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The Interior Department today issued first-time “exploratory” leases for wind projects off New Jersey and Delaware, allowing developers to locate data-gathering towers aimed at supporting planned commercial wind farms. Interior announced four leases for areas ranging from 6 to 18 miles offshore to Bluewater Wind New Jersey Energy LLC; Fishermen’s Energy of New Jersey LLC; Deepwater Wind LLC; and Bluewater Wind Delaware LLC. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, proclaiming a “major first step” toward harnessing offshore wind power, announced the leases today in Atlantic City, alongside New Jersey Gov....

The world today is very different from that of just a decade ago, thanks to our ability to readily access enormous quantities of information. Tools that we take for granted—social networks, Internet search engines, online maps with point-to-point directions, and online libraries of songs, movies, books and photographs—were unavailable just a few years ago. We owe the arrival of this information age to the rapid development of remarkable technologies in high-speed communications, data processing and—perhaps most important of all but least appreciated—digital data storage....

Stuck in one place, plants must endure a host of pests and problems. Too much light, too little light, bacterial invaders, insect infestation–the list seems overwhelming. Yet plants persevere, adapting to changing conditions both in their physiology and their genomes. Now scientists have shown that this ability to increase the frequency of genetic mutation in response to stress is passed through as many as four subsequent generations. Barbara Hohn of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, and her colleagues subjected several thale cress plants–Arabidopsis thaliana–to harsh levels of ultraviolet light or evidence of bacterial pathogens....

Neuroscience textbooks typically portray the five senses as separate entities, but in the real world the senses frequently interact, as anyone who has tried to enjoy dinner with a stuffy nose can attest. Hearing and vision seem similarly connected, the most famous example being the “McGurk effect,” where visual cues, such as moving lips, affect how people hear speech. And now new research shows that touch can influence speech perception, too....

Key concepts Memory Learning Brain Psychology Introduction Have you ever needed to remember a long list of words, such as state capitals or items on a shopping list? Even if a list can be full of interesting facts, it can still be hard to remember. But there are some memory techniques that can help a person to better recall a list. In this science activity you’ll try out a technique called mnemonics—a memory boosting strategy....

I have always been startled and fascinated by the sandlike abundance of galaxies sprinkled across the night sky. The most sensitive optical image ever made by human beings, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, captures some 10,000 galaxies in an area about 1/100th the size of the full moon. Scaled up to the whole sky, such a density implies a total of 200 billion or so galaxies. And those are just the most luminous ones; the true number is probably much larger....

If you want to convince the world that a fish can sense your emotions, only one statistical measure will suffice: the p-value. The p-value is an all-purpose measure that scientists often use to determine whether or not an experimental result is “statistically significant.” Unfortunately, sometimes the test does not work as advertised, and researchers imbue an observation with great significance when in fact it might be a worthless fluke. Say you’ve performed a scientific experiment testing a new heart attack drug against a placebo....

Editor’s note: The following, originally published with the title “Putting the Elements in Their Places,” is the introduction to the Scientific American Classics special digital edition, “The Quest for the Periodic Table” (December 2012). This edition compiles articles from our archive and traces efforts to form the iconic table. See other special digital editions on our Classics page. The periodic table of the elements is one of the most important developments in modern science, although it dates from the 1860s....

DECEMBER 1955 SPACE BIRD–“Some time in the next few years a new object will appear in the heavens. It will be quite inconspicuous. But as men lift their heads and, watching, catch a glimpse of this faint body racing across the sky, they will feel the excitement of witnessing a great historic event. For the tiny object circling the heavens will be metal that man has touched, a satellite that man has made and flung from the earth into space....

Adapted from The Wisdom of Psychopaths, by Kevin Dutton, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Doubleday Canada (Canada), Heinemann (UK), Record (Brazil), DTV (Germany), De Bezige Bij (Netherlands), NHK (Japan), Miraebook (Korea) and Lua de Papel (Portugal). Copyright © 2012 Kevin Dutton Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers—a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse and the manipulation of others—are also shared by politicians and world leaders....

Kevin Langdon was writing several books and designing an inside-out clock. Karyn Huntting Peters was organizing a global problem-solving network. Alfred Simpson juggled multiple Web-programming projects in his free time. These three people might not have had much in common—except for their unusually high IQs. All three belong to exclusive high-IQ societies. Mensa International, whose members’ test scores must land above the 98th percentile (or one in 50), may be the most popular, but it is just one option for the discerning test taker....

The first “female Viagra” drug touted as boosting women’s sexual desire could be approved today, assuming the Food and Drug Administration decides it’s safe and effective. But the odds don’t look good, as the FDA has already rejected the drug, called flibanserin, twice. Although some organizations say that sexism is playing a role in the drug’s lack of approval, experts say safety is the main criterion underlying the agency’s rejections so far....

Warning, couch potatoes: resting on your laurels may be hazardous to your health, not to mention make you old before your time. “A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related disease and premature death,” researchers at King’s College London report today in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. “Inactivity may diminish life expectancy not only by predisposing to aging-related diseases but also because it may influence the aging process itself.” Researcher Lynn Cherkas and colleagues reached their conclusions by examining the genetic material extracted from blood samples of some 2,400 twins....

By Ben Gruber Berkeley, CA (Reuters) - When an earthquake strikes literally every second counts. That was the case 5 years ago when a magnitude 9 quake unleashed a massive tsunami that devastated Japan. A seismological network kicked into action issuing early warnings, but the massive waves still killed nearly 16,000 people and caused an estimated $300 billion (USD) in damage. Since then scientists have been working to improve detection systems in the hopes of generating more accurate earthquake data and ultimately buying people a bit more time to flee a soon to be disaster zone....

As the human population continues to inch closer to 8 billion people, feeding all those hungry mouths will become increasingly difficult. A growing number of experts claim that people will soon have no choice but to consume insects. As if to underscore that claim, a group of student from McGill University in Montreal has won the 2013 Hult Prize, for producing a protein-rich flour made from insects. The prize gives the students $1 million in seed money to begin creating what they call Power Flour....

If thinking about the billions of bacteria taking up residence in and on your body gives you the willies, you probably won’t find it comforting that humans are also full of viruses. These maligned microbes are actually intertwined in the very fibers of our being—about 8 percent of our genetic material is made up of absorbed forms of retroviruses, the viral family to which HIV, the pathogen that causes AIDS, belongs....

One of the world’s biggest scientific conferences—the March Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS)—has been cancelled little more than a day before it was scheduled to begin in Denver, Colorado, for fear of contributing to the spread of coronavirus. Although many physicists have been left stranded by the unprecedented decision, some would-be attendees are finding ways to share their talks virtually. “At first, it was just a shock,” says Nicholas Drachman, a graduate student who works on protein sequencing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island....

By Amanda MascarelliAlmost three million litres of chemical dispersants were injected into the broken Deepwater Horizon oil well during last year’s spill, and lingered for months after the well was successfully capped, researchers say.The dispersants travelled with the deep-water oil plumes in the Gulf of Mexico at depths of 1,000-1,200 metres, and degraded very little between May and September, according to a study published this week in Environmental Science and Technology....

Despite freezing temperatures, scores of snakes slithered out of their hibernation dens in the weeks before a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck the Chinese city of Haicheng on February 4, 1975. The reptiles’ behavior, along with other incidents, helped persuade authorities to evacuate the city hours before the massive quake. For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds....

Satellites aren’t built to last forever, so it’s not a big surprise that the third and last laser on NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) quit working on October 11, outlasting its designed mission length by three and a half years. Since its launch in 2003 ICESat has been a critical instrument for continuously monitoring how much ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are contributing to the rise of the world’s oceans and how much the swath of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is thinning—both of which are occurring faster than projected....