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One evening Adam Mastroianni was reluctantly putting on his bow tie for yet another black-tie party at the University of Oxford that he had no interest in attending. Inevitably, Mastroianni, then a master’s student in psychology at the university, knew that he would wind up stuck in some endless conversation that he did not want with no way to politely extricate himself. Even worse, he suddenly realized, he might unknowingly be the one to perpetuate unwanted conversation traps for others....

For a limited time, “Greater Glory: Why Scott Let Amundsen Win the Race to the Pole”, a feature from the June issue of Scientific American is being made available for fans of Scientific American’s page on Facebook. Read it now or become a fan. Robert Falcon Scott kept detailed notes about his expedition to the South Pole, beginning with preparations in New Zealand in late 1910 and ending with the last entry, written shortly before he died in an attempt to return from the pole to safety....

Seeing Red: Why We Snap: Understanding the Rage Circuit in Your Brain by R. Douglas Fields Dutton, 2016 ($28) Everyone gets angry. We curse under our breath when another driver cuts us off. Or grumble about our neighbors when they make a lot of noise. But what causes tempers to erupt with such intensity that we lash out beyond all reason? What makes some people “go postal” and become homicidal seemingly within seconds?...

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the December 1997 issue of Scientific American magazine. We are posting it because of related news.) Nevada’s Black Rock Desert has become a staging ground for the type of event that would have difficulty finding a home anywhere else on the planet. This vast, dry lake bed—a stretch of flatness that seems to extend to infinity—attracts amateur rocketeers who claim to have launched a home-built projectile into space....

Key concepts Physics Liquids Gasses Pressure Introduction Ever wonder where those little drops of water on the outside of your cold can of soda pop or bottle of water come from? That’s condensation! Cold surfaces can cause water vapor in the air to cool down, condense and form tiny beads of liquid. The molecules in these miniscule droplets of water are grouped far more closely together than when they were in their gas phase, and exert less pressure—a fact that has some pretty cool physical implications....

Early this morning (Sept. 6), the sun released two powerful solar flares—the second was the most powerful in more than a decade. At 5:10 a.m. EDT (0910 GMT), an X-class solar flare—the most powerful sun-storm category—blasted from a large sunspot on the sun’s surface. That flare was the strongest since 2015, at X2.2, but it was dwarfed just 3 hours later, at 8:02 a.m. EDT (1202 GMT), by an X9.3 flare, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC)....

Light is a wonderful medium for carrying information. Optical fibers now span the globe, guiding light signals that convey voluminous streams of voice communications and vast amounts of data. This gargantuan capacity has led some researchers to prophesy that photonic devices–which channel and manipulate visible light and other electromagnetic waves–could someday replace electronic circuits in microprocessors and other computer chips. Unfortunately, the size and performance of photonic devices are constrained by the diffraction limit; because of interference between closely spaced light waves, the width of an optical fiber carrying them must be at least half the lights wavelength inside the material....

Ostriches and their flightless relatives are found across the globe not because continental drift forced them apart, but rather because the ancestors of these birds spread across the world through flight, and only later became flightless, researchers say. The largest species of flightless birds alive today are called the ratites, and include the ostrich, emu and rhea. These birds’ ancestors were once even larger, such as the elephant bird, which stood 10 feet (3 meters) tall, and the moa, which could grow nearly as large....

Yes, it really is that hot. Extreme summer heat—like the sizzling temperatures that hit Texas and Oklahoma last year and Moscow in 2010—occurs far more frequently now than it did 30 years ago, according to a new study from NASA climatologist James Hansen. Between 1951 and 1980, just 0.2 percent of Earth’s land areas experienced that kind of scorching summer, on average. Today, that number has soared to 10 percent, according to Hansen’s statistical analysis of global temperature data....

But those are the big-name review sites—just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. For everything you might spend money on, somebody has set up a Web site where fans and foes can exchange reviews. Here are just a few: • Recipes (Epicurious.com). Here it is, one of the Internet’s most useful clearinghouses of recipes. Recipes are backed up by photos, videos, a place for you own notes—and reviews by people who’ve made the recipes in question....

