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No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess....

Can you put a price on science? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), signed into law on February 17, 2009—a year ago today—sent some $31 billion to scientific pursuits. The money has been a welcome windfall, especially for those who work in basic and social science research and have been struggling to find substantial funding from other sources. “It really is stimulating,” says Ezra Zubrow, an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who is using an ARRA award to study the response of past human cultures to climate change....

Silk—the stuff of lustrous, glamorous clothing—is very strong. Researchers now report a clever way to make the gossamer threads even stronger and tougher: by feeding silkworms graphene or single-walled carbon nanotubes (Nano Lett. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03597). The reinforced silk produced by the silkworms could be used in applications such as durable protective fabrics, biodegradable medical implants, and ecofriendly wearable electronics, they say. Researchers have previously added dyes, antimicrobial agents, conductive polymers, and nanoparticles to silk—either by treating spun silk with the additives or, in some cases, by directly feeding the additives to silkworms....

Tuberculosis is a serious public health challenge in the developing world, where the infection claims roughly two million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Yet the disease, which is a leading killer of patients with HIV/AIDS, is cumbersome to detect, resulting in delayed or inappropriate treatment, greater spread of the infection and preventable deaths. So, researchers in Colorado are developing a portable, rapid TB sensor that could help reduce the death toll and make treatment more efficient....

The excitement and enthusiasm for a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020 is both palpable and understandable. We all hope for a rapid end to the pandemic and an effective vaccine would be a surefire solution. But there are risks that come with a fast-tracked vaccine delivered end of this year, not the least of which are the risks related to the safety of the vaccine itself. Telescoping testing timelines and approvals may expose all of us to unnecessary dangers related to the vaccine....

A group of U.S. climate scientists is urging Congress to quickly pass a strengthened version of the House global warming bill, saying the legislation would provide a basis for stronger federal policies. The letter [pdf] signed by 20 scientists says strong U.S. leadership is needed to avert a “rapidly developing global climatic catastrophe.” The House climate and energy bill proposed by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts offers a “powerful advance and must be enacted this year,” it says, as a first step toward strong U....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - A bird advocacy group sued the U.S. government on Thursday over rules it says loosen protections for eagles killed by wind turbines, arguing they threaten decades of protection that saved the bald eagle, America’s national emblem, from extinction. The American Bird Conservancy filed suit in federal court in California to challenge the authorization of 30-year permits to renewable energy developers to accidentally kill protected bald and golden eagles, which may die as a result of collisions with towering wind turbines....

Most people think of memory as a faithful, if incomplete, recording of the past—a kind of multimedia storehouse of experiences. But psychologists, neuroscientists and lawyers know better. Eyewitness testimony, for instance, is now known to be notoriously unreliable. This is because memory is not just about retrieving stored information. Our minds normally construct memories using a blend of remembered experiences and knowledge about the world. Our memories can be frazzled, though, by new experiences that end up tangling the past and the present....

By Ben Blanchard & Michael Martina China said on Thursday it will stick to the Paris climate deal as the world awaited an announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump on whether to keep the United States in the global pact to fight climate change. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump denounced the accord, and called global warming a hoax aimed at weakening U.S. industry. A source close to the matter said Trump was preparing to pull out of the agreement....

Excerpted from Beyond: Our Future in Space, by Chris Impey. Copyright © 2015, Chris Impey. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Wan Hu would have been proud. Late in 2013, China sent a rocket to the Moon carrying the Jade Rabbit probe to place in the Bay of Rainbows. Despite the lyrical names, Jade Rabbit (“Yutu”) is a protean and workmanlike six-wheeled rover and the Bay of Rainbows is an arid volcanic plain....

Philae, the space probe that made history when it landed on a comet in November 2014, is awake. The European Space Agency (ESA) announced today (June 14) that it had received signals from the comet lander last night, at 22:28 Central European Standard Time. They were the first in over seven months. Excited scientists on the mission told Nature that Philae has probably been awake for a few days and that they hope the lander will start some low-risk science activities in the coming days—assuming that Philae makes contact again....

The ear is quicker than the eye. People can detect changes in sound in a few thousandths of a second while their eyes need about a fiftieth of second to spot a change. This audio ability has prompted researchers to take information normally shown visually and turn it into sounds, a process called sonification. It allows researchers to pick up on differences at faster rates. In medicine, for instance, audio can speed up the analysis of a cancer biopsy....

As representatives from 196 countries gather in Paris this December to negotiate a universal climate treaty, they should keep in mind that richer is more climate-friendly, especially for developing countries. Why? Because faster growth means higher incomes, which correlate with lower population growth. Greater wealth also means higher agricultural productivity, freeing up land for forests to grow as well as speedier progress toward developing and deploying cheaper non–fossil fuel energy technologies....

Henry MacVane sets up his gear along a stream bank at midnight just outside the town of Freeport, Maine. He dunks his dip net in and out of the water for hours, and occasionally stops to inspect his catch—a writhing pile of tiny, translucent glass eels. Maine fishermen have been catching glass eels, or “elvers,” and selling them at modest market prices for years. Recently, however, steep demand from Asia has caused prices to skyrocket....

It wasn’t until a pig nosed me in the backside, in a friendly way, that I mustered the courage to touch one. I had seen thousands of hogs over the past 18 hours, but I had been nervously keeping my hands to myself. This particular pig seemed to disapprove of my restraint. I scratched him on the crown of his pink, wiry-haired head. He snorted loudly. I was in a pungent, crowded barn on a farm that raises 30,000 pigs a year in Frankfort, Ind....

Thousands of years ago humans moved for the first time into the Tibetan plateau, a vast expanse of steppelands that towers some 14,000 feet above sea level. Although these trailblazers would have had the benefit of entering a new ecosystem free of competition with other people, the low oxygen levels at that altitude would have placed severe stresses on the body, resulting in chronic altitude sickness and high infant mortality. Earlier this year a flurry of genetic studies identified a gene variant that is common in Tibetans but rare in other populations....

You are what your mother fed you, especially if you are a young man. A new study that looked at the height, weight, muscle mass, strength, testosterone levels and even sexual history of 770 Filipino men tracked from birth reveals that the degree of a baby boy’s growth in the first six months of life predicts the extent of his masculine characteristics. This period is crucial because it is “when testosterone is at roughly adult levels,” explains biological anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa of Northwestern University, who led the study published online September 14 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

A monstrous computer-based calculation has rekindled researchers’ hopes of solving a longstanding problem in mathematics. In a style of collaboration more commonly associated with sequencing genomes, a team of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists has mapped an extremely complex object known as the E8 group. The calculation is only a stepping stone, but an important one, researchers say, in a larger project to uncover subtle ways in which different equations or geometric shapes can be seen as facets of the same underlying thing—an insight that has led to some of the century’s biggest discoveries in particle physics and may play a role in future theories....

Forty years of research and development by Lockheed Martin into harnessing energy from steep differentials in ocean temperatures will see its first commercial deployment in China. There, a resort developer has partnered with the U.S. defense and aerospace giant to build a 10-megawatt power plant using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology. A recently signed agreement between Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Md., and the Beijing-based Reignwood Group should lead to the completion of the alternative energy plant by 2017 in waters off southern China’s Hainan Island....

Whether they call it crowdsourcing, community-based monitoring or simply volunteer research, many scientists rely on members of the public for collecting data, but that fact is not always obvious in the studies that they later publish. Caren Cooper, a scientist at the Bird Population Studies and Citizen Science programs at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, would like to see that change. She says more researchers should explicitly state when their research relies on “citizen science,” the term she uses to describe “research practices that relies on public contributions of data....