blog....

As farmers struggle with a shifting climate, a group of scientists are drilling down to the heart of the matter: crop genetics. Climate change poses a variety of risks to agricultural produce, including starving crops of water and preventing them from growing in traditional regions. Recent research suggests America’s Corn Belt could soon shift north, and many farmers are already experiencing oddly timed flowering seasons, pest onslaughts and arid fields. Some scientists say the solution could lie in crops’ DNA and are making “gene catalogs” to help farmers grow healthier produce that can withstand climate change....

The lifelong mental benefits of exercising have long been known, from improving learning in kids to staving off dementia in seniors. Yet how working up a sweat leads to better cognition is much less clear. A study in the Journal of Applied Physiology reveals that the key may lie in the body’s power supply. Just as a booming metropolis might build new power plants to meet a rising need for electricity, our muscles respond to the demands of exercise by producing new mitochondria, the tiny structures inside cells that supply the body with energy....

Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Previous research suggests that our problem-solving abilities change depending on our states of mind and that love—a broad, long-term emotion—triggers global brain pro­cessing, a state in which we see the big picture, make broad asso­ciations and connect disparate ideas....

Editors note: About 80 researchers responded to questions about whether efforts to popularize their research had hurt their careers. The informal survey was conducted by Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. and freelance journalist Devin Powell. The trio wrote about their findings in the October Scientific American. Here, they pass along some of the advice they gleaned from the survey for other scientists who are considering engaging a more general audience about their work....

If scientists had a test to confirm Alzheimer’s disease, would that have changed the outcome for some treatments that failed to pass scientific muster in clinical trials? Would such a test open doors for future treatments? Alzheimer’s researchers hoping to explore these questions had mixed reactions last week after Medicare recommended that the national health plan for the elderly and disabled only pay for a controversial $3,000 test that detects brain plaque linked to Alzheimer’s in several specific instances—including clinical trials that seek better treatment for the disease....

Everyone knows that it is impossible to concentrate with a splitting headache, but now neuroscientists can explain why. Researchers at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany have identified a region of the brain that processes both working memory and pain, and it seems to give preference to painful stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that applying pain to volunteers’ hands increased activity in brain areas involved in pain processing, while decreasing activity in areas that were working on the assigned visual task....

The only FDA-approved drug for morning sickness, taken by some 33 million women worldwide since the 1950s, has had a history of ups and downs. A new study adds further uncertainty about the drug. Diclegis, approved by the FDA in 2013, is the rebranded version of an earlier medication called Bendectin. That pill was widely prescribed for more than 50 years, but in the late 1970s, lawsuits began calling into doubt its safety, alleging that the drug caused birth defects....

Industry groups see another wish about to come true under President Trump. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler released a memo last week urging the agency’s top officials to revise the way EPA weighs the costs of regulating pollutants against the benefits of limiting their release for public health and the environment. Instead of drafting an agencywide rulemaking as initially projected last year, the offices of Air and Radiation, Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Land and Emergency Management, and Water are being asked to make their approach to cost-benefit analysis more consistent....

Key concepts Biology Respiration Porosity Food science Introduction Have you ever wondered how an unborn chick breathes inside its shell? Every animal needs oxygen to live, so the chick must get air somehow! When an animal—including a human—inhales, oxygen enters its lungs and is then distributed to all the different parts of its body. The animal’s metabolism converts the oxygen into energy. During this process, a waste gas called carbon dioxide is produced....

Through the Post Box, up the Dragon’s Back, down the Chute and over to the Puzzle Box. Last fall the world followed, via tweets, blogs and videos, as scientists negotiated these fancifully named landmarks of the underground system of caves known as Rising Star just outside Johannesburg, South Africa. The tight squeezes and steep drops made for difficult, dangerous work. The researchers, however, had their eyes on the prize: fossilized remains of an extinct member of the human family....

A rabble-rousing patient on a psychiatric ward is brought into a room and strapped to a gurney. He is being punished for his defiance of the head nurse’s sadistic authority. As he lies fully awake, the psychiatrist and other staff members place electrodes on both sides of his head and pass a quick jolt of electricity between them. Several orderlies hold the patient down while he grimaces in pain, thrashes uncontrollably and lapses into a stupor....

In 1871 Charles Darwin surmised that humans were evolutionarily closer to the African apes than to any other species alive. The recent sequencing of the gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo genomes confirms that supposition and provides a clearer view of how we are connected: chimps and bonobos in particular take pride of place as our nearest living relatives, sharing approximately 99 percent of our DNA, with gorillas trailing at 98 percent. Yet that tiny portion of unshared DNA makes a world of difference: it gives us, for instance, our bipedal stance and the ability to plan missions to Mars....

BLUFF, Utah (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that he intends to reduce the size of two national monuments covering millions of acres of Utah wilderness has stoked local divisions over land use, with all sides anticipating a protracted battle over the move. On one side, Native American groups and environmentalists expressed anger and are ready to sue the U.S. government. On the other, conservative-leaning residents welcomed the decision, seeing it as a reversal of government overreach and a boost for traditional industries like drilling, mining and grazing....

In 1940 Action Comics introduced a brilliant supervillain named Lex Luthor who tries to kill Superman to advance his plot to rule the world. These days news articles often portray Bernard Madoff as an “evil genius” because of his creative Ponzi scheme that siphoned some $20 billion from investors. We think of an evil genius as someone who devises a clever plan for wrongdoing on a large scale. According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely of Duke University, however, the genius of the perpetrators often manifests itself not in elaborate planning of misdeeds but in almost the exact opposite: an unplanned escalation of a minor wrong they imaginatively have justified to themselves....

Planetary Protection Racket As the first planet to form in our solar system, Jupiter helped to sculpt the rest [see “The Genesis of Planets”; SciAm, May 2008]. Because of its gravity, for instance, it has regulated the rate of cosmic impacts on Earth: flinging asteroids in our direction yet also clearing many hazardous space rocks out of our way. Jupiter’s net effect depends on its mass, suggest Jonathan Horner and Barrie Jones, both at the Open University in England, in an upcoming paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology....