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Dragonflies: Magnificent Creatures of Water, Air, and Land by Pieter van Dokkum Yale University Press, 2015 ($35) Van Dokkum is an astronomer with a passion for dragonflies. When he is not imaging distant objects in the cosmos using some of the world’s most powerful telescopes, he produces close-up photographs of one of the universe’s smaller inhabitants: the dragonfly. In this large-format book, van Dokkum captures the exquisite colors and varied features of the insects, portraying the creatures’ full life cycle, from the time a larval “nymph” metamorphoses into an adult dragonfly through mating and eventually death at the hands of bird predators, spider webs, cold weather or other mishaps....

Brains from people with autism show patterns of gene expression similar to those from people with schizophrenia, according to a new analysis. The findings, published May 24 in Translational Psychiatry, deepen the connections between the two conditions, says study leader Dan Arking, associate professor of genetic medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. People who have either autism or schizophrenia share features such as language problems and difficulty understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings....

By Megha Rajagopalan and Koh Gui Qing BEIJING (Reuters) - China will ease family planning restrictions to allow all couples to have two children after decades of a strict one-child policy, the ruling Communist Party said on Thursday, a move aimed at alleviating demographic strains on the economy. The policy is a major liberalization of the country’s family planning restrictions, already eased in late 2013 when Beijing said it would allow more families to have two children when the parents met certain conditions....

The U.N. Environment Programme dumped a bucket of cold water this morning on nations riding high from the Paris climate change accords’ taking effect this week. In a new report, UNEP found that even if every country that made an emissions-cutting pledge in the Paris Agreement keeps its promise, the world will still fall 12 to 14 gigatons short each year of keeping temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels....

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus said today that he has “serious reservations” about a major global warming bill and warned fellow Democrats to water down the measure in hopes of getting it through the Senate. Speaking at the start of an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing where he is the second highest-ranking member, the Montana Democrat said he wanted to weaken the bill’s 2020 target for greenhouse gas emissions – now 20 percent below 2005 levels....

Our universe is highly magnetized, but no one knows exactly why. The current theory is that cosmic turbulence amplified tiny “seed” magnetic fields to create the powerful ones that govern galaxies today. Astrophysicists are still working to fully understand this process but a recent lab experiment mimicking galactic collisions might bring scientists one step closer to figuring out the mysterious origins of cosmic magnetism. The matter in our universe forms a web of densely populated galaxy clusters and connecting filaments separated by vast voids, interrupted only by the occasional stray galaxy....

The nation’s capital has sunk to new levels. In fact, Washington, D.C., along with the rest of the Chesapeake Bay area, is losing elevation every day, according to a new study. Prehistoric ice sheets to the north used to push up the mid-Atlantic region indirectly. When they retreated about 20,000 ago, the ground began to settle, and that subsidence will continue for tens of thousands of years, say geologists at the University of Vermont and their colleagues....

Some quantum optics researchers in France very recently reported an experiment in which photons went through the apparatus one at a time. Each photon was directed along two paths, with horizontal polarization in one path and vertical polarization in the other. The experimenters then had the option of making the analysis with horizontal or vertical polarizers, revealing which path the photon went, or with diagonal polarizers, revealing fringes and anti-fringes. Does all this sound familiar?...

In a patient with the autoimmune disease lupus, immune cells attack the body’s own tissues as if they were an invading pathogen. This can lead to damage to the skin, joints, kidneys, and even the brain. Now a team of immunologists reports that some of these errant immune cells have an overactive metabolism, and that inhibiting two key metabolic pathways can reverse lupus symptoms in mice (Sci. Transl. Med. 2015, DOI:10....

In parts of the Republic of Congo in equatorial Africa, nearly all the gorillas are gone. Since 2001 gorilla and chimpanzee remains have showed up near and in the Lossi Sanctuary, close to the Gabon border. Just what was killing these great apes was unclear. Now researchers finger the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus as the culprit. “No doubt that’s what killed them,” says Peter Walsh, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology....

From Nature magazine Egg freezing is no longer an experimental procedure, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), which on 22 October issued new guidelines on the controversial practice. The change in policy is expected to accelerate the growth of clinics that offer egg freezing to women who face fertility-damaging treatment for cancer or other conditions, and to women wishing to delay having a baby — although the society stopped short of endorsing the procedure for that purpose....

Researchers have finally published the results of data recovered from a cracked and singed hard drive that fell to Earth in the debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up during reentry on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members. The hard drive contained data from the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment, designed to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity. The findings, published this April in the journal Physical Review E, confirmed that when stirred vigorously, xenon exhibits a sudden change in viscosity known as shear thinning....

If Democrat Joe Biden defeats President Trump this November, his EPA will have a blank slate for writing climate rules. Because the Trump administration spent three and a half years demolishing its predecessor’s Climate Action Plan, Biden’s team would have an opening to update rules for carbon, methane and hydrofluorocarbons that would exceed their Obama-era counterparts or be more tailored to the political, judicial and economic realities of the 2020s. To be sure, a departing Trump EPA would leave finalized rules for power plant carbon, vehicle fuel economy, and oil and gas development, among other things, but most of those regulations haven’t faced court reviews, allowing an incoming administration to ask that they be returned to the agency....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Some years ago, when Jennifer Pluznick was nearing the end of her training in physiology and sensory systems, she was startled to discover something in the kidneys that seemed weirdly out of place. It was a smell receptor, a protein that would have looked more at home in the nose. Given that the kidneys filter waste into urine and maintain the right salt content in the blood, it was hard to see how a smell receptor could be useful there....

Gene therapy is the addition of new genes to a patient’s cells to replace missing or malfunctioning genes. Researchers typically do this using a virus to carry the genetic cargo into cells, because that’s what viruses evolved to do with their own genetic material. The treatment, which was first tested in humans in 1990, can be performed inside or outside of the body. When it’s done inside the body, doctors may inject the virus carrying the gene in question directly into the part of the body that has defective cells....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. In last week’s episode, I went over how to send and receive large files over the internet. In the end of the episode, I mentioned that there are always some security concerns when sending personal files over the internet that you don’t want made available for the general public. One way to safeguard against this security concern is to implement encryption....

At 2:33 p.m. in New York City’s East Harlem, four short yellow school buses pull to a stop in front of Reece School, a private elementary school for special needs children. The bus drivers pop their doors open and idle, engines running, while they await their young passengers. As the students trickle out of the school, a clipboard-wielding teacher checks their names off her list and guides them to their buses....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The outmoded gender stereotype that women lack mathematical ability suffered a major blow in 2014, when Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to receive the Fields Medal, math’s most prestigious award. An equally important blow was struck by an Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi, born 300 years ago this month. Agnesi was the first woman to write a mathematics textbook and to be appointed to a university chair in math, yet her life was marked by paradox....

Key concepts Temperature Measurement Thermal expansion Introduction Are you sometimes eager to understand how things work? Or excited about making useful objects and instruments yourself? Did you ever imagine you could build your own liquid thermometer? You’ll be able to use it to track how temperatures vary with location—indoors or outdoors. What will turn out to be the hottest spot in your home? What about the coolest? Your very own homemade thermometer will be able to tell you!...

Makers of fireworks and flares have long believed that the beautiful red color in their explosions could be attained only with chlorine-based compounds. But after these ingredients combust, they can transform into cancer-causing chemicals that then fall to the Earth. Now, new chlorine-free pyrotechnics could pave the way for a generation of red flares and fireworks that are better for the environment and for people’s health, says Jesse J. Sabatini at the U....