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Cyberbullying on social media is linked to depression in teenagers, according to new research that analyzed multiple studies of the online phenomenon. Victimization of young people online has received an increasing level of scrutiny, particularly after a series of high-profile suicides of teenagers who were reportedly bullied on various social networks. In 2013, for example, a spate of suicides was linked to the social network Ask.fm, where users can ask each other questions anonymously....

A long lunch out with co-workers or a late-night conversation with a family member might seem like a distraction from other healthy habits, such as going to the gym or getting a good night’s sleep. But more than 100 years’ worth of research shows that having a healthy social life is incredibly important to staying physically healthy. Overall, social support increases survival by some 50 percent, concluded the authors behind a new meta-analysis....

In 2013, the environmental group WildAid reported that demand for shark fin soup in China had dropped by 50 to 70 percent, offering some hope for the estimated 25% of species of sharks and their relatives, that are threatened with extinction. Many experts thought those numbers sounded too good to be true. A new analysis of worldwide customs and trade data published in the journal Biological Conservation confirms that shark-fin trade has dropped by approximately 25 percent over the last decade “Although we can’t say that we fully understand the scale or the cause of the shark fin trade decline in China, it seems safe to conclude that demand for fins is waning, and that sounds like good news for sharks,” says global shark fin trade expert Shelley Clarke, a co-author on this study....

Since the invention of motion pictures, video science has proceeded steadily in a single direction: upward. Better resolution. Higher frame rates. Richer audio. Yet online, something weird has been going on. The hot thing in video these days isn’t big, sharp and smooth. It’s tiny, jerky and often low-res and mostly silent. Exhibit A: The animated GIF. This format—which creates small, looping, silent videos with limited colors—was invented by CompuServe in 1987....

Smaller pixels + more pixels = greater resolution. This is the dominant theme of electronics these days. Apple has its Retina displays on phones, tablets and laptops. Samsung, Nokia and the others are leapfrogging even the iPhone’s resolution. The big buzz in televisions is 4K: screens with four times the resolution of HDTV. But as I wrote in my Scientific American column this month, there are some substantial footnotes lost in the high-res marketing tsunami....

A chemical compound in wine reduces levels of a harmful molecule linked to Alzheimer’s disease. In a recent study, resveratrol–one of several antioxidants found in wine–helped human cells break down the molecule, which contributes to the lesions found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Fortunately for teetotalers, the compound is also found elsewhere. “Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol occurring in abundance in several plants, including grapes, berries and peanuts,” says author Philippe Marambaud of the Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders in Manhasset, N....

A team of researchers is studying the use of stereographic imaging technology and three-dimensional (3-D) displays to detect potential breast malignancies missed by traditional mammographies, opening the door to earlier detection and treatment as well as reducing the number of false-positive results and follow-up tests. Stereo mammography provides radiologists with a three-dimensional view of the internal structure of the breast by taking two images from slightly different angles—much the way our two eyes create depth perception, or moviemakers create 3-D IMAX films....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

A newfound species of tardigrade, or “water bear,” with tendril-festooned eggs has been discovered in the parking lot of an apartment building in Japan. The newfound tardigrade, Macrobiotus shonaicus, is the 168th species of this sturdy micro-animal ever discovered in Japan. Tardigrades are famous for their toughness: They can survive in extreme cold (down to minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 Celsius), extreme heat (more than 300 degrees F, or 149 degrees C), and even the unrelenting radiation and vacuum of space, as one 2008 study reported....

In the year 2393 a historian in the Second People’s Republic of China penned a book about how scientists, economists and politicians living in the 21st century failed to act on the solid science they had that gave clear warnings of the climate catastrophe ahead. As a result, the world experienced the Great Collapse of 2093, bringing an end to Western civilization. So speculate historians of science Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University and Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology in their book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (Columbia University Press, 2014), a short scientific-historical fantasy....

Every rose has its thorn—but roses grown in a Swedish lab have transistors and electrodes too. Researchers at Linköping University have created bionic roses by incorporating plant-compatible electronic materials into them. One of their modified roses has simple digital circuits running through its stem: another’s leaf changes colour when a voltage is applied. The scientists want to make tools for biologists to record or regulate plant physiology—the plant equivalent of medical implants such as pacemakers....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineMany meat-eating animals have lost their ability to taste sugars over the course of evolution.Sea mammals, spotted hyenas and other carnivores have all shed a working copy of a gene that encodes a `taste receptor’ that senses sugars, finds a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.An animal with a diet devoid of vegetables may have little need to detect sugars, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the lead author of the study....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The Greenland shark is one of the world’s largest marine species, reaching lengths over six metres. And yet these fish, which prefer the deep, cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans, have largely eluded scientific study. Their evasiveness highlights how little we know about Arctic marine ecosystems—and how much we can learn by developing and employing new technologies....

A controversial water contaminant made famous by Erin Brockovich and a small California desert town is carcinogenic. That conclusion by federal scientists, culminating more than a decade of debate, is likely to trigger new, more stringent standards limiting the amount of hexavalent chromium allowable in water supplies. It’s been known for about 20 years that people can contract lung cancer when inhaling hexavalent chromium, also known as Chromium VI. But until now, toxicologists have been uncertain whether it causes cancer when swallowed....

Our planet is in constant flux. Tectonic plates—the large slabs of rock that divide Earth’s crust so that it looks like a cracked eggshell—jostle about in fits and starts that continuously reshape our planet—and possibly foster life. These plates ram into one another, building mountains. They slide apart, giving birth to new oceans that can grow for hundreds of millions of years. They skim past one another, triggering earth-shattering quakes. And they slip under one another in a process called subduction, sliding deep into the planet’s innards and producing volcanoes that spew gases into the atmosphere....

The old saw that “the devil is in the details” characterizes the kind of needling obstacles that prevent an innovative concept from becoming a working technology. It also often describes the type of problems that must be overcome to shave cost from the resulting product so that people will buy it. Emanuel Sachs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has struggled with many such little devils in his career-long endeavor to develop low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells....

Adapted from Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos, by Caleb Scharf, by arrange­ment with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Penguin Press (UK), Hayakawa Shobo (Japan) and Prószy´nski (Poland). Copyright © 2012 by Caleb Scharf. Our existence in this place, this microscopic corner of the cosmos, is fleeting. with utter disregard for our wants and needs, nature plays out its grand acts on scales of space and time that are truly hard to grasp....

The vast and glittering Ivanpah solar facility in California will soon start sending electrons to the grid, likely by the end of the summer. When all three of its units are operating by the end of the year, its 392-megawatt output will make it the largest concentrating solar power plant in the world, providing enough energy to power 140,000 homes. And it is pretty much smack in the middle of nowhere....

For some 40 years, neuroscientists have believed that the brain forms memories by using a “sketch pad” to quickly record experiences and information learned throughout the day. Stenographic duties, under this model, fall to the hippocampus, the two slightly curved sections of the brain located under the temporal lobe that are implicated in episodic memory. During sleep, the thinking goes, neurons in the hippocampus fire, driving a transfer of its information to the neocortex, the top layer of the cerebrum that serves as the brain’s hard disk, or permanent storage bin....

Have you ever tried to cancel a service on a company’s Web page? You look everywhere, but you just can’t find the Cancel option. It’s almost as though the company has hidden it on purpose. You’ve just experienced the power of interface design. And as more elements of our lives become computerized—cars, elevators, ovens, refrigerators—good and bad (and sneaky) interface design is going to matter more and more. The mobile era makes the challenge even greater; it’s especially difficult to cram a lot of features into limited screen space....