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It can support 50,000 times its own weight, springs back into shape after being compressed by up to 80% and has a density much lower than most comparable metal-based materials. A new superelastic, three-dimensional form of graphene can even conduct electricity, paving the way for flexible electronics, researchers say. The team, led by Dan Li, a materials engineer at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, coaxed 1-centimeter-high graphene blocks or ‘monoliths’ from tiny flakes of graphene oxide, using ice crystals as templates....

SAN FRANCISCO—Three years ago, scientists discovered that ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica has accelerated since 1992 due to climate change. Now the same group of scientists has launched an initiative to use satellite data to continually monitor changes in ice mass at the poles. Their work will be made easier in the coming years as space agencies around the world are launching new satellites to track polar ice. “There are processes we know about that happen in the ice sheet—we can see them on land, and from sky and space—that can cause them to destabilize really quickly,” said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds....

The chickens were already getting sick when Yoshihiro Kawaoka arrived in the U.S. in August 1983. A few months before, in April, a bird flu virus had arisen in the poultry farms of eastern Pennsylvania, but veterinarians had deemed it to be “low pathogenic”—meaning it made chickens sick but did not kill many of them. As the virus swept through the poultry farms, however, a new strain developed. Chickens began to die in large numbers, and farmers started to fear for their livelihoods....

More than a year after 1 billion or so gallons of water polluted by ash spilled from a coal-burning power plant in Tennessee, the Obama administration is struggling to decide whether to declare such waste “hazardous.” Slapping a hazardous label on coal ash and other coal byproducts would trigger the writing of a federal disposal standard to replace a patchwork of state regulations. The standard could outright ban wet storage ponds – such as the one that ruptured in December 2008 in Kingston, Tenn....

1986 The results of the first Vasodilator Heart Failure Trial (V-HeFT I) are published. The combination of hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate (H/I) shows promise.FIRST PATENT 1987 Jay Cohn of the University of Minnesota applies for a patent on the method of using hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate together. BiDil is born.1991 A second trial, V-HeFT II, shows that enalapril, an ACE inhibitor, is more effective than H/I for treating heart failure. 1996 Cohn and Medco, which holds the patent rights to BiDil, bring the drug to the FDA for approval....

A new antireflective coating inspired by the compound lenses in moth eyes could help boost the efficiency of solar cells and sharpen the view of image sensors. Using a simple method to stamp patterned lenses over large areas, researchers in Singapore have come up with a process that could make manufacturing such coatings easier (ACS Nano 2015, DOI: 10.1021/nn5051272). Antireflective coatings help solar cells collect as much of the sun’s light as possible, boosting the power output....

Trying to recall the very first episodes of our lives can be surprisingly tricky. In part this is because our infancy is a period of intense learning, and the growth of new cells to support that process may disrupt our older memories. In addition, our malleable young minds can easily create false memories. In June, Scientific American MIND asked readers to think back to the very first events that they could remember....

By Charlie ZhuHONG KONG (Reuters) - As China pushes an aggressive expansion of nuclear power it is running into a major stumbling block - a breakdown of trust, post-Fukushima, in official assurances of public safety.A plan to build a $6 billion uranium processing plant in the southern province of Guangdong was canceled this week after about a thousand people took to the streets demanding the project was scrapped over public health and environmental fears....

Key concepts Oceans Beaches Geology Erosion Introduction A day at the beach is a wonderful way to spend time with your family and friends. You can swim, play games and build sand castles. But have you ever wondered how the beach you are standing on came to be? How, for example, did all of that sand get there? Beaches are formed and continually changed by the ocean’s waves moving rock particles onshore, offshore and along the shore....

“The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.” —Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher, 1960 Flies, birds, mice, dogs, monkeys and people all need to sleep. That is, they show daily periods of relative immobility and lack of response to external stimuli, such as light, sound or touch....

