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As highly social animals—like human beings – elephants rely on their bonds to navigate everyday life. Group living helps elephants with the difficult decisions that they make on a regular basis—what to eat, where to go when the water dries up, how to parent. And as with people, some social bonds are more important than others. Old age among the elephant matriarchs that lead family groups has been linked to more appropriate responses to predator noises, better recognition of the calls of elephants from other groups, and higher calf survival during droughts....

Heavier than Air TECHNOLOGY that defies gravity has always been an obsession, as these excerpts from the archives of Scientific American show. AUGUST 1878: Aviation pioneer Alphonse Pénaud designs a flying machine that resembles a butterfly. OCTOBER 1920: “It is quite possible that the future historian will set down the present year as marking a new era in the history of aviation—the era of metal construction.” DECEMBER 2005: The new Airbus A380 Navigator “achieves significant weight savings by using lightweight but strong carbon-fiber and other advanced resin epoxy composite materials....

Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect. Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test....

Having just completed the tortuous 48-hour journey from the South Pole to the US west coast, John Priscu is suffering from more than his fair share of jet lag. But his tiredness can’t mask the excitement in his voice. After weeks of intense field work in Antarctica, he and his team have become the first to find life in a lake trapped under the frozen continent’s ice sheet. “Lake Whillans definitely harbors life,” he says....

Nuclear energy and energy research are among the big winners in the proposed $28.4 billion Energy Department fiscal 2011 budget the White House unveiled today. The almost 5 percent increase in funding from fiscal 2010 covers a $36 billion boost in loan guarantee authority for nuclear power facilities for a total of $54 billion, $300 million for an innovative energy research program, and a $226 million increase in funding for the Office of Science for research and development of “breakthrough” technologies for a total of $5....

SS 433 is a ravenous black hole that sucks the matter off its companion supergiant star like some sort of cosmic vampire—and it’s a messy eater. To date, SS 433 has been the only confirmed instance of a phenomenon known as “supercritical accretion” in which the black hole’s gluttonous stardust scarfing results in a hail of crumbs being thrust out into space. The viewpoint from Earth relative to SS 433 shows the object through a disk of material spiraling toward the black hole, so we do not see the its powerful x-rays in all their glory....

Most of us strive to do the right thing when faced with difficult decisions. A new study suggests that our moral compass is more reliable when we face those decisions in the morning rather than later in the day. In a series of studies at Harvard University and at the University of Utah, 327 men and women participated in tasks designed to measure cheating or lying behavior either in the morning or in the afternoon....

Special Report: Pollution, Poverty, People of Color Communities across the US face environmental injustices Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of the Special Report Head in any direction on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and you will reach gushing rivers, placid ponds and lakes – both Great and small. An abundant resource, this water has nourished a small Native American community for hundreds of years. So 10 years ago, when an international mining company arrived near the shores of Lake Superior to burrow a mile under the Earth and pull metals out of ore, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community of the Lake Superior Band of Chippewa had to stand for its rights and its water....

Farm-raised salmon has long been the poster child of unsustainable aquaculture practices. Issues of escape, pollution and inefficiency have plunged it deeply into the “avoid” territory of environmental groups—until now. In a report released January 14, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program is taking the unprecedented step of approving a particular method for farming Pacific coho salmon that is currently employed exclusively by the Rochester, Wash.–based AquaSeed Corp. The sustainability nod from the consumer education group means that these salmon also will be assigned a green “Best Choice” rating on Seafood Watch’s Web site....

Ancient bacterial genome sequences collected from human remains in Peru suggest that seals first gave tuberculosis (TB) to humans in the Americas. Modern TB strains found in North and South America are closely related to strains from Europe, suggesting that the Spaniards introduced the disease to the New World when they colonized South America in the sixteenth century. Beginning in the 1950s, however, palaeoanthropological studies found evidence of lesions associated with TB in pre-Columbian skeletons in South America....

By Ron CowenSpace is not smooth: physicists think that on the quantum scale, it is composed of indivisible subunits, like the dots that make up a pointillist painting. This pixellated landscape is thought to seethe with black holes smaller than one trillionth of one trillionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom, continuously popping in and out of existence.That tumultuous vista was proposed decades ago by theorists struggling to marry quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity – the only one of nature’s four fundamental forces not to have been incorporated into the standard model of particle physics....

A weird phenomenon is happening high above the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas that could prove to be an atmospheric nightmare. Pollutants that gather from India and China in the lowlands around the mountains can be boosted as high as 18 kilometers, reaching the stratosphere—the atmospheric layer directly above the troposphere that contains most of Earth’s ozone. That is far higher than aerosols from vehicles, power plants and fires usually reach....

Arguably, all of scientific inquiry in modern times begins with some sort of model. A model takes different parameters you are studying and uses them to make some claim about how our world works. It is a reduction of reality with the aim of reconstructing a picture of truth, whether about the spread of disease, the population of a toad species or the number of people who will move in 2020....

Geneva was cold and gray when air force one touched down in November 1985. President Ronald Reagan had come to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, the newly appointed leader of the Soviet Union. Reagan was convinced that the risk of catastrophic nuclear war was high, and he wanted to reduce the two superpowers’ swollen arsenals. Gorbachev also recognized that the arms race was strangling the Soviet economy. Yet the tête-à-tête quickly degenerated. Reagan lectured Gorbachev on the history of Soviet aggression....

During the past few days, Toyota Motor Corp., has taken the unprecedented step of halting sales in the U.S., Europe and China of some of its most popular car and truck models. The reason: potential defects that cause the vehicles to speed up without warning and run out of control. The move follows a huge (and growing) recall of older Toyota vehicles last week. Safety Research and Strategies, based in Rehoboth, Mass....

A long stretch of DNA called a supergene explains the variety of bizarre tactics that a wading bird species deploys to win mates, a pair of genome-sequencing studies concludes. Common to marshes and wet meadows in northern Europe and Asia, ruffs (Philomachus pugnux) are named after the decorative collars popular in Renaissance Europe. But the birds’ poufy plumage is not the only baroque aspect of their biology. Males gather at mass breeding grounds where they juke, jump and lunge toward other males, in hopes of winning females....

People may think of the plague as a disease from centuries past, but more than 1,000 people in the United States have become infected with plague in the last 100 years, according to a new study. The researchers examined cases of plague in the United States from 1900 to 2012. During that time period, there were 1,006 cases of plague, in 18 states, the study found. Patients ranged in age from less than 1 year old to 94....

Hospital patients are at risk of a number of life-threatening complications, especially sepsis—a condition that can kill within hours and contributes to one out of three in-hospital deaths in the U.S. Overworked doctors and nurses often have little time to spend with each patient, and this problem can go unnoticed until it is too late. Academics and electronic-health-record companies have developed automated systems that send reminders to check patients for sepsis, but the sheer number of alerts can cause health care providers to ignore or turn off these notices....

Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to “self regulate” or focus on the task at hand. The measure for academic success for decades has been a person’s intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called “executive functioning,” which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills....

DURBAN, South Africa—For the first time, all major nations—developed and developing—have agreed to a roadmap that would combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions via an “outcome with legal force” that would not come into effect before 2020. The 194 countries negotiating here also agreed that such a universal plan must be completed by 2015 at the latest. “I think we all realize they are not perfect,” said Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation and President of the Durban U....