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You may know Koko as a huge, happy, captive gorilla who uses some sign language. She is 45 years old now. She lives in California. She likes kittens. She even understands the birds and the bees and can help plan her parenthood—or at least that’s what a popular YouTube video would have us believe. In the video, Koko’s caretaker, Francine “Penny” Patterson, presents the gorilla, who is too old to give birth herself, with a notepad outlining four scenarios by which she could become a mother....

American parents have been warning teenagers about the dangers of marijuana for about 100 years. Teenagers have been ignoring them for just as long. As I write this, a couple of kids are smoking weed in the woods just yards from my office window and about a block and a half from the local high school. They started in around 9 A.M., just in time for class. Exaggerating the perils of cannabis—the risks of brain damage, addiction, psychosis—has not helped....

The tropical rain band that encircles Earth just north of the equator affects rainfall patterns worldwide. By taking sediment cores from pond and lake beds on tropical islands, scientists can determine where the band has been since A.D. 800 and where it may move in the future. At current global warming rates, the band could shift north 5 degrees by 2100, drying out Ecuador, Columbia and the U.S. Southwest. Obtaining the data from such remote locations often requires on-the-spot ingenuity....

From a distance, you probably would have assumed her to be human. Although she stood only about a meter tall, with long arms and a small head, she walked, if perhaps slightly inelegantly, upright on two legs, as we, alone among living mammals, do. This familiar yet strange individual is Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived some 3.2 million years ago. She is one of the oldest creatures presumed to have strode on the evolutionary path leading to our species, Homo sapiens....

Big science is under big pressure at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Gone are the glory days of the early 2000s, when a doubling of the agency’s budget over five years allowed it to establish dozens of programs with their own large, dedicated budgets. Since March, the mandatory government cuts known as sequestration have sliced 5% off the NIH’s already-tight budget. Now, institute directors are assessing the future of these costly legacy programs — and shutting some of them down....

Editor’s Note: This story, originally published in the January 1959 issue of Scientific American is being posted as a supplement to the “50, 100, 150 Years Ago” Column in the January 2009 issue of Scientific American. “This is Clarence Darrow,” said the voice at the other end of the wire, “I suppose you have been reading the papers, so you know Bryan and his outfit are prosecuting that young fellow Scopes....

Editor’s note (2/8/16): A group of Republicans led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is calling for a carbon tax to address climate change, as an alternative to rules and regulations promoted by the Obama administration. Members of the group are expected to meet with senior members of the Trump administration at the White House on February 8 to present their plan. Republished below is a 2015 editorial wherein Scientific American’s board of editors advocated for a similar tax-based approach to reducing fossil-fuel pollution....

A backyard astronomer in Australia made a major discovery early Monday morning when he noticed a newly formed spot on Jupiter—a spot that academics and NASA astronomers have now confirmed marks a recent impact on the giant planet. Anthony Wesley of Murrumbateman had a new 14.5-inch Newtonian telescope at his home observatory trained on Jupiter when he noticed something unusual: a dark spot on the planet’s outer layers that had not been there two days before....

BRIGHTON, Colo. - The low-carbon economy has already arrived on the windy prairie north of this fast-growing Denver ‘burb. It’s here that Danish wind-turbine giant Vestas converted 298 acres of hayfield into the West’s largest turbine factory - and turned Brighton into a magnet for “green” energy companies. It’s part of a $1 billion investment by the company in the United States, what Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter touts as a “new energy economy....

From Nature magazine The carbon clock is getting reset. Climate records from a Japanese lake are set to improve the accuracy of the dating technique, which could help to shed light on archaeological mysteries such as why Neanderthals became extinct. Carbon dating is used to work out the age of organic material — in effect, any living thing. The technique hinges on carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of the element that, unlike other more stable forms of carbon, decays away at a steady rate....

Cathy Wolf read the report carefully. She had every right to be skeptical—in the 13 years since her amyotrophic lateral sclerosis diagnosis, she’d read dozens like it: Celebrex; minocycline; vitamin D—you name it, it could slow the progress of ALS. That is until it was tested in a clinical trial. Many patients around the world also read the report when it was published online February 4, 2008, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—a top scientific journal....

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazineSome dinosaurs grew to gigantic sizes to avoid competition from their own young, rather than to take advantage of abundant oxygen, high temperatures and large territorial ranges, say two studies. But their largeness may also have proved their undoing.Some have argued that dinosaurs were able to grow quickly and fuel large bodies when temperatures were warm, oxygen levels were high, and land masses such as the supercontinent Gondwana provided abundant living space....

I’ve been a hypochondriac ever since I was a kid. As an eight-year-old, I was terrified of having a heart attack, and no amount of parental reassurance could erase this fear. In my childish reasoning, these worries seemed perfectly logical–heart attacks were the most common cause of death in my family, and they appeared to strike without much warning. At my most panicky moments in the middle of the night, the only way I could fall asleep was if I kept my hand pressed against my sternum to convince myself that my heart was still beating....

By Richard A. Lovett of Nature magazineEvidence is growing in support of the idea that liquid water lies concealed beneath the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.Some scientists hope that the characteristic plumes of ice crystals seen erupting from the moon’s surface are geyser-like features fed by an underground water source, with all that would imply about Enceladus as a possible abode for life. Others argue that the crystals could be formed by “dry” processes such as the breakdown of clathrates (which combine ice and trapped gases such as methane) or from the sublimation of subsurface ice layers that never pass through a liquid phase in the transition from ice to gas....

Many people who suffer the pain, depression and negative health effects associated with social anxiety or loneliness do not respond to common therapy tactics or drugs. Two new studies offer hope from an unlikely source: rather than focusing on your relationships with others, turn inward for relief. Mindfulness meditation—which has been around for well over 2,000 years—has many forms, but an extensive body of research supports the effectiveness of one training program in particular....

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it. Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares)....

Acceptance of science has become increasingly polarized in the United States. Indeed, a recent Pew poll shows that there is a substantial and growing amount of public disagreement about basic scientific facts, including human evolution, the safety of vaccines and whether or not human-caused climate change is real and happening. What is causing this, you might ask? People often interpret the same information very differently. As psychologists, we are more than familiar with the finding that our brains selectively attend to, process and recall information....

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO—The ice cream and caramels are delicious, but it’s the brioche that really convinces you eating algae could be a winning idea. The oily, yellow, flour-like residue of wrung out algae—dubbed “algalin” by its marketers—can easily replace the butter and eggs in prototypical French pastry bread. Even on its own, the algalin isn’t bad. It tastes like pancake mix, minus the salt and baking soda but with the addition of olive oil....

Key concepts Physics Collision Momentum Energy Introduction Did it ever occur to you that tennis, bowling and shopping carts bumping into each other all involve collisions? It is fascinating how just a few rules of physics can predict the outcome of these collisions. You can discover these rules yourself with a fun homemade toy. After creating and playing with the toys in this activity, you will be one step closer to understanding what happens when you hit a tennis ball or go bowling!...

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell about Our Pasts Charles Fernyhough HarperCollins, 2013 ($26.99) Andy Warhol had an unusual grooming habit. The artist and pop culture icon liked to wear the same cologne for three months, then store the bottle and never use it again. He hoped to associate the scents with events in a certain time period, so that sniffing the bottles later might evoke those memories....