Discovering the first true “alien Earth” is a long-held dream of astronomers—and recent exoplanet discoveries suggest that their dream will come true in the not-too-distant future. Scientists have found nearly 2,000 alien planetssince the first such world was confirmed orbiting a sunlike star in 1995. More than half of these discoveries were made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009 on a mission to determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the Milky Way galaxy....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Hi, I’m Dr. Sabrina Stierwalt, and I’m Everyday Einstein bringing you Quick and Dirty Tips to help you make sense of science. As an astrophysicist, I often work all night when the telescope calls. Unfortunately for me, the rest of the world doesn’t follow my lead. If I need to grab groceries, I’m still going to have to do that during daytime hours....

Countries generally do not start creating much new-to-the-world technology until they are pretty wealthy—specifically, until their per capita output and income approach that of the world’s richest countries. China is still quite poor. As recently as 2010, its per capita income was less than one-tenth that of the U.S. Yet according to the official data, Chinese businesses increased their R&D spending by 26.2 percent per year between 1996 and 2010. The number of patents that America’s own patent office has granted to Chinese inventors rose 4,628 percent between 1996 and 2010....

When vascular surgeon Paolo Zamboni reported in December 2009 that inflating a tiny balloon inside twisted veins in the neck provided relief from multiple sclerosis, he created quite a stir. The idea that surgically straightening crooked veins could somehow benefit a degenerative nerve problem was astounding. Physicians were skeptical. Zamboni himself concluded that his findings should be subjected to more rigorous testing. Regardless, many people with MS, which affects at least 250,000 people in the U....

The tiny Pacific island nation of Palau announced last week that it will soon become the home of the world’s largest microgrid, a development that could help it ramp up to 70 percent renewable energy over the next three decades. The Armonia project, announced Thursday night after a brief delay, includes 35 megawatts of dispatchable solar power coupled with 45 megawatt-hours of energy storage. It’s the product of a public-private partnership between the island nation and French multilateral electricity utility Engie SA....

The mystery of how Mars could have once had water flowing on its surface is now deepening, as a new study reveals that the Red Planet’s early atmosphere likely possessed up to hundreds of times less carbon dioxide than needed to keep it warm enough for liquid water to last. Although Mars is now cold and dry, there are decades of evidence suggesting that the Red Planet’s surface was once covered with rivers, streams, ponds, lakes and perhaps seas and oceans....

A calorie is a calorie, goes the popular mantra. But now doctors and dieticians might have to eat those words. Researchers have found that not all calories are created equal and that the types of calories you eat, particularly after losing weight, can have a profound effect on how efficiently your body burns calories and keeps off unwanted pounds. The ideal diet that promotes a fast metabolism — that is, your body’s ability to quickly burn off calories — as well as promotes long-term health in terms of disease-free organs appears to be (surprise!...

Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision regarding, say, an object’s position inevitably degraded the level of certainty of its momentum. Kurt Gödel showed that within any formal mathematical system advanced enough to be useful, it is impossible to use the system to prove every true statement that it contains....

In 1990 the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1, careening across the solar system on its way to becoming the most distant human-made object in space, took a glimpse back at the planet it had left 13 years earlier. Six billion kilometers away, Earth was barely distinguishable against the backdrop of space—a “pale blue dot,” as astronomer Carl Sagan would famously dub it. Earlier this month another interplanetary explorer caught a striking glimpse of Earth, this one captured as the spacecraft, a European probe called Rosetta, approached our planet from deep space....

SEPTEMBER 1959 RADIATION— “What should the citizen conclude about ionizing radiation? Ionizing radiation has always been with us and will be for all foreseeable time. Our genetic system is probably well adjusted by natural selection to normal background radiation. Added radiation will increase the frequency of mutations; most of these will be harmful. Exposure to radiation in large amounts will increase malignant disease; small amounts may possibly do the same. In view of these potentially harmful effects every reasonable effort should be made to reduce the levels of ionizing radiation to which man is exposed to the lowest levels that can reasonably be attained....