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After 40 years of blindness, a 58-year-old man can once again see images and moving objects, thanks to an injection of light-sensitive proteins into his retina. The study, published on 24 May in Nature Medicine, is the first successful clinical application of a technique called optogenetics, which uses flashes of light to control gene expression and neuron firing. The technique is widely used in laboratories to probe neural circuitry and is being investigated as a potential treatment for pain, blindness and brain disorders....

Today’s grocery store aisles are overflowing with “healthy,” “whole grain” and “all natural” treats and snacks. But when you take a closer look at the nutrition facts and ingredients, some of these foods are actually packed with sugar, fat, salt or artificial flavors. To crack down on misleading claims, lawmakers recently introduced legislation called the Food Labeling Modernization Act of 2021, which would require and standardize a front-of-package labeling system that tells consumers if a product is healthy—or if it is not....

The vast array of behaviors that are seen in autism spectrum disorder seems to cover an even deeper range of genetic complexity just below the surface. And the largest genetic study of autistic children and their parents to date has located a host of new variations in autistic individuals. By studying rare “copy number variations,” which are individual errant insertions or deletions of DNA segments (each of which occur in less than one percent of the population), researchers discovered a new cluster of genes that are affected in some autistic individuals as well as a number of mutations that were present in autistic children but not their parents....

In 1231 Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled over much of Europe, issued a decree requiring schools that trained doctors to hold a human body dissection once every five years. It was a slow debut for what would become a cornerstone of medical education. During the Renaissance, cadaver dissections helped scientists and artists gain a hands-on understanding of human anatomy. Today they are an essential experience for first-year medical students, a time-honored initiation into the secrets of our flesh....

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates Frans de Waal W. W. Norton, 2013 ($27.95) Chimpanzees are said to be about as clever as toddlers, but who is the more superstitious ape? In one study that set out to investigate this question, young chimps observed a researcher using a stick to retrieve candy from a clear plastic box, employing both effective and ineffective motions. The chimps quickly discerned the candy-releasing moves and proceeded to repeat only those....

We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, the old cliché says—and now scientists know why. Researchers at the University of Exeter in England discovered a brain mechanism that alerts us to situations in which we previously went wrong. In the study, students playing physicians had to diagnose a fictitious disease based on images from equally fictitious blood samples. When participants saw images that had previously led them to an erroneous diagnosis, warning signals in the brain appeared only a tenth of a second later—much more quickly than did signals triggered by images that had resulted in a correct diagnosis....

Fitness Can Vitamin D Help Protect against COVID? Some studies suggest an impact, particularly for those who are vitamin-deficient. But for now, the jury is out June 24, 2021 — Suzanne Elvidge Fitness Why Are People with Obesity More Vulnerable to COVID? Chronic inflammation and immune breakdown appear to be key reasons June 24, 2021 — Tammy Worth Fitness Gut Reactions: Microbes in the Digestive Tract Influence COVID Severity Our resident bacteria help regulate the immune system and response to infections...

Only a handful of physicists have reached the halls of Congress. Bill Foster, a particle physicist and businessman just elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives from Illinois’s newly drawn 11th district, wants this situation to change. The Harvard graduate knows he is one of few in any technical field to hold national office. Foster plans to use his time in the public spotlight to serve as an advocate for bringing more of his peers to Washington....

By Nicola Nosengo of Nature magazineIf you are a small animal, it is useful to know whether there is anything around that might want to eat you. Stephen Liberles from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have analyzed urine samples from a variety of zoo inhabitants, including lions and bears, and discovered how rodents can use smell to do just that.In a research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team identifies a chemical found in high concentrations in the urine of carnivores that makes mice and rats run for cover....

Since the turn of the millennium, a new militancy has arisen among religious skeptics in response to three threats to science and freedom: (1) attacks against evolution education and stem cell research; (2) breaks in the barrier separating church and state leading to political preferences for some faiths over others; and (3) fundamentalist terrorism here and abroad. Among many metrics available to track this skeptical movement is the ascension of four books to the august heights of the New York Times best-seller list—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Hachette Book Group, 2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—that together, in Dawkins’s always poignant prose, “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Rumination is thinking (and thinking and thinking) about something upsetting, but in a passive way, without actually taking action. Now, I bet you never thought you’d learn about taxonomy in a psychology podcast, but I promise I’ll connect the dots: animals like cows, deer, goats, and sheep belong to the suborder Ruminantia....

In a 1955 essay, free market visionary Milton Friedman proposed a revolutionary model of education. Rather than seeing public schools as a rich local resource and driver of social mobility, he suggested they were a reflection of government overreach. Because a stable and democratic society depends on an educated electorate, he reasoned, the government should pay for children to go to school. But that did not mean the government should run schools....

BURLINGAME, Calif.—California provides more funding for stem cell research than the other 49 states combined. So what does President Obama’s executive order lifting the restrictions financing and structure of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state’s cash-strapped stem cell agency? Not much. At recent meetings, the members of CIRM’s governing board have made clear that they see changes in federal policy as good news, but not as something that should slow down their funding or change their plans....

The world is shifting. At least that’s what Bill McKibben, a leading environmental activist, tweeted on November 6. He was referring to the recent wave of push-back against fossil fuel companies. On November 5 New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened an investigation against ExxonMobil for potentially lying to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. The next day, the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Canadian tar sands to refineries near Houston, was rejected by Pres....

Kimberly Cote, director of the Sleep Research Labora-tory at Brock University in Ontario, answers: Daytime napping in healthy adults does indeed lead to benefits in terms of alertness, mood and cognitive functioning. Adults do not require shut-eye in the middle of the day—unlike infants and toddlers—but many grown-ups nap just the same. A 2008 National Sleep Foundation poll found that 460 out of 1,000 respondents had napped at least twice during the previous month....

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work. In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using ’non-viable’ embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics....

The fires that smelt iron also heat up the planet, but researchers are working on ways to produce higher-quality metals with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, potentially giving U.S. steelmakers an edge in a competitive global market. A report released yesterday in the journal Nature highlights a step in this direction that uses electricity instead of heat to extract iron. With thousands of years of development and two centuries of industrialization, making iron and steel is a mature process around the world....

A stowaway strain of yeast, crossing the Atlantic centuries ago, may be responsible for a cool quarter-trillion-dollar beverage industry today. Lager beer, which currently accounts for more than half the global beer market, relies on the yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus. Lager brewers ferment their product at relatively cool temperatures, then condition it under refrigeration, and S. pastorianus can tolerate lower temperatures than can ale-producing yeasts. The so-called cryo-tolerant lager yeast is a hybrid of the ale yeast S....

In the modern world of Web 2.0, though, the audience provides the material. Many of the biggest names on the Web fall into this category: Facebook, eBay, Craigslist, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. In each case, the Web site owner provides nothing but a forum for strangers to connect. If you are that hotel operator, restaurateur, car dealership or what­ever, the rise of the citizen review site is a sobering development....

RABAT (Reuters) - Floods triggered by heavy rain have killed at least 32 people, swept away buildings, vehicles and roads and forced the evacuation of more than 200 people in southern Morocco, authorities said on Monday. Flooding, which is quite common in the mostly arid desert region at this time of year, has in the past triggered violent protests by local people angered by what they see as a tardy or ineffective official response....