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Smartphone companies often boast how much better their devices’ cameras are than those of their rivals, but scientists may have them all beat—they can spot single viruses with a new lightweight, portable imaging system that attaches to smartphones. The power to see single molecules with the system might arrive soon, experts added. The entire system, housed in a casing made with a 3-D printer, weighs roughly as much as a cup of uncooked white rice....

On November 8, three teams of undergraduate engineering students gathered at Space Center Houston to launch rockets powered only by effervescent tablets. At stake was a Guinness World Record and a prize of $25,000 from the sponsor, Bayer. To win the Alka-Rocket Challenge, the finalists, from Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of Minnesota, went head-to-head to see whose original rocket design — plus up to 100 crushed effervescent tablets — could fly the highest....

On February 21, his first day on the job, Justice Samuel Alito settled into one of the nine high-backed chairs at the Supreme Court to hear Rapanos v. United States and Carabell v. the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers–a pair of cases that, though not as well publicized as Jose Padilla’s antigovernment petition nor as high profile as federal wiretapping, will probably eclipse their importance. Bundled together, the cases ask the justices (and Alito in particular, a projected swing vote) to declare whether national agencies can patrol the soggy patches of earth between dry, developable land and federally protected wetlands....

Juggling deadlines is hard enough. Raising a child, too? Might as well ask me to perform brain surgery—maybe on Mars, while tap dancing. As Scientific American Mind’s managing editor, I cope with overlapping deadlines for story editing, art planning and production needs. I can only marvel at parents who hold down a job such as mine while also keeping a child safe, well nourished and happy through the vulnerable early years....

The lethal nerve agent VX has been revealed to be the murder weapon used to kill Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The victim was attacked from behind at Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia by two female assailants who smeared his face with a cloth. Kim Jong-nam sought help from officials, complaining of pain in his face and died following a seizure on the way to hospital....

Like all people, Albert Einstein made mistakes, and like many physicists he sometimes published them. For most of us, the times when we go astray are happily forgettable. In Einstein’s case, even the mistakes are noteworthy. They offer insight into the evolution of his thinking and with it the surrounding shifts in scientific conceptions of the universe. Einstein’s errors also lay bare the challenges of discovery at the leading edge. When pushing the limits of understanding, it is difficult to know whether ideas written down on paper correspond to real phenomena and whether a radically new idea will lead to profound insights or will fizzle out....

Last month various news outlets reported that police had used a technique called “touch DNA” to clear the family of JonBenet Ramsey of any wrongdoing in her gruesome 1996 death. So what’s touch DNA? The touch DNA method—named for the fact that it analyzes skin cells left behind when assailants touch victims, weapons or something else at a crime scene—has been around for the last five years. In fact, the prosecutor in the Ramsey case, Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy, learned about touch DNA when she attended a course here at the West Virginia University Forensic Science Initiative in the summer of 2007....

No one knows whether human consciousness will reside on a computer chip by the end of the century or even if self-driving cars will rule the road. But this much is certain: Earth is going to get hotter. The maps displayed here forecast how much warmer our planet will be in the year 2100 and how precipitation patterns will change. To make the figures, Scientific American worked with earth scientists at the nasa Ames Research Center....

At the dawning of Homo sapiens, our ancestors were born into a world we would find utterly surreal. It’s not so much that the climate and sea levels or the plants and the animals were different, although of course they were—it’s that there were other kinds of humans alive at the same time. For most of H. sapiens’ existence, in fact, multiple human species walked the earth. In Africa, where our species got its start, large-brained Homo heidelbergensis and small-brained Homo naledi also roamed....

A new group challenging the general consensus on climate science is getting significant air time in Australia, where uproar over a proposed carbon tax may topple the country’s minority government. Launched in February, the Galileo Movement is getting much of its lift from its influential “patron,” conservative radio personality Alan Jones, one of the most popular broadcasters in Australia, who has touted the effort on his daily morning show. The effort is the brainchild of two retirees frustrated by what they see as the orthodoxy of “settled science” on climate change....

Stephen Hawking is famous for many things: provocative best-selling books, Simpsons guest stints and his long and productive life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis among them. In the field of astrophysics, the University of Cambridge physicist is also known for his work on gravity and black holes, including his 1974 postulation of the eponymous Hawking radiation, a phenomenon by which a black hole should give off a stream of particles from its outer boundary....

MUCH OF WHAT we do goes on outside the pale of consciousness: whether we adjust our body posture or decide to marry someone, we often have no idea why or how we do the things we do. The Freudian notion that most of our mental life is unconscious is difficult to establish rigorously. Although it seems easy to answer the question “Did you (consciously) see the light turn on?” more than 100 years of research have shown otherwise....

On June 15, Canada broke ground on its first earthquake early-warning system. Sea-floor sensors will monitor the Cascadia subduction zone off British Columbia to provide crucial seconds of warning if the ‘big one’ hits. Putting sensors so close to the fault should give the Canadian system an edge over a more developed sister project in the United States. To produce early warnings of quakes, scientists rely on a network of seismometers and accelerometers to detect the tremor’s first, non-destructive primary (P) waves....

By Dana Feldman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Waves from a cyclone in the Pacific Ocean caused significant damage at picturesque Catalina Island in Southern California, demolishing piers, knocking boats from their stands and eroding a section of beach, officials said on Thursday. Tropical Storm Marie, a former hurricane that is in the Pacific about 900 miles southwest of Los Angeles, has sent large waves crashing along the Southern California coast since Tuesday, and conditions will persist on Friday, National Weather Service officials said....

Method and device to manage freezing of gait in patients suffering from a movement disorder: Imagine walking down the hall, when suddenly your legs refuse to take another step. Up to 60 percent of people with Parkinson’s disease regularly experience such freezing of gait (FOG) episodes, which can lead to falls and serious injuries. “Some patients describe the feeling as having their feet glued to the floor,” says Emil Jovanov, a professor of computer and electrical engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville....

They are just nonsense words, but for decades bouba and kiki have been studied by linguists, who are fascinated by the way they convey meaning across a broad spectrum of languages. Beginning as far back as the 1920s, study after study has demonstrated that children and adults, regardless of the languages they speak, match the words bouba and malumi with round shapes and kiki and takete with spiky shapes. Why this is so has remained a puzzle....

A little stress can do us good—it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system’s anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form. But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline, can directly support tumor growth and spread....

Since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan and set loose a massive tsunami March 11, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has been scrambling to avert a nuclear disaster at its hardest hit plant. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, home to six nuclear reactors, has witnessed explosions at three reactors and a fire in a spent-fuel pool at a fourth. At two reactors, unit Nos. 2 and 3, the vessels containing the nuclear material are suspected to be compromised....

Fetuses favor patterns of light that resemble faces over those without face-like features, a new study suggests. The study, published last week in Current Biology, is the first to test visual processing in babies before birth. The findings suggest that a preference for faces starts even before a baby has ever seen a face. And they run counter to the idea that babies like faces simply because that’s what they see first....

The world emitted 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2003—more than one third, 9.3 billion metric tons, came from burning coal. The dirty rock provides half of the electricity in the U.S. and its role (or the nation’s dependence on it) is likely to grow, according to a new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s cheap, there’s lots of it and there’s lots of it in places with high demand, namely the U....