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Ayah Idris, 14, spent two weeks of her summer isolating strawberry DNA at a Seattle cancer research center, watching heart cells pulse in a dish and learning about ethical guidelines for animal research. The Summer Fellows program “sparked a little passion in me,” says Ayah, a rising 10th-grader whose parents are from Eritrea. “I was kind of interested in science before, but I didn’t really know that much about it. Now I know that science in the real world is what I want to do....

WANTED: NEW PHYSICS Whatever keeps the Higgs mass near the 1-TeV scale must come from beyond the Standard Model. Theorists have advanced many possible solutions. The Large Hadron Collider will decide. Here are three promising lines: SUPERSYMMETRY What tends to elevate the Higgs mass is its interaction with so-called virtual particles—copies of quarks, leptons and other particles that temporarily materialize around the Higgs. But if each particle species is paired with a superpartner, the two will offset each other, holding down the Higgs mass....

Oil and gas interests trump truth for many state legislators. The second in a two-partseries. Our story of the cozy partnership between political leaders and the fossil fuel industrynow moves to Wyoming where the state has moved to block the efforts by 26 states to modernize the science curriculum taught in our nation’s schools. A New Science Curriculum Unless you’re an education wonk or a parent in the weedsof your child’s education, you probably haven’t heard about theNext Generation Science Standards....

In a tiny, windowless conference room at the R&D headquarters of Intel, the world’s dominant microprocessor and semiconductor manufacturer, Mark Bohr, the company’s director of process architecture and integration, is coolly explaining how Moore’s law, as it is commonly understood, is dead—and has been for some time. This might seem surprising, given that Bohr is literally in the Moore’s law business: his job is to figure out how to make Intel’s current 14-nanometer-wide transistors twice as small within the decade....

Editors note: This story is part of a Feature “The Doping Dilemma” from the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. Why do cyclists cheat? The game theory analysis of doping in cycling (below), which is closely modeled on the game of prisoner’s dilemma, shows why cheating by doping is rational, based solely on the incentives and expected values of the payoffs built into current competition. (The expected value is the value of a successful outcome multiplied by the probability of achieving that outcome....

Excerpted from Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies by Sara Lewis. Copyright © 2016 by Sara Lewis. With permission of the publisher, Princeton University Press. All Rights Reserved. People often ask how I first got started with fireflies. Surprisingly, I don’t have many childhood recollections of chasing or collecting fireflies. It wasn’t until I started my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard that I began to really think seriously about studying fireflies....

A recent discovery in a study of room-temperature superconductivity, if borne out, could make the dream of super-efficient long-distance electricity transmission and levitating trains a little closer to reality. Whereas physicists understand how standard superconductors can operate at nearly 275 degrees Celsius below water’s freezing point, the mechanism behind high-temperature superconductors, which function at up to 140 degrees warmer than absolute zero, remains mysterious. Without knowing exactly how these warmer substances would manage to conduct electricity with zero resistance, researchers still don’t know whether it’s possible for anything to be superconductive at comparatively hot room-temperature conditions—which is what a new study claims....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich Click here for the slideshow.When the English naturalist and physician Martin Lister wrote home from France to his wife Hannah in 1681, he explained that he was enclosing a box of oil colors for his oldest two daughters, 11-year-old Susanna and 9-year-old Anna Lister, to paint with. He also asked her to lock away the precious pencils he was sending, “for they know not yet the use of them....

By Malia Mattoch McManus HONOLULU (Reuters) - Scientists in Hawaii say they have discovered an ancient underwater volcano, now dormant, that once extended 3,000 feet above sea level and is believed to have helped form the island of Oahu. The newly documented volcano, named Kaena, began erupting some 5 million years ago in the channel between what is now Oahu and its neighbor island Kauai, according to a study published this month in the Geological Society of America Bulletin....

Pollination Power by Heather Angel University of Chicago Press, 2016 ($40) Photographer Angel has traveled the world to document how plants attract pollinators. Her mesmerizing images showcase magenta hibiscus trumpets in Hawaii, stubbly Arabian starflower stamens and pollen-covered bees in Tajikistan, as well as beetles, butterflies and birds swooping in to feed. Angel’s words highlight the various ways flowers communicate with such creatures. For instance, some plants change color to signal that their pollen is ready, and others open and close petals with precise timing to allow and deny entry....

