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Diamonds have long been available in pairs—say, mounted in a nice set of earrings. But physicists have now taken that pairing to a new level, linking two diamonds on the quantum level. A group of researchers report in the December 2 issue of Science that they managed to entangle the quantum states of two diamonds separated by 15 centimeters. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon by which two or more objects share an unseen link bridging the space between them—a hypothetical pair of entangled dice, for instance, would always land on matching numbers, even if they were rolled in different places simultaneously....

In the past year Scientific American has published several articles examining the rise of misinformation and disinformation in media and general communication and what we can do to resolve this growing dilemma. “Conspiracy Theories Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth,” by Stephan Lewandowsky, Peter Jacobs and Stuart Neil, discusses this topic in the context of the virus that causes COVID, as well as earlier pathogens. I would like to focus on one aspect of these articles: the misuse of the word “truth” and the confusion over its fundamental meaning....

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity. Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity....

In the past few years I have heard more people than ever before puzzling over the 24/7 coverage of people such as Paris Hilton who are “celebrities” for no apparent reason other than we know who they are. And yet we can’t look away. The press about these individuals’ lives continues because people are obviously tuning in. Although many social critics have bemoaned this explosion of popular culture as if it reflects some kind of collective character flaw, it is in fact nothing more than the inevitable outcome of the collision between 21st-century media and Stone Age minds....

Why Do Some People Sleepwalk? —Carlos Navarro, via e-mail Neurologist Antonio Oliviero of the National Hospital for Paraplegics in Toledo, Spain, explains: SLEEP DISORDERS such as sleepwalking arise when normal physiological systems are active at inappropriate times. We do not yet understand why the brain issues commands to the muscles during certain phases of sleep, but we do know that these commands are usually suppressed by other neurological mechanisms. At times this suppression can be incomplete—because of genetic or environmental factors or physical immaturity—and actions that normally occur during wakefulness emerge in sleep....

Although so-called bullet trains in France can travel at speeds approaching 575 kilometers per hour, their adoption in the U.S. has been more local than express. Now, 140 years after the transcontinental railroad’s nearly 2,900 kilometers of track first connected both U.S. coasts, a number of states are hoping for a second golden age of rail, this time fueled by the Obama administration’s pledge of billions of stimulus dollars for high-speed railway development....

Some people seem better than others at fighting the flu, and you might suspect they were born that way. A new study of twins, however, suggests otherwise. In one of the most comprehensive analyses of immune function performed to date, researchers analyzed blood samples from 105 sets of healthy twins. They measured immune cell populations and their chemical messengers—204 parameters in all—before and after participants received a flu shot. Differences in three fourths of these parameters depended less on genetics than on environmental factors, such as diet and prior infections....

Perfectionism: it’s more than just high standards or wanting to excel. Instead, perfectionism is the setting of unattainable standards and making self-worth contingent upon meeting those standards. In other words, it’s like constantly running a race where the finish line can never be crossed. We’ve talked about perfectionism on the podcast before (here and here), but thanks to social media, the issue has been turbocharged to the point that it bears another look....

Strange as it may sound, some scientists suspect that the humble armpit could be sending all kinds of signals from casual flirtation to sounding the alarm. That’s because the body’s secretions, some stinky and others below the threshold your nose can detect, may be rife with chemical messages called pheromones. Yet despite half a century of research into these subtle cues, we have yet to find direct evidence of their existence in humans....

A robot carrying an explosive device was used to kill one of the shooters in Thursday night’s horrific violence in Dallas, Texas, in what many law enforcement and other experts are calling the first such use of robotics technology by U.S. police. Five police officers were killed and seven others were wounded, along with two civilians, during a demonstration protesting the recent deaths of two African-American men at the hands of police in other cities....

On Friday (April 22), the world will celebrate Earth Day, and honor the only planet known to host life. But where else in the solar system might life thrive? Our friends at ThinkGeek.com recently asked 2,400 readers this very question, and the results are pretty interesting. Not surprisingly, Jupiter’s moon Europa took the top spot, garnering 47 percent of votes. The 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) satellite harbors a huge ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell, and scientists think this ocean is in contact with Europa’s rocky mantle, making possible all sorts of interesting chemical reactions....

It is clear that wind turbines—the number of which is steadily increasing globally—kill bats. They also kill birds, but studies have consistently shown the Halloween icons to be more prone to death by turbine. The data also indicate that certain species of insectivorous bats, in particular migratory, tree-roosting species, are especially apt to fly into turbines. But exactly why this is remains a mystery. One theory is that the bats approach the turbines in pursuit of insect prey....

From Hawaii to Papua New Guinea to the Maldives, coral reefs are bleaching — in so many regions that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially declared a global bleaching event on October 8. The event, the third in recorded history, is expected to grow worse in coming months. Warm ocean temperatures, linked to climate change and a strengthening El Niño weather pattern, have triggered reefs to expel the algae that color them....

Determining whether individual nations comply with future climate pacts will require a new satellite to keep tabs on countries that resist other forms of monitoring, a government advisory panel says. The elite, independent panel of scientists – known as JASON – examined the United States’ ability to monitor the progress of international agreements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning fossil fuels. Although JASON’s work is often classified, the new report is not....

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Scientific American’s Take.” In 1974 I matriculated at Pepperdine University as a born-again Christian who rejected Darwinism and evolutionary theory—not because I knew anything about it (I didn’t) but because I thought that in order to believe in God and accept the Bible as true, you had to be a creationist. What I knew about evolution came primarily from creationist literature, so when I finally took a course in evolutionary theory in graduate school I realized that I had been hoodwinked....

Key concepts Chemistry Chemical reaction Surfactants Introduction If you live where there is snow, it can be fun to play in it for a while—but it can get quite chilly. Or maybe you live someplace where it doesn’t snow. In this fun activity, you can experience something similar to snow anytime, in the comfort of your own home. You will mix together some common kitchen supplies to make a sculpted object, and then, whenever you decide, you can let your snow creation “melt” away and turn into a white surface....

One of the items high on the big science project to-do list is to devise a wiring diagram for the human brain. Its 100 billion neurons and the hundreds of trillions of connections among these cells consign this goal and the specifics of achieving it to the long-term bin. A first step, though, is a complete diagram of the mouse brain. Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, N....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineUS researchers have used computer modeling to identify an organic molecule with useful electrical properties - proof-of-concept for an approach that could soon yield new compounds to harvest solar energy in photovoltaic cells.Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a theoretical chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues, used computational models to screen a family of organic molecules and identify those likely to be the best semiconductors. The team passed the finding to researchers at Stanford University in California, who have now synthesized the molecule and confirmed its properties....

The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) has arrived in North America. In the past several days photographs and videos have surfaced showing how viciously this insect has attacked honeybees elsewhere in the world: it crawls into hives and rips off the heads of bees in large numbers—making its supervillain nickname, “murder hornet,” feel disturbingly apt. U.S. government agencies and local beekeepers have sprung into action, hoping to eradicate the hornet—thus far seen just in Washington State and nearby Vancouver Island—before it can consolidate a foothold in the continent....

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is having sensory illusions such as hallucinations or hearing voices. Now clues about the role that one area of the brain may play in generating such powerful illusions come from a study by Olaf Blanke of the Brain Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues. Blanke’s team has described a 22-year-old woman with a normal psychiatric history who reported a “shadow man” right behind her when doctors stimulated a certain area of her brain, the left temporoparietal junction, in preparation for neurosurgery....