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Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts by Stanislas Dehaene. Viking Adult, 2014 Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark. Knopf, 2014 The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014 Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything by Amanda Gefter....

Editor’s Note: This feature, originally printed with the title “Living with Cancer,” Is a free preview of Scientific American’s Special Report “New Answers for Cancer” It was February 2003, and Kris Carr, a photographer and actress, was on a roll. The bubbly, green-eyed stunner was in high demand. She was considered “the Julia Roberts of advertising” (at least according to her agent), thanks to her success in two popular Bud Light commercials that aired during the Super Bowl....

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced today that Mariette DiChristina will formally assume the top editorial post of Scientific American, effective immediately. She becomes the eighth editor in chief of Scientific American and the first woman to hold the position. She had been the acting editor in chief, a title she assumed this past June after the departure of then–editor in chief, John Rennie. She joined Scientific American in 2001 as its executive editor; previously, she spent 14 years at Popular Science, becoming its executive editor....

For decades the primary U.S. strategy to limit risks to people from wildfires has been to thin heavily wooded areas and eliminate buildup of dead trees so that when a fire inevitably erupts, it does not grow inordinately large and out of control. U.S. wildfire policy has centered on how far to take these steps. States and municipalities act on the policy by deciding whether to let small, natural fires burn rather than try to put them out, and whether to use “prescribed burns”—fires deliberately set and monitored to consume excessive “fuel” (those dead trees) in forests....

The injured soldiers had been treated well since their return from fighting in Afghanistan. At the San Antonio Military Medical Center in Texas, surgeons had carefully grafted healthy tissue over their burns and wounds, using microsurgery to connect their blood vessels to the new skin. But the patients still faced an uncertain recovery. The vessels might not supply enough oxygen for the transplants to thrive. When Conor Evans visited San Antonio in 2010 and saw these soldiers, he realized that conventional techniques for monitoring oxygen levels did not work very well, and they often failed to give enough warning if the graft was failing....

Southern long-finned pilot whales are marine mammals with a lot to say—and they may use vocalizations to outsmart a deadly foe. Cetaceans such as whales, dolphins and porpoises communicate through sound to find food and mates, to navigate and to interact socially. Their vocalizations vary between species and within communities. The animals can mimic artificial noise such as sonar, but nobody had previously recorded them matching other cetaceans’ sounds. A new study, however, found overlap in the cetacean sound book....

The term “blindsight” may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s actually a bizarre effect in which people who have lost some of their vision from brain damage are still able to react to stimuli hidden in their blind spots. Researchers report that repeatedly stimulating the blind spots of partially blind people for several months can improve their ability to use blindsight in laboratory tests, suggesting that larger trials of the technique are warranted....

It served nobly, though it was not a Plymouth Valiant. It took me to new places, though it was not a Ford Explorer. I parked it under a tree, though it was not a Toyota Sequoia. (The tree was a maple.) It was the last car I had bought, a 1992 Honda Civic. It even had an air bag—for the driver. But the years had passed it by: my passengers wanted air bags, too, and I conceded that it was time for a new car....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Normal Conditions: Earth’s magnetic field typically deflects the charged particles streaming out from the sun, carving out a teardrop-shaped volume known as the magnetosphere. On the sun-facing side, the boundary, or magnetopause, is about 60,000 kilometers from our planet. The field also traps particles in a doughnut-shaped region known as the Van Allen belts....

Mice have a jungle of bacteria, viruses and fungi in their stomachs—and so do we. These microorganisms help both mice and us break down dinner. As we are finding, these bugs also help to regulate the immune system. But we are just starting to learn how these tiny organisms influence us and how changing their composition changes us. In an attempt to find out, postdoctoral researcher Hachung Chung and her colleagues at Dennis Kasper’s Lab at Harvard Medical School tried raising mice with exclusively human gut microbiota....

So that you can prepare and not miss this event on the first day of August, here are a few tips for observing the partial solar eclipse that will be visible in Germany and most of Europe. Those of you who are able and willing to travel to Russia, Mongolia or northern China can view the more than two-minute-long totality and also see the sun’s corona and the moon’s deepest shadow (umbra)....

Researchers say they have identified a switch that makes dormant breast cancer cells that have traveled to the lungs swell to lethal proportions—completing the dreaded process of metastasis or cancer spread. A team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y., reports that it staved off full-blown metastasis in mice by preventing mini-tumors in the lungs from recruiting stem cells called endothelial progenitors, which assemble into blood vessels to nourish the malignancy....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. regulator on Monday allowed Exxon Mobil Corp to restart operations on the Texas leg of its Pegasus pipeline, which spilled thousands of barrels of oil into a residential area in Arkansas last year. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) approved Exxon’s restart plan for a 210-mile (338-km) stretch of the pipeline from Corsicana to Nederland at 80 percent of the operating pressure in place before the March 29, 2013 incident in the small town of Mayflower, Arkansas....

We regularly hear calls to improve “ocean health.” Health is a powerful metaphor, but scientists have had no way to measure it and therefore no means to evaluate how the world’s oceans are doing. More than 60 researchers from a cross section of disciplines and institutions, including the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have created the Ocean Health Index to do just that....

Blood for all: researchers have discovered two bacterial enzymes that can efficiently remove immune-triggering sugar molecules from red blood cells, thereby turning A, B and AB blood types into the universal type O. Nature Biotechnology, April New car smell—a stew of volatile organic compounds—is not toxic, at least not to human cells in culture. The chemicals did aggravate the cells’ immune response, suggesting that people with allergies should beware. Environmental Science&Technology, April 1...

If you have trouble sleeping, laptop or tablet use at bedtime might be to blame, new research suggests. Mariana Figueiro of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her team showed that two hours of iPad use at maximum brightness was enough to suppress people’s normal nighttime release of melatonin, a key hormone in the body’s clock, or circadian system. Melatonin tells your body that it is night, helping to make you sleepy....

Know what really stinks? The gas that livestock such as cattle release during digestion. These animals produce a quarter of the anthropogenic methane in the U.S. What doesn’t stink is that Pennsylvania State University researchers, led by Alexander N. Hristrov, have now demonstrated that feeding 3-nitrooxypropanol (3NOP) to dairy cows over a 12-week period reduces the animals’ methane emissions by 30% (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA2015, DOI: 1073/pnas.1504124112). 3NOP inhibits methyl coenzyme-M reductase, an enzyme used by bacteria in a cow’s gut....

He created the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and sketched the legendary Vitruvian Man. Yet his tremendous paintings are only part of the story. As historian and writer Isaacson painstakingly chronicles, Leonardo da Vinci was an obsessive learner and thinker who conducted extensive research on human anatomy, the mechanics of flight, optics and mirrors, to name a few. Unlike other Renaissance men of his time, he insisted on discovering things for himself rather than relying on the past work of others....

Editor’s Note: This story, originally published in the July 2000 issue of Scientific American, is being made available due to the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century, drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of this revolutionary change....

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazineThe Dawn spacecraft had a difficult birth: it was threatened by cost overruns and technical concerns, cancelled, reinstated and scaled down. Now, after a four-year journey spiraling out from Earth’s orbit, the probe is set to explore the beginnings of the Solar System.On 16 July, Dawn will enter orbit around Vesta (see ‘Dawn patrol’), an asteroid that, at 500 kilometers wide, is the second largest in the Solar System....