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Procrastination isn’t just universal among humans; the entire universe procrastinates: Newton’s First Law of Motion says a body at rest will stay at rest unless compelled to change state. But just because something is universal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And sometimes we procrastinate even when we know we shouldn’t. We say, “I should really be working,” as we stalk our sophomore year homecoming date on Facebook, stand in front of the open fridge for the fourth time in an hour, or realize we’re watching banjo lessons on YouTube without owning a banjo....

When a brain region becomes active, a flood of blood arrives within a few hundred milliseconds to service local neurons with the oxygen and glucose they need for energy. Scientists exploit this flow when they use functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine what parts of the brain respond to different stimuli. Recent estimates, however, peg the rush of blood to be nearly 10 times the amount neurons need for metabolism....

More than 7,000 languages exist today, a wealth of diversity that continues to puzzle researchers. Languages vary in a number of ways: Parts of speech, for instance, may be ordered differently. And a change in tone can signify a distinct word meaning. One lingering question that has perplexed linguists is whether genes predispose the use of tones or other linguistic features. A study published last month in Science Advances suggests subtle DNA differences influence a person’s ability to perceive tones....

Imagine being twelve years old. Imagine coming home after school and finding your big sister’s lifeless body hanging from a rafter in your home’s stairwell. Phoebe Prince’s little sister did not have to imagine this scenario, because she lived it. She arrived home after school in South Hadley, Mass., last January 14 and discovered that her sister had committed suicide by hanging herself, a result of enduring extreme and relentless bullying at the hands of her peers....

A new high-resolution study of the hot, charged gas spouting from an enormous black hole provides the most direct evidence yet that such plasma jets are powered by corkscrew-shaped magnetic fields. Researchers say the finding helps clarify the inner workings of blazars, extremely energetic galaxies that flare up unpredictably, driven by central black holes millions of times more massive than the sun. Researchers believe that large galaxies such as the Milky Way contain supermassive black holes in their cores that drag dust and gas toward them in a disk and fling it back out via jets of ionized gas or plasma moving at up to 99....

Animal Architecture by Ingo Arndt Jürgen Tautz. Abrams, 2014 Massive beaver dams, woven wasp nests and lofty termite towers are among the impressive constructions documented in this large visual book. Photographer Arndt traveled the world to capture animal architecture that is functional, beautiful and complex. Some creations, such as sculptures that carrier snails make of shells and pebbles held together with the snails’ own bonding secretions, would not seem amiss in the world’s best art museums....

The Cassini spacecraft will make one last close flyby of Saturn’s pockmarked moon Dione today (Aug. 17), in search of direct evidence that the moon is geologically alive and active. Cassini, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, has been studying the Saturn system since 2004, and its grand mission will come to a close in 2017, after the spacecraft makes a series of dives through the space between the planet and its rings....

The 2008 recession hammered the U.S. auto industry, driving down sales of 2009 models to levels 35% lower than those before the economic slump. A new study has found that because sales of new vehicles slowed, the average age of the U.S. fleet climbed more than expected, increasing the rate of air pollutants released by the fleet (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2014, DOI:10.1021/es5043518). Passenger cars and trucks in the U.S. are the second-largest emitters of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, precursors to harmful smog....

Key concepts Potential energy Kinetic energy Hydrostatic pressure Hydroelectricity Gravity Introduction You may not think much about using water for drinking, cooking, washing or swimming. But did you know that water can also be used to make electricity? Try this fun activity to learn about hydroelectric power. Background Thanks to gravity, all objects and materials have potential energy when they are raised above the ground. When these objects fall back toward the ground, the potential energy is converted to kinetic, or motion, energy....

By Barbara ListonORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - A 13-year study of coral reefs spontaneously recovering in the Cayman Islands offers hope of refuting often doomsday forecasts about the worldwide decline of the colorful marine habitat.Scientists monitoring the Cayman reefs noted a 40 percent decline in live coral cover between 1999 and 2004 during a period of warmer seas in the Caribbean.However, seven years later, the amount, size and density of the live coral had returned to 1999 levels as sea temperatures eased, according to Tom Frazer, professor of aquatic ecology at the University of Florida and part of the research team....