About 4 billion people around the world are under lockdown to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. Given that huge number, the drop in global greenhouse gases seems almost paltry by comparison. Forecasters expect emissions to fall more than 5% in 2020, the greatest annual reduction on record. But it’s still short of the 7.6% decline that scientists say is needed every year over the next decade to stop global temperatures from rising more than 1....

TOTORABAMBA, Peru—Smoke swirls around the hearth and hangs in the sunny doorway of the adobe kitchen where Espirita Lima Bautista crouches by an open fire, toasting barley grains. Soot dangles from the thatch roof in six-inch stalactites, a grim reminder of the particles she inhales whenever she cooks. For this 80-year-old grandmother, breathing while cooking for an hour is like inhaling the second-hand soot from 400 cigarettes. Although it only lasts as long as the meal is being prepared, exposure began when she was a baby, slung in a blanket over her mother’s back....

October 1962 Crick on Coding “The nucleic acids are made by joining up four kinds of nucleotide to form a polynucleotide chain. The chain provides a backbone from which four kinds of side group, known as bases, jut at regular intervals. The order of the bases, however, is not regular, and it is their precise sequence that is believed to carry the genetic message. The coding problem can thus be stated more explicitly as the problem of how the sequence of the four bases in the nucleic acid determines the sequence of the 20 amino acids in the protein....

Do black holes jump ship and wander off to other galaxies? If so, a galaxy called NGC 1277 may harbor a fugitive in its core. In 2012 astronomers discovered a supermassive black hole at its center with the mass of 17 billion suns—the most massive known. Normally, a black hole this enormous would be found in a much larger galaxy, which points to something unusual in NGC 1277’s past. Two astronomers have one idea: What if the black hole was captured after being spit out of a galactic collision billions of years ago?...

Anti-hacker defenses have long focused mainly on protecting personal computers and servers in homes and offices. However, as microchips grow smaller and more powerful, new targets for hackers are becoming widespread—embedded computers such as the electronics handling car engines, brakes and door locks; the routers that form the Internet’s backbone; the machines running power plants, rail lines and prison cell doors; and even implantable medical devices such as defibrillators and insulin pumps....

By Toru Hanai HIROSHIMA (Reuters) - Heavy rain delayed a search on Friday for more than 50 people believed buried under a deadly landslide on the edge of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, as opposition politicians rounded on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his handling of the disaster. Rescue workers feared the continuing rain could set off further landslides in the area after a month’s worth of rain fell in one night on Wednesday, loosening slopes already saturated by heavy rain over the past few weeks....

On a rainy Saturday morning in January 2007, Henry Yang, chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, took an urgent phone call. He excused himself abruptly from a meeting, grabbed his coat and umbrella, and rushed across the windswept U.C.S.B. campus to the Solid State Lighting and Display Center. The research group there included one of us (Nakamura), who had just received the Millennium Technology Prize for creating the first light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit bright blue light....

We are often told that there are no shortcuts in life. But the brain—even the brain of a rat—is wired in a way that completely ignores this kind of advice. The organ, in fact, epitomizes a shortcut-finding machine. The first indication that the brain has a knack for finding alternative routes was described in 1948 by Edward Tolman of the University of California, Berkeley. Tolman performed a curious experiment in which a hungry rat ran across an unpainted circular table into a dark, narrow corridor....

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Montana declared a state of emergency on Sunday to battle more than a dozen wildfires as blazes, fueled by drought and winds, also raged in Oregon, Idaho and the California wine region north of San Francisco. Wildfires have destroyed 50 homes in north central Idaho while a fire in north-central Washington nearly doubled in size, almost encircling the town of Chelan and forcing the evacuation of some 1,500....

Polar bears could face mass starvation and reproductive failure across the entire Canadian archipelago by the end of the century, suggesting an area once considered a last refuge for the animals may no longer be a very good one, according to a new study. While polar bears have long been the poster child for climate change, less is understood about the future population in the archipelago, as its narrow channels and complex geography make forecasting and analysis of sea ice difficult....