The mind is not as agile as it once was, even at the ripe old age of 34. Names elude me, statistics slip away, memory fades. This is just the first step on a long journey into senescence; and by 74, if I make it that far, I might remember practically nothing. That age is the average of a cohort of 2,802 seniors who recently participated in a long-term study to see if anything can be done to reverse this age-related mind decline....

State legislators have lined up a bill aimed at preventing the University of California, Berkeley, from executing a controversial program that asks new students to participate in genetic testing as part of a fall semester orientation program. But even if the bill becomes law, it will likely be too late to halt DNA collection because campus officials began mailing saliva sampling kits to about 5,500 incoming freshmen and transfer students this week, whereas the legislation cannot come up for a vote before August 2....

Who would have thought about God as an apt topic for an essay about mathematics? Don’t worry, the following discussion is still solidly grounded within an intelligible scientific framework. But the question of whether God can be proved mathematically is intriguing. In fact, over the centuries, several mathematicians have repeatedly tried to prove the existence of a divine being. They range from Blaise Pascal and René Descartes (in the 17th century) to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in the 18th century) to Kurt Gödel (in the 20th century), whose writings on the subject were published as recently as 1987....

By Maggie Lu YueyangSYDNEY (Reuters) - A Chinese icebreaker that helped rescue 52 passengers from a Russian ship stranded in Antarctic ice found itself stuck in heavy ice on Friday, further complicating the 9-day “roller-coaster” rescue operation.The Snow Dragon had ferried the passengers from the stranded Russian ship to an Australian icebreaker late on Thursday. It now had concerns about its own ability to move through heavy ice, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said....

It’s easy to understand why early humans domesticated dogs as their new best friends. Tame canines can guard against predators and interlopers, carry supplies, pull sleds and provide warmth during cold nights. But those benefits only come following domestication. Despite more than a century of study, scientists have struggled to understand what triggered the domestication process in the first place. A new theory described today in Scientific Reports posits that hunter-gatherers whose omnivorous digestive system prevented too much protein consumption likely shared surplus meat with wolves....

Like humans, dolphins sometimes suffer from irritated skin. But instead of lathering on soothing lotion, Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in the northern Red Sea head for the nearest coral reef. As if they were patrons at a popular spa, the dolphins line up to rub themselves against corals and sponges. And some of these organisms may do more than just scratch a dolphin’s itch. In a new study published on Thursday in iScience, an international team of researchers discovered that the mucus oozing from some of the involved corals and sponges is loaded with antibacterial compounds and other potentially beneficial substances....

When Hurricane Sandy came ashore in October 2012, it made waves in the virtual world as well as the real one. Photographs posted to the picture-sharing website Flickr track Sandy’s landfall on Oct. 30, 2012, precisely, according to a new study published today (Nov. 5) in the journal Scientific Reports. “Our results show that the greatest number of photos taken with Flickr titles, descriptions or tags including the words ‘hurricane,’ ‘sandy’ or ‘hurricane sandy’ were taken in exactly the hour which Hurricane Sandy made landfall,” study researcher Tobias Preis, a professor of behavioral science and finance at the Warwick Business School in the U....

Every day we engage in behaviors that raise or lower our long-term chances for survival. Smoke cigarettes and you increase your risk of dying prematurely. Exercise and eat vegetables and you are likely to add precious time to your existence. But just how bad or good are those and other activities, such as drinking alcohol? David Spiegelhalter, a professor of risk assessment at the University of Cambridge, has converted reams of statistical tables into a simple metric: a microlife—30 minutes....

“Nonsense! Hot air! Balderdash!” blurted out Pavel Kroupa, an astrophysicist at the University of Bonn in Germany, as I stood at the head of the lecture hall. I was just a graduate student at the time, applying for postdoctoral research positions. I had come to Bonn to give a 45-minute talk on my investigations of the small satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. I had helped develop a theory that explains why these mysterious objects are located in what appears to be a straight line stretching across the sky—an unexpected and extremely puzzling alignment....

If and when humans discover extraterrestrial intelligence, should we expect to find it in the form of biological brains or artificially intelligent robots? Could it be something in between biological and technological or something else so out of this world that humans have yet to even fathom it? When searching for E.T., scientists tend to look for signs of life with certain similarities to life on Earth. But abiding by that narrow definition of life could be the reason we still haven’t found any aliens....