DIMOCK, PA – Norma Fiorentino’s drinking water well was a time bomb. For weeks, as workers drilled natural gas deposits nearby, stray methane worked into tiny crevasses in the rock, leaking upward into the aquifer and slipping quietly into her well. Then, according to the state’s working theory, a pump turned on in her well house, flicked a spark, and caused a New Year’s morning blast that tossed aside a several-thousand-pound concrete slab....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Friday denied a request from researchers seeking more time to save an underwater field of coral in a Miami channel where dredging is set to begin this weekend. “Taxpayers would be paying $50,000 to $100,000 a day to keep that dredge on standby and that’s not happening,” said Susan Jackson, a corps spokeswoman. The channel is being deepened to 50 feet (15 meters) in the hopes of attracting the larger cargo ships expected to pass through the expanded Panama Canal when it is completed....

The United States leads the world in COVID-19 deaths but lags behind many countries—both large and small—in testing capacity. That could soon change. At the end of August, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency-use approval to a new credit-card-sized testing device for the coronavirus that costs US$5, gives results in 15 minutes and doesn’t require a laboratory or a machine for processing. The United States is spending $760 million on 150 million of these tests from health-care company Abbott Laboratories, headquartered in Abbott Park, Illinois, which plans to ramp up production to 50 million per month in October....

Four large-scale carbon capture projects launched this year, but regulatory and cost barriers for the technology threaten the world’s ability to prevent temperatures from rising to dangerous levels, a new report warns. The annual report of the Australia-based Global CCS Institute cited a few signs of progress in 2013 – the four new projects, along with eight existing ones in operation, are preventing 25 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from reaching the atmosphere annually....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - It may be years before an underground nuclear waste dump in New Mexico shuttered by a radiation leak is fully operational, and costs for decontamination and other activities to restore the facility are not yet clear, U.S. Energy Department officials said. A recovery plan is being crafted for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad but details are not expected to be finalized for some weeks, Dana Bryson, deputy manager of the Energy Department field office that oversees the federal dump told a public meeting on Thursday evening....

Researchers in China say that they have discovered a way to make rudimentary mouse sperm in a dish, and used them to produce offspring. If the claim stands up to scrutiny, it could point the way to making human sperm in the lab for fertility treatments. But some scientists are not convinced by the report, which is published today inCell Stem Cell. “The results are super-exciting and important,” says Jacob Hanna, a stem-cell scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel....

The study of processes that make life possible is hardly a leisurely pursuit, but that doesn’t preclude researchers from taking advantage of the most advanced video gaming technology available to aid in their work. A team of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.) physicists has assembled a supercomputer consisting of several hundred superfast graphics processing units (GPUs)—typically used for rendering highly sophisticated video game graphics—that they think will help them build a simulation depicting how chromatophore proteins turn light energy into chemical energy, a process called photosynthesis....

Most of us know the story of Achilles, the Greek warrior whose mother tried to protect him from an early death by submerging him in the magical waters of the river Styx. Despite her best efforts, she missed dunking one heel that she gripped as she dipped him upside down in the river. And as fate would have it, a poison arrow to this single weak spot led to Achilles’ demise....

How are memories saved? Where does the recording take place and how? —Michael Saayman, Cape Town, South Africa Michael Rugg, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, provides an explanation: UNDERSTANDING EXACTLY how the brain encodes and stores memories is one of the central, unsolved mysteries in neuroscience. Currently the most widely accepted theory is long-term potentiation (LTP)—the lasting communication established between two neurons when they are stimulated simultaneously....

The staff at Scientific American are mostly—if not completely—vaccinated against COVID-19, and we’re grateful and relieved. An enormous amount of evidence shows that we are almost entirely protected from severe illness or dying of COVID, and more coming out all the time shows that we’re highly unlikely to pass the virus along to other people. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s safe for us to stop wearing masks in most situations....